bot-presentation-erdol
June 17, 2009
President Brogan, Honorable Trustees, Colleagues and Guests,
I represent the faculty of the College of Engineering and Computer Science. I would like to present to you the faculty view on the reorganization of our college and its first line of consequences. May I start by saying that the faculty of my college join President Brogan in our desire to be working at a first tier university and pledge to do all we can to achieve that goal. We have confidence in our trustees to lead us in running this institution whose main product is ideas: ideas that we create, ideas that we develop, ideas that we teach, and continually learn. On each side of the administration and academic culture are people of talent and good will. Therefore we think our participation in the development of our university is essential.
In the Spring Semester of 2009, the College of Engineering and Computer Science Leadership team planned and announced a restructuring of the college. The new structure was the brain child of a business management consultant and addressed the need for efficiency in the business operations of the college. It did not address reorganization from an academic point of view which thinks of units housing complementary areas of expertise that function as a comprehensive unit of research and organization.
For example, The Technical University of Denmark (DTU) has recently restructured their university to reflect changes in technology and scientific endeavors. Electrical Engineers no longer are just concerned with electricity but work on solving problems with medical imaging and hearing and understanding. Some mechanical engineers research in large scale management of systems, some physicists develop financial prediction algorithms. DTU’s new departments accommodate such changes. The slide here is taken from their web site and does not display all their programs.
The new structure of the CoECS is incomplete and needs to be revised taking academic input into consideration. The reorganization brought about sad changes causing the lay off of some of our excellent teachers and leaving courses without instructors. We register our concern for being excluded, for the uncertainty of the future of our college and for the unexpected lay offs that appear to be arbitrary.
Thank you.
Nurgun Erdol, Ph. D.
Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA