Read UNLV’s President recommends which programs should be cut via ktnv.com and the full 15 page dipshit report here.

[05/10/10 @ 2:30p PST] The plot (and plight) thickens as I have tried for two days now to access the Dept. of Informatics web page to no avail.  Has it already been deleted by OIT?  What the hell is that all about?

On a personal note, all decency aside, President Smatresk, the Faculty Senate and the JET and PRC can all go F themselves.  I spent a bit of time soul-searching last night, thinking I may try to channel my energy and desire to work on a PhD and work into a different program, but the more I thought about it, the more I got pissed at UNLV and Nevada as a whole for being so grossly short-sighted, so now I’d rather go spend my tuition dollars somewhere else where the administration (and government) actually thinks about what the importance of a program is rather than purely considering current dollars.  Nothing like a budget deficit to put yourselves into an even faster tailspin, and only increases my spite towards programs that I think should have been looked at more closely but weren’t even considered.

I am, along with the tenured and professional faculty of the Department, urging all students, and anyone who might agree and offer opinion, to write to the President, the university committees and the Board of Regents, urging them to reconsider keeping the department.

Update: selected letters written by students speaking out about the proposed cuts are here.

But I expect myself to be a leader of sorts, an instructor by example, and hence I am posting my letter here, openly, so that anyone who does not understand the dilemma might find it worthy of opinion.  For those who do not know what informatics is, you can read about it on the UNLV Informatics Web Site, but more importantly, here is a succinct explanation from Michael Dunn, the founding Dean of the School of Informatics at Indiana University, where Informatics as an academic college was incepted and created.  He says:

• Informatics studies the application of Information Technology to the arts, sciences and professions, and its uses in organizations and societies at large.
• Informatics is a response to the data/information/knowledge gaps caused by billions and billions of bits
• Informatics is the discipline of science which investigates the structure and properties (not specific content) of scientific information, as well as the regularities of scientific information activity, its theory, history, methodology and organization. The purpose of informatics consists in developing optimal methods and means of presentation (recording), collection, analytical-synthetic processing, storage, retrieval and dissemination of scientific information. Informatics deals with logical (semantic) information, but is not involved in qualitative estimation of this information. Such an estimate can be carried on by specialists alone, in the specific fields of science or practical activity.

Below is the letter that was posted on the UNLV website, posted here.

Sent via UNLV Official on March 22, 2010

Colleagues:

I have received a set of recommendations from Executive Vice President and Provost Bowers and Vice President for Research Smith to start the conversation on how we can reduce the academic budget by $4 million. This list (see below) was made after consultation with our deans and after reviewing various measures of productivity and cost. I thank them for their hard work on this thankless task. This was an extremely difficult set of recommendations to generate, and includes departmental elimination, sub-unit elimination and recommendations for differential tuition (which may ultimately reduce our cumulative need for cuts). The list includes more programs to be reviewed than we plan to cut at this time, thus allowing the Presidential Review Committee (PRC) the opportunity to offer their guidance on maintaining core institutional strengths.

This material has been transmitted to the PRC, chaired by Dr. Gregory Brown, formed jointly by the Faculty Senate and Administration. The PRC charge will be to review this list, along with cuts from the other VP areas, and to deliver a prioritized set of recommendations for program elimination and other savings or revenue enhancing measures by the third week of April. Their recommendations will be reviewed by the Deans and Cabinet, our student governance groups, and the Faculty Senate Priority and New Program Committee before we make final program elimination recommendations to the Board of Regents.

In addition to these “vertical” cuts, we have extended the hiring freeze on all current searches, with the exception of grant funded hires, self funded programs and areas that are absolutely essential for business continuity. Savings in these areas and our VSIP program may help mitigate the need for further cuts later this year. We are all deeply saddened by the need to resort to such drastic measures. If there are any other viable options for UNLV we will pursue them, but I expect little relief, and fear that without significant legislative intervention we will be forced to cut again next year. As we make these cuts, we will honor noticing periods and tenure, allow students to graduate from eliminated programs in a timely fashion, and hope to minimize the disruptive impacts these cuts have on faculty, staff and students.

I understand how much turmoil and distraction our budget situation has created on campus. For programs not on this list I ask you to focus on our mission by providing a strong education to our students and by pursuing scholarly growth so that we emerge from this as a stronger and more focused institution.

Sincerely,

Neal Smatresk
President

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March 22, 2010

President Neal J. Smatresk Office of the President University of Nevada, Las Vegas Las Vegas, Nevada 89154

Dear President Smatresk:

It gives me no pleasure to either write or transmit this letter to you. Indeed, no one who loves and respects higher education could feel anything other than sadness in doing so. However, as you know more than anyone, over the past three years UNLV has had its state funding reduced by 30.9 per cent. No institution can continue to function normally when given such a dramatic reduction in resources. UNLV has made a large number of “horizontal” cuts university-wide but such cuts can no longer achieve the significant expenditure reductions required of us by the state. The University must now look to “vertical” cuts in departments and programs in order to achieve these results. As you have requested, I am transmitting to you recommendations for the Division of Academic Affairs in three areas: (1) unit and subunit eliminations, (2) additional administrative reductions, (3) departments and programs in which differential tuition has the potential to be successfully applied.

The Process
As you have mandated, each vice president, including the Executive Vice President and Provost, will be making recommendations for reductions and outright eliminations in their divisions. The target for Academic Affairs at this time is $4 million. In order to achieve shared governance between administration and faculty, the attached list represents a budget figure higher than the target. This allows the faculty committees to evaluate each proposal and to have a real voice in making these decisions, not simply a take it or leave it option.

Because any reductions in Academic Affairs will also affect research productivity, Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies Ron Smith was asked to sit in on my individual meetings with the deans. At these meetings deans were asked to provide possible eliminations and reductions in their colleges and schools. None of them were happy to do so, of course. It should not be assumed that any of these recommendations were initiated or supported by the relevant dean. The list that I am transmitting to you will not be met pleasurably by any of them. This list will be given by you to the joint presidential-Faculty Senate committee, the Presidential Review Committee, who will review these recommendations and forward those that they believe necessary to meet our state fund reductions. A similar process will be followed by the Faculty Senate Priority and New Program Committee. The recommendations will all go to you for decision, some of which may also require further NSHE Board of Regents approval. To the extent that there is any silver lining in this, it is that you have pledged to protect tenure and any tenured faculty displaced by these decisions will be reassigned.

These recommendations have been guided by factors including, but not limited to, cost, graduation rates, number of majors, student credit hours and FTE produced, scholarship/research/creative activities, external funding, and importance to the University’s mission.

Units To Consider for Elimination

• Educational Leadership
• Informatics
• Management Information Systems
• Marriage and Family Therapy
• Recreation and Sport Management (including Professional Golf Management)
• Sports Education Leadership
• Teaching and Learning Center
• Women’s Studies

Subunits To Consider for Elimination

• Clinical Laboratory Sciences
• Construction Engineering Management
• English Language Center
• Entertainment Engineering
• Gerontology and Senior Theatre
• Landscape Architecture
• Urban Affairs Advising Center
• Urban Horticulture Program

Further Administrative Reductions To Be Considered

• Executive Vice President and Provost: Do not fill Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education position
• Executive Vice President and Provost: Do not fill Vice Provost for Academic Affairs position
• Executive Vice President and Provost: Do not fill Vice Provost for Academic Resources position
• Executive Vice President and Provost/Academic Success Center: Eliminate 1 advisor and 1 classified position
• College of Education: Eliminate 1 associate dean position
• College of Education: Not seek NCATE accreditation
• College of Hotel Administration: Reduce to only two academic departments
• School of Nursing: Return to campuswide semester instead of trimester system
• College of Sciences: Reduce costs of Department of Geoscience
• College of Urban Affairs: Combine School of Journalism and Media Studies and the Department of Communication Studies

Differential Tuition and Registration Fees
There are some programs nationally that are either extremely popular or extremely expensive to operate in which the market will bear differential tuition/registration fees. This tuition/fee is an additional revenue source that can be used to bring down the costs of delivering such instruction to the institution. Not all programs and departments can successfully implement differential tuition/fees (i.e., those in Liberal Arts come to mind) and that is not a possibility for them. For those programs that can implement differential tuition/fee structures, the additional tuition/fee must be sufficient to offset the additional costs of instruction. The following colleges and schools are among those nationally that charge differential tuition/fees and, should NSHE and UNLV determine to pursue that tack, extensive research will be required to determine the appropriate price point for each of them. There may be others that are not on this list that can be further discussed by the faculty committees reviewing these proposals.

• School of Architecture
• College of Business
• College of Engineering
• College of Hotel Administration
• School of Nursing
• Department of Physical Therapy

Conclusion
None of us are unmindful of the effects that these proposals will have on our campus, our colleagues, our staff, and most of all, our students, if they are adopted. However, these proposals are merely proposals at this point and we should look forward to the continuing discussions that will occur in the faculty committees and with students prior to final decisions being made.

Regretfully,

Michael W. Bowers
Executive Vice President and Provost

I seem to recall a president who went to war after misrepresenting that someone was hiding WMDs and incited a big country to invade a smaller one halfway across the globe, needlessly killing several thousand soldiers and just generally being a retarded jerk.

Okay so maybe this isn’t a war but killing education based on misinformation and misrepresentation is bad enough.  LVRJ forgot to take into account that INF is the fastest growing degree at UNLV (over 200% the current school term), that it is the program that covers little things like cybersecurity (preventing hackerman Chang from getting into DoD computers) and HCI (making sure your iPhone has all those touchy-feely gizmos) and realize that LVRJ is suggesting that we should cut one of the few departments that teach for jobs that are still in demand. Nice. All because of not checking facts.

The University readily publishes current, accurate data.  The Provost’s 2009 Joint Evaluation Taskforce (JET) report on the Engineering program for example, reports “…this program is highly multidisciplinary and has a very high enrollment of women and other underrepresented groups. The program only has 2 tenure-track faculty.”  Furthermore, “[W]hile approved by the Board of Regents as an independent school, the program has no support staff and pays for an administrative assistant through course buyouts.”

Write to LVRJ and demand a retraction, correction and proof! People/colleagues, we are about to die a quick and painful death here and we need to fight. In 2010, informatics is a critical program both for the university as well as Las Vegas and the last thing we need is someone with erroneous information deciding our future!

Below is the comment I submitted to LVRJ (though who knows if it will actually get posted) – I ask and urge and plead for anyone who gives a crap that the paper seems to have it out for programs who make a difference to fight back…

LVRJ misreported that Informatics is the most expensive program – that was the case when it first started but is currently inline with other engineering programs.

It was also highly misrepresented and mischaracterized. The 2009 provost report actually recommends HIRING more staff because it is a fast growing field and covers a wide range of cognate areas, in addition to the extremely high ratio of sponsored research contracts and the awards it has received. The program is still small because it is brand new (started in 2005).

It was reported as “most expensive” because the report was based on 2006′s FTE (full-time enrollment) divided by the cost of faculty. Informatics has a low FTE because a high percentage of the students, especially at the graduate level, are non-traditional students who work full-time jobs like myself and cannot attend school full-time. There are only four tenured staff and the enrollment in the program increased 200% in the last year.

On top of the, the earlier LVRJ article that listed the top 20 most expensive programs had an interesting common thread – they were all engineering and computer based programs – and the ones whose fields still have jobs in demand!

To see more accurate reporting, go to the UNLV Provost Joint Evaluation Team (JET) web page and see the 2009 reports. Shame on LVRJ for the bad reporting.

And don’t get me started on why the state is cutting education funding in the first place. Sure the University can use streamlining, but are we setting up the state to lose what edge it has?

Incidentally, for those of you who don’t know:

The mission of the School of Informatics is to provide an academic path for students who are interested in pursuing a career that combines computing and information technology with another academic discipline. The curriculum is inherently interdisciplinary, and recognizes that the human, information, and technology dimensions of problem solving are equal contributors in advanced informatics applications areas. The School of Informatics will produce graduates that become successful and internationally competitive educators, entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders in the global information economy.

Read the rest of my op-ed here…