PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 25, No. 7, Oct. 6, 2005

U-C Senate looks at revising engineering programs

By Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor
217-244-1072; slforres@uiuc.edu

The Urbana-Champaign Senate passed a proposal at its Sept. 19 meeting that College of Engineering faculty members hope will enhance the standing and visibility of two engineering programs at the Urbana campus. The senate voted in favor of a proposal to transfer the industrial engineering program from the department of mechanical and industrial engineering to the department of general engineering to create a department that is tentatively being called industrial and enterprise systems engineering. MIE will be renamed the department of mechanical engineering.

Approximately four of IE’s eight faculty members are expected to transfer to the new department as are nearly all of GE’s 20 faculty members and approximately 660 undergraduates, according to the proposal. The proposed reorganization will need the review and approval of the University Senates Conference, President Joe White and the UI Board of Trustees.

Some senators objected to the proposal because they thought that it required an affirmative vote by College of Engineering faculty members.

Abbas Aminmansour, chair of the Senate Committee on Educational Policy and a professor of architecture, said that careful review of university statutes and the college bylaws and consultation with the Office of the Senate and the Office of the Provost indicated that former College of Engineering Dean David Daniel had been authorized to submit the reorganization proposal without a college-level vote; however, the statutes required him to seek the “advice” of the college’s faculty members, although the means by which he did that was at his discretion. The College of Engineering Executive Committee, an elected body, had voted in favor of the reorganization in April 2004, Aminmansour said, and extensive discussions had been held with faculty members and a public meeting was held on March 16.

Senator George Friedman, emeritus professor of computer engineering, said that the word “advice” was to be construed as meaning a faculty vote and that a departmental transfer should be treated the same as creating a department, which requires votes by the faculty, the senate and the board of trustees.

Huseyin Sehitoglu, head of mechanical and industrial engineering, said that while many faculty members initially had been against the reorganization, the appointments of Deborah Thurston as interim head of general engineering and Ilesanmi Adesida as interim dean of the College of Engineering since then had generated faculty support.

A motion by Linn Belford, professor of chemistry in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, to delay a vote on the proposal until the senate’s annual meeting on Sept. 26 to verify that the statute was being interpreted correctly was voted down.

Adesida said: “The College of Engineering is ready to move. We cannot waste any more time (if) we want to compete with industrial and systems engineering programs” at peer institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University.

“We really need to hire the top-notch faculty that are waiting in the wings. They want to conduct a search for a department head and that can’t move forward until we act on this,” Aminmansour said. “Anyone who wanted to say anything had an opportunity to say it directly and confidentially.”

Aminmansour suggested that senators who believed a college-level vote should be mandatory for departmental transfers should initiate a proposal to revise the statutes.

In other business, the senate approved proposed revisions to the University Statutes that govern employment policies for academic professionals who work for University Administration so that APs would be subject to the policies of the campus at which their principal office is located, in accordance with current practice and with treatment of civil service staff members and faculty members with UA appointments. The revision will require the approval of all three campus senates, White and the trustees before it will take effect.

The senate also

• Approved proposals by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to establish a graduate minor in cinema studies and to rename the master of arts degree program and the interdisciplinary minor in Russian and East European Studies to Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.
  
• Approved a proposal to establish a joint bachelor of science/master of science program in materials science and engineering in the College of Engineering.

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