PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 25, No. 12, Dec. 15, 2005

Forum allows feedback on proposed department merger

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

Faculty members and students – including several dozen chanting protesters on the lawn – braved frigid temperatures Dec. 7 to voice their opinions about College of Engineering interim dean Ilesanmi Adesida’s proposed plan to merge the department of mechanical and industrial engineering with the department of theoretical and applied mechanics. The public forum, held at the Engineering Science Building, was hosted by the Educational Policy Committee of the Urbana-Champaign Senate to elicit feedback before beginning deliberations. Senate statutes require public hearings prior to restructurings.

Abbas Aminmansour, chair of the Educational Policy Committee, said that the committee would make its recommendation to the senate “when we’ve had adequate time to review and evaluate (it). We want to do the right thing, no matter how long it takes to do so.”

If approved by the senate and ultimately the UI Board of Trustees, the merger would become effective in August 2006 and two new departments would be formed in the College of Engineering: a department of industrial and enterprise systems engineering, composed of the general engineering and industrial engineering programs, and a department of mechanical science and engineering, composed of the MIE and TAM programs.

The decision to propose the merger “was not a lighthearted one” and was the result of extensive discussions with faculty members at Illinois and at peer institutions, Adesida said. All but two peer universities have aligned TAM with other departments and a merger at Illinois would support the existing intellectual alignment and coherence between TAM and MIE and enhance opportunities in emerging areas of biology, biomechanics and nanomechanics.

“I do not see any down side at all to the merger,” Adesida said. “It will give TAM students higher visibility, identity and more faculty members, and the faculty in TAM will have more people to collaborate with.”

Opponents of the plan disagreed, including Nancy Sottos, interim head of TAM, who said it would adversely affect mechanics-related research and education, reduce course offerings, compromise external funding and result in duplication of resources.

“The College of Engineering and its students are best served by an independent mechanics department,” said Sottos, who proposed rebuilding TAM by stabilizing the number of faculty at 15, hiring two faculty members during each of the next three years and conducting a search for a department head in 2006, a plan she said would be more economical than a merger.

Dwindling faculty numbers, coupled with forthcoming retirements, are curtailing TAM’s ability to fulfill its teaching obligations, Adesida said in the proposal. Since early 2004, nine of 17 faculty members left TAM, including six who requested transfers to MIE during 2005.

Huesyin Sehitoglu, head of MIE, said that, unlike Illinois, peers such as the University of California at Berkely, Stanford and MIT – none of whom have separate mechanics departments – are expanding their mechanics faculties.

MIE faculty members voted 34-1 in favor of the merger. With additional hires, the department would be able to cover 80 percent of the service-teaching courses, Sehitoglu said.

James Phillips, associate head of TAM; Nigel Goldenfeld, a professor of physics; and Robert Haber, a professor of TAM, were among the people who spoke against the proposal. Haber, who likened the plan to a shutdown, criticized college administrators for tactics he said had damaged TAM and reduced its faculty: pressuring people to transfer, implementing tenure rollbacks, using college funds to support personal research and giving “extraordinary raises” to six people who transferred, allegations that Adesida denied.

D. Scott Stewart, a TAM professor for 24 years who transferred to MIE in January and supported a merger, said, “TAM has been a department in crisis since I entered in 1981,” and has been fraught with leadership problems, dwindling faculty and waning research funding.

Several people were concerned that TAM programs and degrees would disappear, but Aminmansour said that course offerings and degrees would be unaffected. According to the proposal, the new MechSE department would administer the same degrees.

When Alan Borlind, a graduate student in nuclear, plasma and radiological engineering, asked what would happen if the merger did not occur, Adesida said that it was a difficult question to answer because of the strategic planning process that is under way; however, scarce resources would not allow duplications.

An online referendum of tenured and tenure-track faculty members showed voters favored the proposed merger by a margin of 184-95, with 66 percent (279) of the 429 eligible faculty members voting.

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