How can we convince the administration of our university that computer science is important enough to retain it as a discipline?

Question

The university where I teach is currently restructuring in a major way. Alas, we have been told that we have one week to respond to a current plan which includes discontinuing computer science as a teaching discipline, and breaking the current computer science department between mathematics and electrical engineering.

Merging the whole school into either Maths or EE is apparently considered inappropriate because the resulting school would be too large. Staying as a separate discipline is also considered inappropriate because we are too small. But, everyone in CS feels that breaking us up will destroy CS as a discipline at our university.

This is at a quite highly regarded institution that places high value on science, the arts, law, medicine and engineering. It is in a major city that is somewhat isolated so generally it provides the only serious choice for those that want a more academic focus to their studies. But computer science is somehow is considered vocational and not academic enough - something better taught at a technical school.

What is the best way to convince our administrators that computer science is an important discipline, within the next week?

Answer 1

Nobody will know the answer to that question. Its so open ended. MIT has EE and CS as a single department

Answer 2

[I agree this is not programming-related but here's my effort anyway].

I have been through this many years ago where the dept was closed - in chemistry, not CS, but the argument is the same. I agree it's impossible to answer but I feel your pain - I don't know whether you are a student, mid researcher or run the department. If you aren't the head then it will be extremely difficult as if s/he has already accepted the inevitable then pressure from lower down is not effective.

I'd look first to your national or international organizations (perhaps IEEE, British Computer Society, etc.) and get poilcy documents that argue for the need for CS as a discipline. I'd try to show that publications and grant income will be affected (this is the only thing that now counts, unfortunately).

If you are lower in the hierarchy I'd suggest getting it into the blogosophere. Maybe there are depts elsewhere that have changed policy and you need to know how they did it. My guess is that the impending closure is public knowledge so you won't be doing much harm.

When we were threated (1982) I compiled a list of the dept publications and showed that we had more publications per head than any comparable institution. We got it published as a letter in Nature. An early use of bibliometrics - it wasn't effective in the end.

Sometimes change works out for the best - it did in my case.