By a vote of 30 to 3, the Northeastern University Faculty Senate on Wednesday afternoon endorsed a plan to restructure the Boston university's College of Arts and Sciences and its College of Criminal Justice.
The plan, which has also been approved by the university's Board of Trustees, will convert those two colleges into three: a College of Science; a College of Arts, Media, and Design; and a College of Social Science and Humanities. The criminal-justice program will lose its status as a full-fledged college, and will instead be folded into a School of Criminal Justice within the College of Social Science and Humanities.
That element of the plan has angered some people associated with the criminal-justice program, which is one of the country's most prominent. (See, for example, the comment section beneath an article in The Huntington News, an independent student newspaper at Northeastern.)
But according to two accounts, the discussion at Wednesday's Faculty Senate meeting was overwhelmingly supportive. "I thought this was a good way to air any issues and stumbling blocks, and we took care of those," said Stephen W. Director, Northeastern's provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, in an interview. "It's not often that you see such unanimity in a structural change such as this."
Mr. Director added that the university would soon begin formal searches for deans of the three new colleges. The university plans to fill those positions by the beginning of the fall semester in 2010.
Comments
1. renacg334 - October 07, 2009 at 05:47 pm
This is such an interesting story and I would certainly like to know more about the process that Northeastern went through to make this decision. I am using the story as a way to complain about the Chronicle's new 'super brief' People-magazine headline-type stories. I would prefer to have a meatier story with some analysis, and now I have to go to the Boston Globe and Northeastern's site to even approach that!
2. wepstein - October 07, 2009 at 07:45 pm
Many applied fields and area study departments would gain rigor by being returned administratively to their founding disciplines. The covers, to name a few, public administration, social work, womens studies, black studies, gay studies, all the national studies, Jewish studies, enviornmental studies, and so forth. Applied fields usually produce much weaker scholarship that the core social sciences and humanities departments.
3. jeff1 - October 08, 2009 at 07:20 am
Criminal justice, often a significant revenue generator for universities, is placed under the watchful eye of the "real" social scientists and humanists. Please, this is a disgrace and embarrassment. While Northeastern has never been a top-tier criminal justice school, it has always had some very good faculty and certainly been a strong presence in the field. By the way criminal justice stands alone today and while there may be historical mother disciplines, it has developed to a point where its scholarship and scholars as well as real world impacts far surpass many other social science disciplines.
Things may change under this superficial and costly (three deans instead of two?) deck chair shuffling reorganization. Great job Provost Director, you got what you wanted . . . let's just see what the real costs will be.