terrapinsanity.com

Campus leadership has just announced that as of this summer Norma Allewell (whose appointment as Dean of the College of Chemical and Life Sciences would conclude at end of June) will take over as Vice President of Research at College Park, replacing Mel Bernstein who is leaving the role in order to go do the same thing at Northwestern.

This adds to the list of enigmatic (heck, let’s say it like it is – ridiculously inconsistent) messages from the College Park leadership team. Let’s review:

• One of the reasons the Provost cites as motivation for “merging” Allewell’s college into CMPS is that it is under-performing compared with expectations. There is no question that its 50th ranked departments don’t let the Provost brag as much as do the top ten departments over in CMPS so ostensibly, bringing CLFS into the CMPS fold will somehow raise their quality. Translation: “Allewell’s performance as Dean of CLFS is such that we must disband her college to merge its under-performing units into a successful college. And by the way, now we’re putting her in charge of all research in College Park.”
• As cited by its strategic plan, the number one barrier to raising CLFS national rankings is unavailability of modern research buildings on the College Park campus. Therefore we will merge CLFS into CMPS so its units can first compete with CMPS units for facilities requests, diluting the overall potential of science operations to get buildings they need to compete.
• According to Steve Halperin, CMPS dean, “it is clear that neither our office nor that of [CLFS] could handle the responsibility of a combined college.” (Diamondback, November 6, 2009.) That’s why the merger will proceed by disbanding CLFS and assimilating its units into CMPS which will handle responsibility for the combined college.
• It is important to bring the quality of CMPS undergraduate education standards up to those of CLFS, which is why we are abandoning the CLFS administrative structure and bringing them under CMPS policies and administration.

Let’s be real. This is not an administration overly concerned with transparency, consistency or quality, so any mixed messages above (or the thousand other they’ve sent) don’t matter. The reason Norma is moving to VP for Research is simply this: They’ve already decided that the “merger” must happen so taking her out of the game early will make it just that much harder administratively to go back. “Gosh, if CLFS doesn’t merge, then who will run CLFS? Now we have to merge.”