Western Washington Univ. Considers Cutting Computer Science 298
An anonymous reader writes "Due to Washington State budget concerns, Western Washington University is considering cutting their Computer Science Department. The news comes even as local stations report a hiring boom in the tech sector. The WWU administration seems completely out of touch with the current state of the department. This story has gotten a lot of attention and support from local industry and the University of Washington professors."
Re:I am attending Western Washington University as (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking as somebody who has seen what sort of things can happen in campus politics, I see three reasons for what is going on.
1) The department of CS has become... clogged... with under-performing faculty..
2) The administration is playing a brinkmanship game with those above them.
3) The administration is incompetent.
Now, I've listed these in order of most likely to least likely. The administration could be incompetent, but do you really believe anyone could be that stupid? There may be a lot of liberal arts majors, but those are the money sinks; the smart money on alumni donations is still engineers, doctors, and lawyers. Rather than the administration being stupid, there are other explanations, which are far more likely.
They could be playing a political brinkmanship game. I wouldn't be surprised if the plan to close the CS department is just a threat, and nothing more. It would make sense; in a time of mild to moderate budget crisis, it is not uncommon to threaten to cut something popular in order to garner more money for other things. If the threat was to cancel the history department, would there be a big stink? Absolutely not (unless there are a bunch of history buffs in the state senate... who knows? Maybe sports psychology, or sociology, or some other useles.... I meant, less practical... major).
It is very unfortunate, but I think that the most likely reason for this is that the faculty in the CS department are not up to snuff. It could well be that they are, collectively, getting older and tireder, and just not putting the effort into teaching that they could be. It could also be that they just weren't that good to begin with. But, what I think may be the case, is that the CS department is populated by... faculty from an older time. Faculty who, when they were hired, it was a rock solid CV if they had a single top-tier publication. When they got tenure, a solid case had 1 top tier publication plus a smattering of lesser accomplishments. WWU's faculty could think a wonderful accomplishment is a single pub a year.
That is to say, WWU could possibly be staffed by professors who would be laughed out of the room if they tried to defend a thesis today. It isn't that they weren't worthy when they were hired; it is just that standards have gone way up. I personally have a better publication record now than Randy Pausch (famous for "The Last Lecture") had when he was made a full prof; I don't even rate an interview at top schools today. WWU may simply be looking at what they have, and then looking at what the supply of desperate fresh grads are, and deciding that the logical thing to do is to wipe the slate clean, keep maybe one or two of the old faculty, but to otherwise start fresh with, talented, sharp, bright-eyed, and coincidentally desperately eager, newly minted faculty. I've seen it happen at much more prestigious institutions.
Re:It makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry I don't buy that entirely. It's true that outsourcing IT has become more and more popular, but it's hardly to the point where "many Fortune 500 companies only have 6 or 7 employees that even deal with I.T." That's a pretty big hyperbole.
I work at a Fortune 100 company helping maintain production code and working on transitioning development applications all the way to the production environment. We have no less than a thousand employees (with an employee total of over 30,000 people) who work directly or indirectly in I.T. in no less than a dozen different departments. I'm sure that number includes our outsourced colleagues in India (and we do have many consultants as well offshore employees, especially Indians), but we have many, many locally-based workers here in our main locations in the United States. Those include many who work in traditional Helpdesk roles, network engineering, environment moves, development silos, production support silos, business-IT liaisons, database management, host systems management & batch, incident management & escalation, etc. etc. who all help to develop and maintain a portfolio of hundreds of disparate and important applications critical to our infrastructural and business needs.
Maybe I'm not as jaded about outsourcing as the next person because of this experience. Maybe it's because I see the critical role it serves in helping companies/consumers lower costs and Indians/others get better lives. Maybe my company is the exception (though I doubt it, all companies of this size have diverse I.T. needs that make I.T. staffs of hundreds probably needed). Regardless, I think that combining outsourcing strategies while holding onto valuable I.T. employees here in the United States and the Western world is nonetheless what needs to be done in order to facilitate the proper mix of cost-savings and quality service/employee morale.