Faculty Congress Town Hall meeting Emailed Comments concerning the Reorganization Task Force Final
Report:
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Comment#1:
Iʻd like to voice my strong support for re-structuring in general and in
particular for the Thematic Units approach including the allied health
college. Since BB is more balanced than B, I strongly support the BB
proposal. I do not support BBB as I donʻt see the thematic connection
between KES and CoBE.
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Comment#2
The low SSH in Humanities might become a burden for all other nonHumanities divisions/departments.
In any restructuring plan, to separate and protect currently active culture-,
and research- oriented faculty in the small departments of Humanities
might be inevitable from the faculty's welfare perspective. This type of
restructuring may invite the opportunities of Federal grants. In the end we
could keep the academic quality of UHH high enough as a liberal arts
"university (a school offering courses leading to a degree and where
research is done)":
1) Discontinuation of Humanities as a separate unit
2) Creation of Social Science and Cultural Studies [tentative] . Most of
Humanities culture specialists (Communications, Philosophy, English,
Languages, and Art) can go under the new Division.
3) Creation of the Language Institute for the language skills interest group
(English, TESOL, Languages)
4) Creation of the Art Institute for the art skills focused group
(3) and (4) might be merged. The UHH is currently has the English
Language Institute (https://hilo.hawaii.edu/academics/eli/). The Language
Institute models would be: the Defense Institute of Foreign Language
Center, the Monetary Institute for International Studies and the Middleberry
Language Institute.
Comment#3:
Follow-up comment (on index card) from Town Hall Meeting:
“Someone made a comment about eliminating the Dean positions and
incorporating Directors (as done with Ka Haka ‘Ula). This might be an
option worth more consideration.”
Comment#4:
Looking more carefully at the numbers the task force provided and
witnessing the participation of faculty I would like the administration to
consider the following model given that there are 7 Dean positions:
1) College of Business
2) College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences: Math, Geology, CS,
Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry
3) College of Biological Sciences: Biology, Ag, Mare
4) College of Humanities like the Division
5) College of Social Sciences: like the DIvision
6) College of Pharmacy as is
7) College of Hawaiian Language as is
CCECS will have to be absorbed into the regular colleges. Not being in the
Humanities or Social Sciences, perhaps those in these divisions would
know of a better way to change the distribution of Dept. into colleges.