MEMORANDUM
Date: August 25, 1999
To: Task Force on Computing and Information Science, Dan Huttenlocher, Chair
From: Bob Cooke
Xc: Committee on Academic Programs and Policies, Terry Fine, Chair; Don Randel,
Hunter Rawlings, and DDD list
Subject: Organizational Arrangements Implementing the June 1999 ‘Initial Report of the
Task Force on Computing and Information Science: Cornell in the Information Age’
I am responding to your invitation for comments concerning the Initial Report. Given that the University Faculty Forum (September 15 th at 4:30 in Call Auditorium) will occur within three weeks, I’m sharing more widely a proposed alternative organizational structure that I believe is more likely to achieve the vision you propose for Cornell.
First, and most important, I wish to affirm the vision you describe. I share your view of the importance of this topic &emdash; its transforming role for society, its importance to all of higher education, and especially its importance to Cornell. I agree with you that this opportunity is worthy of a major institution-wide initiative. In my opinion, the vision statement is exceptionally well written, thoughtful, provocative, timely &endash; in short, a seminal contribution.
Although I want to focus here on a critique of the organizational aspects of your report,
I wouldn’t want that critique to overshadow my genuine support and enthusiasm for the report’s broader vision.
• Power and control, i.e., decentralized vs. centralized structure
I think the conceptual notion of a ‘Faculty of Computing and Information Science, (FIS)’ has great merit. It could increase the national prominence of computing research at
Cornell, and it could help the university’s faculty link their shared interests in topics that cross organizational boundaries. We have recently done this for thrusts in statistics, economics, and the environment that are currently dispersed among several departments at Cornell. Biomedical engineering is another emerging, inherently multidisciplinary field that deserves better linkages. One can easily construct a very

long list of such thrusts that simply cannot be satisfied by a one-to-one mapping of the faculty into distinct, non-overlapping departments.
But better linkages are what this university needs, not perpetual organizational surgery.
(Surgery can be painful &endash; Modern Languages is an excellent contemporary example.) I believe that some modifications to the organizational model you describe would greatly increase its effectiveness and would significantly diminish its perceived destabilizing and disruptive side effects. I believe that your plan is likely to create unnecessary pressures on faculty loyalties that would be especially acute for tenure track Assistant Professors, but would be felt even by the tenured faculty. (The vast majority of tenure track joint appointments do NOT lead to tenure!) And I believe your plan would institutionalize a competition for resources (faculty lines, money, space, etc.) among all the colleges and departments that would inherently and needlessly lead to confrontation and confused responsibility lines. I am unclear how the proposed Dean of FIS could exercise direct control over faculty lines shared among all colleges without creating perpetual clashes with the college deans. The FIS will bridge all colleges, not just two dominant ones as was the case of the Division of Biological Sciences, so the administrative problems for funding, coordination, and leadership will be exponentially greater for the plan you propose than was the case for DBS.
It is inconceivable that the leader of the FIS will control the dominant share of faculty lines or budgetary resources in computing and information sciences &emdash; now or in the future. Interest and growth will occur in all fields and much of that growth will occur at the boundaries of existing fields in a quite unpredictable manner and rate.
Consequently the leader of FIS must be expected to lead by persuasion, rather than primarily through resource re-allocations (that will be largely beyond that person’s control).
In summary, I am concerned that you have posed the issues of power and control in a manner that likely would be dysfunctional. The structure you propose tilts too heavily towards a top-down, centralized authority model, rather than towards a decentralized model &emdash; the form that has been repeatedly demonstrated to be most effective at
Cornell. Our Graduate School structure, for example, epitomizes this bottom-up approach for nurturing collaboration across boundaries without imposing managerial control. Below I’ll outline a ‘Graduate School (or virtual college) Model for FIS’.
• Examine unintended side effects
Task Force reports often focus solely upon the potential benefits for the group or program being promoted and neglect the potentially deleterious consequences for other interests. When preparing your final report, I urge you to balance your report by taking a more systemic view of Cornell’s various interests, including explicit discussions of costs and how other units may be impacted intentionally and unintentionally.

Are you proposing a net increase in the size of the faculty? If so, you have not grappled with the negative impact that would have upon tuition. If the faculty size were not decreased elsewhere, would the FIS be based entirely upon new resources (or upon reallocated resources)? Would those resources be shared across endowed/statutory boundaries?
• FIS should become pervasive and ubiquitous
Active faculty involvement in computing and information science is appropriate for every existing and future academic department. In my opinion, we should NOT attempt to redirect the loyalties of the most accomplished faculty away from their units via joint appointments, but we should support and enable them where they are. As the recent example of the Division of Biological Sciences shows, joint appointments can undermine a college’s commitment to faculty who are perceived as having their primary allegiance outside the college. As a result, faculty with joint appointments could discover that they have less support from the college that pays their salary when there are severe pressures on faculty lines and budget resources.
I believe your purposes would be far better served by an organizational structure that facilitates and nurtures, rather than competes with the academic departments. The
Faculty Forum discussion on the now disbanded Division of Biological Sciences made clear that the division’s organizational structure created another unintended liability: it often increased the distance between basic and applied biologists, rather than facilitating their interactions in both teaching and research. As with biology, some of the most exciting developments will occur on the boundaries of the existing disciplines and at the boundaries of the basic and applied &emdash; and many of these developments could have little or no connection with the four main thrusts you’ve identified.
Another critical question is whether the college-like structure you proposed would be sufficiently intent upon serving both the teaching and research interests of the university or whether it would it be tempted to limit its teaching role in order to enhance its status as a research group. Your proposed teaching analog to the Writing
Program suggests this prospect. Would the faculty salaries be paid from tuition sources if it sheds a substantial share of its teaching duties? Or would all new FIS support come from new endowment?
The university does need an expanded, comprehensive, well-funded, high-quality research unit in Computing and Information Science (CIS) of university-wide responsibility. In principle, I believe that this broad-gauged group
• could be administered by a college on behalf of the university, e.g., as is done for
Cornell Plantations,

• administered on behalf of university-wide interests in a manner analogous to the
Centers, or
• according to the model of the recently reconfigured structure for biological sciences which reports to a Vice Provost.
In none of these administrative examples cited is the control for hiring and promoting faculty lodged with a non-college unit. The Initial Report is unconvincing in its support for such an aberration.
• The faculty requires both organizational stability and flexibility.
The academic department is the unit that provides a permanent structure and sustains a community of shared intellectual interests. Departments must have a degree of permanency in order to nurture the long term intellectual development of the faculty and to supervise the tenure process, as well as to organize and provide the resources for teaching, research and outreach functions.
Unfortunately the departments usually fall short with respect to providing incentives for addressing broad, collaborative opportunities involving faculty from different departments and colleges. Frequently departments and colleges even fail to reward such efforts after the fact.
The organizational structure you propose is intended to address a major, long-term multidisciplinary thrust of acknowledged importance by regrouping the faculty resources in computing and information sciences. I suspect that the purposes you describe could be served by a large, suitably funded department and that the collegelike structure you proposed will be only modestly less rigid than a large department. I believe it would be cumbersome in its dealings with multiple colleges and departments due to jurisdictional overlaps, and would be needlessly disruptive to the existing departments.
If there is one lesson from my extended observation of this university, it is that the organization must be dynamic &emdash; continually responding to change. I believe that change is such an intrinsic part of our future, that the time has come to conceptualize a generic structure to facilitate change in this and the other exciting new directions already in evidence and those yet to emerge. I believe we should take this opportunity to think about a more general conceptualization of our needs. We should find a generalized solution for providing organizational flexibility and that in this case places no discipline outside its intended sphere of influence.
Joint Appointments: Your proposal calls for a substantial increase in the number of joint appointments as the primary means for bridging boundaries. However, our

success record with joint appointments for tenure track faculty is absolutely dismal.
Since 1984, about two thirds of the assistant professors who had appointments split between two departments failed to gain tenure; this is a failure rate far in excess of the rate for the typical, single-department appointments. Your report hints at this problem, but fails to recognize that it is precisely the youngest faculty who are most likely to have prepared to work in the emerging fields. Absent some major change to the tenure process, what you propose would, I fear, become a brutal and destructive path for young faculty as well as generating a cumbersome, spaghetti organization to administer. Restricting joint appointments to senior faculty would help &emdash; but at the expense of under-utilizing the talents of those who have been most recently educated in this rapidly emerging area.
University Financial Issue:
The size of the faculty is the dominant management issue affecting the financial well being of this University. Increasing the number of faculty ripples throughout the budget
&endash; not just for salary and benefits, but for startup funding, office and lab space, support staff, etc. We have already become dangerously tuition-dependent. Given that endowed faculty salaries are derived mainly from tuition sources (not research grants), increasing the size of the faculty, as you suggest, would create a real problem. Your report appears to ignore that reality but should call for external endowment for the thirty-year plus commitment implied for each new faculty member. I believe that this thrust should not be supported with a net increase in the size of the faculty if their support is dependent upon university funding &emdash; but should be supported by reallocation of faculty lines vacated elsewhere or by entirely new endowment support
(which actually may be feasible).
According to a conversation with Hunter, he does not intend to grow the total size of the faculty. Increasing the size of the faculty has very significant long-term financial consequences measured in multiple decades, i.e., increasing the size of the faculty is not a one-time expenditure. (We are now experiencing the consequences of a hiring burst in the early 80s and I can share the graphs if you are interested.) If your report proposes a net increase, please be explicit about the magnitude and duration of the required financial commitment you propose for the university. If not, be explicit about your recommendations being contingent upon newly endowed positions. All programs at
Cornell will surely experience growing financial pressures. I believe your report must deal forthrightly with this emerging problem.
Leadership Locus: I am not willing to accept, unexamined, the assumption that leadership for this thrust should necessarily (or even largely) come from the Computer
Science faculty. Our Computer Science faculty is truly a world class, pioneering faculty and its breadth of interest has increased significantly during the last decade. But I worry that the standards and vision that are entirely appropriate to the core FIS faculty (level

of abstraction, rigor, etc.) may be needlessly limiting if imposed intentionally upon more applied, emerging areas throughout the campus, especially in those areas in which the information science component is necessarily secondary.
Jery Stedinger, a faculty colleague, made an interesting observation about how his students prefer to learn statistics vs. how faculty typically teach. He believes that faculty are hired on the basis of their ability to deal abstractly and tend to teach using a deductive approach, proceeding from general principles to specific cases. On the other hand, he believes that students grasp material more readily using a discovery or specific-to-general approach. I think we should not impose a single teaching style, but should try to respond to the various styles of learning used by various groups/majors of Cornell students. My sense is that the current CS faculty (and its majors) have a strong predisposition for a certain style that may or may not be optimal for everyone.
Besides, I see no reason to assume that all of the FIS teaching talent should be within the proposed faculty. The breadth and depth of student interest in CIS will surely exceed whatever human and financial resources the proposed faculty might amass.
Teaching program:
Another issue that parallels the biological science experience, but was left unapprised, is the offering and naming of courses. If the goal is to have CIS become pervasive, then all departments should be encouraged to develop courses (with appropriate consideration for unneeded duplication). The practice of selectively assigning some courses to carry multiple course names made the courses more easily identifiable by the students and boosted program visibility, but had a negative impact upon faculty whose biologybased courses were not selected for joint listing. Specifically, this set Bio Sci in the role of being implicitly critical of some faculty and courses. This had the effect of guiding students away from non-bio sci courses in biology, and hence discouraged the full utilization of our teaching and advising capacity in the biological sciences. Would you avoid this limitation?
Another Potential Alternative
Here’s an approach that might accomplish your goals, but without generating the rancor that inevitably accompanies the reorganization of colleges and departments. If this model worked well for computing, it could become a generic organizational model to nurture collaborative work in many other emerging areas.
A Virtual College:
We may need to invent a name other than a ‘Virtual College or ‘Virtual Department’, but that name captures the idea. The ‘Faculty of Computing and Information Sciences’

certainly could serve this purpose &emdash; analogous to the University Faculty, which has a Dean of the University Faculty who controls no faculty lines.
I find it quite remarkable that the Graduate School structure, despite being so Spartan, is able to nurture really remarkable success. It nurtures faculty collaboration across department boundaries and has worked effectively for decades in a flexible and adaptive manner. Yet it exercises no control over faculty lines or departmental resources. In effect, it is a virtual school that allows individual faculty to be members of multiple groupings simultaneously that can be made and broken, as circumstances require. But very importantly, this leaves management responsibility and accountability at the department level.
Its existence and success is a splendid proof by counter-example that control of faculty lines is sine qua non for institutional leadership. Certainly the control of financial resources confers power. But so does a clear and compelling vision (as is articulated in the report). In a practical sense, what really works for institutional change at Cornell is the availability and control of sufficient matching resources to entice the existing institutional structures to choose to move in an institutionally desirable direction. We don’t require and don’t need a massive new bureaucracy.
Research Centers facilitate virtual groupings of faculty across departmental lines to perform research and to manage physical and financial resources, but not faculty lines.
They do not provide formal courses; that is handled through the degree granting colleges.
We do have the example of the Center for the Environment that does sponsor both research and formal courses. In fact, a ‘virtual college’ might serve its purposes too.
The ‘real’ colleges or departments could be invited to participate in one or more ‘virtual’ colleges or departments. To be formally identified with a virtual college, the real unit would voluntarily commit some of its resources (dollars, physical plant, faculty research or teaching effort, courses, etc.) for an extended time span. In other words, the
‘Dean’, ‘Vice Provost’, or whatever title might be appropriate, would coordinate the program through the units that manage the actual resources. The leader of the ‘virtual’ unit would coordinate the securing of external grant support and administer matching university and external resources. When tenure track faculty positions are being filled if there appears to be a reasonable prospect of FCI membership for the incumbent, some form of consultation (but not veto authority) should be arranged. Likewise, the FCI
‘virtual college’ faculty should be invited to provide input on promotions to Associate
Professor and Professor (but without veto rights or otherwise having direct oversight).
In other words, the FIS could help other parts of the university hire the most talented faculty possible without violating college or department autonomy.

A less complicated organizational structure might enable the vision you outline with less political baggage, e.g., fewer conflicts over 'ownership of faculty lines' and cleaner lines of administrative and tenuring control. (To work, however, it does require strong, visionary leadership and some financial resources to leverage cooperation.) I fear that the political cost associated with the organizational change you propose is disproportionate to the benefits to Cornell; we need a more flexible, less abrasive mechanism for change while protecting the existing structures.
Rather than creating the college-like structure you propose, I hope we will either create a college that has its own faculty, sets admission standards, administers degree programs, etc. as a real college or else that we will create a structure that nurtures and enhances the work of the existing colleges. Don’t create a ‘want to be college’ that is destined to clash with the priorities and management of the existing colleges. My own sense of Cornell history is that the faculty rises to greatness more often when nurtured, rather than when 'managed'. That's why I believe you are likely to achieve greater success through a virtual college, than through a more controlling structure.
I do agree about needing resources to encourage collaborative relationships. My corollary to the old adage that ‘leading faculty is like herding cats’, is that ‘if you put out some food, they will come.’
In closing, I urge the Task Force to consider the problem of how to preserve the existing colleges/departments as operational responsibility centers with the institutional stability they provide. At the same time, the Task Force needs to find ways to provide an adaptive mechanism for structural change as opportunities change &emdash; including the evolving change that the FCI will surely experience. We’ll be balancing the prospects for decisive leadership in a core thrust against intended/unintended negative consequences for the remainder of the faculty. I believe that some variation on the Graduate School model will better serve the long-term interests of the University
Faculty.
I shall be pleased to elaborate or to receive comments. I also encourage other members of the faculty to share their suggestions.
Note: This topic will be examined by the faculty in a University Faculty Forum on
September 15 th at 4:30-6:00 PM in Call Alumni Auditorium in Kennedy Hall.