A sub-committee of the Academic Affairs Council charged with reviewing the proposed elimination of civil engineering will report its findings by September 15.
The committee will be “small enough to get the job done in the time frame,” said AAC member Barbara Danowski at a general faculty meeting on Tuesday.
The committee will be composed of one faculty member from CE, three faculty from other departments; one administrator and one student, she said. The members have not been named.
Responding to some faculty who suggested that alumni be represented on the committee, Danowski said she thought it was important to limit the size of the committee in order to meet the deadline, and that AAC members thought it would set a bad precedent to have non-academics reviewing issues of academic resources.
President Roger Hull described the proposal to phase out CE as a “resource-based issue.”
But given limited resources, the desire to improve the program meant that there would have to be changes, he added.
“Why civil engineering and not another engineering program or a part of the liberal arts curriculum?” the president asked. “Because civil engineering is more highly structured and therefore less easily integrated into the rest of the engineering programs, because the remaining parts of the engineering division fit more logically together, and because we are primarily a liberal arts institution (we have 1,700 students in the liberal arts and 300 in engineering).
“But engineering is _ and will remain _ a distinguishing feature of Union,” he said.