Passed: October 13, 1999
Sponsor: University Faculty Senate
Senate Discussions:
Motions to be Presented to the Faculty Senate
Concerning the CIS Task Force Proposal and Its Sequelae
1. [See Rationale Section I,II] The Faculty Senate shares with the Task Force, Provost Randel, and President Rawlings the sense that an information revolution has ushered in an information age with unignorable consequences for our conduct of undergraduate education, scholarship, research, and outreach and with opportunities for new directions in scholarship and research whose pursuit deserves the support of Cornell.
2. [Rationale III,IV]
(a) The recently-created office of the Dean for Computing and Information Science (CIS) be charged with assisting in the implementation of the vision, goals, and principles that will grow out of the Task Force efforts and those of others.
(b) The Dean for CIS be provided with an independent CIS Executive Board having broad membership of stakeholders selected by a process to be determined that ensures that Board membership appropriately balances the interests of University, discipline, and department.
(c) The function of this CIS Executive Board shall be to advise and support the Dean for CIS and provide policy for actions taken in fulfillment of the roles assigned to his office.
3. [Rationale II,VI]
The Dean for CIS together with the CIS Executive Board have the following roles:
(a) Support of instruction and instructional innovation in this area.
(b) Support of the development of faculty in this area both by providing bridging funds to enable departments to hire such faculty and by providing support to current faculty to develop and enrich programs in this area in their home departments.
(c) Proactively and specifically identify important and promising directions in computing, information science, and information technology, as they are observed across a broad frontier, and encourage movements by faculty units in these directions.
(d) Raise funds in support of the preceding.
4. [Rationale V] The Senate finds that the creation of a large Faculty of Computing and Information (FCI) is unlikely to accomplish the aims announced for it and may obstruct the evolution of more useful mechanisms for smaller, more coherent faculty groups to engage with the information age.
5. [Rationale VI] The Faculty Senate recommends that all Colleges at Cornell with undergraduate programs adopt requirements for such programs to ensure that their students become familiar with appropriate elements of computing and information science and technology. In achieving this, their curriculum committees should consult with the office of the Dean for CIS.
6. [Rationale VII] The President, Provost, and Deans of Engineering and Arts and Sciences are urged to rethink carefully the management of the Computer Science Department, taking into account the intellectual reach of this department and its roles in the College of Engineering and assessing whether radical change is justified by the reasons offered thus far.
Background
