SE–CS department merge discussion

Date and Time

Friday, January 9, 2009, 2:00pm–3:00pm

Attendees:

• Dr. Jorge Diaz-Herrera – Dean of the Golisano School of Computing and Information Sciences
• Marc Weil – Vice President of the Society of Software Engineers
• Paul Solt – President of the Computer Science Community
• Angelo Dinardi – President of the Computer Science Special Interest House
• Jeff Linse – Member of the Society of Software Engineers
• Chris Johnson – Member of the Society of Software Engineers

Following is a mostly complete transcript of the meeting. Side discussions with no relevance to the topic at hand were removed with indications of such.

Before the meeting, Dr. Diaz-Herrera agreed to allow us to take notes during the discussion.

A brief summary of the major points discussed, for those don’t wish to read the whole transcript:

• Students would like to foster student/administration transparency, and the dean agreed that this was a good idea.
• Students are worried that the new school will blur the lines between the departments in terms of budget, faculty, staff, and facilities. The dean assured us that this would not happen. The concerns included having CS and SE faculty pulled to the school level and made to teach classes in both departments, being forced to open departmental labs and classrooms to other departments, and having the SE budget reduced because it’s such a small department compared to CS. There was also concern of bias in the school director position depending on the department he or she is pulled from.
• A major theme running through what the dean said is that nothing will change and that faculty and students would never let it happen.
• The restructuring is not a reorganization. It’s only placing one more administrative level between the department chairs and the dean’s office and creating a thin container around the CS and SE programs. Instead of CS and SE both residing within the college, they will both reside in a school unit.
• There are several reasons why the restructuring needs to take place:
  1. There is currently no way to have an open major for students incoming students who don’t know which of the programs they would like to pursue.
  2. In order to have the college-wide PhD program properly recognized by the CRA and the CRA Deans, the programs (in GCCIS’s case) need to be put into containers that match the i-school and the c-school groupings that CRA has come up with. Also see more information on the Taulbee Survey mentioned during the meeting
  3. Bringing the programs closer forces us to truly define why they are separate in the first place, leading us to more solid definitions of computer science and software engineering.
• There will be a transition team formed in the next few weeks that will be responsible for seeing this restructuring through to fruition. It will consist of the CS and SE department chairs, one CS and one SE faculty member, one CS and one SE staff member, and one CS and one SE student member.
• The transition team, not the dean, will be responsible for naming the new school director.

After a discussion by the students following the meeting, it was decided that Marc Weil (Vice President of SSE) and Paul Solt (President of the CSC) would be the two students on the transition team since, together, they represent the largest and most diverse group of students concerned with the transition.

Marc

Let’s start by just letting you know why we’re here.

Dean

And actually I appreciate you taking the initiative. This is very good.

Marc

I’m glad, you know as students it’s probably really good from your point of view that we care about the program.

Dean

Sure.

Marc

We have several points that we want to go through here.

Dean

We’ve got an hour.

Marc

Alright, hopefully we’ll be able to cover everything in an hour. So I guess the first thing we want to bring up is just the fact that there was a really negative, knee-jerk reaction to announcement, students are very upset about it, and part of what we’ve been trying to do is mitigate that and keep students from going off the deep end about the whole thing because, you know, we don’t know everything and there’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s still fluid. But you know, people are mad. We think that might be because they weren’t told directly or asked first. They kind of had to find out through grapevine. I was just wondering what you think about that and if there are any official mediums through which students can voice their opinions about this specific topic to you and the transition team.

Dean

Let me begin by saying it’s unfortunate that this happened to the student body because what we are doing is mainly an administrative restructuring. There will be no effect on the programs or even the departments. So maybe there was some miscommunication someplace. That’s part of the past. I’m glad you came over. I was planning on talking to you anyways. I saw a Facebook group and I said well, this is completely wrong. This isn’t what we are trying to do. Administrative units are like trays, they are recipients used mainly to manage human resources as well as laboratories and things like that. Programs stand by themselves. I’d like to tell you that we are extremely proud of the programs that we have in this college. In fact, we are the only college in the United States that have 9 Bachelors degrees in computing and we want to keep it like that or add more. Having said that, the restructuring is not a reorganization. It was driven by a number of factors. We’ve been talking about it for 3 years. It was this year that we started making changes. The conditions were right to start doing something. So we started by restructuring the IT side of things, and then the next logical step was to reorganize—or restructure, not reorganize—the SE and CS programs. As an administrative restructuring, it has no impact whatsoever on the programs. If anything, it will have a positive impact of maybe sharing resources, if that makes sense. That’s happened on the IT side and I’m not sure if it will happen here because the departments have a pretty much well-established resources and have the resources that they need. I don’t see that happening.

To answer your question, I thought about it. And I said well, maybe we could have student representation on the transition team. Nothing has been decided. We will have a transition team that will work out the details. We’d like to have the restructuring in place by July 1, 2009 because there’s very little that needs to be done. On the IT side there was much more restructuring. A new department was created and faculty had to decide which department they were going to: gaming or IT. It was much more involved. And as you’ve probably heard form the IT students, the impact on the programs has been zero because that was not the intent. Let me give you an example. The programs exist… the structure is purely administrative. The college of arts and sciences has no departments. It has 2 schools. The college of science has two schools and two departments and they are now wrestling with that because one of those schools is very large and there are two remaining departments. The college of business has no departments. So these structures are administrative. They are to be able to administer the resources in the best possible way in order to help the students and the programs.

Marc

We understand the structuring is good. You don’t want to have 20 people reporting to you at the same time if some of the other departments decide to split off. We all understand the creation of the school as a container is good thing. Our concerns weren’t specifically with the fact that the restructuring would occur, but rather the possible perceived implications thereof. The first big one is that the CS department is more than 4x the size of our department. We are a very tiny department. One of the things we’re worried about is if the person overseeing the school would be biased, whether it’s to either department, it could have an impact on the other when it comes to things such as budget and curriculum.

Dean

Let me address that because it’s a natural one. Right now, CS and SE exist within the same house: the college. So, it would be the exact same structure, but instead of reporting to me, they’d report to someone else. We have no intention to get rid of the SE department. I’m a SE myself. I’ve done that for 20 years. I was one of the founders of the Masters of Software Engineering department at Carnegie Melon. In fact, when I first came here, everyone said well you know, Jorge’s just going to favor the software engineering folks because that’s his heart. And because of that I have to be careful that I’m not biased. It hasn’t happened, it won’t happen. Why would it happen? The faculty won’t let it happen, I won’t let it happen, the chairs won’t let it happen, students won’t let it happen. So the point that I’m trying to make, and I made this point in my memo to the faculty, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, it’s my first point. I said, today, the SE/CS leave together under one umbrella, which is the college. Exactly the same thing would happen, but instead of the college, it would be a school: exactly the same.

So to answer that question exactly, I don’t see what that would change. It hasn’t happened yet.

Marc

Again, our major worry was the bias. We heard that in the new IT school, some of the budgets had been blurred together between those departments. I know that’s a completely different situation.

Dean

That’s because of the new department. The gaming department split from the IST department so we had to take the budget to give part to the gaming. This is not going to happen here. The departments will keep their budget. Nothing will change. The only thing that would change is that instead of reporting to me they’d report to the school director.

Marc

The next question that we had then was that we had heard whisperings of plans to centralize the staff, the academic advising staff into one school academic advising staff.

Dean

No. No decision has been made in that sense.

Marc

Right, and I think that comes back to the original point of having the transparency and student involvement. I appreciate that you offered the positions on the team.

Dean

I think it will be great. And actually, I think we need two representatives: one from CS and one from SE.

Marc

So would you mind then if we were to send you names?

Dean

Please do that. Make sure there’s one from each.

Marc

Yeah of course, we wouldn’t want bias in ours as well.

Dean

Right. You had some more questions?

Marc

Yeah actually, Paul had wanted to discuss some things from the CS side of things as well.

Dean

Before we move to that, let me tell you that, and bear with me here, I may ramble a bit. We belong to Computing Research Association (cra.org). Feel free to check them out.

Marc

I’m familiar with them.

Dean

We have a project that, for lack of a better name, has been called the IT Deans group. Started in 2000 by the initiative of the college of computing at Georgia Tech and the school of computer science at Carnegie Melon University. Needless to say, In 2001 when we became a college and got a Dean, we joined. So right now, we have about 48 deans. We’re changing the name starting now. We are now called the CRA Deans. We meet twice a year, in February, sometimes we bring students, by the way. I’d be glad to have one of you come to one of our meetings because we showcase. In that group, we are the largest group. We are the most comprehensive school and they ask us all sorts of questions like how do you do this and that. Allow me to ramble a little bit. The point that I’m making is that in many areas, we’re leading in the group.

In the last two years that CRA does called that Taulbee Survey. Are you familiar with that? The only schools that participate in that survey, actually the only departments that participated were the departments of CS and/or CE that offer PhD programs. So we’ve never been part of it. When we started our PhD program two or three years ago, we said okay we’re ready to join, so we want to participate in this survey. And the question okay, which department is going to participate in the survey? Our PhD is college-wide. So that’s 3 years ago. That started a whole discussion of what’s happening in computing. And now, the CRA has opened their eyes finally, and realized that there are other things besides the department of computer science. I’m not trying to minimize computer science or anything like that. They count actually two things: CS and CE. They refuse to count SE, IT, etc. So I said how do we do this? How can we be counted? If they count us, we’d become the largest producer of computing graduates in the United States, period. The closest one is Georgia Tech and Maryland. So, finally after 3 years of going back and discussing, we said well how about this: how about we don’t count departments, we count academic units. An academic unit is a department, a school, or a college.

And they group the programs into two groups. I don’t know if you’ve heard this.

Marc

The i-school and the c-school?

Dean

Yes. The i-school and the c-school. So now they count the I-degrees, the CS degrees, and the CE degrees. And then we said well, what about SE? How do we count that? So they’re going to put CS, CE, and SE in one group. They will be called the c-school. And IT and anything that has to do with IT for example for us would be medical informatics, information technology, networking, security, and gaming will all be under the “I”. When we send a note, and we’re having a meeting in 5 weeks, February 24th I believe it is, we’d be glad to bring one of you on. I’d love to show our students to show what we do. The case is going to be made that they should only count two groups rather than CS, CE, and “I”. They insist that SE should go under CS. I said well why not CE? You know? And they said oh well no, no, no they are more CS than CE. They are more of the software side and having nothing to do with the hardware. This has nothing to do with you guys. But what I’m telling you is that our decision to have two schools is right on par with that’s going on at the national level of leading the definition of computing as a discipline like engineering was in the 20th century. In 1920’s, people were trying to define what is engineering. In the 21st century we are trying to define what is computing. Computing is a discipline of it’s own right. Separate from science and separate from engineering. And that’s the game that we play. And this is great news, when I told my colleagues that we were moving in this direction they say “Jorge let us know how you did it because we want to follow your example.” And the next one is going to be Cornell. Cornell is coming up to visit us. They have a department of CS and then a bunch of other programs, but only one department: Computer Science. So they are going to come up to see what we have and how we do things.

So, long story short, we’re leading the pack in doing this. The impact on the program is minimal. The impact is that we tell the world that we have two sets of programs in this college: we have the “I” programs and the “C” programs, and that makes it very clear.

Marc

I hope that by saying we have the “C” programs that people don’t actually start lumping the programs together because CS and SE are very different.

Dean

Sure, oh yes. And it’s likewise in the IT. They are also very different on the IT side.

Paul

And then would this make it easier to do an exploration program in Golisano?

Dean

That was going to be my last point. The president and the provost are very interested in having support for, I don’t like to call them “undecided students”, I like to call them “open majors”. We are the only college in the whole university that doesn’t allow that. But if we have two groups—two schools—as a matter of administration, then you have a central point where a student, administered by the school, which doesn’t belong to any department, is allowed to make progress. If we don’t have the school model, we can’t handle that. We can’t. It is of very little cost for the programs. I was amazed. For CS and SE to become a school, it’s a matter of putting it on paper. That’s it. Nothing changes.

Paul

Would you bump up one of the people from the departments to head the school? How does that work?

Dean

I don’t want to name a school director. On the IT side I did name a school director because it was a different situation and there was some sense of urgency. A new department needed to be created. That’s major. Faculty needed to decide where to go—17 of them, not just 2 or 3. So, I did name a director. Here, I don’t want to name a director. I want a team to work it out. I’d prefer for it to be Vallino or Fernando, to be quite honest, and I told Paul Tymann that. Vallino doesn’t want to do it.

Marc

We don’t want to lose him.

Dean

You won’t lose him.

Marc

In the school, or as a professor?

Dean

He would still have to teach.

Marc

Really?

Dean

Sure! He’d have a drastically reduced workload, such as only one course a quarter or something. But Vallino won’t do it, must to my dissatisfaction.

Marc

I can imagine.

Dean

Fernando might do it, and that would be okay. But we are in conversations. Please, don’t say that Jorge is going to put someone in office, no, no, no, nothing like that. The team will decide, and if the team says, let’s say by the end of the spring or winter quarter—because I’d like to name this team in the next week or 2—if the team says “Jorge we can’t do this until July 2010”, well then so be it. But I think we can’t loose time because of this movement that is nationwide.

Paul

How much additional work does this person do on top of everything else?

Dean

Let me use the other school as an example. And I’m not saying that exactly that will happen. In the other school, the chairs today have been relieved of a lot of administrative duties so they can focus more on academics and issues such as student issues and faculty issues. Things like budget, space, policies, dealing with the upper administration have been shifted to the school director so that the chair is relieved. So basically, what the chair used to do before will now be shared by 2 people. And they both will teach. They will probably teach 1 course per quarter.

Marc

It’s shared by the two? So the chair still has a say in facilities and budget in the department?

Dean

Absolutely. And in fact, the school director has no budget.

Marc

Okay, just the department budget.

Dean

Just the department budget. This is the way the university works: as far as the university is concerned, the departments have no budget. I have the budget. When I get it, I say okay you get this, you get that, and you get that. You can do whatever you want with it, but please don’t overspend. That’s how it works. I envision, because you know we haven’t done this yet, when the schools are in place that the same situation would happen but instead of me giving it to departments I’d give it to the school director and they’d give it to the departments. It is the case that the departments have their budgets and that’s fixed. You can’t take that away. I have the prerogative of doing that, but I’ve never done that in 7 years. I could take a faculty member from one department and move them to another department if I see the need. We’ve done it once, [moving one from] CS to IT. We did that.

Marc

So you mentioned the whole issue of space. That was one that I had forgotten. You know, we have our teams our studio classrooms. Nothing will change?

Dean

Nothing will change.

Marc

So I know nothing will change initially as a direct result of this, but again, down the road as things progress is this something to be concerned about? Do we have to worry about the team rooms being opened up to another full department?

Dean

No. It is not happening now, so why would it happen then?

Marc

Different person in charge.

Dean

No, we wouldn’t make that mistake. Faculty would not let that happen. I would not let that happen. I won’t be here forever. Things don’t work like that. No, I don’t think so. As I said before, the school is almost like a tray, a container. In this case it’s almost just like a framework to, for all practical reasons, to administer the undeclared student. That’s the main reason that makes sense to have a school level person.

Paul

Does that mean that we’ll have additional staff or support for undeclared majors?

Dean

Possibly. That would come from the university. We will probably have to ask for that, yes. There’s another thing, too. When I first came here I was very interested in having a college-wide open major. We tried my first year, 2003, and it didn’t work because we have two different sets of programs. These guys require discrete math and calculus and these guys do not. These guys require a CS sequence and these guys don’t do it. So we couldn’t do it. It was frustrating because I thought that since we were a college of computing we ought to have something in common. We didn’t come to the realization that we have two sets of programs until 2 years ago. We have two different programs. So it’s like two new colleges, if you will.

The last item—this is the first paragraph from the letter sent to the faculty, I don’t know if you’ve seen it. Here I said, nothing will change with the program space anything like that, unless people sees there is some obvious benefit to do something. And I don’t know who that would be.

My last point I make in the letter is that right now I’m very tied up with the day to day. The chairs don’t talk to me directly for the past year. They talk to the vice dean. So right now we have the same situation. And the vice dean is telling me that I cannot do my job. So, this restructuring would allow me to be outside which means I’ll be asked to bring dollars to the college. I can’t bring dollars to the college by just being in my office. It just won’t happen. I need to travel; I need to be outside. So basically the school director would deal with the day-to-day issues.

Paul

You work with outside companies or something like that?

Dean

Primarily, I would work with donors, individuals. I like it. It’s an interesting challenge. Before someone commits any sizable amount of dollars to a college it takes anywhere from about 12-18 months. It requires a relationship. I go up to someone’s house 3 or 4 times a year because that’s where we are in the relationship. We have someone this close to giving a million dollars for scholarships. He was about to do something last Sept and the economy went sour so we had to postpone it. Long story shorts, there are many smaller points that when you put them all together, it makes sense to have this new restructuring. You need to rest assured that the Provost, myself, and many people that around me, are aware of this that we will have the students in the programs as the first thing that is not to be touched or damaged. That’s what we’re here for. Everything we’re going is to make things even better. We’re very proud of all the programs that we have [and] it will remain like that. A colleague asked why we haven’t lost a large number of students over the past 6 years when so many people did. You know, 70% of CS enrollment is down from 6 years ago. I just heard today from Mammoth University, I used to work there; they had the very first SE department in the country. Department, we had the first program, they had the first department. I got a call from there saying that the SE department is absorbing the CS department. I said, “what? Are you sure?” Their CS department had 5 new [incoming freshman] students. SE had 35 new [incoming freshman] students. So SE took over CS. I said wow that’s interesting. Things are very developing in a very interesting way. We are in the lead. You should be proud of where you are. You should be very proud of this college and the programs that we have. They are very high quality. Have no doubt abou it. I go to these meetings, 45 deans, from Carnegie Melon, Cornell, Northeastern, Georgia Tech, California has three or four including Irvine, Michigan, the whole 9 yards. Everyone is doing this. MIT doesn’t have a school just a CS department and an aeronautical software engineering department and they are not together. They don’t have a college of computing. Anyway I think I’m talking too much, so I’ll let you guys ask some more questions.

Marc

In terms of the future of everything, how things are happening, and I’m talking long after all of us are way out in industry; you know, 5 or 10 years down the line. And again, this is of course barring the absorption of the CS department by the SE department.

All

[Laughter]

Dean

That would never happen. Oh I didn’t finish the story! Bob Constable [dean of computing at Cornell University] asked me, he said, “Jorge, how come your programs didn’t suffer?” I said because of diversity. We have 9 freaking Bachelor programs. Because our students are not forced to go one route, they can be in CS, SE, CE, whatever they want. It’s not that easy to change programs, which bothers me, but we’ll work on that.

Marc

And they actually have to know the difference between the two. That’s another major issue that we see.

Dean

Yeah. And one of the things I was asked when I was first hired as a dean, somebody asked “why do you want to do that [separate CS from SE]?” And I said, “because it’s a great opportunity to come to grips with what is CS and what is SE and what is IT because now we have to define it.” And we have to define it in such a way that we can all live together. It’s like a hand. Every finger on a hand is different. If you take some finger away, there is something that you cannot do with your hand. There is one finger that is very critical. Which is it? The thumb. The little one. This is the only finger that touches every other finger. This is the finger that, without it, we don’t have a hand. So I asked the faculty, “What is our thumb?” We’re still working on that. There are about 6 or 7 thumbs.

This is fascinating. I love this stuff. We are leading the pack. We are defining what computing is. I was also asked, “what about computer engineering? That’s the only thing we’re missing.” If CE were here, we’d be complete. I hear sometimes they do want that and sometimes they don’t. It doesn’t matter. It’s all politics. You should not worry about that.

Marc

It all keeps coming back to the original point that you were making, that nothing is going to change. It’s just something we worry about in the future. If you leave and your vision goes, we’re just worried that we’re out in industry and all of a sudden we hear from the grape vine that the degree we have no longer means the same thing that it means when we got it.

Dean

Listen, let me explain something, Marc. Can I call you Marc?

Marc

Can I call you Jorge?

Dean

Yes, especially since you said it. Most people can’t, so they say “J”.

All

[Laughter]

Dean

Let’s say we don’t change anything and I’m not here. Anything could happen.

Marc

That’s true.

Dean

Right now the CS and SE live together under the same group, which is the college of computing. It would be exactly the same thing, but a slightly smaller roof. Maybe like a tent within a tent or something. You would have even more control. Marc trust me, it’s been an interesting 6 years with 110 faculty members. I think this is good for both programs.

Angelo

I was going to say we have the three groups here, SSE [Society of Software Engineers], CSH [Computer Science Special Interest House], CSC [Computer Science Community].

Dean

Oh so that’s what it is, okay. I was trying to figure that out.

Marc

Paul is the President of the CSC, I’m the Vice President of the SSE, and Angelo is the President of CSH.

Jeff

I’m from SSE.

Chris

And I’m SSE as well.

All

[Discussion and joking about winter ball and how the dean misses it every year.]

Angelo

So we have the 3 student groups that encompass a lot of the students. So obviously we can go back and try to calm people down and say here’s what we’re hearing.

Dean

Which is that nothing is going to change in any way, shape or form.

Angelo

Right, and at the same time we don’t encompass everyone. So the question is, what’s the timeframe for you and your office to make it an official announcement?

Dean

We want the school to be in place by July 1st.

Angelo

Is there anything before that?

Dean

Before that, we need to create a transition team, a steering committee.

Marc

And you’d be willing to share the details of that with everybody?

Dean

Absolutely. But, I can tell you right now, I have the two department chairs right now, Fernando and Paul Tymann, two faculty members, which probably will be Vallino from SE and somebody else from CS, members of the staff, which will be Lana and someone else from CS, and in this case I’d like to have student representation, at least one from each department. I don’t think I want one from each group [SSE, CSH, and CSC] because then it’s not balanced. Listen, it’s up to you guys. I want to be inclusive; I want to be open. I have nothing to hide. I think this is good for the disciplines. This is good because it forces you to define what CS is and SE is. It’s taken CS 7 years to finally say that we are the scientific, theoretically underpinnings of computing, whatever that means. We will put “scientific” in quotes, okay? Because that doesn’t mean that they are in the college of science.

Marc

Right.

Dean

It’s a different kind of science. We are now realizing that, yes, this is what we are. It’s like the fingers, right? Maybe the thumb it’s not any given department or program. Maybe the thumb is, I don’t know, the school director or dean or some other guy who makes everything else work.

I don’t want to rush. I will be announcing probably in the next week or two. We have a faculty meeting next week for the whole college. I think it might be prudent to have a team formed by then. So send a couple of names.

Marc

We’ll send you names. And you know, referring to the memo you sent to faculty and staff earlier, if there’s ideas forming during the team, I’m sure the students would like to know; all the students. A lot of them are obviously going to delete their emails but some of them will care.

Dean

I gave explicit instructions to the other team. They want to call themselves I-school, and I told them “that’s a bad name” and that they shouldn’t use that. So going back, I gave them very specific instructions about efficiency, use of resources, blah, blah, blah. In fact they were able to share some labs and stuff, especially the gaming department. And that makes sense, since they are a new department. Here, I probably won’t give them any specific details other than to come out with a structure and a way to live together that furthers the student success, faculty success, and program excellence. That’s it. Those are the things we are worried about.

From what I can tell, if I [hypothetically] received that memo from my dean, nothing would change. The only thing that will change is the functions of the chairs and the director. We have to figure out who’s going to do what.

Marc

And I know that’s true. Let me just come from a standpoint of personal feelings. The students felt like there were being closed off from something that, as a whole, they think will affect them. If they had the memo to read and interpret themselves, we could have avoided much of that.

Dean

I was surprised by that because administrative changes happen all the time, and very seldom involve students. Maybe this is a mistake, but that’s the way it is because we think that, as administrators, we change the way that we run the place so we make it smoother or whatever. It very seldom involves students. But it’s not that we close you off intentionally.

Marc

It feels that way sometimes.

Dean

But no, we’d never do it. We did the other thing with the i-school and students weren’t involved whatsoever because they were not impacted. Nothing changes as far as they’re concerned, and the same thing will happen here: nothing will change as far as you’re concerned.

Marc

Assuming that students still want in, since we’re going to have students on the task force we can always bring it back to them.

Dean

Absolutely. I think that’s a great idea. When you had the motive and initiative to come and meet with me, I said, “you know, that’s great. Perhaps they should be a part of the team.”

Marc

Did we have anything else?

Dean

When is the next [SSE Winter] Ball?

All

[More discussion about the winter ball and the dean’s upcoming travels to Malaysia and helping to start a computing college there.]

Dean

This is great, guys. You should be very proud of what you’re doing, especially [representing] the three organizations: CSC, CSH, and SSE.

Marc

It’s quite a diverse student base.

Dean

You should reach out also to the other side, the IT side. They are different, but every bit as good as you are. Remember the hand.

Marc

Absolutely.

All

Discussion of diversity among students and embracing it in CSH.

Marc

We want to give you one these copies, these are our notes from the meeting, just so you have something to go back to.

All

[SE open house pizza discussion. CSH discussion.]

Dean

Feel free to come by. I have an open door policy, Paul knows it. If I have time I’ll see you guys. Don’t be shy. Thank you for taking the initiative. This is going to be good.

I can make a copy of this memo, would that be helpful? Once you send me those names [of the students for the transition team] I’ll give them a copy.

Marc

Sounds good. We’ll talk about that and get that to you next week or so.

Dean

That sounds pretty good. Thanks for your time.

All

Thank you.

[Discussion of proposed change to RIT’s academic calendar. General dissent amongst the students.]