Help Save University of Florida's CISE Department

[penguinfrk]

Hello CD community!
I'm not directly affiliated with the University of Florida, but my friend is studying CS there. He reached out to some of his friends who he knows is into CS and STEM in general.

In a nutshell, the dean at UF is trying to close their CISE (Computer Information Science Engineering) Department, but politicking it as a "restructuring." Effectively, it will merge the CISE and ECE (Electrical and Computer Engineering) department and fire most of the CISE faculty. Supposedly, it's due to budget cuts, which would be reasonable justification were it not that the CISE programs offered actually bring in more revenue for the school than its costs.

They have a petition going, and you can sign it here:
http://www.change.org/petitions/dean-abern...ise-department#

Florida teams! I'm not sure how possible it is to take action on this, but please look into it! A lot of my teammates are going into STEM careers at the University of Washington, so I assume these changes might have far-reaching consequences for your students a few years down the line.

I apologize if this was a repost. I did a quick search and found nothing on this. Thanks for reading!

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Here was my friend's full message:



Hey friends, I know a bunch of you (or us) are computer science/computer engineering/that kind of stuff nerds, so I hope you will be sympathetic.

The University of Florida dean dun goofed and is trying to get rid of the CISE (computer information science engineering) department and merge it with the ECE (electrical and computer engineering) department (which is kind of dumb because CISE is software oriented and ECE is hardware oriented).

Even worse, to do this, she is going to fire about half the staff from the CISE department and move the other half to various random departments. She is also going to get rid of all CISE UF research and fire all TAs, which essentially removes the graduate program at UF.

Even more worse, she has already begun to fire faculty members and has already fired the head of the CISE department...

Anyway, I'm not asking for much, I just want you to sign this petition which takes like, less than a minute (left side of the site):

http://www.change.org/petitions/dean-abern...ise-department#

And if you want to know more, you can read about it here:

http://saveufcise.wordpress.com/

Thanks a lot guys!

UPDATE April 16, 2012

Today there was a pretty big rally in the middle of campus where everyone walks by. Probably about 400-500 people consisting of both students and faculty members showed up to the rally. Everyone was wearing "SAVE CISE" signs.


After the rally, all the students formed a giant chain around the CISE building chanting "Save CISE" and other various chants.



After that, we all walked to the dean's office (who is the one who proposed the budget cuts to the CISE department) and chanted some more. After a few minutes had passed, the secretary of the dean came out and everyone asked her questions about the future, but her questions were really hazy and didn't give anything concrete. Everyone was chanting for the dean to come out, but the secretary said that she was busy.


Note that in the second picture, there were more people across the road too.

Information update too:
Apparently the CISE department makes more money for UF than it costs to maintain the CISE department, so it doesn't really make any sense to merge the CISE department with the ECE department. However, the dean has been trying to merge the two departments for three years now. Each time there was a vote though, a large majority of the college chair members voted to not merge the two departments (votes were along the lines of like 37-0 and 36-1). Now that UF is trying to cut budgets, she says that she doesn't need anyone's approval to merge departments to cut budgets.

Also, the dean only opened up about a week (9 days) to discuss the situation, so after the week, the discussion for the merging will be closed, which is definitely not enough time. In fact, the announcement of this actually opened up on about April 11 last week, so discussion of the closing of the CISE department closes on Wednesday (that's 2 days).

One of the proposals the dean is making is moving the database facility to the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering... How does that even make any sense at all??!

There's a scheduled rally tomorrow to speak with the dean. I'll update more when I get more information.

UPDATE April 17, 2012
There was a big "Study In" in front of the dean's office as a protest against the budget cut proposal. Basically, tons of CISE students just sat outside of the dean's office and did their homework/whatever they wanted.



The final decision got extended to May 7th, so that's good, but there is still a long way to go.

The dean is being pretty snaky calling this a "restructuring" of the CISE and ECE department to mask the fact that it's going to effectively eliminate the CISE department.

She is also talking about how she's receiving lots of positive feedback from companies like Harris Corp and Lockheed Martin which apparently are more hardware oriented companies than software companies. But she doesn't say anything about the software side.

For instance, Google Public Relations sent her an email. Although it wasn't released to the public; it was most likely against her proposal though. Microsoft sent down a representative to express concerns to the dean. The CTO and co-founder of Grooveshark, Josh Greenberg, spoke against the proposal. Barr systems and a lot of other software companies and Universities spoke out against the proposal too.

Also, if anyone is wondering, we're doing more than just protesting. We're also trying to inform UF alumni, spread the news, get outside companies and Universities to oppose this, etc.