The administrative structure of academic departments at St. Lawrence University is being reorganized.
In charge of implementing the changes, SLU Vice President and Dean of Academic Affairs Alison Del Rossi outlined her aims for the restructuring. “My goal was to increase the minimum size of departments and reduce the number of administrative units or departments, which will, over time, reduce the number of department chairs to create greater efficiencies, increase workload equity in academic leadership, and facilitate training of departmental leaders,” Del Rossi said. This goal will mainly involve certain departments merging with others.
A total of nine departments will be merging into three consolidated “administrative units,” according to Del Rossi. Each unit will house a few programs and their corresponding faculty. One unit will be comprised of Anthropology, Religious Studies, Sociology and Public Health. Music and Digital Media and Film will be another unit. Environmental Studies, Geology and Physics will be consolidated as well.
Another change is that Del Rossi is reallocating faculty members from Canadian Studies, Educational Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies, some of the smaller departments that only offer minors, to teach in other departments. The minors in question will not change in any other way, as professors from other departments will provide those majors with courses to balance out the redistribution. Del Rossi added that Academic Affairs is still going to be working with faculty and department chairs to reorganize some smaller programs.
Del Rossi wanted to be clear that SLU’s offerings of academic majors and minors will not be affected by the changes, nor will curriculum, course offerings or who students’ academic advisors are. She hopes that the changes will encourage greater collaboration between related programs, such as creating more interdisciplinary courses, more shared administrative positions and a stronger support community for new faculty. She said that some of the faculty are already thinking about how to take advantage of the new opportunity for closer collaboration. “College graduates today need to be able to work in cross- or multi-disciplinary teams and need to bring their liberal arts skills, knowledge and thinking to the social, environmental, global and political challenges we face,” Del Rossi said. “The re-organization of academic departments will show our commitment to this approach and model this for students.”
As an example of what benefits she hopes the re-organization will bring in the future, Del Rossi said that the Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Department is already a successfully consolidated unit. The department offers five majors with some overlapping courses, as well as specialized faculty for different areas of study. Del Rossi said that two of the department’s majors, data science and cybersecurity, came into existence in the last five years via faculty collaborating and leveraging the broader resource base within the consolidated department.