> 1. We recommend that the faculty and administration reconsider
the
> missions of the Institute committees that deal with academic
> computing, distance learning and other issues related to our
charge,
> in order to stimulate more faculty input.
>
> Possibilities include redefining the charge and membership of
> the administration's Academic Computing Council or the
standing
> Faculty Committee on the Library System.
As I've said many times, if this is done right then I think it's a win
all around. There needs to be more structured interaction between
Academic Computing and mainstream faculty, there are many ways to
achieve this, and we should recommend forward motion. I think we need to
talk about whether any existing committee fits the bill, but that can
wait.
> 2. We recommend that the administration consider linking the
> Academic Computing Office more closely with the Office of the
> Dean for Undergraduate Education, including the possibility
that
> the Director of Academic Computing report to the Dean.
But this, I think, is a terrible idea -- at least given the status quo,
which links the DUE to the DSA, to the clear detriment of the former. If
the UE and SA jobs were split -- not ranked, as I gather is being
proposed, but split into two identically-ranked jobs -- then the idea
might make sense, but an organization that tried to integrate housing
policy with academic computing and everything in between simply wouldn't
work. The resources involved are so different that a cultural morass
would result -- much as happened in the badly-managed merger between DUE
and DSA in the first place, which in my view largely halted central
educational innovation at MIT for considerable time. (I'm prejudiced in
this view, of course, having left DUE before the merger.) Certainly I'd
have no interest in continuing to manage academic computing any longer
than I had to were it part of anything like the current ODUESA.
This isn't to say I think the current arrangement is perfect -- there
are clear tensions among academic, administrative, and commons computing
within IS, and of course IS reports to the Senior Vice President rather
than the Provost, which seems odd given that the Provost funds academic
computing but makes sense given that there are greater operational and
support synergies to be had from academic computing being within IS than
there would be were it located in a non-technological organization. All
in all I think the current arrangement could be improved somewhat, but
that it serves MIT education better than any other arrangement I can
think of.
When this question last came up, during the CAC90 deliberations, that
faculty committee finally concluded that free-standing academic
computing made little sense, and that instead most academic computing
should be merged with IS, that funding for academic computing should
flow from the academic budget, that the Director of Academic Computing
should have reporting relationships both to IS and to the Provost, and
that there should be a formal faculty group to serve as counsel and
reference group to the Director.
The CAC90 chair *was* the separate-but-equal Dean for Undergraduate
Education at that time, and she subscribed to the committee's
complicated recommendation in this regard. Except that my reporting
relationship to the Provost is weaker than CAC90 anticipated, and the
level of funding for departmentally-based support falls far short of
what CAC90 recommended, the status quo is pretty much as CAC90
recommended. Frankly, I think that with the addition of an appropriate
faculty reference group such as would result from #1, the status quo is
pretty good, and I'd be loath to aggrandize the Dean for Undergraduate
Education job (which currently deals largely with the freshman year) at
the expense of our current academic-computing achievements. This whole
situation is further complicated by the incipient move on the
administrative side to create a Vice President for Student Services, who
would oversee many of the offices others are proposing become part of an
expanded ODUESA (housing, registrar, financial aid, bursar, admissions,
etc.).
If one were to move academic computing out of IS, then I think the most
preferable arrangement is direct reporting to the Provost, the next most
desirable is some kind of accomodation with Libraries (whose
circumstances and general approach have interesting parallels with
academic computing), the next most attractive is some kind of
accomodation with a redefined Dean for Undergraduate Education focused
on the entire undergraduate curriculum (including departmental
curricula - not just on the freshman year, GIR, and other educational
Commons), and the least most desirable is something that attempts to mix
academic computing and student affairs. In any case most of the
operational pieces of academic computing would remain within IS, under
formal agreements; it makes little sense to create duplicate network
operations, server operations, deveopment, and so forth as Project
Athena once did.
Of course I'm on very thin ice signing a report that advocates moving my
own organization somewhere else, since this skates remarkably close to
insubordination, and I hope we can be *very* careful if we recommend in
this area -- and even as we discuss it. Given the current levels of
anxiety and controversy arising from administrative reengineering, both
personally and organizationally I need to avoid rolling lit bombs around
willy-nilly.