The last of five town hall meetings for the proposed restructuring of the graduate school brought hundreds of faculty and community members to the Humanities building Friday.
Also present for the first time were Chancellor Biddy Martin and Dean of the Graduate school Martin Cadwallader.
Though their roles seemed to be largely observant, Martin did weigh in on the debate on several occasions, particularly when the future and health of the humanities under the restructure were questioned.
Journalism professor Lewis Friedland said he had the chance to watch a similar restructuring unfold at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where his spouse works.
The three “very clear” effects of that implementation he saw were a centralization of authority in the hands of the research vice chancellor, a loss of shared governance and a university-wide shift away from funding for the humanities and social sciences.
The humanities and social science departments have been a point of particular concern for many when talking about the proposed restructuring, as most of the stimulus for the proposal has been centered on the physical and biological sciences.
Martin credited these concerns as legitimate and went on to assure such a shift in funding would not be part of the restructuring process.
“I think it’s perfectly reasonable for humanists and social scientists to worry about [Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation] funding or funding in general,” Martin said.
She added she thinks it is not only possible, but probably necessary to find assurances that WARF funding would not change for the humanities and social sciences “short of catastrophe.”
“If anything, more funding needs to go to the humanities, not less,” Martin said.
Martin went on to address the fear that the restructuring would create a detrimental centralization of administrative authority.
In her time at Cornell as both a faculty member and later as provost, Martin said she witnessed a very similar separation of the research enterprise and graduate school for the same reasons being currently posed at UW.
During this time, she said she did not see either a centralization of authority or a gap between graduate education and research.
Martin went on to say having two separate heads reporting to the same person could in fact be key to confronting this concern and stands to make the two sections of the graduate school even more intimately tied than they currently are.
Professor William Tracy, chair of the University Committee, said while he did not hear many concerns that were qualitatively new at Friday’s town hall, he now fully expected faculty would be involved in the process through the information gathering period, something he and others have been skeptical of from the beginning.
At the end of the five town halls, it seemed there were many questions and concerns left unsatisfied, though Provost Paul DeLuca Jr. assured that faculty input would continue to be gathered and heard through January.
