GSLIS Gets Vote of Confidence in University of Illinois Faculty Review
By Norman Oder Jun 21, 2010Good news for the top-rated Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: though a university committee was charged with exploring the possibility of structural or organizational changes regarding the GSLIS and three other departments, it has concluded that "any cost savings would be far outweighed by academic and financial risks."
The conclusions in the "Final Report of the Academic Unit Reviews Committee" regarding the GSLIS largely reflect the draft responses issued earlier by Dean John Unsworth, which indicated that the school could raise new revenue by launching an informatics major.
The university will be accepting public comment on the report until July 1; at that time, Unsworth and others will provide a response. The project is one of seventeen that have been commissioned as part of Stewarding Excellence, an effort to identify cost savings.
Few competitors merged
The report notes that GSLIS is the Illinois's only state-supported university offering LIS degrees and that only one of the school's top ten competitors has merged the LIS school (Florida State University's College of Communication and Information):
The professional Master's program at GSLIS is ranked number 1 in the country by US News & World Report. Consolidation or mergers could pose a threat to the professional identity of faculty and students and adversely impact the national reputation of the program.
Growing revenues
Arguing that GSLIS has an appropriate level of administrative support, Unsworth pointed out the school in seven years has more than doubled its ICR (indirect cost recovery), nearly doubled its grant expenditures per faculty FTE, increased enrollment by about 50 percent, and doubled net tuition from on-campus students.
The informatics major
Unsworth cited 2007 discussions "around putting GSLIS in a position to be a full-fledged participant in the campus-wide informatics initiative, with a particular focus on launching an undergraduate informatics major as the long-term solution to our reliance on GRF [General Revenue Fund]." He said he agreed that a solution is needed.
Previously, GSLIS faculty have been prevented from starting an informatics major by objections from the departments of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering, but Unsworth suggested that an interdisciplinary project is possible.
Institutional heft
The report also notes the significant place GSLIS has carved out:
The vested interests of GSLIS' external stakeholders are many. GSLIS graduate students play a primary role in staffing for the University Library. GSLIS maintains strong relationships with its alumni (of about 7,000 worldwide). GSLIS faculty and students collaborate with the College of Engineering, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, College of Fine and Applied Arts, and College of Media, among others. Proposals for inter-college and collaborative degrees in informatics at the BS, MS, and PhD levels could also be detrimentally impacted by merging GSLIS into a larger unit, given that these programs have been planned with multiple partners that each retain their autonomy. Externally, GSLIS collaborates in multi-million dollar projects with Johns Hopkins ($20 million); the Andrew Mellon Foundations, the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and others.
