104 ORGANIZING ACADEMIC COLLEGES: A GUIDE FOR DEANS institutions where this kind of change had occurred, and making STEM-aligned programs stand out from the historical liberal education backdrop of Arts & Sciences was a common driver for change. Case: Keeping up with the Joneses In this case, a new president and provost were hired shortly after a campus was upgraded from a community college to a baccalaureate-granting university. The university had three colleges: Arts and Sciences, Business, and a college housing the campus’s applied programs. The president declared that to be a legitimate university and not a community college, the campus needed a stand-alone STEM college like other successful universities [Symbolic]. The Arts and Sciences college was divided into three parts: STEM; Social Sciences; Arts & Humanities. New deans were hired as leaders for the new units. The president’s goal was achieved by forming a STEM college that resembled those at other universities he viewed as successful. Two unintended yet positive outcomes were realized. The earlier colleges were organized as historical accumu- lations of programs and they had become unwieldy over time. With the reorgani- zation, programs were placed into colleges where faculty was better aligned. This realignment made recruiting faculty easier. It was also easier to promote consistent messages about teaching and research. Second, the three new deans hired were all external and brought with them new tactics to motivate their colleges to embrace the reorganization. In other words, leaders with unconstrained vision were hired to guide the transition. Yet other unintended consequences were not so positive. For example, several faculty members and politically influential chairs believed they would be appointed as deans for the new colleges. When formal searches and external hires occurred instead, these individuals felt overlooked and underappreciated [Human Resource]. They remained in the colleges for the new deans to work with [Political]. This could have been avoided by making clear the full process of how the new colleges would be developed at the onset of the decision. Further, due to the speed of the division of the colleges, new policies and procedures were put into place without significant input from faculty [Structural & Human Resource]. Over the next five years, the colleges operated as established, and the deans regu- larly tweaked the number of departments relative to number of office staff/associate deans in their respective colleges in ways similar to shifting between divisional or functional associate deans. When enrollment began to decline concurrently with the decline in state support, the deans of the colleges of Social Science and Arts & Humanities left their positions for other opportunities, and a new provost was hired. The new provost recommended merging the two colleges now lacking deans rationalizing it would save costs and all the faculty from these two colleges were already located in the same building. The STEM college would remain separate, the