80 ORGANIZING ACADEMIC COLLEGES: A GUIDE FOR DEANS • Changes to a program (growth or shrinkage) • A desire to encourage interdisciplinarity • A need to address a toxic working relationship among faculty within a department Changes initiated outside the college • Upper administration is reorganizing the college/school structure • A department in another college believes it would better fit in A&S In the following vignettes, the genesis and rollout of changes often return—in one way or another—to a few essentials questions: What is the history of the depart- mental organization? What is the nature of the discipline? Does it have an internal disciplinary hierarchy or differences among faculty in their goals for teaching and research? How well do people within a department get along and resolve their differ- ences? How similar are the expectations for research (and therefore the criteria for promotion and tenure)? How well does the departmental mission match the mission of its college? For the most part, this chapter assumes departments already sit in a college and suggests ten possible scenarios for change. The examples in this chapter do not involve wholesale reorganization of the larger college or school unit. In other words, the catego- ries and examples below are independent of an imposed merger or a forced splitting of two or more colleges at a university (which are covered in the next chapter). Scenarios for Changing the Status Quo 1. Separating one discipline from an existing department to form a new department Splitting a discipline or sub-discipline off from its home department to form an in- dependent department is one of the most common ways faculty and programs are reorganized. This move can be occasioned by a number of factors: growth in the popularity of the sub-discipline; unresolvable tensions between factions within the department; emergence of a new line of research within the original discipline; or from a desire to enhance a sub-discipline which shows promise for growth. It can also become desirable when smaller disciplines housed together grow large enough to want administrative independence. Separations can be initiated by a department as a whole, by the sub-discipline, or by the dean. The following cases illustrate these situations. a) At a small private college, the separation of a Communications program from the Department of Performing and Creative Arts was a function of its rapid growth in enrollment and faculty. This split resolved several issues existing with- in the department, and the two groups were happy to part ways. Most of the