82 ORGANIZING ACADEMIC COLLEGES: A GUIDE FOR DEANS 2. Merging two or more departments into one A move to merge two departments is often initiated for reasons similar to split- ting a department: change in the popularity of a major, or unresolvable tensions between faculty (as in the two instances below). Deans may also be motivated to maintain a modicum of equity of majors and full-time faculty among departments within the college. a) An A&S dean at a public research university became convinced a merger of two language departments might be beneficial. Over a number of years, additional faculty had been added to teach new languages in one of the departments to the extent it was becoming the “Department of Other Languages.” The dean believed the faculty in one of the departments was more open to experimentation than those in the other and he hoped bringing the two groups together might generate a bit more flexibility in pedagogy. He embarked on a series of conversations with his provost and with deans in peer institutions and looked at other campuses in the system to which his university belonged, discovering that the most common arrangement was for all languages to be in a single department. The terms of both his department heads were due to expire at the same time (two years in the future), so the timing of a merger would avoid asking for resignations. Armed with a number of arguments to support the move, he met with the two heads separately. One head said she had been thinking along those lines herself; the head of the other department did not like the idea, as he wanted the depart- ment to retain its own identity. It took more conversation to persuade him that the dean was determined to make this change and did not find the head’s arguments compelling. The head agreed not to oppose the merger. The dean met with the department heads together and suggested when their terms expired, he would go outside to hire someone so the new head would not be identified with one of the former departments. He followed this meeting with a fairly long letter to the faculty members the move would impact, outlining his ideas as to why it was a good idea. Then he met with the combined department members and the merger was discussed for several hours. He described his approach as: I presented it to them as a decision I had made for the reasons out- lined in my letter and that we were going to make this change. I explained that the provost was supportive as were the two department heads, and what we were talking about was the mechanism for how we would do this, not if. That was important because it was a defensible move and I didn’t want to start the discussion about whether to do it.