84 ORGANIZING ACADEMIC COLLEGES: A GUIDE FOR DEANS 3. Moving a department from another college/school into A&S As the following cases illustrate, departments from another college may become in- corporated into the A&S college due to a shake-up of colleges outside A&S, or when a department housed in another college believes it would be better served within A&S. Full buy-in from the provost is required to make this kind of change work. a) A new chancellor and provost decided they wanted to combine two existing pro- fessional schools, both which were fairly small. One of the schools had an Interi- or Architecture program. As this idea evolved, the head of Interior Architecture came to the A&S dean to say the department was going to request it be moved into the College of Arts and Sciences. Although it is a professional program, the dean could see some advantages to the College to having them join. The dean said he was open to the idea and would meet with the provost to see if he approved. The provost, it turned out, was delighted with this idea because the merger of the two professional schools was meeting with opposition and, in his mind, if any depart- ment was willing to move somewhere, he would be pleased. The dean next embarked on a deliberate set of steps that involved 1) introducing the idea to his Administrative Council for a discussion (no objections), 2) having the de- partment head come to the Admin Council and talk to them (very cordial meeting), and 3) meeting with the departmental faculty to describe what the College of Arts & Sciences was like and how business was conducted. “It was a matter of having all the right conversations and getting to know each other,” says the dean. And then we worked on the process—we got the budget officer in- volved, decided on the various steps needed to make the move… it all went very smoothly. They really have been a great benefit to the Col- lege. One of the things that was coincidental was that a couple years previously a new building had been built for them and the Art pro- gram (in A&S), so they were already sharing some space and facilities and collaborating across Colleges. I had hired a new head in the Art Department who got along well with the head of Interior Architec- ture. Both are studio-based programs that make heavy use of comput- er technology, and a single IT person supports both departments. b) At a large research university, the chair of a department that included an accredit- ed program started conversations with the provost as a result of being somewhat dissatisfied with being in the School of Professional Studies. Things took off from there, with “a lot of back and forth, with the provost, with the A&S dean, the dean of the School of Professional Studies—who was not in favor but was not able to stop it,” according to a university dean. When it was finally decided the department would come into the CAS (Col- lege of Arts & Sciences), many changes needed to happen: change in course