College of Information, Data, and Society

Sent: June 21, 2024

From: Vincent J. Del Casino, Jr., Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

Dear Colleagues,

Toward the end of the spring semester, the Senate Executive Committee of the Academic Senate recommended that the president rename the College of Professional and Global Education to the College of Information, Data, and Society. This recommendation was based on the review of a proposal presented to a Naming Committee per University Policy S14-4. I want to thank the team in the college for putting forward such a thoughtful proposal for the name change, which they developed through robust consultation with faculty, staff, students, and administrators in the college. It was great to see such collaboration emerge through this process.

The president has affirmed the recommendation. With this name change, we will be able to begin the search for a permanent dean in the Fall of 2024 with the hope that individuals may be able to begin in either January or July 2025.

The name change for the College of Information, Data, and Society is effective immediately and will be seen in all systems moving forward. The Interim Dean of this college is Michael Meth, who will stay in that role until permanent leadership can be identified. The College of IDS now includes the School of Information and the Department of Applied Data Sciences. As a reminder, we already moved many of the functions of professional, continuing, and global education to the Office of Academic Innovation and Institutional Effectiveness under Ron Rogers. As a result, Nami Shukla oversees Continuing and Professional Education, while Alan Wong is working with our Global and International Student Programs and Services. None of these moves have added any new MPPs to the division. 

Also, please note that this is simply a restructuring to allow the academic programs to live in a college and for the support services to live in a central office within the broader central academic affairs administrative portfolio. As we do all this work, we are looking at ways to create shared services and increase efficiencies so that the overall division budget can meet the demands of the current budget crisis without passing down all the divisional reductions to the academic colleges. As a result, the Office of the Provost has either reduced central budgets or reallocated PaCE dollars to cover nearly $7M of the budget reductions in the division over the past two years, staving off deeper cuts in the academic colleges.

As always, please let me know if you have any questions.

Sincerely,
Vin