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Committees studying potential YSU college merger being meeting
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
Two committees — one of department heads and the other primarily of faculty — formed to make recommendations on the potential merging of colleges at Youngstown State University are expected to deliver their findings by early March.
The idea is for the committees “to come up with a recommendation for a structure and to look at opportunities from which we can benefit,” said Martin Abraham, interim provost and vice president for academic affairs.
The committees also will include issues of which to be wary in a possible realignment or merger, he said.
In the midst of lagging enrollment and lower revenue, YSU is considering merging the Beeghly College of Education and the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences or dividing CLASS departments between Beeghly and the College of Creative Arts and Communication.
The committees are expected to give their recommendations in early March. Abraham expects to make a recommendation to university trustees by June.
The faculty committee has met twice, once with Abraham and once without him.
“There are still a lot of questions and understanding of what we can do, what we should do or shouldn’t do and ways we can move forward,” Abraham said.
The former CLASS dean resigned last summer to take another job, and Bryan DePoy, dean of the College of Creative Arts and Communication, is leaving for a job at another college in mid-January.
Although YSU trustees earlier this year had approved a search for a new CLASS dean, Abraham said that search has been suspended.
Joseph Mosca, dean of the Bitonte College of Health and Human Services, who chairs the faculty committee, said the work is in the brainstorming phase. No themes have emerged from those discussions.
The three colleges include 16 departments.
“Our charge is to look at what a possible realignment of those 16 departments would look like condensed into two colleges, what are the advantages of that kind of realignment and possible synergies as well as potential concerns with merging into two colleges,” Mosca said.
Members of the faculty committee were selected by the deans in consultation with department heads, one from each department within the three colleges.
The other committee includes department chairmen and women from those departments.
Abraham said the department heads and faculty committees can offer different perspectives.
“There’s a lot of subtlety to what goes on in individual departments, a lot of which I’m not familiar with,” he said. “If you’re not in the department, you’re not familiar with it. That’s why we have both a faculty committee and a department chair committee because they have different perspectives.”