Information fragmentation

Some characterize it as gross misconduct and an abuse of power.

Others see it as a justifiable administrative decision.

Either way, the departments, programs and people that, until this semester, made up the School of Informatics are now in the process of transitioning to other schools after Provost Satish Tripathi abruptly proposed to dissolve the seven-year-old school over the summer.

Among the critics of the reorganization is adjunct informatics professor Michael Sellitto. Sellitto served as the chair of the now-defunct school's founding committee.

"We had a very strong enrollment, both at the graduate and at the new undergraduate level," Sellitto said. "Other universities have since modeled UB's program, starting informatics schools of their own. It's very sad that other universities across the US are starting their own programs and have leadership that really understands the value, while we're moving backwards."

According to Tripathi, however, a lack of successful cohesiveness between the programs involved underpinned the reasoning behind his proposal to dissolve the school.

"The School of Informatics was originally conceived as constituting three departments and one school: Communication, Media Study, Computer Science and Engineering and Library Studies. Subsequently, two of the departments (Media Study and Computer Science and Engineering) declined to merge to establish the school," he said. "Seven years after the school was established, the two departments have not been able to develop a synergistic relationship. So in essence, the sum of the parts was not greater than the whole."

The school's history

Opened in 1999, the School of Informatics began as a joint effort between interested university faculty and Western New York community leaders. The school brought the Departments of Communication and Library and Information Studies under one roof on the premise that it would create a unique school that would focus on the "intersection of human communication and information processes" according to its now dormant Web site (www.informatics.buffalo.edu).

The school also gave birth to the Informatics Program, a field of undergraduate and graduate level study structured around the core values of society's interaction with information and technology.

"The study of informatics goes beyond the technical aspects of information technology and focuses on human interaction with information and information systems," wrote Jeff Carballada in a July 1, 2006 opinion piece in The Buffalo News. "As these systems become more complex, it is critical that we deepen our understanding of the societal implications of how information is disseminated and utilized."

Carballada is a former member of the School of Informatics' Founding Committee, which was assembled to serve as an advisory panel to the school's then dean, W. David Penniman.

"UB's commitment to informatics met with praise from the Western New York community," Carballada said.

In April of 2004, Tripathi, former dean of the Bourns College of Engineering at the University of California, Riverside, began his term as UB's provost at the discretion of then newly-hired president, John B. Simpson.

Sellitto said that as chair of the Founding Committee, he witnessed a particular uneasiness expressed by Tripathi toward the School of Informatics and its overall mission.

"Provost Tripathi was always questioning the program and how it fit in with fields like computer science," he said. "In my opinion, the provost just didn't get it."

In a public statement released on June 25, 2006, Penniman recounts meetings with Tripathi in which the provost was unwilling to further provide capital to fund the school and its programs.

"(Tripathi) had repeatedly refused to free up resources, indicating he was not ready to invest more in the school when he felt its focus was unclear," Penniman said. "He consistently rejected arguments regarding the broader definition of informatics that took us beyond the computing domain into a broader perspective of informatics."

According to Penniman, he continued to lobby the provost, urging him to reconsider. Tripathi, however, remained consistent with his opposition to the school and its mission. Additionally, Tripathi began to question Penniman's leadership of the school, citing a decanal review completed in the spring of 2006 as a reason for his suspicions.

On June 5, Penniman stated that Tripathi privately informed him that he would only serve one more academic year as dean, and that in the time new leadership and a new direction would be sought for the school's future.

Three days later on June 8, it was announced that Penniman had stepped down, making him the first and last full dean to lead UB's School of Informatics.

Tripathi's closure proposal

Tripathi claims to have begun the process of investigating the School of Informatics in February 2006, four months prior to making his announcement to close the school. In that time, the provost said that he sought the advisement of numerous faculty representatives and consultants on the school's progress and its plans for the future.

"I received much input into this recommendation to reorganize the School of Informatics from my ongoing conversations with the former dean and faculty," Tripathi said in an in-depth interview with The Spectrum. "As a result of the school's strategic planning process, I gained a broad and comprehensive perspective from the faculty as to the efficacy of the school and the ability of the school to develop intellectual - academic and scholarly - synergies between the (Departments of Communication and Library and Information Studies)."

On June 14, 2006, one month after the close of UB's academic calendar year, Tripathi requested the assemblage of all faculty in the School of Informatics for a meeting to discuss the future of UB's newest school.

Frank Tutzauer, Chair of the Department of Communication, was aware that Penniman had resigned and presumed that Tripathi would use this meeting as an opportunity to inform the faculty of new leadership that would soon take effect.

"When we came into the meeting with the provost, I had expected him to say that, 'Dean Penniman is stepping down and we're going to be looking for a new dean,' or 'we'll just appoint an interim dean for a while,' or something along those lines," Tutzauer said.

Instead, Tripathi announced his proposal to close the School of Informatics and move the school's three academic components (the Department of Communication, the Department of Library and Information Studies and the Informatics Programs) to other schools at UB. The proposal does not mention changes to the academic programs.

"When he told us that he was dissolving the school, that surprised me," Tutzauer said. "I had no forewarning, and I don't think that Dean Penniman had any forewarning either."

Criticisms of the provost's decision-making process

Despite what Tripathi has said, some of his colleagues - including former UB Provost David Triggle - say he acted seemingly on his own agenda.

"(There had been) no faculty input within or without the school, no consultation with the Faculty Senate, no consultation with the local community that had supported the school, and no obvious plans, or at least publicly announced plans, with what to do with the school, its departments, its students or its degree programs following closure," said Triggle, who now serves as a SUNY distinguished professor in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. "The issues around the disbanding of the School of Informatics are not that academic structures are monolithic permanent features never to be changed, but rather the arbitrary and non-transparent way in which this decision was reached."

As provost, Triggle was an advocate for timely response on behalf of the university in an effort to foster academic development, however he says that faculty input is always required.

"In my forty-plus years at UB I have been involved with a number of major changes," he said. "Those decisions, and more made by others, were always accompanied by full and open discussion and in the case of the departmental consolidations, by recommendations made by faculty-led committees. I was certainly unaware of any conversations, actions or even rumors of the impending decision by Tripathi to close the school. If there were any, they must have been very closely guarded."

Dr. John Ellison, an associate professor in the Department of Library and Information Studies and former director of the Informatics Program, also expressed concern over the way Tripathi handled the circumstances surrounding his decision.

"I question the provost's process of dissolving the School of Informatics arbitrarily without consulting the founders group, the advisory boards - he didn't even consult with the chairs of the departments let alone the faculty. Good administrators work through a proper process to get things accomplished," Ellison said. "Management defined is 'getting things done through people,' and I think that that office, from the top down, just does not understand effective management processes; their mindset is that, 'we decide it, therefore it is.'"

Ellison's frustrations with Tripathi's leadership continued after the initial announcement. In an August meeting with a representative from the provost's office, Ellison recalls being micromanaged and forced into decisions that were not of his own choosing. One decision in particular related to a list of names for an advisory committee that Ellison was asked to form.

"The provost's representative was very, very upset with some of the names listed. Two names were struck off immediately; both were people who represented large corporations in Buffalo. I was told that they had conflicts with the provost's office and that, 'they certainly wouldn't do,'" he said. "That is the same kind of arrogance that appeared when the provost marched into Baldy Hall and told the School of Informatics faculty that he had decided the school was being dissolved."

The former director went on to express his concern over what he considers administrative oversight he received from the provost's office.

"I immediately made it clear that I worked in a collegial manner, consulting with colleagues and students in the decision-making process and was not one to make arbitrary decisions," Ellison said. "I was being treated in a degrading manner similar to how the provost treated my colleagues when he unitarily dissolved the School of Informatics."

Two days after his meeting with the provost's office, Ellison submitted his letter of resignation.

According to Tripathi, his duties as provost are clear when evaluating academic programs.

"From my vantage point, the most important objective for all of our academic units is achieving and sustaining academic excellence as expressed in quality of academic programs and significant scholarly contributions to their respective disciplines or sub-disciplines," he said. "My focus is on working with the deans to ensure the success of the college and the schools."

Concerns about timing

Some question the timing of Tripathi's announcement, claiming that in mid-June, many faculty and students were off campus and unable to provide input or voice grievance over such a proposal. To this, Lucinda Finley, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Interim Dean of the School of Informatics, claims that ulterior motives were not behind the timing, and that the June announcement was made so that the summer months could be used as a transitional period.

Finley had been aware that Tripathi was considering the option of closing the school before it was announced on June 14. In the wake of Penniman stepping down as dean, Tripathi requested that Finley take over as interim dean, however Finley initially expressed reluctance.

"After the provost informed me of his decision to ask Dean Penniman to step down and for me to be the interim dean, he said that he might wait until the fall semester to announce proposals for the future of the school," Finley stated. "I said that I wouldn't agree to be interim dean under such conditions of uncertainty, as I needed to know what my job would entail - was my job going to be to keep everything in place to the point where a search could be done for a successor, or was my job going to be to tackle the important transitional issues and to help the faculty and staff that make the academic programs work transition into new homes?"

Believing that others placed in her position would have reacted the same way, Finley did not want to take on an undefined role as interim dean.

"Anyone the provost asked to be interim dean, whether from the inside or outside, would have had the same reaction I did," she said. "If you are going to take on a responsibility, you want to know exactly what your job is going to be."

Academic consequences to administrative actions

When Tripathi announced his proposal to dissolve the School of Informatics on June 14, he did so claiming the intent of allowing the school's faculty to use the summer months to begin the process of acclimating themselves to their new academic environments within other schools.

The provost's proposal shifts the Department of Communication and the undergraduate and graduate Informatics Programs to the College of Arts and Sciences, while the Department of Library and Information Studies will be directed to the Graduate School of Education.

Tutzauer prepared for the coming academic year with the provost's prescribed changes in mind and said he has found them to have little effect on his duties and no impact on the academics of his department.

"We are going to teach exactly the same classes in exactly the same manner - everything's going to remain the same" Tutzauer said. "The only difference is that instead of me reporting to Dean Penniman of the School of Informatics, I now report to Dean McCombe of the College of Arts and Sciences - it's like, 'meet the new boss, same as the old boss.' Other than that, in terms of the Communication Department, it hasn't made any difference whatsoever."

According to Tutzauer, the reorganization should not hurt collaborative research efforts between the Communication and Library and Information Studies faculties.

"There's nothing that stops anybody at the university from collaborating with anyone else, as long as the two people involved want to do it," he said.

Tutzauer is looking to the future of his department, anticipating that it will encounter continued success as one of UB's largest.

"I'll miss chatting with my Library and Information Studies colleagues, but we as a department are looking forward to being a productive member of the College of Arts and Sciences," he said. "We were strong before the School of Informatics, I believe that we were strong during the School of Informatics, and I think that we'll be strong after the School of Informatics. Communication is a subject that, throughout the country, lives in many different administrative homes depending on how a university is organized, and our mission and our goals have been the same since before the school was formed to where it is now."

Tripathi believes that his proposal to close the School of Informatics has not and will not affect the academic programs that were once a part of the school.

"Students are not affected by the proposal to administratively reorganize the School of Informatics because all academic programs and majors remain intact, and the departments and their faculty remain intact as well."