While iSchools are springing up all over the place, it is not all sweetness and light for this emerging discipline. News from SUNY Buffalo is that their program, formed from the merger of LIS and Communications seven years ago, is now being ‘realigned’. LIS will become part of Education while Communications will join the College of Arts and Sciences. Ostensibly this will enable greater collaboration. The official line is somewhat at odds with the reported comments of others as you can read here: http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20060620/1006816.asp?PFVer=Story.
There are many reasons why schools and mergers work and do not work so I suspect we will not know the full story here for awhile. The school’s website suggests that original affiliations of faculty lived on with each member still being seen as a professor in LIS or in Communications, and the divisions between these two seem fairly established in the curricular and degree offerings of this program. The provost estimates that the impact on students will be minimal and perhaps that’s the key — there may not really be an informatics program here, just an administrative umbrella under which two quite independent programs reside. Clearly something is not right in such a set up and it’s worth comparing this type of school with others, such as the greenfield program at Penn State which grew from the ground up and has avoided departmentalization.
Are there lessons here for other schools? I would not draw too many conclusions from this example but no doubt others will use this as an dire warning against changing existing disciplinary identities. Stay tuned.
You can read a blog offering the views of a faculty member involved at: http://alex.halavais.net/?p=1457