When worlds collide
How department mergers shake up colleges
In the world of higher education, things change constantly. Whether it be a new administration, new majors being offered or new buildings constructed on campus, college are constantly adapting to serve their students.
Sometimes these changes can have lasting implications for future students. One of these internal changes is known as a "department merge" -- when two or more disciplines combine to better serve university finances or student needs.
In recent years, Central Michigan University has seen a few department merges take place. Sometimes, these departments will even turn into their own specialized schools. This is the case for CMU’s most recent merger, which created the School of Communication, Journalism and Media, also known as SCJM.
“Other than having to go to a new office, I don’t think the students have really noticed the difference,” Heather Polinsky, the director of the school, said. “The classes are the same. The majors are the same. The professors are the same. It’s just now we have a centralized location.”
The merger was made official in Spring 2022, and combined Journalism, Communications and Broadcast and Cinematic Arts (now Media Arts) into one area. The school is now heading into its second year of operation, and Polinsky is serving her second term as the school’s director.
Polinsky said she believes the merge went positively, but there have been some bumps in the road. She said combining two departments that think and operate differently into one unit isn’t an easy task.
“There’s no right or wrong way to do this,” she said. “We did this by choice, and it wasn’t like we just said overnight, ‘Let’s merge this.’ This was quite a process.”
Polinsky said that new programs are being introduced, and the school is looking to consolidate some similar classes while expanding program offerings.
Why have merges?
The school directors serve a two-year term and are appointed by the dean. In this case, Polinsky was appointed by Jefferson Campbell.
Campbell is the dean of the College of Arts and Media, the college SCJM is operating under. It’s his third year in the position, and he said this is the first merge he’s done at CMU.
When he came into the postion, he was aware of the conversation Elizabeth Kirby, his predecessor, had with faculty about the merge. He said after looking at the data, he saw potential.
“We had these three departments that overlapped, and we weren’t taking advantage of it,” Campbell said. “We had put up these walls to prevent anything from happening.”
Campbell said the primary goal of the merge is to improve student experience. He said during the planning stages, he spoke with alumni and they all told him the same thing, “You have to be good at multiple things in your line of work.” Those going into television will still need to know how to write, and those going in to reporting may need to understand marketing.
He said this mindset expanded into the school’s hiring practices as well.
“This is only (going to) enhance the student experience,” he said. “Now we can design courses so they can feed into each other and students can better explore their interests. It gives them a tremendous amount of flexibility to move.”
Campbell said department mergers happen all the time in higher education, and he was part of a merge when at the University of Minnesota. He said the SCJM merge was different, though, because it was done by choice and not because of financial strain.
This is similar to another department merge that occurred at CMU. The School of Politics, Society, Justice and Public Service (SPSJPS) was created back in 2021. The school’s current director, Thomas Greitens, said he was a part of the process prior to being appointed to the helm.
Greitens said the merge was positive, and that it has been making things easier for students by changing elective requirements, and providing them with multidimensional approaches and access to other courses and career pathways.
“We’re working with outside entities to kind of lead to some expanding networking opportunities and student-oriented experiences,” he said. “We’re not there yet: We have to fill out some more paperwork and have some more meetings, but I think there’s great things coming.”
The impact on faculty
Greitens said the most difficult and time-consuming part was changing bylaws and the department’s structural operations. He said when new systems are implemented, they will always start out messy.
“No matter if you’re in academics, the private sector, the public sector, when you implement a new idea it’s always going to be two steps forward, half a step back,” he said. “So you just have to be patient … and just have that empathy where you respect everybody involved in the process and you believe in the mission overall.”
SPSJPS falls under the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, which has seen multiple mergers over the past few years. Richard Rothaus is the dean for the college, and he said these mergers were necessary with CMU’s changing environment.
“We had lots of programs created when we had 25,000 graduates,” he said. “Now we have 14,000, and some majors aren’t as popular as they used to be. We had to take a step back and say ‘Are we organized the right way for the students here today?’”
He said merges that were driven by faculty choice went smoothly, and that the merges don’t just benefit students, but faculty members as well. He said they give instructors more opportunities to network and collaborate with one another, or to pursue individual research projects, and allow them not to stretch themselves thin while teaching.
“It creates a much more comfortable situation for the faculty because you have more people that cover similar things,” Rothaus said.
While the benefits vary across schools and groups, the challenges stayed the same: Creating and learning new systems within the schools was cited as the biggest difficulty departments faced.
“It’s like moving in with a new roommate,” Rothaus said. “People keep things in drawers in different ways. Sometimes you’ll open a drawer and go ‘Dang it, it’s not in that drawer anymore.’”
Campbell said faculty members were also worried about losing their identities after the merge. He said it doesn’t have to be that way.
“Understand and embrace that it is happening, build the structure yourself and let your voice be heard,” he said. “Keep yourselves open and vocal. The light at the end of the tunnel is not a train, it’s a ray of hope.”
This year, both colleges will be approaching things differently. Rothaus said there aren’t any concrete plans to change the college structurally, but he believes this year the “fruits of their labor” will start to become prevalent. Greitens said SPSJPS is working on creating more networking experiences and internship partnerships for students.
For SCJM, Campbell said this year they will be working out some of the kinks they ran into during the first year of the school’s operation. He said at the end of the fall semester, they will hold a meeting to review what’s working and what isn’t. Campbell said he’s open to revising and making changes to anything that isn’t working.
