Comments from Richard Thompson

I have four related comments on the concept of having one unified SIS masters degree.

ONE.

SIS is a "school," but what kind? (not just what kind of I-School) If we look around any university, we see two kinds.

A "school is an organization within a university that governs:

1 - a single unified academic discipline, like the Nursing School, the Law School, and GSPIA

2 - a collection of related, but separate, academic disciplines, like FAS and the Engineering School.

GSPIA and the Nursing School have a unified masters degree, but I doubt anyone would suggest a unified masters degree for FAS. There are some schools, like KGSB, that claim to be Type 1, but we observe that it is only the students who major in marketing and management who call themselves "Business Majors. Students who specialize in finance and accounting call themselves "Finance Majors" and "Accounting Majors" respectively. The reason is self-evident and a discussion would be inflammatory (but honest).

So, it seems that, since we're having this discussion yet again, SIS is back to the "same old question." Are we one academic discipline or are we a set of related, but separate, academic disciplines?

Before we can answer this, we have to ask how one determines whether a body of knowledge qualifies as a discipline? Issues like efficiency and similarity suggest that Pitt might consider merging Anthropology with Sociology, or Civil Engineering with Mechanical Engineering, or Economics with Finance (in KGSB), or IS with CS (instead of LIS), or even all of SIS with CS. But efficiency and academic similarity are NOT the over-riding issues. Especially in a school that calls itself a "professional school," discipline-ness is determined by the industries that hire our graduates, PERIOD.

Yale and Harvard have unified Engineering Schools and, "coincidently," these outstanding institutions are not famous for their engineering schools. Should Pitt's Engineering School emulate Yale and Harvard? Some in this administration would blindly say "Well, of course." But, I'm sure the faculty AND the administration in the Swanson School of Engineering would resist it, I'm sure the industries that hire Pitt engineers would resist it and I'm sure Mr. Swanson would want his endowment back. Michigan converted its I-School to the kind of school we're discussing here. Are we looking at doing this just because Michigan did it. Can anyone explain how Michigan's new I-School is "better" than its old one? I know a UM graduate who thinks it is not, and who would not have gone to the current version.

We produce people who have different, and only slightly overlapping, skill-sets. We know these people are in demand by their respective industries. I'm not aware that the enterprises which hire our graduates are complaining that MST graduates know too much about TCP/IP and not enough about archiving or that MLIS graduates know too much about archiving and not enough about TCP/IP. I'm not aware of anyone who is predicting a future trend in this direction. Our programs are pretty well "tuned" to the needs of the enterprises that hire our graduates. Why on earth would we change that?

TWO.

Has anybody thought about the implementation issues if we actually did this? Here are just three out of many:

1 - What would be the entry requirements for our unified masters program? What math skill would be required? What literary skills would be required? Will we require the GRE?

2 - What will be the impact on enrollment? I think we should consider polling our existing students and ask them if they would would have come here if:

a - the GRE were required,

b - their ability to specialize were restricted, or

c - their MS had another name.

3 - Finally, the implementation elephant in the room is that we couldn't agree on one common school-wide introductory course. How do does anyone think we're going to agree on a common curriculum? This exercise will not unite us.

THREE.

I like to think of SIS as a Track Team that is proficient in weight events, jumping events, sprints, distance races, and hurdle races. A track team is very difficult to defeat if it has good people in each of these areas. Although SIS is a strong analogy to this, for the 21 years I've been here, people have wanted to screw this up also. They think we would have a better track team if we had only decathletes and no specialists. Usain Bolt would get a bad raise because he runs too fast and can't throw a discus very far. Why am I the only one who thinks this is, not only silly, but the silliness is obvious? My colleagues, I have said this before and I'll say it again: "SIS' strength is her breadth."

FOUR.

Having argued that we are good just as we are, we all have to admit that SIS is NOT excellent. Our significant problem is that, collectively, we have never lived up to our potential. We could do some amazing things if we would only work together. Before I came here, I worked in an organization at Bell Labs that was similar us (it included Bob Allen, now at Drexel). When I intervied here in 1989, I though this school was better than that group at Bell Labs. But, I have been disappointed. My colleagues, our track team has good stars and good depth, but we lose track meets because of the relay events. We simply don't work together.

That is our problem. We blamed it on our leadership; so we changed Deans and nothing changed. Others blamed it on "silos" and having separate departments; so we abolished departments and nothing changed. We added SIS Council and nothing changed. These changes were irrelevant to our real problem, but at least they were benign. Now, we are discussing a change in the structure of our bread-and-butter masters programs. This change is also irrelevant to our real problem, but this change is NOT benign. Let's solve our real problem and quit kidding ourselves that working on a different problem is going to solve it.

So, how do we solve our real problem? I used to think that we would come together quickly and happily if NSF announced some big pot of money for coherent research proposals in areas that lie at the center of SIS. But, we did NOT put a coherent proposal together for Digital Libraries when that area had a lot of funding. I still think something like that would help but, now, there's no money in the area, and no journal we all respect that we would publish in.

The Bell labs group that Bob Allen and I worked in had a common focus which every individual related to and "owned." That focus was "the office of the future." We were all encouraged to do our own research, but it was expected that SOME of each individual's research would affect and effect that common theme. Furthermore, and very important, this common theme did not exist only in papers and on viewgraphs; we were actually MAKING a prototype of the office of the future. I still have some physical souvenirs in my office at Pitt.

So, instead of dismantling our bread-and-butter, instead of changing arbitrary things that have nothing to do with our problem just so we can report "change" to Pitt's administration and our Board of Visitors, instead of forcing ourselves into some common center that has no common theory and no industry waiting to be served, let's do something CONSTRUCTIVE:

1 - Let's pick a theme; I propose "health-care management of the future" because (a) it has components in archiving, distributed databases, decision making, information organization, security, networking, geography, cooperative documents, etc. and (b) it addresses an important national need.

2 - Let's get a partner that has a vested interest and very deep pockets; that would be UPMC.

3 - Let's start working on system properties and an architecture.

4 - Let's work with our partner to get seed money (venture capital) from some source with deep pockets; that would be NIH or Bill Gates.

5 - Let's use this initial money to (a) start hiring some implementation specialists (programmers etc.), which could be some of our own future graduate students, and (b) to generate some publicity about ourselves and how (because of our "amazing breadth") we are uniquely positioned, on the entire planet, to work on this problem.

If we do this instead of making yet another pointless change, then (a) just maybe we can be the kind of school that I thought we would be when I first saw us in 1989 and (b) just maybe others will stop trying to destroy us.

Richard Thompson