July 16, 2021 |
The University of Wyoming moved closer this week toward launching a new School of Computing. The board of trustees approved the UW’s notice of intent to develop the new academic field on campus.
UW President Ed Seidel said the new school “will ensure that computing and digital literacy become pervasive across all disciplines” at the university.
The program is in Seidel’s wheel house.
That was Seidel giving a speech in 2017 entitled “Revolution in Computational and Data Enabled Science and Engineering.” He had just been promoted to vice president of economic development and innovation at the University of Illinois, where he served until being selected as the president of UW one year ago.
The new school of computing will be at the core of reconfiguring all of the academic programs on campus as UW responds to budget cuts and to changes in the academic arena itself.
Seidel offered a glimpse of the changes during that dinner speech in 2017 when he talked about the year and a half he spent at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, established in 2011 in partnership with MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Seidel was vice president of research.
UW is a land grant university. In yesterday’s news release announcing the trustee’s approval of the School of Computing, Seidel said the unit will provide a new way to organize the university to “accelerate the growth and impact of computing, artificial intelligence and data science” across multiple disciplines. Perhaps most importantly Seidel promised that it “will increase external funding.”
The plan comes as UW absorbs a $42.3 million budget cut. About 80 unfilled positions have been eliminated and efficiencies are being put into place campus-wide.
Those efficiencies mean that the various colleges on campus will be reconfigured to create larger, more stable departments with common disciplinary interests while reducing redundancies.
At the center of it all will be the School of Computing.
The trustee’s approval of the university notice of intent to develop the new unit is the first step in a lengthy process. Plans to reorganize, discontinue and consolidate existing academic programs will follow. Then Seidel will submit a request to implement the program, which will require another vote of approval from the trustees. With final approval the launch could take place in early 2022.
