Help me! UF is closing the CISE department

[Anonymous1]

Hey friends, I know a bunch of you (or us) are computer science/computer engineering/that kind of stuff nerds, so I hope you will be sympathetic.

The University of Florida dean dun goofed and is trying to get rid of the CISE (computer information science engineering) department and merge it with the ECE (electrical and computer engineering) department (which is kind of dumb because CISE is software oriented and ECE is hardware oriented).

Even worse, to do this, she is going to fire about half the staff from the CISE department and move the other half to various random departments. She is also going to get rid of all CISE UF research and fire all TAs, which essentially removes the graduate program at UF.

Even more worse, she has already begun to fire faculty members and has already fired the head of the CISE department...

Anyway, I'm not asking for much, I just want you to sign this petition which takes like, less than a minute (left side of the site):

http://www.change.org/petitions/dean-abern...cise-department

And if you want to know more, you can read about it here:

http://saveufcise.wordpress.com/

Thanks a lot guys!

[clark10]

tried helping, but somehow i cant submit my form. sorry, i'll try referring this to my friends

[Anonymous1]

No problem. Thanks for trying man and for spreading the word.

An update:

Today there was a pretty big rally in the middle of campus where everyone walks by. Probably about 400-500 people consisting of both students and faculty members showed up to the rally. Everyone was wearing "SAVE CISE" signs.





After the rally, all the students formed a giant chain around the CISE building chanting "Save CISE" and other various chants.





After that, we all walked to the dean's office (who is the one who proposed the budget cuts to the CISE department) and chanted some more. After a few minutes had passed, the secretary of the dean came out and everyone asked her questions about the future, but her questions were really hazy and didn't give anything concrete. Everyone was chanting for the dean to come out, but the secretary said that she was busy.




Note that in the second picture, there were more people across the road too.

Information update too:
Apparently the CISE department makes more money for UF than it costs to maintain the CISE department, so it doesn't really make any sense to merge the CISE department with the ECE department. However, the dean has been trying to merge the two departments for three years now. Each time there was a vote though, a large majority of the college chair members voted to not merge the two departments (votes were along the lines of like 37-0 and 36-1). Now that UF is trying to cut budgets, she says that she doesn't need anyone's approval to merge departments to cut budgets.

Also, the dean only opened up about a week (9 days) to discuss the situation, so after the week, the discussion for the merging will be closed, which is definitely not enough time. In fact, the announcement of this actually opened up on about April 11 last week, so discussion of the closing of the CISE department closes on Wednesday (that's 2 days).

One of the proposals the dean is making is moving the database facility to the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering... How does that even make any sense at all??!

There's a scheduled rally tomorrow to speak with the dean. I'll update more when I get more information.

[virulent]

signed :]

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