Please chill!

I understand that some alumni and current students are writing to Dean Latham to complain about the student-faculty ratio in CS. Please don’t. I realize that things seem bad right now. We have large classes. We have a large student/faculty ratio in the department. And I have way too many advisees. Those are all very real problems.

At the same time, we remain a very strong department. While we have a large student/faculty ratio, we have faculty who care very much about supporting their students, we have a generous peer education budget which supports a committed corps of peer educators, we have an excellent Peer Education Coordinator, and we have wonderful students who do a lot to support each other. We are supervising 28 summer research students this year within the department and we helped a number of others achieve excellent positions elsewhere.

Next year, we move from 4.5 full-time-equivalent (FTE) faculty to 6 FTE faculty [1]. No, it’s not enough, but it is an improvement. Colleges are also slow-moving creatures; it is rare that a department can add more than one FTE per year. It’s more complicated than normal at Grinnell because the Trustees and the President have capped the number of tenure-line positions. That means that if we gain a tenure-line position, someone else loses one. So it is not easy for the Dean or for Executive Council.

What also makes it more complicated is that CS is not a typical academic discipline. In most disciplines, the number of available Ph.D.’s interested in academic careers is much higher than the number of positions. That means it’s easy to hire for term positions. In CS, the number of open tenure-line positions outstrips the number of qualified applicants. That means it’s much harder to hire for term positions, particularly if you are in the middle of Iowa. But tenure-line positions are significant commitments; you should normally think of a tenure-line hire as a thirty-year position. So even I would be reluctant to add more than one tenure-line position, even though I think we need about three more faculty members in the department.

Writing to the Dean is unlikely to be helpful. He does not make the decisions on how to allocate tenure-line positions. Our Executive Council (faculty governing body) does. He does not make decisions on how many tenure-line positions we have. The President and Trustees have put on that cap.

As importantly, Dean Latham has been an incredibly strong supporter of the CS department. He helped bring in our Peer Education Coordinator. He supported the expansion of Mr. Stone’s position to full-time lecturer. He increased our peer educator budget. Complaining to him is unfair and wastes his limited time.

Over the next year, the department will be exploring solutions. I hope that we get another tenure-line position [2]. I worry about what the College loses if we do [3]. We will work with the Dean to get long-term visiting positions (even though we are worried about our chance of filling them) and to find spaces to house them. We are building relationships with other departments and initiatives on campus that can help. We will continue to be welcoming to a broad variety of students, to support them in their learning and exploration of CS, and to make sure that they can complete majors in the department.

So, if you’d like to help, don’t complain to the Dean (or to Council or to the Trustees). Rather, find positive things to do: Help us mentor our students (many of you are doing so already). Identify people who might serve in term positions and encourage them to apply. Find someone or some organization to donate $2 mil for an endowed chair; we’re a leader in diversity, certainly Microsoft or Google or Amazon or Intel would want to help with that.

I appreciate your passion for your College and for our department. Please use that passion productively.

Samuel A. Rebelsky
Professor and Chair of Computer Science

[1] Just to be clear: That increase involves a position approved by Council in Spring 2016 to start in Fall 2017 and the expansion of John Stone’s position from three courses per year to five courses per year.

[2] I have heard nothing yet. My understanding is that Council has not yet decided.

[3] While the College’s official policy right now is We don’t have to cut the year we add, I do worry about the departments that have applied for replacements for faculty who have left. Even if those are not cut, I worry about whatever department would be cut in the future.

Version 1.1.1 of 2017-05-18.