Due to severe budget cuts imposed by the state legislature, University of Florida has decided to essentially get rid of their computer science program, fire all the teaching assistants, force 50% of the faculty to abandone their research (effectively forcing them to resign), and move the other 50% of their computer science programs into other unrelated engineering programs.
The move was reported by the Forbes blog. The budget plan is here (pdf).
Under this proposed plan, all of the Computer Engineering Degree programs, BS, MS and PhD, would be moved from the Computer & Information Science and Engineering Dept. to the Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept. along with most of the advising staff. This move would allow us to support these degree programs using the existing faculty support staff in other depts. Roughly half of the faculty would be offered the opportunity to move to ECE, BME or ISE. These faculty would continue to support the graduate and research mission in the Computer Engineering degree track. The choice of which faculty and which departments will be made based on fit with the research program and with the receiving departments. Staff positions in CISE which are currently supporting research and graduate programs would be eliminated. The activities currently covered by TAs would be reassigned to faculty and the TA budget for CISE would be eliminated. The faculty remaining in CISE would then focus their efforts on teaching and advising students in the existing Computer Science BS and MS degree programs, offered through both COE and CLAS. Their assignments would change to reflect this new educational mission with sole focus on delivering quality education for students in these degree programs. Any faculty member who wishes to stay in CISE may do so, but with a revised assignment focused on teaching and advising.
The plan was announced two weeks ago, and the implementation starts next month. The first firings will begin June 1, according to comments following this
blog.
Florida is moving back into the 20th century, or worse.