Departments to merge business tasks

The business functions of the departments of geological sciences and marine sciences, and the Curriculum for the Environment and Ecology could merge within the next month.

While the academic functions of the departments would remain distinct, their support staff would be merged into one unit. If successful, the change could represent the beginning of a series of similar changes throughout the college.

Administrators hope centralization will increase efficiency within the college and let these units grow without having to hire new staff. But some employees have expressed apprehension about potential job losses and the inconvenience created by such change.

No changes have been made yet, and administrators are still figuring out how they want to implement the recommendations.

“A lot of the details have not been worked out, and that always makes people nervous,” said Brent McKee, chairman of the marine sciences department.

According to recommendations from Monarch Services, a consulting firm hired by the college, the departments in question should centralize all eight office staff members into one unit that would serve all three departments.

Instead of having employees engaging in a number of tasks, members of the “unified business center,” as it is named in the report, would specialize in specific tasks, such as human resources, accounting and grant assistance.

“When we’re hiring a faculty member, we’re lucky if we do it once a year,” said Allen Glazner, chairman of the geological sciences department. “Rules change every year, so when we do it, we have to learn all the new rules. If that were centralized, and it became a person’s job, he or she would be up on everything.”

Michael Crimmins, senior associate dean for the natural sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, said this is similar to the way large departments are organized.

Crimmins said the centralization would have no effect on the academic culture of any department.

He said the three departments were selected to be centralized because they were small in size. Two recent retirements mean the changes may be implemented without reducing staff size.

Although recommendations suggest that the total number of positions remain the same, administrators would not say whether the same people would hold these positions after the reorganization.

Crimmins said the departments should expect to see changes within the next month.

Last summer Bain & Company published a report that motivated the college to increase efficiency. The report found UNC’s bureaucracy to be excessive and cumbersome, hindering the school’s ability to do everything from scheduling classrooms to purchasing. One of the report’s recommendations was to reduce redundancy among departments.

Crimmins said the College will evaluate how well the unified office works with these three departments and determine how that model can be applied to the rest of the University. The dean’s office has already asked Monarch to evaluate how efficiently its office is organized.

The provost’s office has also centralized the support functions for several research centers and institutes.



Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.