Just threw down the gauntlet with College of Engineering, sorta:
Greetings, Engineering Faculty Senate.
I am an MSCE graduate (with focus on Environmental Engineering) of the UAB College of Engineering (2010), and I am currently in Ph.D.-seeking status (but have not yet achieved candidacy). I am writing you tonight to say that I am very concerned about the future direction of the College of Engineering under President Ray Watts. I believe that this is about more than Football, and the College of Engineering as we know it is an immediate concern.
What Watts has done with regard to the Carr Report isn't what it seems. He uses big words like "shared governance" to describe it, but if you break it down, that is not really what is going on here. A true leader would involve others at all points of a difficult decision like the discontinuation of three athletic programs, but Watts' response to the criticism he has received is unsatisfactory. Rather than involving these "committees" and "task forces" in the real process, he has discontinued them whenever they stumble across a version of the truth which doesn't fall in line with his personal agenda, as he did with the task force which was disbanded immediately following his press conference on January 7, and left some of those key members out on January 9, until he was lobbied-to on January 12. But perhaps even more damningly, he has limited the scope of the current committee's scope of work, and moved the essential task of verifying the data in a the very limited, flawed Carr Report, which any good engineer can tell is less than satisfactory, as good engineering practice would not ignore pertinent patterns and trends (specifically, the 2014 season) regardless of whether or not they fall outside the scope of the original report. His version of "shared governance" is not shared governance at all. It is mere tokenism amid a backdrop of tyranny.
Extrapolating this to his vision to the School of Engineering, it is not hard to see my cause for concern. It has been rumored that one possible benefit under Watts' leadership is expansion of the BEC building, but at what cost? Watts has also been on record saying that UAB's chief mission is as a medical center, so it isn't hard to see him cutting programs of Engineering from UAB that aren't consistent with this mission. Of course Biomedical Engineering stays and will probably grow, but what of Materials, Mechanical, Civil, and Electrical (and Computer) Engineering? They all have analogs in Tuscaloosa, and though there is some potential for cross-pollination with medical and health professional initiatives (For example Construction Management could be twisted so that its primary focus is on construction of medical facilities), it isn't hard to see a Board of Trustees that is biased toward the University of Alabama (in Tuscaloosa) to an almost despicable degree wanting Birmingham-area students which would major in traditional non-health related engineering disciplines which are currently available at UAB to have no choice but to attend UA instead.
Thank you for reading my concerns in this long e-mail and I hope that tomorrow morning you will do the right thing and vote No Confidence in UAB's current President. UAB deserves so much better in a leader.
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Just threw down the gauntlet with College of Engineering, sorta:
