Dec 16, 2021
To: Faculty, staff and students (STL and Madrid)
From: Provost
Subject: Announcing the new School of Science and Engineering and a reimagined College
of Arts and Sciences
Dear Saint Louis University community,
Today, I am pleased to announce the final plans for a reimagined College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) and the establishment of a new School of Science and Engineering (SSE).
This process was initiated by former Interim Provost Chet Gillis in Dec 2019 to address a number of issues present within A&S at the time (a summary of those can be found in my initial proposal from June 2021). The Task Force to Advise the Provost on the Future Structure of the College of Arts and Sciences was charged with addressing those issues and providing an executive summary to the Provost, which they provided to me in fall 2020.
During the last academic year and continuing this fall, I held more than 40 listening sessions and open forums with faculty, staff, students, and administrators to receive feedback on the task force’s proposal and then my own initial proposal from this past summer. I appreciate the community’s engagement during the process and the passion and commitment to our students I witnessed during these listening sessions. The community was encouraged to provide alternative proposals by mid-November, and I received about a dozen responses to my initial proposal.
To our current students: I want to assure you that this reorganization will not have any impact on your degree completion or time to graduation. Your degree program is NOT changing.
I will meet regularly with the leadership from the new colleges throughout the spring semester and into the summer to stay up to date on the progress of this work, and offer any support that I can throughout the process. For now, the interim deans in the current A&S and Parks will remain as interim deans, and I will work with each college/school on plans to search for permanent deans. I am also committed to startup and ongoing investments in each college/school to support the new administrative structures, the need for expanded advising, and other student success areas that will be critical moving forward.
All of that work has culminated in the final decision that I am announcing today, in the attached document. The new structures will go into effect at the start of the next academic year, July 1, 2022.
Best Regards,
Mike Lewis, Ph.D.
Provost