On Friday, WICS hosted a faculty lunch with our department chair, Dr. J Strother Moore. I was a little late coming from class, but fortunately the part I missed out on was about backpacking, rock-climbing, and fishing, none of which interest me too much.
Afterwards, he talked quite a bit about his main project as chair–which is to get a new building for our Computer Science department. Right now our faculty is spread across 6 different buildings, not all close to each other, and having everyone together would be great for sharing ideas, working on research, and just building a community. I frequently hang out in the basement where the ACM and WICS offices are, but it’s not convenient for most other people to just come by, and yes, it does smell a little funny. Unfortunately, the date for starting the new building still isn’t set, and it would take four years or so to complete, so it definitely won’t be up while I’m still here. I’m still not completely sure it’s necessary to take on that cost of not having a central hub for that amount of time, but the ideas Moore presented of our new building sure did sound lovely.
Another interesting idea he had was to have senior faculty teach the lower-level classes, while the newer faculty who are doing more research would be teaching the upper level classes. Personally, I think that’s a great idea since there’s nothing that turns more students off of certain classes than not having a teacher who really has teaching experience. I agree with this completely, as well as his idea to have larger class sizes using tools such as iClicker for extra interaction. My one concern with his ideas here was that of reducing reliance on lecturers. It really makes sense financially since the funds for lecturers fluctuate every year, but Mike Scott has been doing a great job of teaching CS 307 for about a decade now, and I don’t know if anyone else could fill that role so well.
Anyhow, Moore is teaching CS 313k occassionally and I don’t have him next semester, so I may never get to see how he is as a professor, but it certainly was enjoyable to have our group sit down to lunch with him and learn a bit more about what’s going on with the department.