MIS department may face tight budget after drop in rank

Kristy Mangos Arizona Daily Wildcat Delta Sigma Pi fraternity member Megan Wienand (left) gives a medal to Sunnyside student Anthony Valdez for winning second place in the 100-meter relays at the Pima County Special Olympics Saturday. Many supporters came to cheer on participants at the annual summer games competition held at Rincon High School. Delta Sigma Pi members spent the entire day passing out medals and announcing winners as the events concluded.

"A drop in the U.S. News and World Report's ranking of our graduate program from third to fifth place is a great disappointment to all of us," said MIS department head Olivia Liu Sheng. "However, it is not a complete surprise."

The Management Information Systems department has not received adequate funding to hire enough faculty, Sheng said. The department was also unable to provide sufficient course offerings, she added.

"Limited resources have recently had an unfortunate impact upon the department's ability to provide our students with an adequate number of instructors and classroom seats," Sheng stated in a letter to MIS students and faculty.

The MIS department suffers from limited resources, but it's a problem that also plagues other campus programs, UA President Peter Likins said yesterday.

"There are strong constraints on many departments at this time," Likins said. "But the MIS department is currently operating with strong resource constraints."

Sheng said that a large influx of MIS majors - a 30 percent increase that reached 1,000 students this year - left the department without an adequate number of instructors. During the past year, the MIS department has lost six of its 14 full-time faculty members, she said.

Daniel Zengh, a first-year assistant professor, teaches the MIS 111 core class that enrolled 350 students.

"I currently teach an MIS core course that is so large, we had to add another section," he said. "We also have a lack of equipment that forces students to use the university computer cluster, which is essentially out of date."

Because of the large classes, the department cannot offer all MIS graduate students their necessary, career-based electives, Sheng said.

"Both faculty and students have been overwhelmed by the effects of these measures at a time when MBA and MIS programs at other universities have been expanding their faculty and hiring programs," she wrote in the statement.

Likins said the university is in the middle of its budget process, and has not decided whether to allocate additional funds to the MIS department.

"Upper-level administration allocates funds to the colleges as a whole," Likins said. "The deans of each college will then allocate funds to specific departments."

Likins said although the MIS ranking dropped two spots this year, the department maintains a very high status nationwide.

"A ranking of third is a remarkably high ranking," Likins said. "This strong department (MIS) has also helped raise the ranking of the business graduate school as a whole from 39th to 34th."

Sheng also saw a positive side to the decline.

"We are going to use the opportunity to reflect on our program," she said.

Sheng also stated in the letter that there are "many positive initiatives under way that can help us recover our ranking."

"We have strengthened partnerships with industries through establishing the department's own board of advisers, enhancing technology synergies with Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, SGI, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard in our research and education," she said.

Likins said the MIS Board of Advisers brings strength to the university.

"In most fields, academics are driving the changing character of each field," Likins said. "In MIS, the non-professional business community is instituting changes all the time."

Sheng urged MIS faculty and students to become more alert and supportive of any effort to improve the quality of our program.

"I was, of course, very disappointed that we were unable to maintain the high ranking we have held in the past," Sheng said. "I nevertheless believe that, despite difficult circumstances, we can work together to regain or surpass our earlier achievements."

But Likins doubted the validity of the rankings as a true indicator of programs' progress.

"Intellectually, the rankings are not an accurate way to measure anything," Likins said. "But we must realize that the issue containing the U.S. News and World Report rankings is the most widely read issue during the year.

"It takes a sophisticated reader to really view how various schools compare, and such a reader knows that such comparisons are not based on a single ranking based on linear measurements," Likins added.