When top administrators announce tomorrow their preliminary plans for program mergers, department heads will be listening.

Fearing difficulties recruiting top faculty, and afraid that their current faculty may not want to work in a merged department, they are hoping administrators keep their programs off the merger list.

Tomorrow's announcement will be the second time this month that department heads will hold their breath about the future of their disciplines.

Last week, President Peter Likins and Provost George Davis targeted 16 departments for possible elimination under Focused Excellence, Likins' plan to reshape the university into a premier research institution.

Administrators are remaining tight-lipped as to which departments will face mergers, but Davis said last week that a department's placement on the elimination list did not preclude its placement on the merger list.

Avoiding possible elimination was a relief for many department heads, but some fear the loss of faculty morale resulting from a proposed merger could be nearly as damaging to their program as proposed elimination.

German studies head Thomas Kovach worries his department will make the merger list. The German studies department moved recently into the new Learning Services Building, and is sharing a floor with the Russian and Slavic Languages department.

Though Kovach considers the possibility of a merged department of German studies and Russian and Slavic Languages "comical" based on the two cultures' histories, he said the prospects aren't completely unlikely.

Kovach said some German studies faculty are concerned for their department's future, and he wonders if they would be able to combine with another department's faculty.

"Faculty members tend to be in their positions for a long time and they tend to build a certain rapport with the people they work with," he said. "(A merger would be) a huge disruption in their work lives on a day-to-day level."

Thomas Baldwin, head of the biochemistry and molecular biophysics department, fears faculty would see merger plans as a "professional insult."

"That's telling someone that what they have put their life into is not worthy of continuance," Baldwin said. "And that's insulting. For a member of the faculty there's probably nothing more insulting."

Communication department head Michael Dues said that faculty, students and potential donors would view mergers as a sign that the discipline isn't valued.

Dues, whose department already has a 100:1 student/faculty ratio, more than four times the university average, also worries that a merger involving the communication department could bring even more students into the overcrowded program without the resources necessary to serve them.

"That would be a dumb mistake," he said.

Likins and Davis have said that their decisions to close and merge programs are critical in order to strengthen programs starved by a series of budget cuts.

They have said that their decisions do not reflect the quality of the programs, but rather they fit into Likins' long-term strategy of narrowing the UA's focus.

"We are recommending the elimination · of some quite wonderful programs," Likins said last week when unveiling his proposals for program cuts.

Both Likins and Davis have expressed that decisions to potentially eliminate or merge programs have been painful and difficult.

But Baldwin said faculty in departments under scrutiny would take little solace in Likins and Davis' statements.

"I can remember my father saying ÎIt pains me, but I'm going to give you a good thrashing, boy,'" he said.