Department Chairmanship, 1997-2001
From 1997 to 2001, I served as Department Chairman for the Computer
Science Department at the University of Texas at Austin. It's an
honor, a weighty responsibility, and a lot of work, most of which a
PhD is poor training for. I was glad to do it; I enjoyed it while
doing it; and I'm really glad to stop and go back to being a
professor.
Some things that we (the faculty, the administrative staff, and I)
accomplished during that time:
- The ACES Building: we participated in the design, observed
the construction, and moved about half the department in.
- Friends of Computer Science: we created a new, more vigorous,
industrial affiliates program.
- Elements of Computing: we created a new program of courses
for non-majors, meeting a widespread need, and factoring our
overwhelming enrollment into components that can be handled
separately and better.
- Admissions to the CS Major: we set up a program that, for the
first time, restricts admission to the CS major. This is
raising the quality of our students, ensuring that they get
seats in the courses, helping them graduate in a timely way,
reduces attrition, and should actually increase our number
of graduates slightly.
- Lots of other programmatic changes and endless fire-fighting.
- We hired six really outstanding tenure-track faculty members:
Steve Keckler, Doug Burger, Tandy Warnow, Inderjit Dhillon,
Kathryn McKinley, and Sanda Harabagiu.
- Awards: all of our junior faculty have NSF CAREER Awards,
and five have Sloan Fellowships.
BJK