I want to address my concern about the recent changes that will be made to the Fort Hays State University College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.
The change that will be taken place, where they separate the college into five different departments instead of having 11, is extremely upsetting to students and staff.
This will be putting an immense amount of distraught emotions on each and every person in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Science.
When conversing with peers, none of them agree with this decision and neither does the staff.
This merging of departments will negatively affect the staff that I care about in the art and design building, and it will also be affecting staff in the theater and music departments.
In addition, it was unfair for the college to only ask the chairs that would be continuing their position as a chair, and targeted the chairs that would be least likely to resist pressure.
Without asking each and every department, they took the five chairs and asked them if they would be OK with something like this. I believe it was unjust of them to do this because of course they're going to say yes, they wouldn't be losing their jobs.
They claim that this will not affect pay rate, jobs or funds, but how can it not!? At the art and design building, the staff and students do a lot of collaborative work to make the art and design building what it is today.
Our chair, Karrie, does a lot of hard work for both students and staff and is pushed to an extreme limit to get everything handled appropriately and on time.
She has an excessive amount of insight as to what goes on in each and every classroom.
If we were to have a chair that does not appropriately understand what it is to means to take care of the art and design building, the whole building would be set on fire.
To add to that, because Karrie does so much for us, putting two other departments on top of her or anyone else's workload would be extremely dehumanizing.
On top of that, we just had our annual high school art day, where we preached to high school seniors, juniors and sophomores about how awesome our department is and how well each section of our art building does.
If this implementation were to take place, the incoming freshmen who join our department would be cut extremely short and not have the experience we so proudly talked about.
I want to stress that the art and design department has nothing personally against the music and theater departments; however, there is no obtainable way for us to merge.
It is like Kansas and Wyoming trying to become one state, there is no possible way that can happen appropriately.
We can collaborate the best that we can, but this implementation is outrageous and unobtainable. With no official plan or written document as to what is actually going to happen with our departments, I strongly encourage that we demolish this idea and look for other solutions to our problems on campus.
There was NO democracy in this decision, and it is inappropriate for anyone to implement this decision in just a couple of months with absolutely no plan or answers to anyone's questions other than "that's a good question" or "I don't know."
I have been told over and over that this will not affect students in any department; however, I could not disagree more.
Here at FHSU, we have a very tight-knit community that strives off of small classrooms and one-to-one help from our teachers.
If we put more stress on our staff and chairs, they will have no time to help their students succeed in the ways they so efficiently do so now.
In conclusion, I believe that this implementation is outrageously unobtainable, and FHSU should look for other ways to solve its problems.
Please help us stress how against this the students and faculty are. The students are doing the best that we can to make sure this doesn't happen because of how impractical this decision is and how it negatively affects our department.
Respectfully,
Mariah Dechant