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Comment by joshhart | Hacker News Reader

I graduated from UF in 2009, with degrees in both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. UF was running into huge budget issues, which they mostly took out on Liberal Arts. At the time, the Computer Science department was under Liberal Arts and Sciences, not engineering.

The department chair at the time, Sartaj Sahni, responded by cutting teaching funding and letting some of the best teachers go. UF had a few teachers without PhDs, which reduces a university's ranking in US News & World Report. Of course, these teachers were the ones that REALLY cared about teaching, since they didn't have research distractions. These teachers were replaced with postdocs who lack the experience needed to teach at a major institution.

I don't know how you can have a solid program if you slash your best teachers to save research, then slash your research to save teaching. Doesn't make sense.

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Letting go of your best teachers sounds like a brutally flawed decision. The only reason I am now getting back into learning programming after a 8 year hiatus, is because of how great my untenured lecturer was in teaching us and inspiring us in the ways of C programming.

If not for him, there would be far fewer students from my school who would have stuck with programming. In 2004, we made a facebook group called "Everything I know about C I learned from [insert guy's name]". From what I can tell, the number of former students in this group keeps growing every year. He is beloved by all his current and former students, and I would vehemently protest to the school/department if he ever got cut prematurely for any reason.

If you're talking about Dave, he did get cut prematurely.

What the hell happened? He was the only one that cared.

Fired since he didn't have a PhD

I graduated in 2004 and did NOT like Dave. Too much ego. He cared more about people listening to him talk than learning the material. I know he was loved by others, and am sorry he lost his job.

CISE professors will be able to join EE/ECE.

According to the proposal "Roughly half of the faculty will be offered the opportunity to move to ECE, BME or ISE."

The dean also stated several times and faculty must be accepted into this different dept. So it is not clear who which faculty will be allowed to continue research.

> UF had a few teachers without PhDs, which reduces a university's ranking in US News & World Report.

Does this really happen? This attitude that if you don't have a PhD you must be stupid is incredibly annoying.

Yes it really happened, and yes, the leaders publicly cited it as the reason why. "We must remain competitive in the rankings!"

You know what would be REALLY innovative, if instead on judging the department based on the number of PHDs, they would instead look at the accomplishments of the graduates at 5, 10, 20 and 30 year marks.

There is a community college in Gainesville called Santa Fe (it's now considered a "college" I guess) but their graphic design program had something like a 95 percent job placement IN THAT FIELD.

Well said. I was honored to have you as the programming team pres while I was at UF.

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