A School of Public Policy could be in Cornell’s future if the University decides to implement the recommendations of the Social Sciences Task Force Report. The report, released on Nov. 5, focuses on improving the quality of Cornell’s social sciences while simplifying the departments’ complicated and dispersed organizational structure. At a public discussion about the report yesterday, Deputy Provost David Harris, who chaired the task force, emphasized that the recommendations are still in their early stages.

“Cornell should create a School of Public Policy,” the report stated. “The School would help redefine Cornell’s land grant mission by creating an institution dedicated to making contributions to key public policy debates at the state, national and international levels.”

The policy analysis and management department could provide the core of the new school, which would offer broader versions of the undergraduate and master’s degrees currently offered in PAM, according to the report. PAM would also provide the school’s core set of 29 faculty positions.

Using PAM as the core of the school “is one way to go,” but there are a number of other ways to create a new public policy or social science school that were not specifically discussed in the report, Harris said.

While the task force calls for a new social science school, Harris emphasized that this is only a recommendation. By the end of the semester, Provost Kent Fuchs will decide whether to further pursue the idea, along with the other “Reimagining Cornell” task force recommendations.

The task force report includes other strategies to improve Cornell’s social sciences, and emphasizes that the departments are currently “good, but not great.”

The University’s social sciences are spread between 20 departments and more than 40 centers and institutes, the report notes. Many disciplines, such as economics, are dispersed across several colleges.Economics at Cornell

This dispersion makes recruitment and hiring of faculty and graduate students more difficult, Harris said, because they can be confused by Cornell’s organizational structure.

“We get really, really good faculty, but we could do even better” if we had an organizational structure that was more understandable, Fuchs said.

Dispersion also means core social science disciplines receive insufficient attention and are smaller than those at peer institutions, which hurts the departments’ national rankings, the report stated.

Yesterday’s public discussion about the task force’s report was well attended, mostly by professors. After discussing the report’s content and answering questions, Harris and Fuchs emphasized the historic changes Cornell is facing.

“We’re really thinking about what Cornell will be like for the young faculty we’re hiring and for generations after that,” Fuchs said. “This is our chance if we want to make changes.”

“This is the time when we’ve got the ear of the provost. This is the time when we can do things,” Harris said.

In addition to recommending the creation of the public policy school, the report includes four possible models for merging social science units and increasing collaboration between units. The models are intended to improve teaching and research in the social sciences and decrease the dispersion across the University.

One suggested model would create a “super-department.” The department would absorb several smaller departments and would be funded and administered by multiple colleges. It would be similar to the current biology department shared between the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Harris said.

Another model involves absorption, where one core department would absorb the faculty and resources of another unit. This idea would create a large department like the super-department, but without the complicated ties to multiple colleges.

The report’s two other possible models include a “coordinating committee,” which would oversee multiple independent units, and “extensive joint appointments,” which could create strong links between departments through joint appointments, the report said.

The same model would likely not be a good option for all of Cornell’s social science units, Harris said. Different models should be used for different units.

Most faculty at the public discussion had neutral or positive reactions to the task force’s recommendations. Several were excited with the idea of a public policy school.

An economics professor at the discussion worried that Cornell would become too much like other universities if the recommendations to condense social sciences were implemented.

“Doing what every other economics department or every other sociology department is doing is not a good idea,” he said.

But due to Cornell’s current economic woes, the dispersed and sometimes redundant nature of the social sciences cannot be maintained.

“[The University’s] tradition of breadth, consistent with ‘any person, any study,’ has been a hallmark of Cornell social sciences for decades,” the report stated. But “the fact that there are multiple versions of some disciplines at Cornell may be a luxury (or impediment) that we can no longer afford. We strongly encourage the administration to choose excellence over breadth in the social sciences.”

The proposed School of Public Policy is one way to bring disciplines together and strengthen them, Harris said.

“Cornell University has many high-caliber, internationally-known policy scholars, but they are located in departments and centers dispersed across campus,” the report stated.

The report spends a significant amount of time discussing how to improve Cornell’s social science rankings.

“Rankings are not what drove us from the beginning. It’s not what drove us throughout,” Harris said. But “like it or not, [rankings do] affect a number of things,” he added.

Currently, all of Cornell core social sciences are ranked in the mid-teens, according to the report. The goal of the public policy school would be to become a top-10 public policy program within ten years.

Thanks to the existing professors at Cornell, the school would immediately be ranked near the top 10, and modest growth would make the top 10 “a realistic goal,” the report stated.

The school would be a “contemporary articulation of Cornell’s land grant mission," Harris said.

“The committee believes that anything less than a full commitment by the administration to establish an independent School of Public Policy would be a band-aid solution” to the problems faced by Cornell's social sciences, the task force’s report stated.