LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) - The University of Nebraska-Lincoln plans to merge its College of Architecture with the College of Fine and Performing Arts.
The Lincoln Journal Star reports (https://bit.ly/1gQxms2 ) that college officials expect the merger to happen in the 2015-16 school year.
UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman said combining the two would help the university create more diverse courses that combine different disciplines. The primary reason for the change is not to save money, Perlman said; UNL is facing a $4.6 million budget shortfall.
Two other Big Ten Conference universities have already combined arts and architecture programs. The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and Penn State University have created successful combined colleges.
Ellen Weissinger, senior vice chancellor for academic affairs, said merging the arts and architecture programs would create exciting opportunities for students interested in studying art and design.
“It will allow more students to study traditional majors in the arts or architecture and also practice broader skills at the intersection of design and computational thinking,” Weissinger said.
UNL officials plan to study what needs to be done to combine the colleges by July 2015. The current dean of the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts, Chuck O’Connor, will lead the new combined college.
O’Connor said both the architecture and the arts colleges will have a say in what the new entity looks like.
“We need to find our own vision, something that will be uniquely our own,” O’Connor said.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has combined a couple other colleges in recent years. In 2003, UNL’s colleges of education and human services were combined.
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Information from: Lincoln Journal Star, https://www.journalstar.com
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