Dear Colleagues,

On previous occasions, I shared the 2025–2026 goals we established for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Chief among these goals is the Re-imagining and Strategic Growth of the College. This strategic effort is focused on maximizing faculty impact, enhancing student success, and ensuring the vitality of every academic program.

Both President Koppell and former Provost Gonzales communicated their commitment to the college and to the place that Humanities and Social Sciences play in Montclair State University’s education, in shaping our students’ development, and in guiding social transformation at all scales. They wanted to see our college take on a leadership role in realizing the Vision and Mission of Montclair State University and in “responding flexibly and nimbly to changing circumstances, fostering creativity, taking intelligent risks and actively seeking new approaches while holding each other accountable and using wisely the resources entrusted to us.” Their vision for the university and passion for the potential of CHSS are innovative and unique, especially at this juncture in time.

The Process

This strategic planning and restructuring process has been defined by an unprecedented, college-wide effort focused on transparency, input, and shared governance. The effort, which began in March 2025, has included:

2 student surveys April, September.
3 faculty and staff forums in April.
4 faculty and staff surveys run between April and September.
4 faculty and staff College Meetings between April and November.
2 faculty and staff meetings with the consultant in May.
Multiple CHSS Leadership Council and chairs Meetings, April to November.
1 CHSS Chairs Meeting with the Consultant in May.
1 faculty and staff meeting with the Committee and Provost in June.
1 meeting of 15 members of CHSS and President Koppell October.

These opportunities have been constructive and generative. The re-imagination of CHSS is a three-prong effort:

A comprehensive vision for the college, framing its mission and its signature teaching and research. The exercise sought to build on the strong sense of identity within each of the disciplines to emerge a broader, connective vision for the college and to articulate its aspirations for the future.
Rethinking the administrative structure to promote flexibility, effectiveness, and innovation and position the college to grow and realize its aspirations for the future.
In line with the university's new budget model, grow the shared ownership and responsibility for the resources, and create incentives to reward innovation.

The Organizational Structure

Thanks to the foundational work initiated before my arrival and continued through summer and fall, we have converged towards the following structure.

The College will be composed of schools, centers, and institutes.

Schools:

The schools will house degree programs. A core principle of this reorganization is the preservation of academic programs and the disciplinary integrity within the new structure. Assessment and changes in the college’s curricular portfolio will follow established processes.
Current departments, with all of their existing academic programs and their faculty, will be grouped into schools. The move is designed to create synergy, promote resource sharing, and build capacity for innovation.
Crucially, this change will not affect current students. For example, an English major enrolled in a BA in English will remain an English major, enrolled in a BA in English, working with the same peers and the same faculty. Students will only experience the benefit of a more energized and supportive structure.

Institutes:

The institutes are issue-focused, and are primarily research and scholarship. They are intended to be broadly inclusive and transdisciplinary, spanning, not just the entire college but the university.
Typical institutes are externally funded. We will invest in promising ideas to jump start some around big encompassing themes such as Social Transformation, or Values and AI-Infused Societies.

Centers:

Centers reflect areas of research excellence and community engagement
The College is already home to several such centers (New Jersey Center for Indigenous Justice, Global Center on Human Trafficking, Center for Latino Heritage and Spanish Language Excellence, etc.)

The Four Schools

The college with have four schools as follows:

School A, home to disciplines related to human behavior and well-being (to be named by its faculty)

Psychology (39 faculty, 2,384 majors, 32,882 student semester hours)
Linguistics (5 faculty, 247 majors, 7,230 student semester hours)
Social Work & Child Advocacy (18 faculty, 548 majors, 12,102 student semester hours)
Religion (5 faculty, 7 majors, 6,292 student semester hours)

Total: 67 faculty, 3,206 majors, 58,506 student credit hours

School B, home to disciplines focused on the design and understanding of civic and social systems (to be named by its faculty)

Anthropology (10 faculty, 49 majors, 9,876 student semester hours)
History (13 faculty, 188 majors, 13,416 student semester hours)
Justice Studies (13 faculty, 636 majors, 10,636 student semester hours )
Pol. Sc. & Law (14 faculty, 410 majors, 9,050 student semester hours)
Sociology (9 faculty, 162 majors, 6,953 student semester hours)

Total: 59 faculty, 1,437 majors, 49,731 student semester hours

School C, home to disciplines focused on human narratives and creative expressions (to be named by its faculty)

English (20 faculty, 340 majors, 9,421 student semester hours)
Classics & General Humanities (11 faculty, 97 majors, 21,108 student semester hours)
Philosophy (3 faculty, 32 majors, 7,167 student semester hours)
World Languages & Cultures (13 faculty, 97 majors, 11,512 student semester hours)
Spanish & Latino Studies (7 faculty, 63 majors, 11,990 student semester hours)

Total: 51 faculty, 597 majors, 63,198 student semester hours

School D, home to interdisciplinary programs and writing studies (to be named by its faculty)

This school will include the following programs

BA in Interdisciplinary Studies (0 faculty, 2 majors, 66 student semester hours FA25)
Medical Humanities (1.5 faculty [3 contributing faculty all have primary appointment in another school], 123 majors, 2,121 student semester hours)
Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies (0 faculty, 8 majors, 1,896 student semester hours)
Writing Studies (31 faculty, 20 majors, 29,200 student semester hours)
Language, Business and Culture (0 faculty, 30 majors)

Total: 32.5 faculty, 183 majors, 33,283 student semester hours

The Institutes

The specific institutes and their areas of focus will be determined by the faculty and college leadership. Examples of possible institutes:

Institute for Social Transformation
Institute for Topics TBD

We will establish a mechanism for establishing institutes and a process by which they can secure internal startup funding, they are assessed, and sustained.

Skeletal Functions and Processes

The new organization structure directly enables us to meet the four criteria by transforming key administrative and academic processes:

Vision, Data, Resources

Now, each department creates a discipline specific vision.

In New Model: The goal is to harmonize all units and make them strengthen each other. The school leadership shares data and resources, consults with all members, and guides the emergence of a collective vision. This sets shared goals for the school that are aligned with college vision.

Course Scheduling

Now, staff members create 15 different schedules with input from chairs, and no lateral visibility. The 15 schedules are then reviewed, and iterated on in light of interactions and consistency, and then merged.

In New Model: The goal is to create schedules that best serve students, maximizing their learning and their interactions with full time faculty. The college distributes data analytics and data intelligence to shed light on student demands and best interests. School staff collects requirements and preferences from disciplinary and programs leadership, and proposes a schedule encompassing all the information. The schedule is reviewed and iterated on based on additional input from the programs.The outcome is a schedule that meets students needs, program requirements, and faculty preferences in a holistic fashion, accounting for all programs and faculty.

Student Success

Now, college provides data to departments. Each department chooses how to message to faculty; each department chooses what strategies, resources, and approaches to use.

In the new model: The goal is to improve equity and success for all students. The college provides data and strategy. The same messages, reminders, guidelines are sent to all faculty and staff. Best practices are shared and adopted more broadly to maximize benefits to students.

Student Recruitment and Retention Events

Now, each department organizes their own events. Events often overlap, leading to thinner attendance. This places a heavy burden on chairs and faculty; staff is often engaged late and in multiple events at the same time.

In the new model: The goal is to use faculty time wisely and maximize the impact of their activities. With the schools, we have economies of scale and scope that will yield more engagement and higher attendance. School leadership and staff organize and coordinate events, ensuring broad dissemination, use of best practices, higher attendance, and better outcomes for students, faculty, and staff.

Faculty Hiring, Review, Mentoring, and Assessment

Now, each department runs their own search. Candidates primarily interact with a small number of specialty colleagues and students. This does not fairly convey the vibrant, interdisciplinary, dynamic environment of the larger organization. The mentoring falls on a very small number of colleagues, reducing choice and burdening a small number of faculty. Each department runs its own search. Mentoring falls on a small number of colleagues, limiting faculty choice and broadening support.

In the new model: the goal is to attract an excellent diverse faculty pool and to promote the success of the faculty hired. The whole school is engaged in the search, mentoring, development and assessment of faculty. Faculty get the dual benefit of having faculty from their own specialty as well as a broader and diverse perspective from the larger school pool. Faculty learn how to contextualize, provide, and receive feedback both within specialty and across disciplines. This is an important component in professional development and leadership cultivation.

Other Functions

We will continue to explore together the main functions and services provided by the old structure, and how they are modified by the new structure.

We will collaboratively design and update our processes to best serve the students, the college, the university, and the community.

The Guiding Criteria and Benefits

The above efforts have been guided by four criteria:

1.Maintain disciplinary integrity and shared governance.

The excellence of our faculty is a core asset and a point of pride for the college and university. We nurture disciplinary integrity by promoting faculty professional and intellectual development, and by maximizing faculty impact on research, teaching, and student mentoring.
Shared governance and academic freedom are cornerstone values of academia. The institution values and protects faculty’s voice and shared governance. Any changes to the organization of the college is bound by the strengthening and preservation of these two assets.

2.Maximize interaction between different disciplines and cross disciplinary innovation.

Restructuring is driven by the goal of creating an intellectually rich and diverse environment, a fertile ground for new ideas.
We seek to build on deep expertise and specialization without being confined by them. As microbiologist Lynn Margulis documented, existing organisms grow and improve through evolution, but new life-forms emerge through the close interaction of different organisms. Our goal is to create these opportunities for intellectual combination, leading to more powerful frameworks for contemporary challenges.

3.Minimize administration and optimize our investment in faculty and student thriving.

Faculty time is the most valuable resource. Managing 15 separate units (many with fewer than 10 faculty) takes faculty away from teaching, research, and community engagement.
The reorganization seeks to allow faculty to grow their scholarship and teaching and increase the percentage of students who are mentored by full-time faculty, maximizing the return on our investment in expertise.

4.Make the diversity of disciplines an asset to address societal & educational challenges and opportunities.

Our most important, wicked problems demand solutions that go beyond any single discipline. Professor Scott Paige's work demonstrates how diversity of thought in a team is so powerful that it often trumps the ability of individual members in problem-solving.
Universities are unique in hiring experts from every discipline. As Professor Ottino, our December Distinguished speaker highlights, achieving "break-withs" (breaking with inherited assumptions) requires stepping outside the existing framework—a transcendence generated by the interaction between different domains and systems of thought.
A college organized less tightly around disciplines and specialties is in a better position to hire more diverse candidates and further enrich the pool of faculty and expand the domain of what they can work on.

In addition to meeting the criteria, the organization will have the following benefits:

Benefits to Students

While students' programs themselves remain formally unchanged and fully preserved, the benefits to their education will be significant. The most immediate impact will be many more interactions with full-time faculty. By optimizing our administrative resources, we aim to increase the percentage of students who are mentored by our full-time faculty—currently, half of our credits are delivered by adjunct faculty. Every study correlates student success with the quality of the relationship they form with their faculty. This reorganization directly supports higher quality of instruction and mentorship.

Benefits to Faculty

Faculty thrive through the exchange of ideas and the access to an intellectual community of peers. It is difficult to create such a community in small units with different teaching schedules. The schools will naturally broaden faculty’s immediate number of peers and encourage them to be more present on campus.

Leadership support and development

Schools with their dedicated staff and pooled administrative functions will free up faculty time from many administrative duties and enable the development of strategic leadership.

Curricular Vivacity

The larger context of schools will help identify new programs and enable us to create and test new curricula without the need to create new structures.

Next Steps

Together, we have reached an important milestone. I deeply appreciate the dedication and vigilance that brought us here. Special thanks to:

The restructuring committee, whose leadership and perseverance were instrumental.
Members of the college who contributed constructively and stayed engaged. This includes those who have sounded cautionary notes. By responding to these concerns and critical feedback, this proposal is more robust.

While our framework has taken shape, much work remains.

We have several decisions we are still to make including

The naming of the college.
The naming of the schools.
Elaboration on a comprehensive set of functions and processes, at least identifying them.
A nomination process for implementation committees.

This work will allow us to create a set of implementation committees and their charges to begin working in January 2026. This will also allow us to start the activities of Dean search with a clear vision of the college.

I look forward to our college-wide conversation later today, where we discuss and refine these plans.

With my best regards,

Fatma

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