The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/merger/)
Planned Parenthood announced a merger with five affiliates in New York State — including the organization’s local Ithaca branch — in a move to increase access to high quality reproductive care in the state.
Provost Michael Kotlikoff’s decision to move on from the proposed merger between the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the College of Human Ecology is the right one, and we are glad to see this exercise in academic Frankensteining put to rest. We hope that without the most unpopular proposal casting a shadow over campus, Cornell can constructively debate the other elements of the Committee on Organizational Structures in the Social Sciences report. The merger idea encountered fierce pushback from faculty and students alike, particularly in the ILR school, and drew comparisons to 2016’s much-maligned creation of the College of Business. Eighty-eight percent of ILR faculty expressed opposition to the proposal in a survey presented to the Faculty Senate, 163 current ILR and Human Ecology students wrote a letter to The Sun objecting to the idea and all four living former deans of the ILR school similarly argued against the change in an open letter to Kotlikoff and President Martha Pollack published in The Sun. Throughout this process, the co-chairs of the committee and other members of the administration reiterated that the proposals laid out in the report were just that — proposals — and that the merger was not even the highest-rated idea.
When Pollack sat down with The Sun last week to reflect on the year, the president said she wouldn’t necessarily describe her first year as ‘turbulent.’
The Graduate and Professional Student Assembly tackled the issues of the possible restructuring of the social sciences and the proposed consensual relationships policy, while passing four resolutions at their meeting on Monday.
After a presentation from the co-chairs of the Committee on Organizational Structures in the Social Sciences explaining the proposal, assembly members raised concerns about the potential merger of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the College of Human Ecology.