No one disputes that we live in the Information Age. How then can the College of Engineering justify taking aim at the specialty that spawned the age we live in?
We take for granted the underlying data structures, the protocol standards born out of the minds of computer scientists and the open Web. Software powers everything from farming to Farmville. Databases are everywhere.
From the largest data consumers such as the federal government, Google, AT&T, IBM and the rest of the Fortune 500 companies to the mom-and-pop companies using QuickBooks, databases are everywhere.
Supply chains are increasingly automated and made to be more efficient. Smart power and green technology depend on intelligent machinery made possible only through applied computer science.
Driverless cars are on the horizon, which will save tens of thousands from needless deaths and millions more from accidents, thanks to software. Algorithms, the great sledgehammer of computer science, have tackled immense problems from space travel to nuclear power to weather prediction.
The impact of basic research and education in the field of computer science has been so phenomenal, so significant that no science nor art has remained untouched by computing.
Bill Gates said that software is the soul of the machine, and he’s right. Just as your soul is a separately distinct entity from your biology, it is an emergent property of your biology, but it remains an important entity in and of itself.
It is worthy to note that the College of Medicine has an entire department dedicated to neuroscience. This is a praiseworthy thing. Neuroscience is sufficiently complex and nuanced to justify its own department separate from other distinct areas of medicine or biology.
Computer science is analogous to neuroscience or psychology. It is a specialty of its own, completely separate from biology. It is so complex that there are many sub-specialties of computing that grow increasingly relevant in this digital age.
In fact, Georgia Tech, a Top 10 engineering school, just recently made the move to create a separate College of Computing because of this increased importance.
The move to integrate computer science and electrical engineering is a move to generalize our education rather than specialize it. Expert knowledge is the single difference separating us from antiquity. It’s not so much that we are orders of magnitude smarter than our ancestors; we are just more focused on learning more and more about specific domains.
The proposal by Dean Abernathy and the College of Engineering to diminish the research activity in computer science is devastating to all areas of this college. I just listed myriad industries, arts and sciences that are positively affected by research and breakthroughs in computer science.
There is an unseen ripple effect in the damaging nature of this, and every student should be furious. I don’t know who to blame — the dean, the UF president, the governor of Florida or the people of Florida. All I know is that whatever system we have for determining our priorities as a society are broken within this state.
The modern world is here to stay. Florida can either be a part of it or be left in its wake. I call on all residents of Florida to stand up and support the mission of our universities.
We need to turn this attitude around. We need to be forward-thinking and positive about progress once again in this state.
We need to SAVE CISE!
Chris Cordle is a software engineering junior at UF.
