86 ORGANIZING ACADEMIC COLLEGES: A GUIDE FOR DEANS school or into technician jobs. The faculty in Nutrition, on the other hand, were receiving small contracts from school systems and health departments about how to teach nutrition to school children and were training graduates to become Reg- istered Dieticians. It seemed clear to the two of them that Nutrition was not an appropriate discipline for the department. For the dean, the program’s focus was not consistent with the larger goals of the College of Arts and Sciences. She met with her counterpart in the College of Nursing and Health Professions, an application-focused program. She explained to the other dean the goals of the Nutrition program; the Nursing and Health Professions dean agreed Nutrition was consistent with what they were doing and, importantly, the College of Nursing and Health Professions was cognizant of not doing enough about issues of healthy eating and obesity. The timing for such a move seemed propitious. Together the deans went to the provost who agreed it sounded logical, but asked what they planned to do about the faculty, considering two were tenured and two were pre-tenure. As explained by the A&S dean, We [the two deans] both believe in doing a lot of talking before ac- tion, so that’s the approach we took. We both met with the Nutrition faculty as a whole and separately. After this consultation, we agreed we would just switch tenure homes for the two tenured faculty mem- bers and for the pre-tenures, we would review the guidelines, and see if it would do them a disservice to move. To ensure these two professors were not disadvantaged by the move, a joint com- mittee was named to clarify expectations for tenure. The committee clarified why these faculty had focused more on research while in Biology, rather than on appli- cation as emphasized in the Nursing & Health Professions criteria. Subsequently, both faculty members were awarded tenure. Today, the dean reports that whereas the program had been “invisible” in Biology, it is now “vibrant and flourishing.” 5. Creating a new school out of existing departments Sometimes it makes sense to pull together a cluster of departments into a new school within a college or into an entirely new college. As these two cases illus- trate, there is the perception that being an independent school or college will give more visibility and voice to a disciplinary cluster. Other reasons include using the school framework as a testing ground for whether it should eventually become an independent college; to allow for promotion and tenure guidelines better suited to those disciplines (e.g., creative or applied scholarship rather than research); and to bring efficiencies in staffing, event planning, and the like. a) At a public comprehensive university, four departments (Art, Communication & Media, Music, Theatre & Dance) within the College of Liberal Arts were combined