Immediate Thoughts

1. Where do the decision makers think the coupling of technology to society is going? Surely they don't think technology's role in society will be decreasing anytime soon?
2. In 5 years, what is the projected minimum requirement of "computer skills"? Do they really think that it will only entail using a single company's office productivity software? What about the ability to not just use specific software , but the ability to think of industry specific data in the context of industry specific workflows? Just where is *that* skill taught? Forgetting the technical specialists; do they seriously not get that the "computer literacy" of today is significantly subpar for the next generation of doctors, biologists, physicists, chemists, social workers, historians, theologians, writers, and communication specialists?
3. Since when is a decrease of revenue by $217,000 justified in order to reduce overhead by only 1 FTE? Am I the only one to see a huge discrepancy here? It seems to me that the reduction in revenue far outpaces the reduction of overhead. Is "low enrollment" really the driving factor of this decision to cut the CS major?
4. What will the absence of a CS major offering have on prospective CE majors? If you are a CE major, would the absence of a CS major affected your decision to attend WWU? Will it affect your decision to continue to attend WWU?
5. What is WWU's contribution to low enrollment in CS? Surely, WWU doesn't expect the CS department to be the sole entity marketing CS as a major.
6. Where do they think technology comes from? Do they not understand that a computer engineer at WWC had an mp3 player long before stores even knew what an mp3 was? Technology without computer science is like the galaxy without gravity -- it doesn't get any more fundamental.
7. Where do they think software comes from? Do they not understand that *every* sector of *every* industry will soon, if not already, be run by software built especially for that sector? Software doesn't magically pop into existence; a cs major is trained to think generically and not just how to learn new methods, but how to create new methods.
8. Do they even know that computer science is something far beyond any specialized skill, and is directly applicable to *every* field? Since when does higher education equate to teaching a particular subset of monkey behavior--let the "technical" schools teach that?
9. Today it is possible to find a startup company without a CS major playing a pivotal role -- Tomorrow, it will be next to impossible to find such a company. It is increasingly difficult to differentiate a company without some form of specialized software driving a more efficient business model--and this software must be designed and implemented by an intelligent human, not a trained monkey.