This article DOES NOT PROVIDE ENOUGH INFORMATION on why this restructuring has taken place. Is it really just a ham-fisted budget cutting move or is there some

This article DOES NOT PROVIDE ENOUGH INFORMATION on why this restructuring has taken place. Is it really just a ham-fisted budget cutting move or is there something more subtle going on? It looks like the university also had an ECE department that it was able to consolidate into, at least to some extent. It also does not provide any information on the numbers related to the research of the Computer Science Department. How much money were they bringing in in grants? How many papers were they writing? How many students were moving through the department? If these numbers don't make enough sense, or they don't stack up to other departments when a cut has to be made, then it really just boils down to something like this. It seems completely absurd that a thriving research department would be shuttered because of budget reasons, which is what the Forbes article (and I use that term loosely, "post" is probably a better word) seems to imply, and this may be the case, but I'm quite skeptical. Sometimes, if you have a bad set of faculty that create a stagnant department (no research, bad teaching, all tenured, and all resisting hiring good new faculty to maintain the status quo) you have to take dramatic steps to get rid of them so you can trim back on your budget (tenured faculty make a lot more than new faculty) and breath new life into a program. In some cases, the only option to reboot a department may be to scrap it entirely, offer zombie profs new spots in a similar department, and bin the rest you don't like or offer them much-less-cush teaching jobs where they have to work for dinner. Later on the department can be restarted and reconstructed from new and preexisting good faculty. I'm not saying this is the case here. What I am saying is that there can be real reasons to scrap an entire CS department this day in age when you have budget problems, or even if you DON'T have them. I don't know the particulars here, but it sure would be nice if people weren't so self-righteous with these postings and gave us more facts so we could understand how crazy the situation actually is instead of hearing about (unrelated) athletic budgets. All the Forbes post is really doing is engaging in sensationalism by co-opting the notion of American decline via self-sabotage that's so popular right now. I wish we could hear some more about the real issues.