When universities began to form computer science departments, there was some discussion over how long computer science departments would exist. Some thought that after a few years, computer science departments would have served their purpose and computer science would be absorbed into other departments that applied it.
It looks like computer science departments are here to stay, but that doesn’t mean that there are not territorial disputes. If other departments are not satisfied with the education their students are getting from the computer science department, they will start teaching their own computer science classes. This is happening now, to different extents in different places.
Some institutions have departments of bioinformatics or biomathematics. Will they always? Or will “bioinformatics” and “biomathematics” simply be “biology” in a few years?
Statisticians sometimes have their own departments, sometimes reside in mathematics departments, and sometimes are scattered to the four winds with de facto statisticians working in departments of education, political science, etc. It would be interesting to see which of these three options grows in the wake of “big data.” A fourth possibility is the formation of “data science” departments, essentially statistics departments with more respect for machine learning and with better marketing.
No doubt computer science, bioinformatics, and statistics will be hot areas for years to come, but the scope of academic departments by these names will change. At different institutions they may grow, shrink, or even disappear.
Academic departments argue that because their subject is important, their department is important. And any cut to their departmental budget is framed as a cut to the budget for their subject. But neither of these is necessarily true. Matt Briggs wrote about this yesterday in regard to philosophy. He argues that philosophy is important but that philosophy departments are not. He quotes Peter Kreeft:
Philosophy was not a “department” to its founders. They would have regarded the expression “philosophy department” as absurd as “love department.”
Love is important, but it doesn’t need to be a department. In fact, it’s so important that the idea of quarantining it to a department is absurd.
Computer science and statistics departments may shrink as their subjects diffuse throughout the academy. Their departments may not go away, but they may become more theoretical and more specialized. Already most statistics education takes place outside of statistics departments, and the same may be true of computer science soon if it isn’t already.