Focus at Four: Interim Dean of the College of Architecture discusses name change
BRYAN, Texas (KBTX) – Texas A&M went through a rebranding two years ago, changing the name of its individual colleges to schools. However, earlier this year, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board gave the green light for A&M to revert back to the term “college” for eight academic units.
Interim Dean of the College of Architecture, Patrick Suermann, said the change was proposed previously by former Texas A&M president, Kathy Banks.
“President Banks had proposed in the initial or there was a proposal in the MGT report to move Construction Science, which is our largest department in the College of Architecture to engineering. By December when she came out with the final Path Forward report. She said, possibly the most feedback she had heard from everyone in industry was, that was not popular. So, President Banks at the time listened and did not move Construction Science,” Dean Suermann recalled.
Suermann said the change is a positive one allowing for a larger umbrella to fit under the name.
“A lot of Departments of Architecture are called Schools of Architecture, and that was partly why President Banks switched some of the colleges, because they had an industry that they were tied to,” explained Suermann. “There are a lot of great exemplars who are schools, but the part that was slightly confusing for us is that we’re not just architecture. We have landscape architecture, urban planning, and construction science. So, we really appreciate the the relative connotation that comes with the elevation from school to college because it just makes more.”
