University of Massachusetts Amherst
IC-3: Academics and Demographics

This report and this credit is currently using Academic Year 2016-2017 academic/demographic statistics... 2016-2017 At A Glance document: https://www.umass.edu/oir/sites/default/files/publications/glance/FS_gla_01_2016.pdf UWW (distance ed) stats: https://www.umass.edu/oir/sites/default/files/publications/dept_profiles/department_reports/hc11%20University%20Without%20Walls%20(CPE).pdf NOTE 1: There are 493 student Residential Staff: comprised of 416 RA's and 77 peer mentors, totaling 493 but these are not counted under residential employees due to double counting. There are 50 non student residential staff including RD's and ARD's which are counted. NOTE 2: The STARS 2.1 standards for academics and demographics in IC-3 define "Academic department" in a way that happens to map well onto our own campus nomenclature for a "department". At UMass, an academic department is formally defined in Faculty Senate Policy Document 12-021A as "an academic unit that ... is the tenure home for faculty, offers one or more degree programs, and is led by a Head or Chair who reports directly to the Dean of a College." By this definition we have 61 "true" academic departments, and accordingly this is the number we report in IC-3 for academics and demographics. However, in AC-1, the credit is focused not on descriptive demographics, but on *course offerings*, and at UMass the way we number courses doesn't map one-to-one onto our academic departments. For example, the academic department of Environmental Conservation has courses in Sustainable Building Construction Technologies labeled "BCT", courses in Natural Resource Conservation labeled "NRC", and graduate courses in Environmental Conservation labeled "ECO". That's easy enough: all BCT, NRC and ECO courses are offered by only one academic department. But in addition to our 61 true departments, we also have a multi-disciplinary inter-departmental undergraduate degree program in Environmental Science which is jointly offered by faculty from 3 academic departments (including some from Environmental Conservation) and this program's courses have their own course label "ENVIRSCI". To complicate it further, we have two Colleges that offer courses at the College level (i.e., what STARS calls a "Division", so their courses belong to a College rather than to an individual academic department within that College). The STARS standard for IC-3 (see Technical Manual v2.1 pg IC.07) allows for these situations: it explicitly recognizes that (1) that "Departments may exist under other nomenclature and with coarser or finer divisions," and (2) that "Fields of study, programs, subject areas or the equivalent may also be considered to be 'departments'". Therefore, in IC-3 where it is just about demographics, we report our 61 actual academic departments. In AC-1, where the credit focuses on the *number of courses*, in addition to the 61 "true" academic departments counted in IC-3, we also include as 'department equivalents' the two Colleges that have their own course listings, and the Environmental Science program, thus giving a total for AC-1 of 64 "department" equivalents.