Why UNC-CH Revived a Plan to Merge Library and Data Science

As the academic year wound down last spring and UNC-Chapel Hill planned its next major fundraising campaign, the university’s deans participated in a series of internal presentations to “pressure test” their messages to potential donors.

After the School of Information and Library Science’s (SILS) presentation, led in late April by then-Dean Jeffrey Bardzell, most attendees said the school’s vision was compelling.

“​​Many volunteers appreciated the school’s commitment to organizing and applying information in ways that promote wisdom, ethical decision-making, and social good—framing SILS as a vital bridge between technical systems and human needs,” read a summary of the feedback that the university’s fundraising staff sent to Bardzell after the event. The Assembly obtained the report, which was generated by ChatGPT, through a public records request.

But there was another theme: Confusion about the overlap between SILS and the School of Data Science and Society (SDSS), which launched in 2022, as well as the computer science and statistics departments.

“Why are you separate schools?” wrote one attendee who was asked to predict questions that donors might have. Another wanted to know more about the “broader vision” for data science and artificial intelligence at the university: “How does SILS fit into that picture?”

Others had suggestions: “Collaborate with Data Science and blend your programs to leverage the power of every dollar from every donor,” one volunteer wrote. “Merge with data science on a unified effort,” wrote another.

“There was broad agreement that SILS sits at a pivotal moment, with both the opportunity and responsibility to lead UNC’s AI and information strategy, provided it can sharpen its message, deepen its partnerships, and define a more unifying identity moving forward,” the AI-generated summary concluded.

The discussion foreshadowed a major shift that was about to come.

On October 9, UNC-CH Chancellor Lee Roberts and interim Provost Jim Dean announced SILS and SDSS would become the “founding leaders” of a new, yet-to-be-named school intended to “position the University as a national leader in applied technology, information and data science research and teaching.” (The university did not address a question from The Assembly about whether the campaign presentation influenced the decision.)

Roberts and Dean singled out the “transformational impact” of generative AI as part of the impetus for the merger. And the effort is likely to support one of Roberts’ key goals. Last year, he identified AI and its implications among his top four priorities as chancellor. He said at an Assembly event last month that the technology “will reshape just about everything we do” at the university and in society. Bardzell recently left SILS to be UNC-CH’s chief AI officer, a new position formed after Roberts’ AI working group recommended it last year; SDSS Dean Stan Ahalt will lead the combined school.

But much of the plan for the new school remains unclear—notably including how, and to what extent, it will focus on AI. 

When the SILS student association surveyed students about the merger shortly after the announcement, AI was among the top concerns, said Abigail Allred, a second-year master’s student and president of the group. On their minds, Allred said, were questions like: “What if I ethically object to the usage of AI?” “What does that mean for how I’m going through this school?” and “What does it mean for the professors who do not want to engage with AI?” 

Campus leaders have said the school is not intended to shut down existing programs, nor is it a cost-cutting measure (though they acknowledge some “administrative savings” might be identified). Leaders from the existing schools were recently tapped to serve on a task force that will guide the process, with additional working groups tackling key issues like faculty governance, operations, communications, and identity for the new school. 

In some ways, the idea to merge the schools isn’t new. It will take a page from a plan the university scrapped in 2020. But this time, the merger is moving full-steam ahead—and they’ll have to act fast. The university says the new school will launch by July 1. 

What’s Old Is New Again

UNC-CH faculty, staff, and administrators have long strategized around various issues related to the ever-growing amount of data and the frameworks used to interpret and manage it. 

Since 2012, various committees have considered, among other issues, how UNC-CH could handle its collection of research data, ensure students were “data literate,” and align its public-service mission with data-intensive studies. 

By early 2020, a committee led by then-SILS Dean Gary Marchionini and Jay Aikat, now an SDSS vice dean, recommended creating a school focused on data science to address those questions and position UNC-CH to “lead the world in using data and information to solve humanity’s greatest challenges.”

The school, the committee proposed, would be interdisciplinary and engage the university’s “preeminent scholars in the social sciences, fine arts and humanities and health sciences across all departments, schools and centers.” But they said it should merge SILS and the departments of computer science and statistics and operations research.

It was an exciting possibility for SILS, which was nearly 90 years old at the time, to be considered an anchor of UNC-CH’s initiative in a discipline that was “all the buzz,” Marchionini told The Assembly. And the conversations were happening in a competitive environment; universities around the country, including some of UNC-CH’s peers, had already propped up programs and schools in data science. 

“It was brewing. It was in the air. It was in the context of the larger world at the time,” Marchionini said. “The fact that there was a really interesting, grand vision, it was tantalizing for all of us.”

Library science, information science, and data science overlap in several ways. SILS describes library science as a discipline to learn how to “collect, organize, store, and retrieve the world’s recorded knowledge”—in or out of libraries—while the school says students in information science will learn how information is created and how to analyze, process, and manage it. Data science, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, “uses scientific methods, processes, and systems to extract knowledge and insights from data.”

By the end of 2020, though, the plan to build a merged data science school had failed. When the School of Data Science and Society launched three years ago, it did so as a new and independent entity—something the university hadn’t done in over 70 years. 

Recounting the 2020 process to the university’s Faculty Council last month, Dean, the interim provost, said: “We were fairly far down the road, and at the 11th hour, faculty from SILS decided they didn’t want to be part of it, and pretty much the whole deal fell apart.”

To hear Marchionini tell it, SILS ended its involvement because of what he described as fundamental differences between the proposed founding units.

For example, SILS has historically had a “much broader range of acceptable criteria for being successful,” with professors ranging from storytellers to archivists to human-computer interaction experts and more, compared to the more “technical” fields of statistics and computer science, Marchionini said. Questions also arose about governance structures and research operations in the proposed school. The statistics department asked in a December 2020 “pre-implementation” report whether the school’s graduate students would be supported by funds raised by faculty advisors or by teaching assistantships, as the department preferred.

“​​It was pretty clear that we had some really major differences in opinion about the world and about how we work together,” Marchionini said.

Now, as UNC-CH pursues a new merger, computer science and statistics aren’t included—at least, not now. “I think our feeling was that we wanted to do something that we’re fairly sure we could accomplish in a short period of time,” Dean said at the November faculty meeting. “That doesn’t mean that other schools, other people, couldn’t be part of it sometime down the future,” he added.

It’s not uncommon for information and data science disciplines to be housed under one roof. Of the top five information and library science schools in the country, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, three currently offer programs in data science.

That includes the University of Maryland, which is tied for No. 3 with UNC-CH and where the College of Information offers undergraduate degrees in information science and “social data science,” which started in 2022, and several graduate programs. Douglas Oard, the Maryland program’s interim dean, said adding data science was a natural evolution from its graduate program in information management, which launched in 2003.

“It didn’t grow because we tried to grow data science,” Oard said. “It grew because data science was a natural thing to grow, and we had a garden in which to grow things.”

Giving It Another Try

That university leaders had decided to again pursue a merger came as a surprise to many in SILS and SDSS. 

Allred, the president of the Information and Library Science Student Association, learned of the plans in a group chat of fellow SILS students on October 8. Some of her peers had attended a SILS “town hall” meeting where Bardzell made the announcement before the university’s press release went out the next day, Allred said.

“It was new news to the faculty,” Allred said. “They did not know at all.”

Records obtained by The Assembly show Bardzell and Ahalt kept the plans to close circles in their respective schools in the weeks leading up to the announcement. 

On September 8, Bardzell wrote to Diane Kelly, a distinguished professor in SILS who is now interim dean, that he and Ahalt had met with the provost and “put to him the why question.”

“The gist: some of society’s most pressing issues are in a sociotechnical domain that SILS and SDSS both occupy,” Bardzell wrote. “They are pressing enough that the university needs a serious, concerted response.” 

But, Bardzell wrote, both SILS and SDSS are “very small, with SDSS still in start-up mode, and SILS in a place where it has missed some opportunities and has shown signs of losing steam.”

In a September 28 email to Ty Cole, who was SILS’ development officer, Bardzell said his school was facing several issues, including “disrespect and disinvestment from South Building,” which houses the chancellor’s office, and “low enrollments.” (In his emails to Kelly and Cole, Bardzell wrote that he had plans to address such issues, but plans for the new school took shape before he could implement them.)

University budgets for the 2025-26 fiscal year show SDSS got about $10.4 million from the general fund, which is a combination of state appropriations and tuition. This fall, the school enrolled more than 320 undergraduate and graduate students. That was a 72% increase in enrollment from last year, its first, when the school had 188 students and received roughly $8.9 million from the general fund. Legislators in September 2023 allocated $7.5 million in recurring funds to launch the school, plus $2.5 million in one-time start-up costs in the 2023-24 fiscal year, the university told The Assembly.

Meanwhile, SILS enrolled 602 students this fall—213 undergraduates and 389 graduate students—and received about $8.8 million this year, up about $750,000 from last year. 

SILS’ trajectory is complicated. Overall, since 2017—the earliest date at which public-facing enrollment data is available from the university—the school’s enrollment is up 52%. Undergraduate enrollment has nearly doubled during that time, but graduate enrollment has fallen the past three years after peaking in 2022.

It’s not clear whether enrollment or other concerns at SILS were driving factors in the merger. A university website about the effort says officials don’t plan on shuttering programs in either school, and “we are hoping the new school is able to support academic program growth, both in terms of enrollment and impact.” 

In a statement to The Assembly, Bardzell said: “I don’t know all the reasons that went into the merger decision, but I can say there is a growing level of overlap between the Library and Data Sciences.”

“In my opinion, students will be well served to have these disciplines available from a cohesive unit and the future school will be more competitive when seeking to attract the best and brightest students and grants,” he wrote.

Marchionini, who is in his last semester on the SILS faculty before retiring this month, said the growth of SDSS bodes well for the merger in that it places the two entities creating the new school on somewhat equal footing. As proposed five years ago, the relatively smaller SILS and statistics department would have merged with the much larger computer science department, which this spring was the fourth-largest major among the university’s graduating class of more than 4,300 students.

It should help that SDSS has made concerted efforts to live up to the “and Society” portion of its name, Ahalt told The Assembly. Like SILS faculty and others around the university, SDSS’ faculty “have a focused interest in making sure that what they’re doing is for the public good,” he said. In emails to Bardzell this fall, Ahalt highlighted three SDSS professors whose work uses data to study and analyze pressing issues like homelessness, gun ownership, and the ethics, policy, and governance of AI.

“The work the two schools do is mutually complementary,” Ahalt said in an interview. “And I think it’s going to be a real intellectual boost for us both, in the sense that we will be able to bring faculty together to talk about things from different perspectives.”

Email records from Bardzell and Ahalt show the deans discussing a need to frame the school as something new. Bardzell also told Kelly that the provost “views the merger as two equals coming together for a new, third entity; he does not see this as the dissolution of SILS into/under SDSS.”

Still, Allred said “hackles were raised” among many students and faculty when the word “library” was listed just once, in the SILS name, in the university’s announcement of the new school. In Allred’s eyes, it was a slight that carried extra weight given the federal government’s attempts to shut down an agency that issues grants to libraries.

Kelly framed the merger in a recent article on the SILS website as a change that would bring more eyes to the school’s work. “The core of what we do will not change as we propel the field forward into the next era,” she wrote. “What will change is how much people know about the incredible work our faculty, staff, students, and alumni do. The new school will give us a bigger platform to elevate this work.”

How Much Will AI Be a Factor?

The extent to which the new school will focus on AI is a question on many people’s minds, Allred said.

Initial reports about the merger claimed the technology would be at the core of the new school, with one unnamed SILS faculty member writing to The Daily Tar Heel that the result would be a “School of AI.” University leaders say the school won’t take that name, though the working groups are still determining what it will be called.

“AI is one of the things that the school will address, but the focus is quite a bit bigger than that,” Dean said at the November Faculty Council meeting.

UNC-CH in recent years has introduced initiatives to build AI “literacy” among students, faculty, and staff, with the campus libraries leading much of the effort, University Librarian María Estorino said at an Assembly event last month. The new school could bolster those efforts, and expand the university’s research on AI and its impacts.

Ahalt told The Assembly the school will “spend a significant amount of our thinking looking at how the new developments of AI, as well as the more traditional AI, is impacting society, impacting information, and how information flows.”

“I think lots of what’s happening in AI is going to impact many organizations … and so thinking that through, and trying to understand what the longer-term and shorter-term impacts are going to be, and maybe trying to avoid some of the unintended but unfortunate consequences, is a really good idea,” Ahalt said.

Roberts acknowledged at the event that the university, with its $4.5 billion budget this year, can’t compete with the massive, multibillion dollar investments some technology companies are making in AI and the researchers who study it. But he doesn’t “necessarily worry about recruiting talent in the academic context.”

“Every time we go out to recruit somebody, we’re overwhelmed with the quality of people that we get from around the world,” Roberts said. 

Some of that work is already happening in the existing schools; a handful of professors in SILS and SDSS list AI as part of their research interests. SDSS is expanding its efforts in the field after receiving approval from the UNC System Board of Governors last month to offer two new graduate degrees in data science starting next fall. Students in those programs will be able to choose from four specializations, including “advanced data science foundations and AI.”

Other questions about the new school remain, such as how the schools’ leadership structures will merge and whether staff positions will change. 

In some ways, the lack of specificity is welcome, Allred said: “Not having any answers of how it’s going to look does give immense agency to us.” 

They won’t have to wait much longer, as the new school is set to launch in seven months.