I am sorry to hear that. When I was in China, there is usually a Dept of Mechanics in each university, because it is so important to other Engneering Depts, like CE, ME, BME etc.

Dear Kewei and all others who have expressed their support for TAM at Cornell:

 I would like to thank you for your articulate expressions of the value of a dept. like TAM in Colleges of Engineering.  Although I do not see much hope that TAM will not be dismantled, your support has helped us to make the case that the activities embodied by TAM should, for the good of the entire College and University, continue to be nurtured within any new structure we find ourselves.  

As far as I know, there are about 60 departments of mechanics in China. Now most of them exist in the colleges like ME,CE and aerospace. These departments have encountered the same problem as you,too. Many academic governors say that people of mechanics do too much theoretical analysis but less engineering. And in their view the abstract formulas are worthless and things which can bring benefits to people quickly are approved.

But I think mechanics is a basic subject and the department should be reserved. Many people who have done excellently in ME and CE have an experience of mechanics study,especially in computation mechanics.Existing of this department is a character of a university,too. In America, there are few departments of mechanics and I think Cornell should keep and develop it, to give the mechanics people a free place to look for truth.

Folks - thanks for your support.  But over  the 100% opposition of the TAM Dept. and despite our strong support from around the world we are being merged with Mechanical Engineering, see http://www.cornell.edu/president/statements/2008/20081222-tam-dissolution.cfm .  The graduate field of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics will continue.  When I have time I will write out a history of how things unfolded.   

I have been fortunate enough to see the demise of departments in three fields that interest me:

1) Geography

2) Mining Engineering

3) Applied Mechanics 

Much as we might hate the fact that our favorite department is getting the axe, I believe that such deaths are unavoidable and possibly desirable. 

Geography had become quite irrelevant before the departments reinvented themselves as experts on Geographical Information Systems (Google Maps, Mapquest etc.).  Mining Engineering departments around the US were closed down during the commodity price lows of the mid to late 1990s.  We all know about the fate of TAM departments.

Highly specialized fields such as the three listed above can only garner students if there is the possibility of gainful employment after graduation.  The market still needs a few (10s of) graduates in each field per year to fill academic positions (and maybe a few industrial jobs).   But that sort of demand is not enough to justify the existence of whole departments with teir associated costs.

Perhaps TAM needs to reinvent itself and broaden the scope of its activities.

-- Biswajit 

My condolences to the faculty and alumni of an illustrious TAM department.

I have followed this particular thread with some interest.

It no longer matters---not at least in this case of the Cornell TAM---but I may as well note here that I had supported keeping the TAM department separate. (I had written a small email as Alan had suggested.)

I do believe that TAM, as an area of knowledge, is in an altogetherly different class from the usual engineering branches (like Mech, Civil, Electrical, etc.).

There are many areas that fall neither in physics nor in the usual engineering. A few readily come to mind: (i) Engineering Physics (ii) Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. (iii) Indeed, Materials Sciences also comes, in a way, in this category. In each of these cases, a separate existence is better to have. (IIT Bombay has a BTech prgram on the first but not on the second/third. I am mentioning this only to counter the claim often made that physics can handle anything that engineering doesn't wish to, or vice versa. Nope. There are many areas in between, offering a partial, but valid, synthesis.)

As to TAM, there are many topics that are special only to TAM and cannot be imagined in any other department. For example, (a) energy principles (as in structural engineering) (b) more generally, variational principles and methods (as in every branch of physics and engineering), (c) dynamical instability, (d) space mechanics, (e) applied partial differential equations, (f) catastrophe theory, (g) Etc. If not in TAM, where else would the topics like these find a first-class treatment? Sure enough all these topics are sufficiently different, and sufficiently integrative in their own character, that a separate specialized study pertaining to them is called for. And, that can happen only in a *separately* organized department.

Coming in particular to the TAM departments, if anything, these should have been not only kept separate, but they should also have been *expanded*. They should have been augmented with the "third" paradigm of Computational Science, Engineering and Mechanics. Thus, TAMs should have been made TACMs (Theoretical, Applied and Computational Mechanics)---rather than made a part of a Mechanical Engineering Department here, or of of the Civil (and Environmental!!) Engineering Department there, etc.

Mechanics has aptly been called the mother of all physical sciences and most of engineering. Here, take a moment to think how the mechanistic models simplify something crucial in every branch from mechanical, civil and electrical engineering, to electronics, to biology (e.g. migration of K and Na ions across cell membranes---their *mechanics*). Think how condensed matter science is simplified by molecular *dynamics*. Etc. (Also look at the history of science---how it got developed). ... Mechanics, thus, plays a special integrative role than no other subject does or can.

TAM Departments therefore fulfill a very special integrative need (and in a very special way) that no other department possibly could: integration of theory and practice of *mechanics*.

For example, do refer to any ordinary "engineering" mathematics book written by a mathematics department professor in India, and, go ahead and compare it with the treatment Professor Michael Greenberg gives the same topics in *his* book on engineering mathematics. The distinct TAM flavor is inescapable in that book of his. Greenberg is a Cornell TAM alumnus, I suppose (off-hand). And, I am sure there would be many others too, who "combine" or integrate, the theoretical and the practical in many innovative, even ingenious ways. Having a separate TAM department helps foster this culture of integration that is not otherwise found anywhere.

You might say (as Zhigang and Biswajeet have indicated above) that these TAM faculty members could perhaps work just as effectively in any other department. I doubt. Very much. My reason is to do with the way things get managed. Though this situation is human, let me give my argument by way of a physical analogy---to bring out the organizational mechanics [!], so to speak.

*Everybody* knows that in MD simulations theory, the potential function extends at least to the condensed matter boundaries, if not all the way "to infinity." Everybody "knows" *that*. Yet, in practice, everybody cuts the potential off at some ridiculously small and finite distance---say, at 3 or 5 atomic radii (or whatever). Why? Because, otherwise, the simulation would get computationally too expensive. Now, here, does anybody have any real fundamental argument? Nope. Cutting off the potential is pretty arbitrary. Still everybody does it, practically. More important: While watching those wonderful MD simulation graphics or movies, none wants to be reminded that the potential was cut off. It's inconvenient, and perhaps would be considered even rude to suggest that in a conference hall.

A similar mechanism also operates in human organizations, in particular, also in the academic (and industrial) departments. In principle, everybody agrees with everyone else's research program(s). Every authority nods, at least smilingly if not enouragingly, to whatever is the specific way you wish to conduct your own research programs or want to practice your academic speciality. And yet, in practice, the cutting off of your ideas, your potential does take place routinely---despite all those benevolently smiling glances.

For example, for all you know, think, which ME Department chairman (or funds-management authority) is going to be sypathetic to a research topic like the studies of dynamical instability or of fracture mechanics, to be conducted in his own department---if these areas happen to be *in competition with* some core mechanical engineering topics like, say, data-oriented modeling of IC engines? Just think about it. Which ME chairman would permit the former at the expense of the latter? It's obvious who is going to be a loser in this case, isn't it? And what goes for funds (and promotions), also goes for intangibles like honors and respect.

And, finally, I also wish to name what is not being named in any such discussions. Under the worldwide trends of increasing State control of all private domains, including education, there is this increasing tendency towards making everything uniform. For instance, every e-school must look like MIT (or the top ten). Or, in India, every top aspiring engineering college (COEP or BITS) must look like the IITs (which, themselves, were based on the "MIT Model".) May one raise the question, "Just why?"

Why can't Cornell be Cornell? And, Dartmouth, Dartmouth? And, Harvard, Harvard? Why can't each institution be like what it has always been like---or whatever it *itself* wishes to mould itself into, in future? Why can't a COEP continue to remain like COEP? Why must COEP become like an IIT/IISc (which, themselves, are almost indistinguishable from each other anyway, except for the Tata and Raman names historically associated with the IISc---an association that even today still fools some foreigners)? Let me add a very minor detail here: Why must, for instance, COEP begin to call its third year by the name TYBTech---just like in IITs? What was so wrong in continuing to call it TE---in COEP's own way?

Let me note here (simply because it has become so fashionable with the Indians settled and successful in USA, and, therefore, also in India lately) that the issue is not quite like what a second-rate, pragmatic, "businessman" would call it---an issue of "branding." ... Branding, of course, is a part of it. But the issue itself is both larger and deeper than being merely "branding".

Why is there this bureaucratic sort of emphasis in every way---small and big---to make every private institution lose its own distinct and unique character, and be forced to acquire that bureaucratic greyness? be forced to follow the bureaucrat/politican/third-rate intellectual's dream of egalitarianism? Pray, why?

Anyway, returning to the Cornell issue in particular, in my humble but honest opinion, it was a poor decision on both theoretical and practical grounds---no matter what the immediate compulsions might have been like, perhaps. I do believe that an integrative discipline like mechanics would eventually suffer if every school/university went that way. (And most have, already!) And, if mechanics suffers, so would mechanical engineers too, further down in future. So, it's bad for *both*.

Just my two cents.

Dear Alan,

 I am an alumnus of the MechSE Department at UIUC, and a witness to the UIUC TAM-ME merger. It was not a pleasant experience by any stretch of the imagination for us as TAM undergraduates. I'm sorry to hear that Cornell, too, has succombed to this pressure to change the structure of its college of engineering, instead of having the audacity to realize the rationality of rational mechanics. Though I see Prof. Suo's opinion, I don't think the faculty who remained on at UIUC necessarily represent the whole spectrum of those involved in the merger. I can only speculate as to the reasons that several tenured faculty left shortly before the merger, but I don't doubt that their reasons for leaving might have been intimitely related with the departmental merger. 

On the up-side, several faculty who stayed on at UIUC were very kind, and provided ample assistance to ensure the livelihood of mechanics research within the new department. This brings little consolation at the loss of official recognition of the importance of mechanics in the form of an independent department. It does reiterate that mechanicians are passionate about their profession. I hope the dilution of the practice of mechanics doesn't follow the dissolution of these great departments.

Best wishes through the process,

John Kolinski

Here are two articles on the merger of Cornell's TAM Department into Mechanical Engineering:

Merging-engineering-departments-arouses-criticism

Research in TAM

Looking back on the past few months and piecing together information from colleagues, administrators and acquaintainces, it appears to me that the fate of TAM was decided 2-3 years ago and that our existence since then was but a stay of execution.  Maybe had we read the tea leaves more clearly and taken radical steps to reinvent the department we might have survived, but even then I doubt it.

Since December he have been working hard to work out the merger details, a process that will span the rest of this calendar year.  We should be largely functioning as a single department in 2010.  

 If you are ever a dean or in a position to force a merger against the will of the faculty, think hard about it.  The merger process uses up a vast amount of faculty time and energy, not to mention good will and spirit of the faculty, staff and students. Unless this cost is clearly balanced by a gain in [ insert your goals here ...]  find other ways to achieve those goals.