Courtesy of LC Website
Prior to the Fall 2025 semester at Lewis & Clark, the mathematics and computer science departments were happily married. Both departments were housed in the top floor of BoDine, shared a section in the undergraduate course catalog and were led by a single department chair. Math students and their siblings from the computer science department got along amicably. They had to, as the cramped BoDine attic forced them to stand nearly shoulder to shoulder while waiting to visit their respective professors’ office hours.
Over the summer, the two departments finally outgrew each other and decided to end their union. Professors Peter Drake and Iva Stavrov, the new chairs of the computer science and math departments, respectively, announced the split to students in an email titled “Announcing the Computer Science Department” on Aug. 27.
“After many years of existing under the auspices of the Department of Mathematical Sciences, our computer science program will now have its own department!” they said, continuing that, “the work to formalize our new department will occur throughout the 2025-2026 academic year, as we roll out changes on the college website, in the college catalog, etc.”
The attitudes of both departments are a combination of wistful and hopeful. In an email to The Mossy Log, Stavrov discussed the feelings of the math department faculty toward the separation.
“It was not emotionally easy to part ways with what has become familial, and yet there was a growing sense that having the computer science program leave the metaphorical nest of the math hallway and stand on its own independent feet is the right way to go,” she wrote.
The feelings of the computer science department faculty are similar.
Drake noted, “We are all still friends with each other, and we are still closely-allied departments … (the split) gives us a little bit of freedom to proceed in different ways.”
While members of the math faculty have described the separation as a “divorce,” the computer science department is perhaps more optimistic, with Drake describing the split as a “meiotic birth.”
As Drake highlighted, dividing math and computer science into two departments gives each the freedom to move in different directions and improve their respective programs.
“We are looking into moving on from ALEKS as the math placement tool, we have more bandwidth for the reform of our Calculus 1 curriculum, and to research options for a corequisite model of calculus instruction,” Stavrov said.
Computer science students have numerous exciting changes to look forward to as well.
“We are thinking about how we might introduce some new minors in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence,” Drake said.
Now untethered from each other, the future of each program is bright. In addition to allowing each department to move forward freely, the split demonstrates the quality of our computer science department.
“An independent department communicates better the strength and depth of our computer science program to prospective and current students alike, and we believe it will improve the value of a computer science degree for our graduates,” Drake and Stavrov expressed in the email.
While our math and computer science departments are excellent, their expansion has been limited by their inability to act independently of one another. Through the split, each department is able to individually gain resources and prestige, which has the potential to improve the reputation of LC as an institution for the mathematical sciences.
While going separate ways is never easy, the math and computer science departments have parted as the closest of friends. The split has launched each department into an era of optimism and growth, with many exciting changes on the horizon for students of both departments. Whether the math and computer science students now view themselves as children of divorce or children of meiosis, their newfound room to breathe is full of opportunity.
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