When I decided to join FSU, I must admit I was unclear about several 
aspects and indeed your innovative fresh approach was part of the appeal. I 
now understand the situation better and I am afraid that I am very worried 
about my chances of success at FSU under current conditions. I have had 
some tactical problems recently while moving but my somewhat negative 
view reflects the underlying reasons for the problems and not the difficulties 
themselves. As far as I can see everybody involved is working hard and with 
good faith but there are possibility insoluble problems due to impedance 
mismatches between organizations.
CSIT seems to me a concept and fledgling organization of great 
promise. The only clean implementation would be as a standalone school but 
I understand why this is not possible. So instead we have a particularly 
confused situation for me at least with CSIT and Computer Science linked 
together. Currently this linkage is not well defined and I understand steps are 
under way to define better the separate responsibilities of these units. 
However this will not be sufficient (in my opinion) because the two 
organizations are very different in culture, goals and understanding of the 
needs of international quality research. I gather from my own experience and 
several comments from others, that I can expect continued difficulties from 
computer science in performing large scale research. I understand that this is 
not a personality issue and anybody like me could experience the same 
difficulties. This is a special difficulty for CSIT as computer science and 
mathematics are in some sense the core disciplines.
I thought of resigning my position in computer science but then I can’t 
be effective with computer science students who must be a key to my 
research in the next few years. Further I feel bad that I am moving to a unit 
(computer science) which I cannot unreservedly recommend to new faculty 
and graduate students. I will have to work very hard to shepherd my 7 
transferring students through the CS/CSIT mismatches. CSIT will eventually 
have its own students but this will only have major impact in say three years 
and I would personally expect to always be interested as well in CS students.

I see two scenarios where I could be effective
a) The current mixed role but where the units responsible for faculty 
and students, enthusiastically support CSIT, understand CSIT and 
are sympathetic to its needs. This requires that units like CS have 
the experience and expertise to understand large-scale research and 
other requirements of CSIT. This I think implies that their mission 
and staffing have characteristics similar to CSIT.
b) CSIT is a standalone school in both academic and research areas.