DA with full representation of the CITA faculty makes decisions on the basis of consensus. DA has always been fully unified as a graduate department. Historically, A&A activity was centred at the David Dunlap Observatory. As the undergraduate program flourished, activity spread to the St. George campus, and to UTM and UTAS. Because of the relatively small size of the Department, our research focus has been concentrated on the St. George campus, providing cohesiveness, efficient delivery of our graduate program, and an attractive setting for effective postdoctoral training. In research and graduate education we benefit from close interaction with CITA which is housed in adjacent space and shares our library. Our fledgling collaboration with the Department of Physics on the subfield of experimental astrophysics takes place on the St. George campus. Consequently, our planned David Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (§ 2.7) will be sited on the St. George campus too.
Delivery of undergraduate programs across three campuses can potentially lead to duplication of effort and dilution of the critical mass. However, we have always encouraged a lot of interaction on the undergraduate curriculum and the composition of the planning committee has allowed us to benefit further from the comparative experiences of success in the undergraduate programs on each campus. There has been satisfying progress recently: as described in § 2.2.4, DA is now fully engaged in the ETP program, and a cooperative agreement to harmonize and stabilize the undergraduate program delivery at UTAS has been worked out (§ 2.2.3). UTM houses a highly successful and stable group of two faculty in A&A, committed to the distinct identity they have cultivated on their campus. There will be a retirement in that group in 2007 to be replaced in the next planning cycle.
Recruitment of new faculty, and graduate students, into DA takes place in a highly competitive market and so our strategic plan is to concentrate new faculty resources onto the St. George campus to the greatest extent possible. This is our first planning opportunity to address A&A at UTAS, which ceased to support astronomy in the SC plan. This not only put the high-demand UTAS undergraduate courses (Table 3) in jeopardy, with only stipend and CLTA commitments, but also damaged the DA graduate program with the loss of 2 FTE. A draft agreement to remedy this is described in § 4.1.1.