Mellon College of Science Records

In 1967, the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Mellon Institute were brought together to form Carnegie Mellon University. For three years after, the Mellon Institute--re-minted as the Mellon Institute of Research--was maintained as its own separate research division, and the College of Engineering and Science was left unmodified. In 1970, Carnegie’s College of Engineering and Science was divided into the Mellon Institute of Science--renamed the Mellon College of Science (MCS) in 1979--which merged with the Mellon Institute of Research, and the Carnegie Institute of Technology, which retained all the engineering departments, including the newly created department of Engineering and Public Affairs. The Mellon Institute of Science housed the departments of Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, the Biological Sciences, and Computer Science. The majority of the departments of the Mellon College of Science were located in Science Hall, which was later renamed Wean Hall. The exceptions to this rule were the departments of Chemistry and Biological Sciences. [1.206] [2.14]

There was apparently a great deal of friction in the early years of the Mellon College of Science as the scientists originally working for the Mellon Institute were combined with Carnegie Tech faculty when the two merged. The Chemistry department jumped from 16 faculty to 37 between 1966 and 1967 as a result of the merger, and, according to Fenton, “some chemists had joined Mellon Institute specifically because they did not want to teach in a university.” Fenton implies that this friction was the catalyst for the Chemistry Department’s research and graduate studies moving to the Mellon Institute building blocks away from the main campus, leaving the undergraduate chemistry classes to languish in “obsolete teaching laboratories on the central campus.” The Department of Biological Sciences, which, at the other end of the spectrum, had too few teachers, also joined Chemistry at the Mellon Institute building. [1.206-207]

One result of the University's attempts at reconciling the two original camps was the creation of a Center for Special studies to accommodate programs with no specific departmental affiliation. The programs included polymer science, metal science, collision spectroscopy, radiation research, nuclear magnetic resonance, and continuum and molecular quantum mechanics. The Center, however, became more of a political problem than it solved, and was officially terminated in 1974. [2.233-34]

The Department of Computer Science originally had no undergraduate program and the other departments in the College opened computer science tracks within their undergraduate curriculum to meet the demands of students. [1.206] Through the 1970’s computation power, and accessibility, grew very quickly and by the mid-80’s the department had grown as large as all the other departments in MCS combined. In 1985, the Computer Science Department, by necessity, separated from the Mellon College of Science to become a free standing unit, and officially became its own School of Computer Science in 1988. [2.152-160]

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