Speeches
University at Buffalo + The Community
Strengthening a Vital Partnership
A major public address by
John Barclay Simpson, PhD
14th President of the University at Buffalo
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Good morning, and thank you all for attending! I am really impressed with the size and the scope of this audience. People here are from a variety of different communities: from the business community, elected officials, from various faith communities, neighborhood communities, and, of course, from the university and educational communities. This tells us a great deal about the place of our university in the community, and I thank you all for attending.
The University at Buffalo, as you know, is not an entity that sits passively in Amherst or on Main Street—and now downtown—but rather, it’s very much part of the community. In the same sense that you were drawn in here today to learn something about the future of the university, I witnessed last week what really was a remarkable event: where more than 30,000 people on one occasion last Tuesday afternoon came onto the campus to hear His Holiness the Dalai Lama speak. This was remarkable, not only for itself, but also because of the degree to which the communities beyond the university, including many people who otherwise have never been on the campus, participated in that particular event. I hope you learned something good about the university, and I’m confident that they did.
“I see today as the start of an ongoing dialogue that I hope will increase our thinking about ways in which we and our surrounding communities—all of us here—can form a more vital and a more lasting partnership toward our common benefit.” John B. Simpson President
Thank you, Mr. Jacobs, and thank you, Vice President Henderson, for your introductions, and thanks as well go to Louis Grachos and the staff here at the Albright-Knox for their hospitality in letting us use this magnificent room. I’ve never had the chance to give a talk in the presence of such wonderful art.
I have the pleasure of serving on the board of the Albright-Knox gallery, and I also would like to tell you that about a year ago, through a partnership between the Albright-Knox and the university, we brought to Buffalo and exhibited both on the campus and here in the Albright-Knox gallery the largest exhibition of contemporary Chinese art that has ever left China. The exhibition was called The Wall, and I think it’s a very good example of the ways in which the university partners with entities in the community for the benefit of the community, the university, and all of Western New York.
I’ve been here about three years now, and one of the things that struck me when I first arrived was how ingrained the university and its people are in the communities of Western New York. But I also was struck by the interest generated that today’s audience is an example of—the interest taken in the University at Buffalo by its surrounding community. It goes both ways. Moreover, in my experience, which consists of some years in public higher education, I’ve never seen the degree of engagement or interest that we share with our local Western New York community. This is not the normal arrangement for public research universities.
My sense is that the university will continue and, indeed, expand the degree of its interest, its commitment, and its partnership with the communities that surround it. I see today as the start of an ongoing dialogue that I hope will increase our thinking about ways in which we and our surrounding communities—all of us here—can form a more vital and a more lasting partnership toward our common benefit. As you have just heard from Vice President Henderson, we have made an institutional commitment to ensuring that in the future we do an even better job of communicating with, and integrating with, our surrounding communities. That commitment is very much part and parcel of our academic mission as a public research university.
I’m here today to talk to you about a vision. It’s a vision for making the University at Buffalo, the university I have the pleasure of leading, even better than it is. It’s also a vision of how Western New York and the university can strengthen the vital partnership that binds them together for their mutual benefit. It is what we call in biology a symbiosis—a relationship between organisms that is to the mutual benefit of each. In this case it is clearly to the benefit both of the Western New York community and of the university to see that we have strong, vital, and collaborative partnerships between each other.
If I can leave you with just one message this morning, I want to convince you that strengthening the partnership between the university and the community—which really is, I believe, a team effort—will benefit all of us. Our university and our community are in this—whatever “this” might be—together. I’d also offer one more observation: that it seems to me there are no great American cities these days without a great hometown university. I want to tell you a little about where the university is, where I see it going, and why in my view a close partnership and collaboration—a symbiosis—between the university and its communities is something that is beneficial to both of us.
Some basic information about the university would include things like the following: We are indeed a large university, but with an enrollment of approximately 25,000 full-time students, we are not even in the top 50 universities in the U.S. in terms of size. We have about 12,050 full-time faculty and we have a total workforce of full- and part-time employees who get paychecks numbering some 14,000. We’re a member of the AAU, the Association of American Universities, to which membership is selective and which includes the top 62 research universities—roughly equally public and private—in the United States and Canada. UB and Stony Brook are the only two public universities in the whole northeastern part of the country that are members of the AAU.
We have as well a huge economic impact already on Western New York, and I can think of three good examples that make this point and make it very clearly. First, our economic impact is estimated by economists to be about $1.5 billion a year. This is more than four times the $300 million subsidy we receive from the State of New York. To put this in perspective, our budget is about the size of Erie County’s, and it’s bigger than the gross domestic product of—as I found last night in a quick perusal using Google—some 30 countries. We spend more than a quarter of a billion dollars a year on sponsored research, and these are new dollars that come into the community as a consequence of your having in your midst a very good research university.
“In essence, UB 2020 is about making a very good university into a great university, and a major part of this goal is that UB must increase in its size.” John B. Simpson President
A last and more focused example: The New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, which we just opened on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, has already turned an initial investment by state and federal governments of $11 million into $55 million of new sponsored research activity. We’ve also measured how UB and the Center of Excellence operate with respect to fueling job growth and retention, and we estimate more than 4,000 well-paying jobs have either been created or retained by efforts fueled by the Center of Excellence. What this means for New York residents—or more particularly, for Western New York residents—is that you gain a huge benefit from having a successful research university.
The university gets about $300 million in support from the State of New York and, in turn, its students put back by spending locally about $200 million. So even two-thirds of what the state contributes to us as a tax subsidy is put right back into the community by the students we educate. A strong research university like UB leverages its state investment and the investment of its students’ tuition and the investment of the human capital—the faculty, the students, and the staff—in a very strong way. Put another way, having a good university simply is good business. The better the University at Buffalo is, the better it is for the local community and for Western New York.
I spoke a bit about the large economic impact the university has on Western New York, but the university is not an entity; it’s not a monolith. It is composed of people, and I believe it is through the people we have and the people we interact with that really we can find the measure of the commitment and the impact we have on our local communities. Involvement in our communities remains one of our core values in educating our students and in how we look at the professional work of our faculty and our staff. It is embedded in our mission as a public research university.
Here are a couple of examples. It’s evident in the annual Smile Education Day, in which 400 dental students interact with 30,000 or more elementary school students in Western New York to promote good health. It’s evident in our initiatives to improve pre-K-16 education, such as helping thousands of Buffalo public school teachers to improve student performance through use of novel technological and Web technologies. It’s evident in our efforts to strengthen neighborhoods such as UB’s regional community policing center, which brings together people and organizations in the vicinity of University Heights to keep their neighborhood safe.
And last, this commitment is clearly seen in our economic development efforts, an example of which I gave you earlier with the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, which not only achieves the goal of our pursuit of academic excellence, but also is helping breathe new economic life into the neighborhood surrounding the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, and indeed all of Western New York.
We improve life here in many ways for the people of Western New York—through our galleries and concerts, our Distinguished Speakers Series, through our Division I athletics, the countless volunteer hours that faculty, staff, and students put into the Western New York community, and the nearly $1 million that our faculty and staff and students contribute to local organized charities each year.
UB alumni provide the professional backbone of Western New York, and these data are absolutely fascinating. There are about 100,000 UB graduates who live in New York State, two-thirds of whom remain in Western New York. Nine out of ten dentists, eight out of ten attorneys, and seven out of ten pharmacists are all graduates of UB’s professional schools. The slide here shows in a very quick and easily understood fashion where UB faculty and staff live. Each dot represents the home address of one of our faculty or a full-time staff member and as you can see, we are scattered about Erie County in a very, very dispersed fashion. If you’d like to learn more about this, I encourage you to go to the university’s Web page and go to “Your UB.” It is a site that has been constructed specifically to give you a sense of the broad array of things that the University at Buffalo does in the local community.
Where do we want to go from here? I made the case earlier that UB is already a strong school. Probably I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you unless that was the case. But we—and I do mean we—as a university are not satisfied with where we are. Quite to the contrary, over the last two years, we have been engaging as a university in a campus-wide strategic planning process, which is now to the phase of being implemented. Every successful organization needs a plan and a strategy for thinking about where it wants to go and a roadmap for how to get from here to there. We call ours UB 2020: it is our vision for achieving enduring academic excellence, and it provides a roadmap for getting there. The term UB 2020 bears a quick mention. It suggests not only a clarity of vision of where we intend to go, but it also lays out a multiyear timeframe—as opposed to a year-by-year outlook—of how and when we will proceed in achieving that vision.
We are now implementing the results of that campus-wide strategic planning process. In our academic enterprise, we have identified what we call our academic strategic strengths, which are areas of research and academic excellence on which we will focus our future. We also are going about reorganizing in ways that directly support and benefit our academic mission, including all the academic support services that exist in the university, such as IT and HR. In other words, remembering that first and foremost we are an academic institution, we are doing what we need to do to put ourselves in a position to grow, to expand, and to enter the realm of great American universities. There is no other university in the country that I know of that is going through such a complete and thorough planning process.
In essence, UB 2020 is about making a very good university into a great university, and a major part of this goal is that UB must increase in its size. It needs to do so to have the critical mass to do what we need to do both within our departments and programs, but also to compete in the very, very Darwinian world of higher education.
What then would a new UB 2020 specify for how the university should look in 15 years? I see as a goal an increase in faculty somewhere in the vicinity of 750 new full-time faculty, and an increase of students by 10,000 from the 25,000 full-time students we have now to roughly 35,000 students. This represents an increase in approximately 40 percent of the size and the scale of the University at Buffalo. We simply need the size to be able to do what we need to do and to realize our vision as a great university.
But, you might ask, why should I support such a thing? How is it going to benefit the community if the university does pursue this agenda of excellence and does grow by a 40 percent amount in the next 15 years? And it’s a fair question. In 1953, General Motors president Charles Wilson famously said that he thought what was good for GM was good for the United States of America. In my view, I’m happy to say that in many ways, what is good for the University at Buffalo is good for the Buffalo Niagara region.
A great UB will bring new economy, jobs, more tax dollars, more research dollars, and more potential for the commercialization of inventions that take place right here in your research university. It can through its growth and its striving to be excellent help to reverse what is spoken of as the “brain drain”—the loss of educated and talented younger folks from Western New York—as it acts as a catalyst in the transformation of our economy from one based primarily in manufacturing—that’s yesterday—to one based on knowledge, technology, and creativity, which I believe is the future of this area.
Now I understand there are very high expectations for the University at Buffalo within the community. Those exist already and perhaps I’m setting the table for even higher expectations. But I’d also point out that we—as any dean here would tell you—also set very high expectations for ourselves. I’d also add that no university, regardless of its successes, should be or can be held accountable for solving all of an area’s economic issues.
The Buffalo Niagara economy and its success will grow and succeed because of a whole host of factors, which all of you are familiar with, and only some of which are under the control of the university. That said, universities can and should serve as a piece of the economic development puzzle. Among other things, universities such as the University at Buffalo can spark innovation and investment, promote the community both nationally and internationally, serve as a catalyst for conservation and regional planning, and attract more members of a creative class, which leads to health and vitality and interest in our major American cities.
One example of an area where the university is uniquely positioned right now to make a major contribution is in public education, especially in Western New York’s urban school districts. The university is committed to creative and collaborative ways of enhancing and strengthening the educational continuum from pre-kindergarten through graduate school. Moreover, we’re exploring ways right now to make the efforts we have even deeper and more invigorated. The goal we have is to work together with our partners in the school districts to make sure that teachers have access to the kinds of technological tools that help prepare and will prepare many more public school students for a university education. In my view, hopefully that university education will mean attendance at the University at Buffalo. Just as an example, the university has already secured more than $75 million in extramural funds to further this agenda of community-based and school-based technology projects, and I look forward to and endorse more of this kind of activity in the future.
“The goal we have is to work together with our partners in the school districts to make sure that teachers have access to the kinds of technological tools that help prepare and will prepare many more public school students for a university education.” John B. Simpson President
And here’s another way in which we’re thinking carefully about where we’re going and what we’re going to become. Having spent much of the past two years designing and now implementing ways in which we operate both academically and in terms of the academic support, we’re looking now at the physical size and shape of our university to ensure that we have in the future the facilities, the transportation links, and the connections to the community that we need for the next quarter-century to support this growth, and to support the great university scheme.
I’m excited to announce today the launch of a master planning process that will commit UB to providing a safe and modern and attractive series of spaces to all of our current and future students, faculty, and staff on all three of UB’s major locations: the campus in Amherst, the Main Street campus, and now the downtown campus. This is, I believe, a historic undertaking—historic in the sense that this is the first time the university has looked carefully at its physical master plan since the 1970s, when the Amherst campus was planned and constructed.
Moreover, one of the main goals of this process is to assess the strengths and the weaknesses of the current links we have between our three campuses and their surrounding communities. We want to make sure that these links are thoughtful and are carefully conceived and structured in a way that benefits both the university and its surrounding communities in Amherst, in University Heights, and now in downtown. Because of the remarkably complex nature of this work, I feel very fortunate in having as a member of our faculty Professor Robert Shibley, whom I’ve asked to devote the major portion of his time to this complicated master-planning effort. Many of you probably know Bob Shibley already from his remarkable work in UB’s Urban Design Project, and perhaps more to the point, from his very influential and major prize-winning plan for Buffalo, the Queen City Hub. I think Bob is exactly the right person to do this job. We are blessed with having him in our community and having him on our faculty, and I look forward, as I hope you do, to welcoming him to this complicated and yet very, very important task that he is undertaking.
I’ve been here now nearly three years and I’m more convinced than ever that I did not come here to manage a relatively successful university—and UB surely is that. Rather, I came here with the hope of leading this university into the realm of great American public universities. We’re not there yet.
Now, I’ve talked about how UB is doing and where we ourselves view where we need to go in order to get our house in order and to join the realm of great American universities. We are doing our part through UB 2020. We, in one metaphorical sense, have set the table for the push to becoming a great American university. But we cannot do this alone. UB cannot get to UB 2020 and realize that vision without your interest, your support, and your help—you, the Western New York community. We cannot achieve our objectives in a vacuum. We don’t exist in a vacuum. We are the community.
Every great university relies upon a variety of constituent groups outside of the university in order to help it, support it, and further its goals. Alumni, community, faith and business leaders, elected officials, policy makers—in other words, many of those of you who are here today. We need you as our partners to realize the vision of UB 2020—UB as a great university. And in any good partnership, both partners think of ways in which they can strengthen one another. They realize that they will benefit from collaboration and trust and that they will suffer from competition and mistrust. Look at the enormous impact of relations between universities, businesses, and government at various places elsewhere within the country. A few examples: the Silicon Valley; the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina; Boston, Massachusetts; and one with which I’m very familiar, Seattle and the University of Washington, which I think it’s safe to argue gave rise to Microsoft and continues to support that major enterprise—one can identify more than 600 biotech entities if you simply Google “biotech Seattle.” These come out of having a great research university.
We’ve seen in our recent Western New York past the results of a coming together of government, business, and community leaders to attract new businesses to the region. I’m asking you today to see UB in a similar kind of light, to make the growth of our hometown university our community’s big initiative. I believe that with such an effort to achieve the growth of this university and its movement into the realm of great public research universities, there’s nothing this community can’t do. The benefits will be tangible and real—hundreds of new jobs, thousands of new students, and literally millions of dollars of economic impact. This is something that as universities grow and prosper, you can bank on. And let me leave you with the following image: a University at Buffalo which is 40 percent larger in size, with an even larger increase in its quality and, therefore, its economic impact. Spread at three primary locations throughout Western New York, it will be—and it is—part and parcel of our future.
We’ve done our work in setting the table to get there through UB 2020, and now we need your partnership, your help in getting there. We simply cannot do it alone. I think both of us need each other’s help, and we both—the university and the community—should constantly ask, “What can I do to help the other one achieve its goals?” We will be able to do this now that we have a vital and lasting partnership, something of true benefit for all of us. We are, after all, in this together.
Thank you very much for joining me this morning.
