Reporter Volume 25, No.16 February 10, 1994

By ANN WHITCHER
Reporter Editor

Taking a cue from the land-grant tradition of the last century, UB's
Office of Public Service and Urban Affairs is forging a new
enterprise, one that blends community well-being with intellectual
rigor.
	Muriel Moore, vice president for public service and urban
affairs, says the idea behind her officeQcreated a year agoQis to
address community betterment in a manner that supports the
university's research and teaching missions. 
	"Over the last decade, Moore said during an interview, "the
university really focused a great deal of energy on research. And I
believe that was the best thing that we could have done, to put a lot
of energy into that research. Without that knowledge base, you can't
have service."
	Moore's Capen Hall office administers several academic
programs and community outreach services and internships, and also
tries to engender a spirit of public service on campus. 
	"We provide the leadership, linkages and facilitating, so
faculty and staff can become more involved in public service," Moore
says. "We try to restrict handling projects and issues out of this
office. We really try to push them into the academic departments.
However, we may seed a project to get it going and once the initiative
is moving along, try to get deans to co-sponsor it with us and
eventually to take it over."
	Emphasis is on a broad interpretation of university public
service, whether it is improved undergraduate teaching, the deployment
of graduate students to community projects, or programs that
contribute to the common good. "We're trying to address problems that
are occurring in society across the state."
	Last week, the university and the Buffalo Public Schools
signed an agreement to expand UB's involvement in Hamlin Park-Public
School 74 in Buffalo. With help from the Graduate School of Education,
School of Information and Library Studies, School of Management and
Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, the project promotes
parental involvement, and exposes 50 sixth graders to educational
technologies and UB resources. 
	In September, UB's public service program was cited in a
six-part report on the North Carolina research triangle by
author/journalist Neal Peirce, published and commissioned by the
Charlotte News & Observer. Peirce and colleague Curtis Johnson
interviewed community leaders and government officials and included an
assessment of area universities' preparedness to aid the larger
society. 
	UB, through its Schools of Medicine and Biomedical Science,
Social Work, Education, Nursing and the Center for Applied Public
Affairs Studies, also supports the King Urban Life Center, which plans
to offer parent education for children ages 3-7 in a restored former
church. The project follows restoration work on the beautiful but
badly deteriorating St. Mary of Sorrows Church directed by a team that
included Beverly Foit-Albert of Architecture, and Stephen C. Halpern
of Political Science, who did much of the pro bono legal work needed
to save the building. The prototype of this program is currently
operating in Public School 90, an early childhood center on Buffalo's
east side. 
	"We learned that we could provide help to a distressed
neighborhood and simultaneously serve our own mission of educating
students and generating knowledge," writes Halpern in Universities and
Community Schools, a publication of the University of Pennsylvania,
which praised the Buffalo effort. The Penn publication noted the
accelerating rate at which "colleges and universities throughout the
country are engaged in efforts to systematically link teaching,
research, and service in projects designed to assist local schools and
communities."
	Moore says the university has long been active in public
service, with many faculty and staff serving as volunteers in a
variety of service and research projects.  The professional schools,
especially, she says, offer clinics with a wide range of medical,
legal and other specialized services and technical assistance. 
	What's new, says Moore, is the centralized emphasis on having
the university realize "initiatives, ideas and programs that have a
direct impact on the infrastructure and development of the area that
we live in." 
	And this is service directly in the university's interests,
she says, as the country faces mammoth social problems. "If there's no
society around us functioning, we cannot have a university," she says
emphatically. 
	In charting this direction, Moore drew on President Greiner's
insistence that the university has, indeed, an obligation to the
larger society, the notion behind the 1860s Morrill Act which led to
the establishment of land-grant colleges and universities. 
	"We need colleagues in independent higher education to lean
more toward the Morrill conception of the social role of higher
education," Greiner wrote in a paper presented last summer at the
Conference on Community Partnerships held at the University of
Pennsylvania. "We need colleagues in public higher education, not so
much to reengineer or redefine themselves as to return to their public
roots.
	"No matter what kind of setting we function in--urban, yes,
but also suburban and rural," Greiner added, "it is incumbent upon us
to do a better job of helping to serve our neighbors, of understanding
and addressing the specific needs of our localities. Our society will
no longer support resource-intensive institutions like
research-intensive universities if we do not provide some significant
return to the people who most depend on us."
	According to Moore, "The community understands very clearly
what the university has to offer. So the kinds of things they ask us
to do are actually the things that our public service mission covers.
They (the community) want research, both theoretical and applied.
Sometimes, they need long-term, theoretical research to help them
improve things, to make the community more viable, whether it's
related to social or economic issues. But they also want us to do some
applied research." 
	To fully integrate public service, Moore says, "balance and
discipline" are needed. "I think that if you look at the total career
of faculty members, there are times that they are not as active with
their research as they desire; this is often a question of available
funding within a discipline. However, by working at some of the
social, educational, economic and  public service issues that the
administration is trying to address, they may be able to identify
projects that support their research, but on the other hand offer some
direct service to the public as well. 
	"That's a discussion that will have to be engaged in at the
faculty level," Moore says, "because faculty will need to know how we
reward this new goal and mission of the university as it relates to
the tenure review and promotion processes."