Reporter Volume 25, No.17 February 17, 1994

By MARK WALLACE
Reporter Staff

The Faculty Senate Academic Planning Committee lacks specific data and
background material to proceed much further with its consideration of
proposed reorganization of UB, Dennis Malone, chair of the committee,
told the Faculty Senate last week.
	Malone gave his remarks as part of a Senate discussion that
was designed, according to Peter Nickerson, chair of the Senate, to
give the faculty a "proactive" role on the question of reorganization
at UB.
	The committee does not have a careful analysis at hand of the
precise nature of the difficulty associated with the delivery of the
UGC curriculum which, Malone said, is what the committee believes to
be the primary impetus for reorganization proposals. The committee
believes that a cost/benefit analysis of both the present and proposed
structures is critical to the generation of a reasoned opinion on the
issue of reorganization, Malone said.
	Also reporting to the Senate was David Triggle, chair of the
Provost's Advisory Committee on the Structure of Arts and Sciences,
who said his committee has been involved in three areas of work:
seeking information and opinions from various interested parties,
including the deans of the potentially affected areas, representatives
of the Undergraduate College, and individual faculty members; focusing
the subcommittees on a number of questions central to any
reorganization proposal; and moving toward the writing of a final
report.
	"In the end," Triggle said, "recommendations for
reorganization will be made by the Provost's Advisory Committee, and
they will be made according to what is unique at UB."
	Vic Doyno, reporting as a member of the Arts and Letters
faculty, said that a number of questions had emerged from the
deliberations of that faculty regarding reorganization. These included
how particular departments would be affected, what the intellectual
advantages of reorganization might be, whether promotion and tenure
problems would result, how deans would be reeducated to deal with the
differing scholarship of the areas under their control, and many other
issues. The Provost's vision of the humanities was also a key issue in
Arts and Letters deliberations, Doyno said.
	In the absence of any official spokesman for the Faculty of
Social Sciences, Peter Nickerson reported on the results of a meeting
of the Social Science faculty. Among other issues, the question was
raised at that meeting of what would happen to the History and
Philosophy Departments if they were transferred to Arts and Letters,
Nickerson said. Also, Nickerson said, one commentator suggested that
maybe the problems of the Undergraduate College should be addressed
first, and only then should university-wide reorganization be
considered. Nickerson said that questions were raised also about how
reorganization would affect graduate students and teaching loads.
	Mary Bisson of Biology, chair of the subcommittee on graduate
and professional education and research for the Provost's Advisory
Committee, said that the way reorganization would affect faculty and
graduate students would be difficult to predict. Such questions as
differences between faculties in terms of tenure decisions, the role
of deans, and different graduate student cultures were all relevant to
the problem, Bisson said. But she said that, in general, benefits or
detriments of reorganization to faculty and graduate students would
probably be small. It was not clear, she added, that any of the
proposed new structures would improve interdisciplinary research.
	Samuel Schack of Mathematics, reading from a draft of the UB
mission statement, said that the issue to consider was how the
proposed reorganization would further UB's primary mission of
promoting research, scholarship and creative activity, and the
importance of UB's unique professional schools. "We should be less
concerned about individual departments and units than we should be
about the future of the whole university," he said. "If we have to
redesign our curriculum to take advantage of our uniqueness, then we
should."
	In response, Michael Metzger of Modern Languages and
Literatures said that the central problem was how to bring
undergraduate education, graduate education, and research into better
balance at UB. "I would strongly advise that we do not simply
dismantle the UGC, but keep it as an active center for thinking about
undergraduate education," Metzger said.
	Alfredo Matilla of American Studies referred to the fact that
lack of adequate advisement for students may contribute to the problem
of undergraduate retention, one impetus for the proposed
reorganization. He asked whether the UGC could be improved without
university-wide reorganization.
	Stephen Dyson, interim dean of the UGC, added that "Getting
rid of the UGC will not solve all our problems." He pointed out that
greater attention to undergraduate education at public universities is
happening all over the country.
	Michael Cowen of Mathematics said that the UGC has always
"imposed" on many departments without "being accepted" by those
departments. He said that he didn't see how reorganizing the decanal
structure of UB would help solve that problem.
	David Triggle said that he thought that the Provost's Advisory
Committee took undergraduate education, graduate education and
research seriously. Triggle said that reorganization did pose "some
real difficulties," in terms of university structure, questions of
management, functional problems, and social and cultural issues.
	In other business, the Senate passed two resolutions on a new
role for faculty in student advisement, one which recommended that
every faculty member be involved in academic advisement, and that
every student should be assigned a faculty adviser.