Reporter Volume 25, No.21 March 17, 1994

By ANN WHITCHER
Reporter Editor

A 17-member force has been formed to assess the quality and services
of the University Bookstore on the North Campus, part of Follett
College Stores, headquartered in Elmhurst, Ill.	
	Chaired by Vice President for Student Affairs Robert L.
Palmer, the task force will recommend ways in which the bookstore can
"maintain and improve the responsiveness of its services to the needs
of the university community." 
	According to President Greiner's directive, the task force
will be asked to: 
	- identify those issues pertaining to the University Bookstore
that are of major concern to faculty, staff and students, consulting
broadly among all constituencies in the university community and
soliciting information from sources both on and off campus;
	n identify the range of services rendered and types of
merchandise marketed by the Follett Corporation, particularly with
regard to merchandise exclusivity;
	- investigate the process used by the Follett Corporation to
determine fair and competitive pricing;
	- assess the Ellicott satellite and South Campus bookstore
operations;
	-provide national market context for the assessment of
University Bookstore operations, consulting with other Follett
Corporation affiliates and competing campus bookstores at UB's peer
institutions;
	-establish an ongoing Bookstore Advisory Committee.
	The task force will summarize its findings in a final report
to President Greiner due in July. 
	According to UB Bookstore General Manager Gregory Neumann,
"The task force is a good mechanism to determine the level of service
and goods we provide to the campus. You are always seeking to improve
yourself. I feel that our selection is actually pretty good for a
store our size: 22,000 to 25,000 titles in our trade books section. We
also process special ordersQthis is a pretty substantial part of our
business." 
	According to Neumann, a subcommittee plans to survey bookstore
users from all segments of the university community.
	He adds: "As a task force, we are going to be looking at
comparable bookstores in this part of the country; operations that
have similar demographics. Dr. Palmer has discussed visiting campus
bookstores not only in Western New York, but possibly in Pennsylvania,
central New York State and Ohio. 
	"There was a bookstore advisory committee set up about a year
ago that met a few times but disbanded," Neumann reports. "Basically,
it was made up of faculty. Students, administration and staff were not
represented. Here we have a good cross-section of the campus. I view
the task force as providing me with an opportunity to better evaluate
our operation and come up with ways to enhance and improve services we
provide to the campus community." 
	Bernice Noble, professor of microbiology, represents the
Faculty Senate on the task force. "It seems to me that the bookstore
is a very important component to contributing to the quality of
university life. There seems to be on the part of the faculty, a
fairly high level of dissatisfaction. It appears that a great many
faculty do not feel that the University Bookstore meets their
professional and personal needs for books. And some faculty don't even
like to order textbooks for their students from the University
Bookstore, and use other bookstores in town. There is a whole other
problem that I'm sensitive to as a medical school faculty member: the
fact that there is no South Campus bookstore at all. 
	"The purpose of the task force is to determine the facts from
all these perceptions: One thing the task force will try to do, is to
sort out facts from dissatisfactions which may not actually have any
basis in fact, resulting from prejudice or misconception. The other
part is to try and identify areas needing improvement and make
specific recommendations to accomplish those improvements as easily as
possible."
	Noble says she has encouraged the committee to make site
visits. "Otherwise people have fantasies or (may even) underestimate
what's here. For a lot of faculty Harvard Co-op Bookstore is at the
top of fantasy: it's the epitome. In any case, the bottom line is that
a good bookstore is really important for morale, a sense of community
and could be a large focus for socializing, intellectual camaraderie,
not just a place to pick up a textbook." 
	Follett College Stores is a division of the Follett
Corporation, headquartered in River Grove, Ill. The UB Bookstore is
one of about 400 stores in that division, says Neumann. The UB
Bookstore at Lee Entrance has about 20,000 square feet of selling
space in a total plant area of about 24,000 square feet. Follett
opened here in 1982.
	According to the Edward Schneider, executive director of the
University at Buffalo Foundation and a task force member, "The lease
expires sometime in the next century. There is a contract between the
UBF and Follett relative to the off-campus bookstore on Main Street.
There is also an arrangement relative to the Ellicott bookstore. 
	"The condition of Follett accepting the management
responsibilities of the University Bookstore and the risk associated
with putting up their building back in 1982, was that they would have
exclusive rights to bookstore operations on campus. This was part of
the negotiations back in the 1970s." 	Kenneth Benjamin, representing
the Office of Disability Services, says his subcommittee will examine
the bookstore from the standpoint of parking and compliance with the
Americans with Disabilities Act. "We're looking at all parking and
accessibility issues, both layout in and outside the building," says
Benjamin, who is pursuing his master's in social work degree. "There
is only one handicapped parking spot for the bookstore and only one
ramp that is usually covered with snow. There are no power doors and
once you get in, the aisles are often not wide enough to turn without
some damage to the person, wheelchair or store goods. 
	"As a wheelchair-bound graduate student, I must say that Mr.
Neumann has been very supportive in his efforts to make it as
accessible as he can. Yet even though Mr. Neumann's staff is willing
to assist you, it comes back to the issue: independence vs.
dependency.
	In Benjamin's view, the goal should be "to look at the best
bookstore that it can be at UB. I've attended several other
universities with bigger and smaller bookstores. There are different
scales of bookstores, from the grandiose, such as Brigham Young, which
has a department store within a bookstore, also a reading section
where you can browse through the daily paper, and current journals.
The University of Utah bookstore has two levels. Texts are on the
whole floor upstairs. The lower area has a combination of specialty,
dry goods, a music center, college wear it's a big bookstore. Ohio
State's is huge: the clothing section would fit in our present
bookstore.
	"My own feeling is that ours is really too small for the
services offered. For as many students as we provide for, I feel it's
a relatively small bookstore. It needs to expand."
	Clifford B. Wilson, associate vice president for student
affairs and task force member, said, "There have been a number of
concerns principally from students, over all sorts of issues, the
biggest being pricing, and beyond that whether the bookstore is
providing that full range of services that the university community
wants. 
	"Given that we've not, as a campus community, communicated
very well with the bookstore, the task force provides an opportunity
to go over with the bookstore management just what would we like in
our bookstore. We're at a point where it's important for all members
of the university community to have interaction over the issue of what
we want the bookstore to be. The committee is broadly based in terms
of representation, and the bookstore folks have been very open to
this, and are very interested in trying to make it better." 
	Antara Satchidanand, representing the Undergraduate Student
Association, comments: "The students' greatest concern is textbook
pricing, predominantly used books. Right now, were working on
developing a survey to see what changes students as well as faculty
would like to be made, what they think of the bookstore right now. 
	"We don't have very specific ideas of where the bookstore
needs to go to better serve students, but we are gathering information
as how best to proceed. We're also trying to identify the needs of the
UB community in particular, what it needs to be at UB. These are
different needs than what would be the case at Big 10 schools. We have
such a big commuter population, for instance."
	Other task force members are Donna S. Rice and James S.
Nadbrzuch (Student Affairs); William Miller (Faculty Senate); Carol J.
Kobrin (Classified Staff); Phyllis M. Parisi (Professional Staff
Senate); Bimal Patel (Undergraduate Student Association); Raymond D.
Volpe (UB Commons Merchants Association); Timothy J. Conroy (UB
Publications); Adrian Knight (Faculty Student Association); and Garry
R. Soehner (Residence Halls).