Reporter Volume 25, No.8 October 21, 1993

Overview

I am pleased to inaugurate what we intend to be an annual event at
UBQan occasion to share with you a retrospective on the events of the
past academic year, and a prospective on where this University is and
ought to be going.  This year the course of events in the University,
State, and nation has lent that agenda a special urgency.  We are
faced with an extraordinary set of opportunities, and we are in a
position to exploit them if we are willing to take the measures
necessary to move this University forward.  I am not talking about
tearing the place apart and putting it back together again, but
neither am I talking about minor pieces of fine tuning:  I am talking
about aligning ourselves to take advantage of who we are and what we
have, and using that advantage to project UB into new kinds of
national leadership.

This will be a long and complicated report, so let me begin with a
summary of its flow.  I want to say something at the outset about the
rapidly changing environment in which we find ourselves in this
country, both for higher education and for research.  I want to say
something as well about the way this new environment is reflected in
microcosm in the State of New York, and also about its effects upon
the internal environment at UB.  All of these factors converge to
dictate some very different kinds of steps which we will need to take
if we are to respond effectively to our evolving circumstances.

These steps begin with some of the structural changes that have
already taken place at UB. The importance of these changes is going to
become increasingly evident in our day-to-day lives, starting with the
decentralization and shift of many kinds of responsibilities to
faculties and schools in a way that is aligned with the overall
directions of the University.  This "coherent decentralization" plays
out in important ways in the academic budgeting process. Especially
important is the notion that budget is not an entitlement but a
strategic instrument, working hand in hand with an ongoing process of
strategic review and academic planning.

The budget represents one of the two great economies of UB.  There is
another great economy which has received less attention:  the economy
of student numbers.  We've undertaken an ambitious approach to the
management of enrollment, and of the concomitant demands on faculty
workload, classroom space, and other elements of infrastructure that
are necessary to support our students.  This initiative will add an
administrative burden, but it also represents a chance to improve
vastly our effectiveness as a university.

All of this leads to a set of specific proposals that I want to make
to you.  We have already started to test them with state legislators
and with trustees and central administrators of SUNY.  They have to do
with a role for UB which begins to differentiate us from the rest of
the SUNY system and to position us to do the things we do best in a
much more telling way. They entail a reassertion of our role as the
center of public professional and graduate education in New York
State, a focusing of our undergraduate programs to take advantage of
that environment, a concomitant shift and reduction in our overall
enrollment, and a gradual expansion of our non-State resources.

At the heart of this repositioning of UB is our Arts and Sciences
coreQand I use the word "core" advisedly.  The Arts and Sciences have
to be the heart of a university like ours.  But if they are to be the
heart, I think it reasonable to ask whether they are now structured in
a way that is to their own best advantage and to the best advantage of
the University.  The dialogue about the structure of Arts and Sciences
has already begun, and I want to talk to you about my own thoughts and
about the process we have set in motion to continue the discussion.

I'll follow with attention to two structures central to our purpose,
our Graduate School and our research enterprise.  The Graduate School
is in serious need of revitalization, and I want to describe some of
the steps we have begun to take to address the problem.  Research
administration is newly consolidated at UB, in a climate which gives
reason for concern.  We need to take steps, for example, to
reinvigorate our sponsored program activity and recover some of the
remarkable momentum in growth that research at UB sustained during the
1980's.

Finally, for any of this to work, it is absolutely essential that UB
and all of its members think of the University, and of themselves, as
a community.  Words like those can too easily degenerate into slogans
or gratuitous afterthoughts, but I mean them in a newly urgent sense.
The challenges we face are enormous, and we simply cannot hope to meet
them without building a community in which our faculty, staff, and
students take ownership, feel loyalty to the institution as a whole,
and work to shape it.  That means not only service to the University
itself, but much more profoundly a collective sense of responsibility
for looking after the people within our community, of working with one
another to bring out the very best in each of us.  These elements of
community come together importantly in issues of diversity and
affirmative action, and I will discuss some of the ways that this
University's approach to the support and celebration of diversity has
begun to broaden.
Environment and Context

In this country we have thrived for two generations upon a remarkable
paradigm for the support of higher education and basic research.  For
better or worse, that paradigm now is rapidly and irreversibly
changing.

We have been the beneficiaries of a golden age.  For both good and
dubious reasons, not least among them the Cold War, governments at the
State and Federal level have been willing to finance the things that
we at universities love to do, with few questions asked.  We have been
supported largely on our own terms, largely on a competitive basis of
merit, with very little overt accountability for the return of
something tangible to the society that sustains us. Government was
content with the proposition that the support of higher education was
going to produce skilled and useful citizens, that the support of
basic research was indirectly going to produce technologies and
betterQthe health and condition of the society, and that all of this
was to the public good.

Our problem is not that public and government no longer believe these
things.  No one is seeking to end support of higher education and
basic research.  Rather, we live in a time when resources are more or
less permanently scarce and when the society is forced to scrutinize
everything that it does and to ask what value it is getting in return
for the investments it has made.  The question it is asking is
whether, at the margin, the next public dollar should be spent on us,
or on health care, or on housing the homeless, or primary and
secondary education, or any of dozens of other pressing social and
economic needs.

In this new climate of competition the posture of the academy has not
been impressive.  We need to understand that we simply can't afford
either of the two responses we have become most accustomed to making.
We can't afford to be aloof and silent, or we will be overwhelmed by
bureaucratic and utilitarian impulses.  Nor can we afford to become
indignant and to assert academic values in ways that appeal to
ourselves, but to outsiders seem unresponsive, arrogant, and out of
touch.

Instead we must realize that we are a complex and expensive enterprise
that is difficult to explain.  If we are the teachers we think we are,
then we ought to be able to communicate to those who support us,
patiently and in their own terms, the worth and the content of what we
do.  And we ought to have enough confidence to convince ourselves that
in a public research university like UB, there need be no
contradiction between the academic values that we cherish and the
difference we can make to the society around us.

*               *               *

The pressures upon us are going to increase.  There are many in
Washington who expect that once health care is dealt with, higher
education is next on the list for reform. Those universities who are
willing to work in partnership with other segments of society, and to
look inside themselves and evaluate and project what they have to
offer, are going to be the universities that take the lead nationally.
I see no reason why UB cannot be at the forefront of this shift in
institutional leadership; in fact there are lots of reasons why we can
be in the forefront.

One of these is our position within the SUNY system.  In many ways
what is going on in New York State echoes the national scene.  SUNY
has experienced savage budget cuts over the past few years, and I
think these have left a system that is hungry for new ideas and
directions.  We are the biggest and most comprehensive campus in the
SUNY system and the only major public research university in this part
of the State.  If we are not going to take the lead, it is hard to
know who is.  Many of our sister institutions now perceive it to be as
much to their benefit as to our own that we sharpen our identity and
differentiate our character and purpose within the system.  So the
stage is set for us, it remains only for us to step forward and take
that kind of lead.

That is the external environment as I see it.  There is an internal
environment to speak of as well.  UB is different from many American
universities.  There is an energy here, and a special vitality, in
spite of all the cuts.  This contrast may not be fully apparent to
everyone inside the University, but it is very evident to those who
come to UB from the outside.  
We are scrappy and we are flexible.  We are not hampered by the kinds
of traditions that can impede the progress of some private
universities.  Most important of all, we have a President of UB who is
willing to take risksQa tremendous asset that sets him apart.  In
short, there is a lot here waiting to happen.

Financially we are strained, and we are hurting in some quarters, but
despite some regrettable losses UB has fared well compared with
universities around the country.  Our academic programs are intact;
our capital plant is superb and free of debt; our services are
strained but fully functioning.  We are what we areQa major AAU
research university-Qdespite the budget reductions and despite the
fact that we have not approached our potential to exploit sources of
revenue beyond direct State support that other universities employ
routinely.  We are very underdeveloped in private philanthropy, though
we are now taking steps to correct that.  Major private foundations
are largely unexplored territory for us.  Our performance in sponsored
programs has been excellent, but nowhere near the capacity of a
university like UB, and our technology transfer has only begun.  There
is every reason to expect that we can improve substantially over the
next few years.  Most of our long-term financial risk is on the
upside.

In the shorter term, our situation is more delicate.  As I reported to
the Senate Budget Priorities Committee last Spring, out of a State
budget of more than $200 million, we are only a few million dollars
short of being able to invest in some dramatic new initiatives, and we
are only a few million dollars above having to consider draconian
measures.  I think the chance of achieving the first is much greater
than the danger of falling to the second, but our financial condition
remains sensitive.  Conversely, that sensitivity implies that small
changes on our part can be amplified into large effects.  It will not
take much redirection of our resources or control of our costs to make
a substantial difference in some of the things that we do.

Further, we now have some special opportunities to make such
adjustments.  The internal distribution of our resources, frozen for a
time by sudden budget reductions, can be improved considerably.  We
are substantially overenrolled for the capacity of this university,
and we can relieve pressure by correcting that situation.  We expect
new flexibility over the next five to ten years with a dramatic
turnover of faculty as the wave hired in the 1960's and 1970's begins
to retire.  Together, these factors represent a chance for us to
accomplish a lot more with what we have than we might under ordinary
conditions.
When we speak of building or planning any institution, we need first
to identify the special strengths around which we can build, the
strategic niche that can set us apart from the competition.  For many
universities, the answer might be a particular strength in a given
area, a given field that should be built up at the expense of others.
But for UB I believe there is a different kind of answer.  Our
"specialty" is our breadth.  We are the most comprehensive university
in SUNYQthe only university with anything approaching our twelve
professional schools, the only one with so full an array of graduate
programs.  We are the only public university in New York State that
can offer all of this in one place and can nurture the
interdisciplinary synergisms that follow.  That is the beginning of
what makes us special.  It invites us to build upon what is unique,
rather than compete with the rest of the system for what we have in
common.

*               *               *

This kind of thinking is the basis for the five institutional
priorities that President Greiner laid out in his speech to the voting
faculty last month.  We cannot lose the momentum we have gathered in
becoming a superb research university.  We must project UB as the
principal center of public professional and graduate education in New
York State.  That profile must be built around a vibrant Arts and
Sciences core and an innovative undergraduate curriculum that is
intertwined with the professional and graduate environment.  We need
to direct our energies to be a university that makes a difference to
the region, State, and nation, as an educational, cultural, economic,
and technological force.  Finally, we will depend upon a diverse but
cohesive and supportive internal community.

*               *               *

Coherent Decentralization

We have to begin with structure and infrastructure.  I want to spend a
moment talking about the way in which UB has begun to restructure
itself administratively, a process which is almost complete in many
ways.  "Decentralization" is a word that is widely misunderstood. What
it means is that responsibility for most budgetary and strategic
decisions is handed down from the center to those people who know best
and are best equipped to make them. Decentralization in some ways
makes the deans the most important administrative officers in the
University.  It means that schools and faculties will have a lot more
to say about their own directions and destinies, and that they will
have incentives to develop their resources in an entrepreneurial way.
But at UB it assuredly does not mean that the center has been
abandoned, and that we are l5 faculties and schools spinning off in l5
independent directions without communication or coordination.  Instead
we intend to build and promote a "coherent decentralization" in which
schools and faculties develop their special character but share the
overarching institutional purposes of the University.  They will be in
many ways autonomous, but they will also be accountableQthrough the
budget process, through strategic and academic review, and through
central points of coordination for activities which span faculties and
schools.  

Those central points of coordination are not independent units of the
University:  they can succeed only by working collaboratively with
deans and faculty members.  The most important academically are headed
by three vice provosts and two vice presidents.  The vice-provostal
responsibilities include the Graduate School, the undergraduate vice
provost's office (including the Undergraduate College), and our
growing international programs.  I will have more to say about these
later.

The two vice presidencies entail the two faces of the University's
outreach- economic and technological on the one hand, and human and
social on the other.  Vice President for Research Mike Landi is
responsible for sponsored programs, technology transfer, the
administration of our organized research units, and many of our
industrial partnerships. Muriel Moore, our Vice President for Public
Service and Urban Affairs, has responsibility for community outreach,
our special programs for minority and disadvantaged students, and
importantly for Millard Fillmore College and the summer session.
Under her guidance the last two are assuming new identities as
instruments of outreach and community involvement. Because both areas
are closely intertwined with our academic programs, these two vice
presidencies now report to the Provost.

Coherent decentralization changes substantially the character of a
number of worthwhile enterprises that until now have been administered
centrally.  I have in mind the Undergraduate College, some of our
research centers, and other activities that have been funded by the
Provost and have not been accountable to deans.  Gradually but
steadily, we are putting an end to that mode of operation.
Collaborative enterprises will continue to thrive, but as joint
ventures of schools and faculties rather than projects imposed from
the center.  What coherent decentralization really means is that we
are demanding of the main academic structure of the University that it
do its job.  We will neither create nor support an overlay of
competing structures.  From the center there is much we can do to
encourage and catalyze new interdisciplinary initiatives, but
ultimately their ownership must reside in participating schools and
faculties.  That is the key to their long-term viability.

Academic Budget and Strategic Review

Against that structure, we put in place last year a budget process
which is in many ways a departure from past practice.  We were able to
do so in part because SUNY has now given us the flexibility to move
money among budget categories.  We are thereby able to budget on what
is called an "all-funds" basis.  We can examine the total resource
base of each school and faculty, determine its full financial
wherewithal, and ask it to use its reserves and move money within the
school in order to accomplish its objectives.

This approach stretches the resources of schools and faculties to the
point of measured risk. Particularly in the larger units, for example,
there is always a certain amount of "float" available-- faculty
turnover, sabbaticals, other sources of short-term or one-time funds.
Under all-funds budgeting, these funds can be applied to long-term
needs, under the assumption that statistically, similar short-term
sources are likely to be available in ensuing years.  By taking risks
of this sort last year, we were able to expand the effective resources
of many schools.

In the same way, we are able to consider the University as a whole and
move money among academic units.  What has emerged is a very fluid
kind of budgeting.  In effect there is no longer a strict base budget
for any school or faculty.  We have been able to tell each dean that
he or she can expect next year to work from a base of 98% of last
year's State budget, assuming that overall State funding will remain
more or less constant.  The remaining 2% goes into a University-wide
pool and is reallocated according to the strategic plans and critical
needs of each school.  In order to do that and make intelligent
decisions, it has been necessary to review each school's strategies in
depth.  We have asked each school for its vision of itself, where it
is going, how far it is from its goals, and what it's going to take to
reach them, prioritizing its most important needs.  From some very
detailed discussions and a little bit of mutual ingenuity, we have
been able to use the reallocation pool collaboratively to address some
of the most pressing problems and inviting targets of opportunity.

That is what we did last year, finding loose change and moving money
around.  In the end out of a State academic budget of about $140
million, more than $8 million was allocated or reallocated to
strategic needs of schools.  I do not expect that kind of performance
again this year, because, if you like, the system has been shaken out
once already and the most obvious pockets of underutilized resources
have been tapped.  But I do expect that we will go through the same
kind of process and that there will continue to be movement.

I won't take your time to review the school-by-school outcomes of the
budget process; I shared that information with the Senate Budget
Priorities Committee last Spring, and it is available to you upon
request.  I do want to take a moment, however, to review what emerged
as some of the pressing University-wide needs.  A lot of the
reallocation went toward retention of faculty.  We made targeted
salary adjustments, particularly for mid-career faculty who are in the
steep part of their lifetime earnings curve and who were especially
disadvantaged by the salary freezes of the past few years.  We were
also able to fund some strategic hires of new faculty and some
selective restoration of graduate assistantships where instructional
loads required them.  In addition, we addressed some very serious
needs for support staff, equipment for instructional labs, and
computing.

There are two categories in which we took and will continue to take
funding off the top before it is distributed to any of the schools.
One is support of the University development effort.  As you have
heard from President Greiner, we are making a concerted effort under
the leadership of Vice President Ron Stein to build an extensive
infrastructure for philanthropic fundraising.  That is going to
involve at least half a development officer's time assigned to each
school, financed jointly by the central administration and the deans.
Joint reporting is essential if the development officers are to be
responsive to overall University priorities and to the specific needs
of the schools at the same time.  We have set aside an increment to be
added to the academic budgets of the schools in support of these new
development officers as they are hired.

The other piece of funding that we held back and administered
centrally had to do with the Underrepresented Faculty Initiative.  In
order to encourage the hiring of underrepresented minorities, SUNY has
a limited budget with a standing offer to apply some funds toward the
salary for the first few years, in a phased out way, of any member of
an underrepresented minority group who is hired at a SUNY campus.  I
last year offered to match that for any cases that were not covered by
SUNY.  Whether as a result of this or not, minority hiring this past
year is the highest it has been in the recorded history of UB.  We
financed nine new underrepresented minority hires.  There were several
more returning, and we were also able to make very strong offers to
two others who finally chose not to come here.  Those numbers are
nowhere near where they ought to be, but they represent a doubling of
the best we have done in the past.

All across the University, strategic initiatives are underway which
coincided with and in some cases emerged from the new budget process.
Major restructurings of curricula have begun in Management, Law, and
Architecture.  The new dean of the School of Dental Medicine, Louis
Goldberg, is vitally interested in renewing its clinical enterprise,
and we helped invest in the beginnings of that. The Health Sciences
schools are now working together toward a medical informatics network
that will connect them with hospitals in the region and will vastly
expand the scope of the Health Sciences Library.  The School of
Pharmacy is not far from a top national rating.  We believe that a
relatively small additional investment over the next few years can
catapult it to that level, and we have agreed with the Dean Triggle to
help in that direction.  With Dean of Arts and Letters Kerry Grant and
the Department of Modern Languages, we have reorganized modern
language instruction, moving the World Languages Institute into the
department and taking the first steps toward implementation of the
foreign language requirement that the Senate approved last year.  The
School of Information and Library Studies has begun to consider a new
profile which interacts more strongly with libraries both in the
University and the external community.  There are proposals at various
stages of development and funding for interdisciplinary programs in
women's studies, policy studies, Asian studies, rehabilitative
medicine, and structural biology. 
I don't mean for this list to be exhaustive, but I do mean to leave
you with the understanding that in very tight times this University
has the wherewithal to move forward in selected areas, and that we
have begun to do so.  This is not the profile of a university that is
retrenching or is in retreat in any sense.  I expect more initiatives
like these to emerge next year, and I expect us to be resourceful
enough to fund at least some of them.

All of this entails some serious concerns and risks, and it is
important that you understand them fully.  First, I have described a
deliberate stretching of our capacities that leaves us with very small
central reserves.  There is little flexible funding left in the
central University or in my office.  We have enough to meet a few
emergencies, but should we be hit by the State with a major mid-year
budget reduction-- which we do not expect-- the schools will directly
bear some of the brunt.  We talked in advance with the deans about
this prospect, and they preferred to assume the risk rather than leave
funds idle.  I think they made the right decision, and I expect that
we will all benefit from it, but you should be aware that the danger
is there.

Second, several schools proposed major initiatives that we thought
better timed for 1994-95. They were postponed until then, and as a
result the pressure on the l994-95 academic budget is going to be
heavy.  Third, there is serious strain on the infrastructure of the
University. The reason our academic programs are largely intact is
because Bill Greiner and Bob Wagner, in administering the budget
reductions of the past few years, rightly chose to reduce services
more drastically than academic program.   Their reasons had to do with
the values of UB, and with their perception that services would be
easier to rebuild eventually than academics.  As a result, our
services in computing, libraries, laboratories, and building
maintenance are severely strained.  As we begin to build back academic
program, we need to remember that if we do not build back services at
the same time, we are going to find ourselves very much out of joint.

Enrollment Management

But the biggest strain, and probably the most serious one for UB, is
the strain on our undergraduate programs.  There are historical
reasons for this.  As many of you can attest, UB during the 70's and
early 80's had ambitions of becoming a much larger place, with a
profile something like that of a major Midwestern public university.
And it was a time when funding was plentiful.  By the mid-80's, the
University had deliberately grown to several thousand students above
its targeted enrollment.  As the 80's ended, however, it became clear
this was more than the resources of the University could support.  UB
agreed with SUNY to a two-part remedy:  first to reduce enrollment
back to the target level, and second to reduce the targets themselves
slowly over a period of years to bring the student-faculty ratio into
line with the rest of the system.  Starting in 1989-90, that plan was
very effectively put in place. But the plan never anticipated the
extent or impact of the budget reductions that have taken place at the
same time.  And so while full-time enrollment has dropped by about the
5% that was planned, the faculty has dropped about 9%.  The
student-faculty ratio is now higher than it was at the time the
agreement was reached.

And you feel the results of that overenrollment in much of what you
do.  We are congested in many ways.  There is serious over-demand in
key courses, some of them prerequisites for certain majors. There are
bottlenecks in admission to some of the majors in highest demand, and
this contributes to a relatively poor retention rate.  We keep or
graduate only about half of our undergraduate students.  Fully 25% of
those who leave in good academic standing report that they do so
because they are unable to gain admission to their major of choice.
It is becoming rare for a student to finish within four years,
although this is part of a national trend.

This situation severely limits our flexibility to innovate in the
curriculum, and the people who have felt that most sadly are the
members of the Undergraduate College.  We simply don't have the
resources to add new courses, to implement new curriculum, without
sacrificing curriculum somewhere else in the University.

All of this has conspired to limit the access to a degree for students
who come to UB.  This is an important point, because it is a central
tenet in SUNY that we owe the public access to our colleges and
universities.  I submit to you that we also owe to our students access
to the degrees they came here to earn, and that we need to align
ourselves so as to see to it that they have a fighting chance to earn
those degrees in a reasonable time, provided that they remain in good
standing.
The only way that I can see for us to do that, and still to maintain
excellence in the rest of our mission, is to reduce our enrollment to
a level compatible with the resources of the University.  We have been
examining that prospect in some detail.  But before I discuss the
numbers, I invite you to consider the consequences of not doing
anything about the level of our enrollment.  We are on the verge of
some serious instabilities.

When students cannot get into majors or prerequisite courses, many of
them leave for other universities.  They leave behind a gap in our
enrollment, jeopardizing a budget that depends on meeting our SUNY
targets.  The only device available to fill this gap has been to admit
even greater numbers of freshmen, who, when they cannot get into their
majors, will form an even bigger exodus and necessitate an even bigger
freshman class.  This pattern quickly spirals into an instability
which this University simply cannot tolerate-- economically,
academically, or morally.  The bulge of more than 3000 freshmen who
entered this year may be the harbinger of such a spiral.  We must get
our enrollment under control, and we must do it now.

To accomplish this will require a new kind of comprehensive enrollment
management.  We have taken administrative steps toward that end, and
they have been covered extensively in The Reporter.  We have set up a
committee structure involving the senior officers of the University;
we have all of the technical players at one table; and we have a
better handle on the numbers and their consequences than ever before.
We are still only beginning to put in place real mechanisms of
coordination.  For example, when one school designates a given course
as a prerequisite, the office of Interim Undergraduate Vice Provost
Nick Goodman will try to anticipate the effects upon the faculty that
offers the course.

But globally, these small administrative steps will not be enough.
Our root problem is in the overall numbers, and we need to control
them in a rational way.


Specific Proposals

Taken together, these considerations-- environment, budget, and
enrollment-- lead to a set of proposals which we have begun to make in
a preliminary way to key figures in the SUNY system and the State
Legislature.  Our first step is to position UB as the primary center
for professional, pre-professional, and graduate education in New York
State.  In order to concentrate our resources in that direction, we
propose to reduce to some extent our general lower-division
undergraduate enrollment.

*               *               *

This leaves us the room we need to expand access to degree, increase
our retention of students, reduce time to degree, and increase our
overall effectiveness.  

The viability of this proposal depends in part upon our capacity to
reduce enrollment without reducing our entitlement to State budget.
SUNY measures that entitlement by an elaborate "benchmark" that is
based upon perceived standards of workload for different levels of
instruction in different fields.  Since small, specialized courses are
intrinsically more expensive to offer than large lectures, the
benchmark weighs upper division and graduate programs more heavily
than lower division introductory courses.

Without endorsing its merits, we can use the SUNY benchmark to
construct model student profiles for UB.  If we were, for example, to
reduce our freshman classes by just under 500 students, at the end of
four years the total number of students who had entered UB would have
decreased by almost 2000.  If the percentage dropping out did not
change, the actual reduction in population would be something like
1500.  But we think retention would increase, perhaps by 250 students,
leaving us with a net reduction of 1250 undergraduates.  If we
increase our graduate classes by about one per graduate program, or a
total of 250 students, we are left with a University-wide reduction of
1000 students, with the same entitlement to the State budget that we
had before we started the exercise.  Our graduate student population
would be marginally larger than it is today.  Our lower-division
undergraduate enrollment would be substantially smaller, but better
served and still the largest in SUNY. Our upper-division undergraduate
population would be slightly reduced but larger in proportion to the
overall student body.

Whether these would be the final numbers is a matter of discussion and
negotiation, but this kind of reduction and shift in enrollment at
constant budget, phased in over time, is within our grasp.  Such
measures would allow us to concentrate our efforts on the things many
of our faculty do best, to make lower division enrollment available to
the SUNY colleges that are crying for it, to project a profile that
clearly differentiates us within SUNY, and thereby to put us in
partnership rather than in competition with the rest of the system.

A reduction of 1000 students is a loss in revenue to the SUNY system.
The system can make it up if those students enroll elsewhere in SUNY,
but if they don't, we could make up the loss if we could charge an
extra $200 differential tuition on this campus.  Coupled with a strong
tuition assistance program, $200 may not be too high an increment for
our students to pay in return for a substantially improved
undergraduate experience. 

That is Phase One of the proposal.  Phase Two is to develop new
resources beyond direct State support, gradually expanding our
programs, eliminating bottlenecks, and putting more money into much of
what we do.  It will depend in part upon the growth of private
philanthropy and upon measures we can take to encourage sponsored
research programs, technology transfer, and clinical revenues.  We
could return to the overall funding levels of a few years ago with an
additional differential tuition increase of $800.  I do not expect us
to impose a total increase of $1000 per student any time soon, but it
is worth noting that such a rise would only place us near the average
for a northeastern public university, a bit below the in-state tuition
of Rutgers.  We are not speaking here of exorbitant costs:  we are
simply asking what it will take to make UB function as it ought to
function.

That is the proposal:  announce our profile; re-emphasize professional
and graduate education; reduce enrollments and shift them toward the
graduate and upper-division undergraduate levels; and to the extent
that additional revenue is necessary, push for a differential tuition
increase and continue in the meantime to develop additional sources of
funding.  It is not a revolutionary proposal, but I think it is the
minimum needed to stabilize UB against a serious set of potential
problems.

Structure of the Arts and Sciences Core

If we are able to implement all of this, we will have twelve
professional schools centered about an Arts and Sciences core with its
present size in faculty but somewhat smaller in undergraduate
enrollment.  The Arts and Sciences are the heart of the University,
and it is incumbent on us to see that they are organized and
structured in a way that does them and the University the most good.
They have had to bear special burdens, budgetary and instructional, at
UB, and I am not at all convinced that our present organization is
helping them adequately.

It is for that reason that I opened the dialogue this past summer
about what the structure of Arts and Sciences ought to be.  This is an
issue which is deeply felt, for good reasons.  Many local interests
are at stake, and many higher interests as well.  There are competing
legitimate visions as to what Arts and Sciences ought to be in a
research university, and they deserve a full airing.  

Across the country, I daresay there are very few universities -- none
that I have encountered -- where Arts and Sciences as an entity,
however it is organized, is perceived as working well. That is no
reflection on the Arts and Sciences faculty.  It's a reflection of the
disparity among the multiple missions of Arts and Sciences in a
research university.  We speak of the Arts and Sciences collectively
as one entity largely because they share the responsibility for lower
division undergraduate education.  That is operationally what brings
them together.  But as we move up the instructional scale away from
general undergraduate education and towards the specialties and
graduate research, what the departments comprising Arts and Sciences
have in common diminishes steadily.  At the level of doctoral
research, the question of why experimental physics and English
literature ought to be in the same faculty becomes problematic.

It's a kind of national experience that wherever the Arts and Sciences
are together in one faculty, people think it's impossible to
administer-- too big, with too many disparate specialties.  They
either decide to add another layer of administration to deal with
them, or they split the Arts and Sciences up.  But where the Arts and
Sciences are divided, people find that undergraduate education is not
properly organized, and that the several faculties have a hard time
working together.

I do not think structures solve most of the problems of a university;
I think people solve them.  But there are cases in which structures
can become dysfunctional, and I think our present arrangement is one
of those cases, at least with respect to delivery of undergraduate
instruction.  Our problem is that nobody has clear ownership of the
general undergraduate enterprise.  We have three faculties who are
obligated to participate, a vice provost's office which is responsible
for the infrastructure, an advising system which is overwhelmed, and a
general education curriculum which is frankly in a shambles.  We have
an Undergraduate College which in response to the problem was set up
as a fourth, matrix entity, operating independently outside of the
structure.  It is in many ways a noble experiment, and it has been
responsible for some wonderful ideas and innovations.  But when it has
attempted to implement them universally, it has run up against
limitations in resources that really belong to three faculties with a
broader set of responsibilities.  

There is no place where all of this comes together except in my
office.  I then become, as then-Provost Greiner was before me, a de
facto dean of Arts and Sciences.  The problems are solved only if, as
I had to do last year, I call the College dean and the three Arts and
Sciences deans together to meet with me regularly to address the
issues in detail.  That is not the best way for the University to
function.  I should be doing other things, and the faculties of Arts
and Sciences should be much more directly in control of the
undergraduate instruction they deliver, and of the balance between
that instruction and their other academic priorities.

I have no interest in harming the Undergraduate College, nor in
arbitrary reorganization for purposes of administrative convenience.
Rather, I believe we need to bring the Undergraduate College home to
the faculties which sustain it.

There are of course many different approaches to these issues, and no
one of them offers a magic panacea.  Any solution we adopt is going to
be incomplete.  If we consolidate into one Faculty of Arts and
Sciences, we are likely to need extra administration and special
arrangements for the laboratory sciences, with their very different
economy, physical infrastructure, and mode of graduate education.  If
we maintain a partial separation of the faculties, then to the extent
that they are divided, general undergraduate instruction will suffer.
There are other issues of budget, governance, and academic culture
which also have to be addressed.

I am not sure that I know the right answer.  The best I could devise
is the one I proposed during the summer to the department chairs of
the three faculties, the Executive Committee of the Undergraduate
College, and the Chair of the Faculty Senate, with the understanding
that we would be spending the Fall, at least, in serious faculty-wide
dialogue about the outcome.

The proposal I made consists of three parts.  The first is to exploit
another opportunity, to form a School of Visual and Performing Arts.
This would consist of the five arts departments currently in Arts and
Letters, split off into a thirteenth professional school which can
give identity and focus to the arts at UB, take advantage of the new
Fine Arts Center, and project itself as a cultural force in the
community.  There are many inviting opportunities for collaboration
between that kind of school and cultural institutions around the
region, and the idea has been well received in the community.  I have
hope that such a school would be attractive to new faculty and
students, and that it could be a magnet for philanthropic funding as
well.

The second part of my proposal is to combine the remaining Arts and
Letters departments with the present Faculty of Social Sciences to
form a new Faculty of Liberal Arts.  This would eliminate the
organizational gap that now divides the humanities at UB, separating
History and Philosophy from the other humanities, Classics from
Anthropology and History, Modern Languages from Linguistics, American
Studies and Afro-American Studies from the social sciences, and so
forth.

The third part of the proposal is to place the principal
responsibility for the general undergraduate curriculum in the Faculty
of Liberal Arts, in collaboration with the Faculty of Natural Sciences
and Mathematics.  The latter, which has a role to play in future
University-wide development of science and technology at UB, would
remain intact as a separate faculty. 

This is a compromise solution.  It would not fully solve, but would
certainly simplify, the problem of undergraduate instruction.  It
would create one faculty which is large enough to house most of that
curriculum.  It would emphasize the fine arts and unite the
humanities, but it would avoid the difficulties of accommodating them
and the natural sciences in the same organization.

There are counter-proposals as well, and I believe that there is more
than one solution which would improve upon our present state of
affairs.  I have appointed a committee of wise senior faculty, most
but not all from Arts and Sciences, who are in a position to assess
the alternatives in a way as free as possible from constituent bias.
The Chair is David Triggle, Distinguished Professor and Dean of the
School of Pharmacy.  I have asked the committee to consult with the
faculty groups that will be discussing this issue, including the three
Faculties themselves, various departments, senate committees, and
others, and to try to synthesize those opinions with their own
judgments to give a balanced assessment of several alternative
structures.  The committee is of course also free to introduce other
options as it chooses.  I have listed the alternatives proposed so
far, and the constraints upon any solution that we do adopt, in the
letter of charge to committee members which is being published in The
Reporter.  A list of committee members appears there as well, and I
urge you to contact any of them if you have an opinion to express.
They are certainly free to suggest other alternatives.

I have asked the committee to meet during the Fall and to try to
report at least preliminary conclusions by the end of the present
semester or early next semester, so that if we do decide to reorganize
we will be able to work through the details during the Spring and be
ready to implement the change next year.  That schedule may sound
rushed, and it probably is, but I think the issues of alignment of
this University are urgent enough that we need to do address them as
expeditiously as possible.  They are complex and vital, and they
deserve a full airing, but for the good of our institution we need to
be able to think about them, talk about them, make a decision, and get
it behind us.  We do not want these questions hanging over our heads
for years.

I know that we are asking the faculty and University to digest a great
deal in a short period of time.  With all that is facing UB now, I
introduce the subject of Arts and Sciences structure with some
misgiving.  It is vexing and controversial, and it can distract us
from all of the other pressing concerns that I've discussed with you.
If I did not think it central to effective resolution of those other
issues, I would not have raised it at this time.  I do want you to
know that I am impressed and very pleased with the constructive tone
that most of the debate has taken so far, and I ask for your
continuing good will and good advice.

Revitalization of the Graduate School

Graduate education is largely a departmentally centered activity, and
with decentralization the Graduate School has gradually weakened at
UB.  It is in need of revitalization, especially if we are serious
about repositioning UB as a major center of professional and graduate
education.  The Graduate School has to be the center of a
University-wide focus and an interface with the external world and
with our faculty and prospective graduate students.  It has to be the
seat of quality control in graduate programs, and it has to help set
standards of excellence.  It has to continue to function as an
important source of student services and support.  And it has to be,
much more than it has been, a catalyst for interdisciplinary
scholarship and education.

These roles are increasingly significant because as we become more
decentralized, the formal mechanisms available for interdepartmental
and interschool cooperation will be fewer.  The Graduate School, like
the research office, will become critically important as an active
link among schools and faculties.  I expect it to become a full
participant in our academic planning.  It ought also to emerge as a
unifying source of identity and pride, particularly for faculty in
some of the professional schools who have no other organizational
association with the graduate enterprise.

Early last year I asked Dean Sirianni and the Graduate School
Executive Committee to conduct a strategic self-study of the School.
That exercise started with a faculty-wide survey and a preliminary
statement of vision and direction.  The Graduate Faculty has now met
to consider the results, forming workshops to consider the principal
issues in more depth.  I expect reports or a proposal within this
academic year.  The process will culminate with the report of an
external visiting committee, probably made up largely of graduate
deans from other universities who can evaluate and comment.  As the
proposal takes shape I will want to share it with the Faculty Senate.

Research Enterprise

When President Greiner spoke about University priorities, the first
thing he mentioned was excellence in research.  UB has devoted a great
deal of energy, resources, and intense effort toward establishing
itself as a major national and international research university.  In
some ways we have achieved that goal; in others we still have a lot of
work to do.  But it is undeniable that UB had gathered a remarkable
momentum prior to the budget cuts, and we have no intention of losing
that momentum now.

The growth in sponsored programs at UB in the 1980's was spectacular
and quite visible. But that growth has leveled off dramatically in the
past few years, and in the current year our total sponsored research
dollars may actually decrease for the first time in memory.  We do not
yet fully understand the reasons for the decrease; it is likely that
they have much to do with the national situation.  Whatever the case,
the decline is forcing us to take a hard look at whether we are doing
enough to encourage and develop research at UB.

To facilitate this kind of support we consolidated last year the
offices of the Vice Provost for Research and the Vice President for
Sponsored Programs.  Mike Landi is now the Vice President for
Research.  He is still filling out his staff, and I do not think the
office is yet as pro-active internally as he intends for it to be.
But in the meantime, we are setting ourselves up administratively.
Mike and I meet regularly with the deans responsible for sponsored
research programs.  We are especially concerned with research policy,
interdisciplinary coordination, and large scale institutional
initiatives.

*               *               *

The period of most rapid growth in sponsored research at UB coincided
with the availability of Graduate Research Initiative (GRI) funds
through SUNY.  The GRI was a principal source of seed and matching
money for new programs, and of start-up funds for new faculty.  It was
not available in large scale over the last few years.  There will
however be a restoration of GRI funding this year and probably next
year as well.  We expect about $2.5M to come to this campus this year
in capital money.  We intend to apply it as a catalyst for
strategically important research programs.

Other sources of capital for research may become available as well.
UB has not been as active in Washington as many research universities
in raising large scale federal funds, despite some important
exceptions like the National Center for Earthquake Engineering.  We
have now added to President Greiner's staff a special counselor who
has had long experience in this area, John Dearden.  John has begun by
conducting a research audit of UB to highlight inviting targets for
industrial and federal organizations, in order to find matches and
then to try to make links.  He is conducting a similar audit of
technology-intensive industry in the arc from Toronto to Syracuse, and
he has laid some of the groundwork for building up at UB a major
presence in structural biology.

There will be a more active central presence in promoting such
activities, but they cannot be launched or sustained by the central
administration:  they have to be driven by the faculty. They will
depend on your initiative and your cooperation.  Under our form of
decentralization the concept of a research entity formed and funded
out of the Provost's office at UB is obsolete.  I would like to think
that future interdisciplinary research initiatives will take place
through the collaboration of the departments and deans who are
involved.  We can encourage, facilitate, and sometimes lead from the
center, but it is they who ought to be the stakeholders in the
enterprise.  If they don't think enough of the collaboration to help
underwrite it, then either they are doing something wrong or the
collaboration shouldn't happen.  If they are doing something wrong, it
will come out in our budget review process, which is a mechanism of
accountability.  If the collaboration should not happen, we have found
an effective filtering mechanism.  In the end I think we will find
that we have a more difficult, but a much more sustained and
sustaining system of interdisciplinary research than we have had here
in the past.

These changes in approach have special implications for our organized
research units (ORU's), some of which have been among the great
successes of UB.  These are centers that have for some time been
funded substantially by the central administration, and they still
receive something like $700,000 per year in central funds.  Most of
that sum was originally intended as seed money, but for many ORU's it
has been allowed in effect to become base budget.  Some ORU's have
become self-sufficient, but most have not, and they rely on their
central funds to meet important personnel commitments that cannot
abruptly be abandoned. Vice President Landi is now working with the
ORU directors to establish policies for regular review of the
Organized Research Units, for opening and closing them, and for
gradual replacement of seed money with external support.  The ORU's
will continue to have an important role to play at UB, but we expect
an orderly transition to modes of support more consistent with the
decentralized character of the University.

The Vice President for Research also has responsibility for the
conduct of technology transfer. This is one of the great untapped
potentials of UB, but it also creates some issues which I think the
Senate is going to want to consider.

Serious transfer of technology from American universities to industry
started only in the early 1980's, when Federal law first allowed us to
take ownership of inventions, and to sell or license them and keep the
proceeds.  At some of the more enterprising universities around the
country, annual revenues from such activities have now exceeded $20M.
That is equivalent to 10% of UB's State budget, derived from sponsored
research bases not hugely larger than our own.  Developing that kind
of income is in part a matter of experience:  it takes time to
identify and protect inventions, more time to market and license them,
and still more time for commercialization and substantial returns.  We
have a very active patent and licensing office in the capable hands of
Kay Terry, and the number of patent disclosures and filings has been
growing dramatically.

The reason I raise the subject now is not to point to our income,
which is still relatively small (annually in the range of a few
hundred thousand dollars gross), but to alert you to the fact that as
this activity grows and becomes more and more a part of our academic
life, it will inevitably raise fundamental questions of policy and
values.  Some other universities have had to deal with these in
serious ways, but I don't think that either SUNY or UB has quite faced
up to them yet.  There will be issues of conflict of interest, of
conflict of commitment, of intrusion by commercial concerns into
academic and scientific priorities-- all of them complicated by
occasional Federal attempts to dictate university policies.  These are
deep and profound matters, and I don't intend to resolve them in this
talk, but I do think they are going to have to be considered by the
Faculty Senate.  Our policies in these areas are rather primitive, and
they certainly don't envision the volume and variety of patent-related
activity that I think will be taking place at major research
universities in the coming decades.  This is something we simply must
take up at UB, and in short order.

Culture and Community

Because it pervades all of the topics we have discussed, I have left
for last the human side of our enterprise.  We simply cannot succeed
as a university without explicit attention to the building of
community at UB.  That would perhaps be true of any organization, but
it is particularly true here.  We are large; we are academically
diverse; we tend to coalesce around parochial interests.  In the days
when money flowed freely from above, there was not much reason for
many of us to do anything else.  We learned that if we could protect
our own entitlements and keep our local circles intact, the rest would
take care of itself.

The notion that there is a larger institution to be built, and that
the building is primarily the business of its faculty, has not been a
resounding theme in American universities.  Loyalty is often first to
a discipline, second to the department, and perhaps a weak third to
the school or university.  More often the university has been viewed
as a passive receptacle for a mobile faculty moving from place to
place in response to better offers.

     We need to build a community which does more than that.  We need
to see to it that faculty and staff who come here feel that they are
supported, that this is an environment which helps them to bring out
their best. That's contrary to a lot of academic traditions.  We are
very good at searching out talented people and scrutinizing them when
they come here, and we are also very good at pulling them up by the
roots five or six years later to see whether they have done enough to
avoid being thrown out.  We are not very good at working with them
year in and year out as their lives and interests change to see that
they still feel themselves to be productive and interested members of
the community.  To the extent that this is true, neither the
institution nor its people are getting the most that they can out of
one another.

That kind of career development is rather foreign to academic culture.
It smacks to us of paternalism and intrusiveness.  But it ought at
least to be available to many of our faculty, especially as their
practical tenure at one institution becomes longer and longer:
mobility is reduced, retirement ages are lifted, and people remain
here for many years.

This building of community and help for career can't be accomplished
from the central administration except in the setting of broad themes.
The real work has to be done locally, and it falls first and foremost
upon the department chairs.  With the help of Vice President Muriel
Moore and some outside consultants, we have begun to work with
department chairs to develop skills and devices appropriate to this
responsibility.  We held a pilot workshop of chairs for a few days
during the summer, and those who were there can tell you what an
enlightening and uplifting experience it was.

We intend to continue to work in these directions, to develop
mechanisms for the mentoring of junior faculty and for support of
senior faculty who are changing careers and directions, and I will be
reporting to you on our progress from time to time.  I have also asked
the deans to nominate a committee of new junior faculty to meet with
me several times per semester, so that I can hear directly their
concerns and ask what fresh eyes see that our institution ought to be
doing.

These issues of career and changes in career arise often in
discussions of faculty promotions. In promotions to tenure we are a
classic and conservative institution, and I think that we ought to be.
We are generally agreed that tenure should be governed by the highest
standards of scholarship, research, and creative work (although there
is a range of opinion about the acceptable scope of these activities,
as in some areas of applied research or fine arts).  It's my sense
that we conduct this process rather well:  in tenure cases I've noted
occasional lapses in the guidance and mentoring of junior faculty, but
very rarely a compromise in academic standards.

But in the case of promotion to full professor, the promotion of
people who are already tenured citizens of the community, I am not
sure we have been as helpful or as creative on behalf of the
institution as we might be.  There is no doubt that continued
adherence to high standards of scholarship should lead to a full
professorship.  The question is to what extent other kinds of
contributions ought to be rewarded over the course of a career that
may last thirty or forty years.  I have asked the President's Review
Board to examine this question and to make some specific
recommendations.  The Senate will consider these, and I look forward
to the dialogue.

We cannot speak of community and human development at UB without
attention to issues of diversity and affirmative action.  One need
only look around this room to understand that the numbers of
underrepresented minorities and of women here are nothing like what
they ought to be.  We are numerically behind some of our peer
institutions, and in some respects culturally behind as well. 

By and large this is an organization of good intentions, and one which
has tried hard and has paid diligent attention to the mechanics of
searches and the requirements of affirmative action.  But the world
has changed and we must change.  The burden is shifting from the
formalities and policing of searches to the building of a community
which is supportive and welcoming of minorities and of women who come
here.  In short, the problem for us and other universities is shifting
from one of searches alone to one of retention as well.

This need strains academic culture.  There are few universities which
take the time or the trouble to make intelligent accommodations for
the first member of a minority group or the first woman in a
department, recognizing the special pressures and experiences someone
in that situation goes through.  Fewer still are thoughtful enough to
find ways of being genuinely supportive rather than negligent on the
one hand or overprotective on the other.  We won't be able to develop
such a climate through codes or rules:  we must do it through the
building of culture and sensitivity.  That in part is what the
department chair workshops are about, and it is something toward which
we all need to work.  There is no more important priority for this
University than opening itself up culturally, intellectually, and
socially to a much broader and more diverse faculty, staff, and
student body.

As I said earlier, faculty turnover at UB is going to be enormous over
the next decade-- and with that turnover the demographic profile of
our faculty is also going to change.  We simply must be in a position
to support and to retain people of all backgrounds.  I do not believe
we are going to make much progress on their numbers before we make
progress on our culture. I don't believe there is a cadre of
underrepresented minorities out there who are waiting to come to UB
only if could look a little harder to find them.  We can't relax the
pressure on our searches, and we will continue to be as diligent as we
have been, if not more so.  But the fact is that people will come to
find us, when they perceive us to be in the forefront rather than the
backwater of rebuilding of culture.

To the extent that we have been able through the devices of the
Provost's office, we have tried to help.  I have already mentioned the
workshops of department chairs and our extended Underrepresented
Faculty Initiative.  We have made accommodation for faculty spouses
and partners who are qualified for our faculty in special arrangements
between departments and our office.  We are looking into the
possibilities for childcare on both campuses.  And we have asked the
President's Committee to look carefully at our search procedures and
to see whether they are as enlightened as they might be.  We'll
continue to put energy into such administrative measures, but again
the key is going to be less in the traditional way we have been doing
things and more in bold steps toward real changes in our human
environment.

Conclusion

All of us need to think about this institution as a whole, and to
think from our local perspectives about what can be done to build it.
The time has passed when faculty can feel that they are going to be
funded automatically by somebody, or that issues of community and
affirmative action are going to take care of themselves.  The kind of
university that we are trying to build is one where all of us
participate, a university that is determined to marshal its strengths
and resources and to use them to make a difference to the world around
it, a university of electric intellectual atmosphere in which
disciplines learn to work with one another and produce new concepts, a
university whose community is not only open to all but actively
supportive of all of its members. 

We can set a national example of what a fine research university can
and ought to do, and we can be the living response to the new critics
of higher education.  That is going to be difficult, but I think we
are as well positioned to accomplish it as anyone, and better
positioned than most.  This will be the adventure of the next few
years, and I look forward to sharing it with you.