Letters

Sending Letters to the Reporter
The Reporter welcomes letters from readers commenting on its stories and content. Letters should be brief and may be edited for style and length. Because of space limitations, the Reporter cannot publish all letters received. They must be received by 9 a.m. Monday to be considered for publication in that week's issue.

"The Department may have to choose between attracting an adequate number of undergraduates to support major ensembles and enhancing graduate strength in Composition, History and Theory." And later, "One can pose the choice...between further enhancement of Composition, History, Theory and selected strong performance areas...or expansion of Music Education..."

The Department Chair at that time referred to this letter as the "catalyst" for his proposal to the music faculty. The ensuing "stir" created by faculty and student response to the draft proposal was widely reported in the Buffalo News, on local TV, and in the Spectrum. (Interested researchers, see Spectrum, April 8, 12 and May 3, 1991, and The Buffalo News of April 9 and June 8, 1991.)

Two parts of last week's report by Provost Headrick rang particular bells for me. Although he says in one place that:

1) "...Music Education...is not an essential program" (in spite of the fact that its students comprise annually anywhere from 35 percent to nearly 50 percent of the department's undergraduate enrollment),

He also admits that:

2) "...a low-enrollment-and primarily graduate-Music program would not necessarily improve the economic picture, particularly if the undergraduate program shrank considerably; nor would it provide the Department with the music ensembles essential for a sound graduate program. [Italics mine.] (Music ensembles may contribute to graduate programs in music, but they are essential to undergraduate degree programs, the recruitment of music majors, and the overall health of the Department, not to mention the attraction they hold for nonmajors.)

Fortunately for the Department in 1991, Dean-elect Grant was successful in counseling the Chair to wait until he arrived in Buffalo before any proposals for massive restructuring of the Department went forward.

By the Spring of 1994 the Music Department was engaged in two national searches to replace earlier faculty losses-one for a specialist in vocal music education and the other for a Director of Bands. The searches yielded two junior faculty (female) who are still here, but for how long? By Fall 1995 the Department had survived that troubled period and been re-accredited by the National Association of Schools of Music. Since 1991 the Department has graduated approximately 50 music education majors. Nearly all of them are employed-the vast majority currently providing music instruction in the schools of Western New York.

I am forced to conclude that the Provost has a limited comprehension of the role of the Music Department in a public university like ours. (How did Harvard and Berkeley get into a report about UB's Music Department?) But that's why Chairs and Deans compile all those statistics and prepare all those reports.

In introducing the section about our sister in the Arts, the Theatre/Dance Department, Provost Headrick states: "The Department relies on part-time faculty...and is particularly blessed by being able to draw on some extraordinary local talent." The same sentence could have been used to introduce the report of the Music Department. The reason we have been able to maintain our programs over the years of decreasing state support is, in large part (as in Theatre/Dance), because we have such extraordinary part-time faculty, many of whom play in the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. We're cut to the bone, but we are determined to continue as a viable academic department as well as a provider of the usual array of concerts in Slee Hall which enhance the cultural life of the campus and our region.

Harriet Simons, Professor
1991 recipient, Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching

Education must prepare for life in a democracy
Editor:
Christianity is America's dominant religion and unfortunately many of its adherents forget that America is a pluralistic democracy. Many UB undergraduates come to our university with Christianity's religious dogmas thoroughly permeating their minds and hearts.

For those who take them, courses in logic, scientific method and comparative religion generally throw these dogmatic beliefs into doubt. A period of skepticism often ensues. As part of their general education studies, UB students are required to take a course in world civilization, which presents the emergence of Christianity as Western civilization's dominant religion.

What is often not mentioned however is that an important controversy is raging among serious scholars in this field. There are many aspects to this controversy, but there is one central question around which all the debate hinges, who founded the Christian religion: Jesus or Paul?

Hyam Maccoby is one of the world's leading Talmudic scholars and his ground-breaking work has shed much light on this ongoing controversy. He has devoted most of his life to pursuing the quest for the historic Jew, a venture greatly impelled by Albert Schweitzer's classic, published in 1906. Maccoby's major works in this area are: Revolution in Judea, The Mythmaker-Paul and the Invention of Christianity and Paul, Pharisaism and Gnosticism. His conclusions are not only startling; his analysis of Rabbi Joshua's actual place in history is both highly compelling and provocative. His methodology is based on the Jewish school of historic research, but his erudition is so profound that no one seriously interested in the subject can ignore his work.

However, the full truth about this famous religious figure will probably never be actually known. None of his original writings are available for scholarly analysis. Why Western civilization has been so greatly influenced by a personality we know so little about remains a mystery hard to unravel or thoroughly grasp. Students and scholars studying Maccoby's work will obviously not have all their questions completely answered, but his brilliant scholarship will greatly enhance their quest for the true historic Jesus.

Dispassionately delving into controversies such as this is central to becoming a liberally educated human being and inimical to the fanaticisms of our age. UB's undergraduate general education program should unequivocally commit itself to this process as part of preparing our students not just for vocations but for life in a democracy. At a time when the future of American democracy is in jeopardy, when religious, racial, gender, class and political divisions are threatening to tear America asunder, the importance of this endeavor should not be minimized.

Yours sincerely,
David Slive
Class of '85

Metro Rail link to North Campus long overdue
Editor:
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) finally recognized the fact that construction of new and widening of existing highways does not solve the congestion problems because it induces more traffic. The only question is how much. The study on highway expansion in California conducted by professor Mark Hansen of the University of California determined that 10 percent increase in highway lane-miles immediately increased traffic by 2 percent and within two years by 6 percent. Yet the Town of Amherst in a futile attempt to solve its traffic congestion problems is contemplating to spend $35.4 million on new and wider roads, which will result in more traffic and consequently will increase air pollution, urban runoff and waste of energy.

Garrett Hardin, the author of Managing the Commons, wrote in the World Watch magazine: "Whenever it is thought to be impossible to limit the growth of either population or desire, it is impossible to solve a shortage by increasing the supply. Solving the shortage increases the demand until the same mismatch is re-established at a higher and more painful level." It is apparently in this spirit that in U.K. the House of Commons is contemplating to draw a plan to achieve a 5 percent reduction in traffic miles by 2005 and 10 percent by 2010.

Perhaps this might be the right approach to our transportation needs that Amherst and other communities in the region (and in the nation) should adopt. Instead of constructing new highways let us arrest suburban sprawl and diversify our transportation system. It is becoming more and more obvious that our outdated transportation system based almost exclusively on an automobile is socially, economically and environmentally unwholesome and unsustainable in a long term. Whereas some other cities in the nation woke up to the reality, whereas European countries with already superior public transportation keep developing new rail links, we in Buffalo and Erie County fell in a deep slumber. It is a crying shame that 10 years after the completion of a very successful trunk line of our metro rail nothing has been done to complete the project by linking the line to the suburbs and to the North Campus of the university as originally planned.

Sigmund R. Zakrzewski
Research Professor Emeritus

Questioning numbers in Task Force Report
To the Editor:
Professor Joseph Gardella's thoughtful letter makes many valuable points about diversity in general and the Report of the Task Force on Women in particular. There is one area, however, where his argument bears some critical scrutiny. Professor Gardella asks, "so why do we fail to address the serious imbalance in numbers reported in the Task Force's tables?" Later he observes that "the statistics published in the report by the Task Force on Women at UB for FNSM departments show that there are few women in certain departments and that there are deficits when compared with the expected values from the current population in that discipline."

Professor Gardella is of course right about what the numbers show, but I wonder if he has satisfied himself that the numbers are real. I have no independent knowledge about the faculty availability pool in the sciences, but the number used by the Task Force in an area I do know something about is entirely at variance with reports that we have every reason to believe are authoritative. The National Center for Education Statistics of the U.S. Department of Education published data on degrees awarded in the field of "Business and Management," data that are disseminated annually by the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business. Since the availability pool for faculty presumably consists of people having received relevant degrees over a period of time, it is instructive to look at the gender breakdown of graduate degrees awarded over these years. The most recent data for doctoral degrees show a steadily increasing female percentage of 8.3 in 1977-78 to 28.2 in 1993-94. (The percentages are much smaller, of course, in the years prior to 1977.) If we allow that a doctorate may not be necessary to be a faculty member (something I doubt many fields would acknowledge), then we may note that the percentages for master's degrees range from 16.8 in 1977-78 to 36.5 in 1993-94.

The "national availability pool" for faculty in management is given in Table F of the Task Force Report as 46 percent women. It is unclear where this number originates, but it is without any plausibility to anyone with even a casual familiarity with the field. From this "pool," UB's shortfall is calculated. I have no idea whether this discrepancy between the Task Force's numbers and the numbers routinely received in academic offices would be found in other fields, but Professor Gardella might want to inquire how it was determined that 21 percent of the people now living who would qualify for a faculty position in Chemistry at UB are women.

I realize that anyone raising these issues risks being dismissed as a nitpicker who is in denial about the "big picture." I suggest, however, that addressing any problem starts with accurate measures of its nature and magnitude. Without them, we don't really know how far we have come, how far we have to go, or even whether we are succeeding or failing. An even bigger danger is that the analysis reinforces the conception that our numbers, which I suspect most everybody would like to be larger, reflect a demand side problem rather than a supply side problem. It's not that too few people with faculty credentials are being produced, it is implied, it's that we are not trying hard enough or cleverly enough to find and attract the ones that are being produced in sufficient numbers. We also continue to think we perform a social good by recruiting women away from other universities, as though that serves the objective of gender diversity in the academy. And we ignore, relatively at least, the real service: making an effort to fill the pipeline by increasing the representation of women in doctoral programs, perhaps by encouraging or underwriting gifted women in our baccalaureate and master's programs to pursue a Ph.D. Then we could even hire some of our own, as in the MIT example offered by Professor Gardella.

But the whole process starts with numbers that we can rely on.

Sincerely,
Howard G. Foster
School of Management