Provost's academic plan: it's hardly revolutionary

As a faculty member in one of the "evil" professional schools, I find the controversy over the Provost's academic plan endlessly amusing for what no one seems willing to say. Since, as best as I can tell, we of the professional schools are all Neanderthals intent on destroying the "true" university, I suppose that I may be forgiven if I pick up my blunt rhetorical club to comment.

First, the problem that the Provost's plan is addressing and that all sorts of people seem to miss is simple. There is not now, nor is there likely to be in any foreseeable future, enough money from either the State of New York or locally retained student tuition sufficient to support stand-alone departments of a size sufficient to create nationally prominent scholarly groupings in most of the traditional areas in the Arts and Sciences. The best we are likely to do is to hold total funds at their current level and that is going to be a struggle.

Second, in such a circumstance, it is a plausible, though hardly revolutionary, strategy for this university to attempt to identify areas of knowledge where enough faculty share teaching and research interests such as would make possible assembling groups of a size sufficient possibly to reach national prominence and then to foster the growth of such groups. The proposed Centers and Institutes are just such groups. This is a less risky strategy than not making such an attempt, a choice that in all likelihood remits the traditional areas in the Arts and Sciences either to increasing national invisibility or to conversion to largely teaching programs such as are found in the state colleges. The academic plan is thus an attempt to save scholarship and teaching in the Arts and Sciences at the university, not to destroy them.

Third, it is not obvious that the Centers and Institutes identified in the Provost's plan are the groupings that will bring their participants national prominence. Better plans often may be devised by the troops in the trenches than by the generals on their mountain tops. But, those groupings presently proposed by the Provost come from discussion with interested faculty. If such groupings are somehow "wrong," then it makes better sense to spend time identifying more plausible groupings than to rail about the demise of "the disciplines." An examination of the history of higher education would show that the disciplines as we know them are an accident that reflects the organization of knowledge in the West at the time-late 19th and early 20th century-of their creation. They are in no sense "natural" divisions of the world, however familiar they are. In all likelihood, were the modern university not to have taken form at that time, but have been delayed in its organization the present day, changes in the organization of knowledge would have occurred during the intervening years such as would give us a very different set of disciplines, and thus departments, in the university.

Fourth, the cheapest way to secure money to support faculty engaged in teaching and research is to eliminate administration-deans, associate deans and chairs. It is truly odd to see faculty attempting to defend their disciplines by retaining the costs that are most expendable in any university. The level of professional insecurity thus displayed is truly astonishing, since unintended.

Fifth, the best way to ensure the continuation of graduate education in the Arts and Sciences would seem to be by increasing the number of graduate students. Master's candidates generally pay their way; it is never a bad thing to add a terminal master's candidate of sufficient quality. Doctoral candidates, on the other had, most often follow financial aid. Since the available pool of financial aid is not likely to be increased in even the medium future, the most plausible way to attract good graduate students is not by offering increasingly marginal and fragmented programs from small departments, but by presenting programs that offer approaches not obviously available elsewhere. While surely anything but a matter of "If you build it, they will come," if the groupings are sensible, if they present approaches that talented, adventurous graduate students find interesting, then it seems likely such student will inquire. If we cannot turn inquiry into matriculation then we have a more difficult problem than even the Provost is willing to admit.

Sixth and last, anyone interested in the future history of the university ought to be worried most about how timid is the Provost's plan. It abolishes little, consolidates only slightly more. There is no idea in the plan that has not been around for a decade or longer and it shows little effort to gauge where knowledge groupings will be in 20, much less 40 years. The greatest risk it poses is that by the time it is fully implemented it will be too little, too late. As an individual whose scholarship is in the social sciences, whose leisure reading includes a long-time devotion to good science writing and whose spouse and children have chosen art and music for their careers, I think that eventuality would be a tragedy that far exceeds our recognition of the decline of traditional disciplines or a diminution in graduate programs staffed by not more than a few individuals and undertaken by, at best, few more.

Sincerely,
John Henry Schlegel
Professor of Law

Why all this commotion over foreign contributions?

There is no question that our election campaign financing system is rotten to the core. However, I do not understand all this commotion about alleged campaign contributions from China and Indonesia and no concern about corporate contributions. Certainly these governments are human right abusers and we shouldn't uphold their behavior. But even if they succeed in buying some favors, it will not affect our lives. I am much more concerned about contributions from big American and international corporations. By and large, corporations, especially the very big one, are inherently amoral. They have neither social nor environmental conscience, as evidenced by massive layoffs due to mergers, downsizing and moving abroad, or by the tobacco companies claim that cigarettes are harmless. Their guiding principle is the bottom line. Neither Chinese or Indonesians try to wrack our environmental or labor protecting laws. Yet American corporations do. No foreign contributors lobby to render EPA and OSHA powerless. Yet American corporations do. Who is trying to wrack or at least to slow down any progress in the international negotiations on climate change? The lobbyist for coal and oil industries united under misleading name The Global Climate Coalition. They don't care about earth's future. They care about lining up their pockets with money. Who is lobbying the Congress to prevent repeal of the 19th-century law that mandates the federal government to sell land for $5 per acre to whoever discovers mineral deposits? American mining companies. So who represents more danger to our welfare, Chinese and Indonesians or corporate America?

To protect us from being dominated by corporate America, as well as from foreign influences, our rotten campaign financing system should be scraped down, all contributions should be outlawed and a public financing of elections should be instituted.

Sigmund F. Zakrzewski
Professor Emeritus

'Fuzzy' draft was not a code of ethics

To the Editor of the Reporter:

The Reporter attributed things to me I never wrote and things I never said. I've never opposed a code of ethics for UB or anyplace else. I think rational codes of ethics are fine things and if I heard of one being considered by the Faculty Senate Executive Committee I'd support it.

What I heard about instead was the draft code on social relations brought to the FSEC by John Boot. All my remarks were directed to that specific document. The draft's language was fuzzy, its tone was moralistic, and its substance violated the United States Constitution.

Our Faculty Senate shouldn't endorse fuzzy, moralistic documents that encourage unconstitutional behavior by university officials. We have no need for a puritanical regulation that exiles from all university decision making or advising all people whose only "crime" is that a past or present spouse, lover, or close companion elects to register for a course at SUNY Buffalo. And we should never accept a code of any kind in which the accused-faculty, administrators, librarians, graduate students-are presumed guilty until they prove their innocence. That's what I thought mean and muddle-headed about the draft code and that's why I wrote the Faculty Senate Executive Committee opposing it. I was delighted to see that they, for whatever reasons, also found John Boot's draft unacceptable.

Sincerely yours,
Bruce Jackson
SUNY Distinguished Professor

Are some using report for research, teaching clash?

Dear Editor:

Can you believe it? Members of our university community are beginning to question the importance of uni-versity-based research and scholarship. Are these people misreading the Provost's report, or am I? What I read in the report is a strong attempt to increase the quality of the research undertaken, and the quality of the relevant graduate programs that give sustenance to that research. It suggests implicitly the possibility of reducing the size of some graduate programs in order to increase the quality of others. Whether one agrees with this approach or not, this is the intent as I perceive it. To me the Provost's report is a quality-centered document. I am distressed that some of us appear to be using this report to set forth a clash between the research and teaching activities at the university.

The University at Buffalo is a Research I University as categorized by the Carnegie system. As such, we should continue to support an emphasis on research, scholarly, and creative activity. To the extent that we diminish our commitment to excellence in these areas we alter the essence of the institution, and not for the better. I don't ask the doubters and Cassandras to take my word for this. Indicated below in italics are quotes from a talk entitled, "Best Practices in Research and Graduate Education," given at the Council on Research Policy and Graduate Education Summer Forum (1996) by University of Florida President John V. Lombardi, one of the true shining lights in modern academia. I will let him speak for those of us who have a positive view of university research.

Many non-academic communities are hostile to the notion of academic research. They don't understand why we are involved in studies of the chemistry of nitrones (what the hell is a nitrone anyway?), or the high physics involved in smashing the nuclei of atoms to smithereens, or the ramifications of the mathematical theory of knots. They don't understand that this research can have practical implications that can benefit humanity; however, they do understand that this research can cost a lot of money-and they don't want to foot the bill. Yet, when people send their children to a university, which university do they choose?

And those who hate research and are hostile to graduate education only want to send their children to a university whose name brand is build upon the research and graduate education that exist at those institutions.

Why are people lining up at the gates (at Harvard or Yale or Michigan or Illinois or Florida) when you say that because of research and graduate education our undergraduate program sucks?

High quality research and graduate education enhances the prestige of the institution, that's why.

We're famous because we do research. We are famous because we turn out graduate students. We are famous for the work that our professional group does, our students do, at the highest level of achievement in the academic world. and that is what buys the name brand. That's what informs it with its quality, and that is what distinguishes it from the generic college that does not have that quality built in.

It is often very difficult to convince people that the aforementioned is indeed true. Yet, it seems obvious that

the standard you set in the high end of your business-the research and graduate education-that standard informs every other standard in the university. And if that standard is high enough in the performance of research and graduate education, then those who drive the undergraduate program have to drive against that standard. And if that standard isn't there, then the quality of the undergraduate program can drift downward without any reference point and without any sense of loss in the quality of the undergraduate program because there is no nationally referenced activity going on in the university.

Whether we like it or not, a university's prestige is built in the areas of research and graduate education. The National Research Council (NRC) ranks universities on the basis of the perceptions of faculty at other academic institutions. These perceptions are based on the graduate education and research that occurs in the institutions being rated. There is a recent study of productivity factors implicit in research and graduate education which has been assembled by the folks at Stony Brook for the purpose of rating universities. These factors (e.g., publications, citations, grants, awards, etc.) are based on the research accomplishments of the faculty at the university being rated. Very recently, an excellent book has been published, "The Rise of American Research Universities," by H.D. Graham and N. Diamond (Johns Hopkins University Press) which ranks universities based on per capita research and scholarly activity productivity measures (i.e., publications/faculty, citations/faculty, awards/faculty, grant funds/faculty, etc.). Nobody that I know of ranks universities on teaching excellence. You can wail and you can gnash your teeth, but you can't change the fact that academic prestige is based on research/scholarship.

How often have you heard of faculty being recruited from another university based on teaching excellence? Teaching is important, but it is not marketable. Academic stature, like it or not, is based on research and scholarship.

The marketplace is on the research and graduate education.

How important is teaching? From what has been stated thus far, you might think that I undervalue teaching. Nonsense. Teaching is exceedingly important. It is important because our constituencies demand it. Our students deserve it. Their parents want it. The legislators mandate it. And they pay the bills. We should reward good teaching by giving sizeable discretionary awards to our truly excellent teachers. The University of Florida has given awards of $5,000 to base salary as the result of a competition which identified the truly outstanding teachers on that campus. Good teaching is important in its own right and because it enables us to do our research and scholarship without engendering so much animosity from the communities we serve. Good teaching enables us to do good research because it calms the attacks on universities that have been so prevalent in recent years. But make no mistake about it, it is good research and good graduate education that are of prime importance in a Research I university. It is the creation of knowledge that must maintain primacy in such an environment. That is the way it has been, and that is the way it will always be.

Sincerely yours,
Joseph J. Tufariello
Dean, Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics