To the Editor:

I would like to respond to Professor John Boot's Letter to the Editor in last week's issue of the Reporter regarding the university's policy on Undergraduate Teaching Assistants (UTAs). It would appear that Professor Boot's presumptive claim to be regarded as the academic conscience of the university, without duly informing himself of either existing policy or practice in this area, has led him to produce a misleading diatribe against an honorable and effective pedagogical approach.

Rather than an irresponsible aberration, as Professor Boot contends, UTAs are, in fact, widely utilized in leading research universities. Furthermore, his apparent eagerness to see intrigue where there is none, coupled with a penchant for overblown rhetoric, gives his letter a particularly strident and disrespectful tone. In the interests of clarity and fairness, let me set the record straight.

First, Professor Boot is mistaken in seeing "the administration, specifically deans Grant, Stinger and Eagles," as responsible for the existing policies governing the utilization of UTAs. The University's Faculty Senate in 1996 adopted a general enabling policy covering their use (selection, tasks, supervision, etc.). Individual departments can provide additional, more detailed, sets of regulations. In the one case where the Dean's Office has become involved in this area, it was in response to a request from a department seeking to ensure that its policies were being consistently implemented by all members of its faculty.

Secondly, Professor Boot's unfortunate and callous analogies to repressive labor regimes in the Far East notwithstanding, participants in the undergraduate UTA experience (either as TAs or students) routinely emphasize the high quality of the learning they gain from it. As educators at all levels know, there is no greater incentive to genuinely learn material than to have to teach it, and our undergraduate TAs benefit from this. Their experience generates course credit and provides an enriching, highly responsible, career-relevant experience. As for students served by UTAs, a substantial body of research on peer learning emphasizes the effectiveness of teaching in the more relaxed and casual atmosphere created when the social and psychological distance between teacher and student is diminished. In its resolution regarding UTAs, UB's Faculty Senate makes it clear that this is a case of educational advantage, not exploitation.

Finally, the College of Arts and Sciences does have a legitimate interest in exploring the UTA issue and is presently doing so. Our consideration will include looking at the practices of other schools utilizing UTAs. We are examining the experiences of Cornell, Brown, Illinois/Champaign-Urbana, Arizona, Maryland, Georgia, Oregon, Stony Brook, University of California-Berkeley and Rochester, to name just some of the highly ranked universities that have adopted this practice.

As an institution, we invite our undergraduates to share, as fully as possible and together with faculty and graduate students, in the total university experience. Where appropriate, our best undergraduates are transformed from consumers to producers of knowledge through involvement in the research process. By the same token, it would seem misguided to deny our best undergraduates an opportunity to share in the challenges of disseminating knowledge.

Apart from the substance of this important issue, I cannot let pass Professor Boot's characterization of the CAS administration. For him to insinuate that the Dean's Office is in some fashion a rat's hole where administrators hide from their responsibilities is both demeaning and insulting to the dedicated and highly professional people who work there. Deans and associate deans are faculty members as well as administrators, and to dismiss their efforts in such derogatory and insulting terms is reprehensible.