University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

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• “This [budget crisis] may well mean that what was UB 2020, indicating a certain dimension in time, may in fact be more like UB 2022 or UB 2023.”

  President John B. Simpson

By KEVIN FRYLING

Published: November 5, 2008

President John B. Simpson called surviving New York State’s budget crisis a serious “chore” for UB during his annual address to the voting faculty yesterday, but not the central issue that will define the university’s future.

“We are in a situation in which the budget is bad, going to worse, and it is very threatening to this institution,” said Simpson. “But this is an issue that we have to deal with now—it is not the long-term and defining issue of the university.”

UB is better suited than most of its peers within SUNY to weather the financial storm since it’s already spent the last several years identifying its central goals and vision for the future, he added.

“This [budget crisis] may well mean that what was UB 2020, indicating a certain dimension in time, may in fact be more like UB 2022 or UB 2023,” he said. “But there is no mistake that this is still the direction that we are going.”

So far, state cuts to UB have equaled about 10 percent of the university’s budget—approximately $21 million—the result of a $51 million cut to the SUNY system in June coupled with a recent additional reduction of $96 million.

At UB, Simpson said approximately 50 percent of the cut will be taken from the university’s central budget. The other half will come from differential unit-level cuts, he said, meaning that each department or unit will not receive an equal reduction in funding.

“The cut is differentiated both among the academic divisions and between the primary division of academic and academic support, such that academic support divisions—like the president’s office or the vice president’s office or external affairs—are being cut approximately twice what the average of the academic divisions are being cut,” said Simpson. “Our fundamental business is academic and this is, at the core, what in my view we should preserve as we go forward.”

Due to an overhaul of various business processes, including IT, grants and contracts, HR and purchasing, all as part of UB 2020, he noted that UB already is saving more than $5 million a year—much of which has been reinvested in supporting academics, including hiring approximately 100 new faculty positions in the past five years.

Other numbers included a rise in research expenditures to $323 million, nearly 10 percent more than New York University; philanthropic commitments of $57.2 million, a record for a year in which there has not been an active capital campaign; and freshman SAT scores, indicating that this year’s incoming students are the most academically advanced in the university’s history.

Following Simpson’s remarks, James Holstun, professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), asked the president to address a recent situation in which three female faculty members were rejected for tenure by the provost, and two others by the president, after being endorsed by peer-review boards within their respective departments and schools.

Added David Shucard, professor of neurology, pediatrics and psychology: “What’s the purpose of having those committees when the entire process can be overturned by one individual without explanation, without justification and without…discussion?”

Simpson answered that his role is to act as an independent reviewer, and pointed out that no “hard and absolute measure” exists for earning tenure. Nor, he said, is everyone’s interpretation of the quality of a faculty member’s teaching, service and research guaranteed to be the same.

In response to suggestions of gender bias in the tenure denials, Ezra Zubrow, president of the Buffalo Center Chapter of United University Professions (UUP) and professor of anthropology, said that the union had looked into the issue of gender discrimination and “there is, as far as we can tell, and as far as NYSUT (New York State United Teachers) legal can tell, no evidence of gender discrimination.”

Lucinda Finley, vice provost for faculty affairs, added that tenure denials for men and women have been about equal for at least the past eight years.