Dr. Wels and Members of the University Council, President Greiner, Dr. Lawrence-Lightfoot, Distinguished Professors, Chancellor's Awardees, Faculty, Staff, Students and Friends.

The House of Commons has a tradition that when a new Member of Parliament rises for his or her first speech the normal customs of the House are held in abeyance-the hoots, jeers, and heckles from opposing backbenchers are replaced by polite attention. In a way this occasion marks my maiden speech as Provost, and though in this setting I would not expect hecklers (actually that might offer a refreshing challenge), I will have very much failed if what I have to say today goes unremarked or unchallenged later. I have already stimulated considerable discussion with some ideas for rearranging our enrollment distribution and emphasizing our appeal to upper division undergraduate and graduate students. I will not spend time today elaborating on those ideas, but don't take this to mean that I have laid them aside.

The Presidents' recent Mission Statement set a goal: that UB be recognized as the premier public university in the Northeast by 2005, and thus be acknowledged as SUNY's flagship campus, competing vigorously with Rutgers, Penn State, Pittsburgh, and Maryland; and become a public university of stature in a region of our nation that has always held private universities in higher esteem than the publics.

There is more than a little irony that as the Mission Statement was being fashioned the state government was cutting the state tax subsidy to SUNY by more than 20 percent and is now floating the possibility of another nearly 20 percent withdrawal of state support next year. The "public" in public research universities has been put on a rather strict diet. These political realities also mean that UB is likely to remain a small public AAU university, more like Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado than the large Midwest flagships.

But be that as it may, I have not come here today to reflect upon the SUNY budgets or their impact on UB. Too many of my recent waking hours have been given over to those concerns. I would prefer on this occasion to pose and think about the question: how should UB organize itself to pursue its 2005 goal?

One of the reasons I have been drawn into administration over the years has been my fascination with organizations, with how humans structure their relationships and interact to achieve some common goal, or perform some collective task. It started when I spent two years as a graduate student studying local governments in England. Organizational analysis later became a source of my livelihood when I worked as a management consultant in factories in Glasgow and board rooms in London; it constituted one of my graduate exam subjects at Stanford and has been a focus of a significant share of my teaching and writing ever since. My experience has made me particularly sensitive to the problems that can be exacerbated by allegiance to existing structures, and to the good that can flow from organizational resilience and flexibility. As a result, I bring to the Office of the Provost a clear predisposition about organization in a public research university: that pursuing our fundamental goals of providing educational quality, nurturing intellectual discovery and creativity, and serving the public is sacrosanct. Maintaining UB's current organizational structure is not.

Departments based on disciplines have long provided the essential structural elements of a research university. They define major and graduate degree requirements, recruit and appoint faculty, and set standards for quality and excellence. Through faculty representation in professional associations, journals and conferences, departments represent the university to the research and educational world beyond the university.

Within the university, they provide academic identity for faculty and simply the complex task of managing a large, essentially non-hierarchical organization because they are granted autonomy in key decisions about the important elements of our responsibility-what students should learn, what areas of knowledge should be taught, what avenues to the creation of knowledge should be pursued. And the autonomy is justified by standards of excellence externally created through the professional expectations of the discipline.

For the most part this form of organization and its attendant decentralized autonomy has succeeded. It has made universities stronger than they would have otherwise been in a more hierarchical and centralized environment.

But valuable as that organizational form has been it also has a downside. The present departmental and disciplinary structure imposes limits on the university's potential for development. Today I want to focus on the need to overcome some of these limiting features.

In addressing those problems, I don't want to leave the impression that I seek a wholesale abolition of departments. Absolutely not. But I do see the need for some change in our organization and its incentive system. For instance, sometimes departmental autonomy has protected weak departments and programs by permitting them to perpetuate their own weaknesses. Efforts by deans to intervene have occasionally succeeded and at other times failed. University faculty have tolerated weakness more than was probably warranted, creating a milieu in which it has been easier to take from the strong than from the weak when resources become restricted. If UB is to pursue its goal of being the premier public university in the Northeast, undermining strength to shore up weakness cannot be a sensible development strategy.

Simply declaring on the side of academic strength, of course, does not make it happen. Existing programs have been protected by our characterization of UB as a comprehensive public research university. This conception has given each program, once established, a license to grow and expand. Only the programs regarded as peripheral, those unaffiliated with a discipline, lacked this license. For example, the old College system disappeared, and the more recent Undergraduate College failed to gain a foothold and was folded into our traditional structure.

Any examination of major research universities-almost all of which claim to be comprehensive- shows that their array of programs are far from uniform. Of course there are many similarities, but there are also differences which arise from the accidents of history or the past ingenuity of particular faculty members. Though the range and diversity of programs at UB are important to our mission, it is hard to support the argument that dropping a few programs would deprive us of our claim to comprehensiveness. I believe that we need to deal more directly and honestly with the very few UB programs that are unlikely under any circumstance to become strong and attractive to good students.

Tolerating weakness, however, is not the only problem that the departmental and disciplinary organizational structure might occasionally pose. This structure also provides obstacles to making the most of the talent and ingenuity the university possesses.

The self-directed, academically-free faculty member is also an important structural component upon which great universities are built-a fact that most people outside the university do not and cannot understand. But to the extent that the university determines the activities of its faculty, it does so primarily at the departmental level of our organization. Because the aggregate range of UB's professional schools and arts-and-sciences departments encompasses some disciplinary overlap, a number of faculty have relevant training to teach outside of their departmental or school niche. Yet we bow more often than we should to obstacles cast by departments in the way of sensible solutions to broad instructional problems.

Departmental prerogatives can frustrate reasonable deployment of our faculty's teaching talent in several ways. In an institution this size there are shifts in student demand for particular courses, alterations in enrollment distributions between lower and upper division, and changes in faculty availability because of research grants, sabbaticals and turnover. These shifts can leave a department short of faculty for teaching an important offering in its program or long on offerings marginally important to its program. In another department or school there may be faculty members whose competence lends itself to teaching the needed course and whose own courses may not be as institutionally important-as distinguished from departmentally important-as the offering left unattended.

In these situations the departmental priorities almost invariably trump institutional need. An important course goes untaught or an extra person must be hired to teach it. Or sometimes the reverse occurs. Faculty in one department may be willing with their chair's blessing to teach another department's offering, but the receiving department balks because its faculty had no hand in appointing and anointing these willing faculty members from the other department. Such exclusionary authority, of course, should scarcely be relevant to whether faculty members by education and experience have the ability to teach the subject well.

This is not to dismiss the departmental view as mere obstructionism. It flows quite understandably from a key role that the department plays in the university's organization, that is, to maintain the university's academic quality by selecting excellent faculty in the area where the departments possess the necessary expertise to make such judgments. The department perceives the importation of faculty it has not selected as an erosion of its academic authority and status. But a more salient factor may be that it lessens the apparent leverage which the department has (with the dean or provost) to gain more resources. This is particularly meaningful to the extent that status both within the university and in the academic world outside derives from possessing significant resources and large faculty size. Although the obstacles to sensible cooperation have rational underpinnings in the roles that departments have been assigned within the university, they can be counterproductive for ensuring the university's appropriate overall use of its faculty.

These obstacles are compounded by a culture within a department that ranks the importance of the department's various responsibilities. For instance, among the options of teaching to graduate students, to undergraduate majors, and to undergraduates who will major elsewhere, the "elsewheres" are not perceived to be as important as the others. These non-majors are perceived as someone else's students, not the department's. Think about that for a moment. Although they are students who have signed up to learn what the departmental faculty have to teach, they are considered less significant to the academic mission and enterprise of the department. It seems to me that when a student enrolls in a department's course, that student is the department's student, there to learn what the department and discipline have to offer. To think otherwise cannot contribute to the healthy functioning of the university as a whole.

And yet from the departmental perspective, the ranking makes sense. Both the university and the external disciplinary world measure the department's contribution by the number of its majors, its graduate students, and the degrees it grants. The faculty naturally invest themselves most in the students engaged by and fascinated with their particular subject matter and research. In many departments, faculty see and work with their majors on a regular basis, and certainly in departments with doctoral programs faculty work closely with their graduate students, who in many cases also become integral contributors to the faculty members' research investigations.

Not only do the organizational and social incentives of departments encourage the priorities that put the "elsewheres" at the bottom of the list, but our language also reinforces that ranking. Teaching non-majors is universally described within academia as "service" teaching-that is, a teaching obligation of departments fulfilled in order that they can maintain their place and size within the university, rather than being thought of as teaching done because of a basic mission to enable students to learn. For the university to meet its broad undergraduate obligations, we will need to change the incentives and perhaps the linguistic conventions.

So far I have touched on some of the limitations of departments in our undergraduate mission. If we turn to graduate education and research, the problems are of a different order. Essentially, the departmental structure and intellectual identity flow from the graduate mission, particularly in a university like ours. The discipline provides the link to the external validation of our academic efforts and for many graduate programs the discipline links its graduate students to their career opportunities.

The problems at the graduate level are less inherent to the organizational structure per se, and more related to the particular context of this university. To put the matter directly, UB, with its 3 faculties and 28 departments in the Arts and Sciences, 5 Schools of Health Science, and 7 additional professional schools, is spread too thinly to do everything well. Strong graduate education and research depend upon a critical mass of faculty and students sufficient to produce intellectual friction and creative spark. In several areas, that essential critical mass is lacking. A number of departments are too small to provide adequate coverage in the discipline, often fostering an inward-looking academic conservatism that limits intellectual engagement across disciplinary boundaries. Yet, as our own efforts at interdisciplinary research and education indicate in the several successful Centers we have established, much fruitful research is to be done through collaborative work at disciplinary intersections. In fact, forward thinking and good reason suggests that some of the most exciting advances in knowledge in the years ahead will come through such work.

How, then, do we overcome the built-in disabilities of our size for graduate education and research as they are reinforced in our departmental/disciplinary structure? Let me suggest several strategies.

One, for those departments and schools where critical mass and demonstrated quality exist, we maintain current size and try to enhance quality. In other words, we support and enhance strength.

Second, for areas without critical mass or recognized quality, we reorganize through combinations of faculty into Centers or Institutes or multi-department graduate programs to emphasize developing areas of graduate education and research that bring together different disciplinary perspectives. We may need to invent new areas of graduate study along the lines of emerging mixed-disciplinary research and support the development of related journals or their electronic replacements. These programs may provide broader, less narrowly specialized doctoral education as they respond to a widening concern that doctoral education attune itself to the needs of society beyond the now diminishing academic market.

Third, in graduate areas taught both at UB and other University Centers in SUNY, we may be able to work out understandings to concentrate specializations at specific campuses and also to share student access to faculty at other SUNY Centers through fellowship exchanges as well as conventional and electronic communication.

Fourth, because of our rich mix of professional schools and arts-and-sciences graduate programs, UB has an opportunity to develop graduate programs that blend study in the traditional academic disciplines with professional education. A variety of such combinations might broaden career opportunities for our students while taking particular advantage of the special role and configuration of UB within the SUNY system.

In other words, if UB is to establish itself as a premier university as the millennium turns, we must rethink our academic organization, we must let ingenuity lead us down unconventional paths, we must alter some of the departmental structures defined by disciplinary perspectives, and we must combat department isolationism.

Departmental isolation arises in part because among ourselves as faculty we do not know enough about each other, we do not talk enough with each other, we do not share ourselves academically and intellectually enough with each other. In general, we are falling short in maintaining an academic community which is a key aspect of our idealization of university. No quick fix exists for this problem, but I hope through efforts of my office and of the fine group of Vice Provosts-Ken Levy, Bill Fischer, Nick Goodman, Stephen Dunnett and David Triggle, who is soon to take office, we can encourage more knowledge about our colleagues, more discussion with them, and collaboration among them. We can help, but our efforts will be a small contribution compared to what would occur if all faculty seized just a few of the many opportunities to find some other kindred academic and intellectual spirits in a department or school outside of their own.

My final point shifts from consideration of the parts of our university to its whole. I cannot tell you how many times I have encountered faculty who voice concern that the university is turning away from graduate education and research to focus on undergraduates and public service. At the same time I hear from other faculty who fear just the opposite, that our preoccupation with graduate education and research relegates undergraduate education and public service to secondary status. The Mission Statement makes it clear that research, graduate education, undergraduate education and public service-all four activities-are integral parts of institutional responsibility. If UB is to be the premier public university in the Northeast, the university as a whole must do all of these well, exceedingly well.

But for particular faculty members, that does not mean that they must divide their academic work and effort among all four of these activities. Different faculty members have different talents and interests. Their particular contributions to these multiple responsibilities may and should vary. UB must do all four well, but not every faculty member must do all well or even do all. We need to organize ourselves so that each School or Faculty has a clear understanding of its responsibilities in these activities, so that each, in turn, organizes itself and its faculty to deliver on these responsibilities collectively. The role of the central administration is to organize these expectations to enable the university as a whole to deliver excellence in all these activities.

This approach will require some shift in the way we set and evaluate the expectations of individual faculty members. We should expect individual faculty members to do what they can do best to contribute to overall university responsibilities, and not necessarily do what every other faculty member does. We need to work with a somewhat more differentiated model of faculty performance, finding ways to acknowledge and value different sets of strengths and forms of distinction. We have had a tendency to rely more on external validation of performance than internal assessment of contribution, with the consequence of impeding the university's success at achieving all that it might achieve. In short, we need to look hard at how we evaluate and hold accountable the Schools and Faculties for their teaching, their research and their public service, and we need to revisit how we evaluate performance meriting promotion to full professor. I continue to believe that tenure should be granted only to faculty who have strong research accomplishments and fine teaching abilities. But I also believe that promotion to full professor might rest on demonstrated achievements in one or two of the major areas of university and faculty responsibility.

To summarize, let me review briefly and succinctly what I am proposing.

1. The university-faculty and administration-should build on its strengths and not protect a small number of programs not likely to achieve sustained vitality and success.

2. Departments should not have organizational prerogatives that prevent other parts of the university from calling upon their faculty member's talents and services when needed, or that self-limit their access to faculty talents from other departments from which they could benefit.

3. We have to find inventive ways to build excellent graduate programs and support path-breaking research where our conventional departmental and disciplinary structures have not been wholly successful, and do so with the quality faculty we have, rather than with a host of new additions.

4. We cannot forsake quality undergraduate education for nationally acclaimed graduate education and research, nor worthy public service for both. As a university we must do all well. An individual faculty member, however, should be able to expect rewards for high quality achievements that contribute to any of the major university missions.

5. If our organizational structures and departmental priorities, if our allocations of authority and our incentives, inhibit this drive for excellence, then we ought to alter them. To repeat my predisposition, pursuing our fundamental goals of providing educational quality, nurturing intellectual discovery and creativity, and serving the public is sacrosanct. Maintaining UB's current organizational structure is not.

As I said at the beginning, I expect that these remarks will lead to serious discussion and debate among us. That would be a welcome step toward our becoming the premier public university in the Northeast by 2005.