Convocation: stressing academic unity; Ceremony's speakers, awards focus on sense of community for modern university

By BRENT CUNNINGHAM
Reporter Staff

Amace bearer and a host of flag bearers extended a 650-year-old academic tradition last Wednesday when they led UB deans, faculty members, staff, students and community members along the North Campus Spine and into the Center for the Arts for the university's third annual convocation.

While much of the ceremony involved distribution of awards, honors and titles, the keynote speakers explored the idea of "convocation" itself, asking what "coming together for a meeting" might mean in an age of technological expansion and budgetary reorganization.

Sargur N. Srihari, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and director of the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition, suggested that information technology might be able to provide the modern university with the sense of community it has lost.

Academy fuels information age

Citing both the economic vibrancy of information technology and its tendency to cross all academic disciplines, Srihari reminded his audience that, "the academy brought about the information age and will continue to fuel it."

A good case can be made, said Srihari, for connecting information technology to almost any discipline: mathematics, engineering, the arts, the hard sciences or the social sciences.

"For example," he noted, "the attempt to get computers to read English handwriting...straddles all these disciplines."

In such cross-disciplinary tendencies, Srihari located the possibility of real academic unity. He compared information technology to the elephant in the Indian tale of "The Blind Men and the Great Beast." While each discipline understands information technology from its own perspective, just as, in the story, each blind man feels a different part of the elephant, still there is unity and community in the fact that there is a common object of study.

Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture, discussed academic community from the perspective of literature and the arts, evoking the budgetary and technological stress he and his colleagues have weathered.

Change creates stress

"All that technology is so lovely," said Jackson, echoing and complicating Srihari's comments. "But in the humanities, we don't live in a simple world of technology. We also live in the messy world of politics and priorities and programs."

According to Jackson, the "messy world" of change creates stress. "We all know that stress compresses," said Jackson, "but I want to tell you stress can also liberate."

Arguing that delight and community are just as possible in a university during times of "dazzling and sometimes terrifying change," Jackson quoted the poet William Blake: "The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water and breeds reptiles of the mind." But, he went on, even when individuals are capable of changing their opinions, they do not become islands unto themselves. "We are not only individuals," he said. "We are also partners, collaborators, family members in the enormous and complex enterprise that is this university. "

President William R. Greiner later echoed Jackson's comments about change. "We are about creation, destruction and recreation in the search for truth," he said.

Provost Thomas E. Headrick concluded that both speeches were concerned with "how much we mean to each other as a community." The public distribution of awards, honors and titles, he argued, was a symbol of that togetherness.

In a ceremony honoring professor Jacob D. Hyman's 50 years of service to UB, including 11 years as dean of the School of Law, Greiner and Barry Boyer, the law school's current dean, praised Hyman's service to the ideal of academic community. Hyman, who oversaw the transition of the School of Law from a component in a private university to a component in the State University of New York system, said he had seen "an excellent small school become an excellent large school."

Thomas B. Tomasi, former president of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, was presented with a SUNY honorary doctorate for his stewardship of a "crucial biomedical resource for UB, Western New York, New York State and the nation as a whole" and for his own research. iArnold B. Gardner, a member of the SUNY Board of Trustees, presented the degree to Tomasi.

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Professional Staff Senate, Voldemar A. Innus, senior associate vice president for University Services, presented Michael A. Stokes, chair of the Professional Staff Senate, with a glass and a plaque.

Also honored were five UB faculty members recently named Distinguished Professors, the highest faculty rank in the SUNY system, by the SUNY Board of Trustees: SUNY Distinguished Professors Paras N. Prasad of the Department of Chemistry and director of the Photonics Research Laboratory, and Srihari; SUNY Distinguished Service Professors Peter H. Hare of the Department of Philosophy and Charles V. Paganelli of the Department of Physiology, and SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Diane R. Christian of the Department of English.

Faculty and staff who received the SUNY Chancellor's Awards for Excellence also were honored, as follows:

Excellence in teaching: Shahid Ahmad, associate professor of civil, structural and environmental engineering; Michael P. Long, associate professor of music, and Triantafilos J. Mountziaris, associate professor of chemical engineering.

Excellence in librarianship: Edward Herman, associate librarian, Lockwood Library; Glendora Johnson-Cooper, associate librarian, Undergraduate Library, and Nancy A. Schiller, associate librarian, Science and Engineering Library.

Excellence in professional service: Martha A. Barton, assistant dean in the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics; Sandra J. Fazekas, staff associate/events coordinator for the Center for the Arts; Maryanne L. Mather, instructional support technician in the Department of Periodontics, and Leonard F. Snyder, senior associate vice president for University Services.

The solemn tone of the convocation was undercut by humor more than once. During Bruce Jackson's speech, the Center for the Arts' disaster alarm was triggered, cutting him off in the middle of a skeptical comment about computers.

"Have I offended the computer gods?" Jackson asked.

"It must be a computer glitch," joked Greiner.