OK given to vote on trustees issue

The university's representatives to the SUNY Faculty Senate received the go-ahead at Tuesday's UB Faculty Senate meeting to vote in favor of any resolution expressing no confidence in the SUNY Board of Trustees that may come up at next week's SUNY Faculty Senate meeting in Cortland.

Dennis Malone, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and a SUNY senator, told the handful of senators remaining at the end of Tuesday's meeting that he expects a resolution to be introduced at the Cortland meeting to censure the trustees for their adoption of a general-education curriculum for the system's four university centers and 13 four-year colleges without consultation with the campuses.

"I need to know how to vote on this issue, should it come up," Malone said.

The UB FSEC on Dec. 16 passed a milder version of a likely SUNY Senate resolution, one that expressed "regret" with the trustees' action.

The new general-education curriculum as approved by the trustees requires candidates for bachelor's degrees to complete at least 30 credit hours of coursework in mathematics, natural science, social science, American history, western civilization, other world civilizations, humanities and the arts, foreign languages, basic communication and reasoning, and information management.

The requirement will apply to all freshmen entering SUNY institutions in Fall 2000. Trustees left the responsibility for establishing the specific course requirements and content of the curriculum to the faculty of each institution.

Judith Adams-Volpe, director of Lockwood Library and a SUNY senator, pointed out that the trustees' adoption of the curriculum violated their own policies, which place faculty in charge of curriculum issues.

William Baumer, professor of philosophy, added that although the SUNY Faculty Senate has been working on the general-education issue for more than three years, system administration and trustees "ignored" the body's report.

Malone warned that a greater danger to campuses than the general-education curriculum was the plan by central administration to institute a system-wide student achievement test that will determine "if we taught (the curriculum) the way they want it taught." And the results of those tests could well come back to haunt the campuses via the performance-funding component of the new resource allocation methodology (RAM), he said. Although the senate lacked a quorum to provide an official instruction to SUNY senators, Malone said he felt it was the "sense of the house" that SUNY senators should endorse a resolution to censure the board of trustees.