Faculty urged to focus on undergraduate education

"This university can no longer continue to function with priorities that put undergraduate education in second or third place; it has to come first," said Nicolas Goodman, vice provost for undergraduate education.

"If we do not provide an educational experience for our students that they are willing to pay for, then they will go elsewhere. If that happens, then the budget of the university will shrink even faster than it has in recent years, and the quality of everything we do will decline."

Goodman emphasized that faculty involvement is essential for any university to change a culture that values research over teaching and graduate students over undergraduates.

"Each department and each program must urgently find ways to attract more students, to treat its students better, to enable more students to succeed in its program and to make the whole experience happier and more satisfying for our students," he said. "Programs that do not do that are a drain on the institution that we can no longer afford.

"The truth is that, as we often say, the university is the faculty; only the faculty can change the faculty culture," he said. "Only the faculty can exert the pressure on colleagues that will be required really to change university priorities."

Goodman added: "Bill Greiner and Tom Headrick and David Triggle and I have been saying for some time that the faculty must change their priorities or they will be forced by external circumstances to change their priorities.

"Those external circumstances have arrived," he stressed. "We no longer have the luxury to neglect our undergraduate students. If we do not do a better job of taking care of these young people and if we are not perceived of doing a better job, they will not come."

Dennis Malone, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, noted Goodman's use of the word "perception" several times in his remarks, calling it critical to the issue.

"Because, in a sense, it really doesn't matter as much as we wish it would what the situation is actually here; what matters is what it is perceived to be here," Malone said.

He said that when he's talked to students at other institutions about their perceptions of UB, he's been told that UB is big and impersonal and that the faculty must be more involved with undergraduates. Moreover, Malone said, those students perceive that in the sciences, lower-division students are taught in large numbers by faculty and teaching assistants (TAs) who do not speak English well.

"The data probably show that in fact that is not nearly so true as you might think. Nevertheless, it is damn well the perception," he said.

In the short term, there are "draconian" solutions that could be undertaken, such as not using TAs who do not speak English well in lower-division courses, he noted.

"That involves a big change," he said. The question is, are you willing to do it? Are we willing to pay that price?"

President William R. Greiner told senators Goodman's remarks were a "great piece to start a dialogue."

UB should be making a "long-run commitment to the kinds of changes that will improve the quality of what we do, both undergraduate and graduate and then you have to balance the graduate and undergraduate," Greiner said.

He called undergraduate education "our franchise mission-that's what the people of the State of New York pay us for first." But, he stressed, taxpayers also want undergraduate education "that is of the type you would expect from an institution of our type, which is a university, and I think that ought to be a different type and quality and character of education than of the type of education you would expect to get in a collegeŠand that's where our graduate and research mission comes in."

Jack Meacham, professor of psychology, questioned how faculty members will react to statements that undergraduate education is the top priority of the university.

"Quite frankly, if I carry those messages back to my colleagues I'll be met with a fair amount of skepticism; some will just laugh at me, some will just turn away and not even continue the conversation," Meacham said, noting that faculty think the university's mission "has to do with research grants and graduate education."

Mitchell Harwitz, associate professor of economics and chair of the Faculty Senate Admissions and Retention Committee, compared UB to a corporation that is rapidly losing market share and needs to change "the corporate culture."

One technique that works, he said, is an effort by the administration of the company to involve individual decision-makers-in this case, the faculty-in things like quality circles and change circles.

Instead of issuing orders from the top down, the company, he said, should go into an "intensive communication-and-learning mode to sort out issues."

"I think what we're talking about here is getting a lot of face-to-face talking done," he said. "If we're going to have a long-term change in the institutional cultureŠit's going to have to come this way. I can't imagine any set of orders will get tenured faculty to change."

Robert Palmer, vice president for student affairs, told senators the university has an enrollment target for the coming fall of about 24,000, including 2,700 first-time freshmen and 1,700 transfer students. With the number of applications in both categories declining, meeting those targets will be "a stretch," Palmer said.

He noted that at this point in the calendar year, the Office of Admissions will concentrate on three areas: increasing the number of applications from transfer students; increasing the yield of freshmen and increasing the yield of transfers.

"We think we can do the job of getting enough applications; when the dust settles, we'll have over 20,000 applications. We will accept enough students to meet our targets if we're looking at a yield of 24 percent," Palmer said.

Follow-up with accepted students by deans and faculty, he noted, will be crucial to increasing the yield.