EDITOR'S NOTE:
The following is a longer version of stories written about three meetings on the provost's academic planning document held on March 5, 6 and 11 than appear in the printed issue of the Reporter. Because of space limitations, shorter, yet still comprehensive, versions of the coverage appear in the printed issues.

Faculty voice views, concerns on Provost's planning document

Similar sentiments were expressed at meetings Headrick held last week with arts and letters faculty and department chairs. The meetings are part of a series of such discussions the provost is holding to gather input about the planning document.

While faculty members at all three meetings welcomed the increased emphasis on interdisciplinary research that the focus on centers and institutes would represent, they voiced concern about what they perceive as a de-emphasis on the departments as the defining structures within a faculty or school.

They also wondered what the rationale was for reorganizing the arts and sciences.

Speaking at the Faculty Senate meeting, Don Schack, professor of mathematics, said there is concern within the senate's Tenure and Privileges committee about how centers, institutes and initiatives would fit within the promotion and appointment criteria of the university.

In particular, he said, the committee is concerned about the centrality of the department in promotion and tenure decisions and the issue of properly valued collaborative work. "Culturally, this universityÉvalues the establishment of a single focus and an independent publication record over collaborative work that spans many different areas. And yet we're pushing in a new direction," he said.

Committee members feel that if the university is to move in a direction that emphasizes collaborative work, there is a need for a broad outline for dealing with some of these significant issues in promotion and tenure and how "we can begin to change the culture to recognize these other modalities," he said.

Barbara Bono, associate professor of English, said concerns among her colleagues revolve around "critical mass, a sense of home, a sense of integrity, a sense of material base for doing work, a sense of the long run," as opposed to concern that "we will dissipate our energies and divide ourselves as a faculty."

She urged that the university resist tendencies to polarize the notion of departments from centers and think carefully about how departments have a history and an integrity. Many of UB's problems stem from the fact that it has been "deprived of critical mass at precisely those centers," she said.

Faculty members can do both disciplinary and interdisciplinary work, but "for their work life in the long run, it seems to me that it is from that sense of the core that the periphery develops," she said. Bono noted that she would be "severely deprived of the very life blood of what I do at this university" if she were not working together in a building with her colleagues in a "shared enterprise."

Headrick said there seems to be an underlying presumption among faculty that centers and institutes will "take over the university.

"What I'm looking forÉare opportunities for people to find that kind of intellectual sustenance," he said. While some individuals may find that within a department, Headrick added, others may be frustrated by the departmental structure and may find their opportunities outside their department or discipline.

Laura Winsky Mattei, assistant professor of political science, told Headrick that she personally supports the idea of more interdisciplinary research, but is concerned about his idea of generating agreement for the theory without worrying about the practice.

"In part, support for this plan will depend on how it folds out practically," she said.

While worrying about exactly where faculty members might be based-in a center or in a department -"seems like a trivial thing, I think these day-to-day, practical issues do have an impact on our lives."

Winsky Mattei also noted that as a junior faculty member who will be facing a tenure decision in a few years, she wonders who will be making this type of decision. "If I sort of become part of an institute and I'm sort of part of a department, what kind of criteria will be applied?" she asked.

"I simply want to reiterate to you, the great uncertainty associated with a decision in principle is going to lead to a lot of opposition in the initial stages, particularly among junior faculty, a lot of whom are dying to leave UB, quite honestly, and are looking for other job opportunities."

Headrick said he hopes to chart a direction for the university that "people will find exciting and find attractive and will want to stay here. That's what the purpose of this is, not to scare people away and it's not to throw up warning flags. Quite the opposite."

Jean Dickson, Polish curator in Lockwood Library and president of the Buffalo chapter of UUP, wondered "what exactly is the problem we're trying to resolve with this reorganization?"

She said she thought the problem was the lack of money, but the only problem she said she saw being addressed was "the lack of ratings.

Ratings, she said, are only a reflection of what's happened to the university because of eight years of budget cuts.

"We need to talk about the basics, which is the resources that we have or do not have, and if we're going to set up all these new programs, institutes and centers, we do not have a growing fund coming in from the state. At what expense are we going to create these institutes and centers? How many jobs will probably will be lost?" she said, noting that since the administration has assumed a no-retrenchment policy, most of the losses will have to come from nonrenewals.

Headrick replied that the plan should not reduce the size of the faculty and staff-and in fact should substantially increase the number of faculty-since he plans to have more resources to spend. Some of the money will come from increased revenue from other sources, some from the retirement of senior faculty earning high salaries who are replaced with junior faculty hired at lower salaries, some from expanded research and technology transfer and some, hopefully, from tuition that comes directly back to the university, he said.

Christina Bloebaum, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, noted that the National Research Council ratings of doctoral programs are "totally, completely and utterly inadequate" and offered two examples from her department to back up her assertion.

"I question the validity of using something like NRC to make these kinds of decisions-extremely important decisions-about viability of programs, for instance. I think you seriously need to reconsider the matrix being used to decide viability of programs and where resources should be invested and where they should not."

The planning document has set as a goal raising the quality of doctoral programs in the arts and sciences and professional disciplines over the next decade so that at lease one quarter are rated in the top quartile-and almost all in the top half-of programs in the country.

Headrick agreed that there are problems with the NRC's-and other-ratings, but noted that UB can't ignore them because of the reputation the NRC holds in academia.

He proposed that UB create its own internal system of evaluation of programs, as well as develop a better data collection system to funnel information to groups such as the NRC.

James Holstun, associate professor of English, said a number of his colleagues are puzzled about "the democratic content of the new university" Headrick is proposing and how the institutes and centers would be funded and administered.

"I've always thought that one of the best indices for the democratic content of an institution is the way in which it is instituted to begin with," he said, noting that Headrick has been consulting with numerous groups on campus.

"Consultation is great; I think democracy is better," he said, asking Headrick if he would be willing to submit his document to a vote of the faculty and commit himself to abiding by that vote.

The provost responded: "I don't think that's the way in this academic community, or any academic community, to do these kinds of things; I think you do it by talk and dialogue." He added that there are a number of committees in the Faculty Senate that are examining various parts of the report and making recommendations.

"A vote, which you describe as democratic, is probably not the form of democracy we want to operate here," he said. "We want considered deliberation and discussion and recommendations that clearly reflect the large spectrum of opinion, not the summary of opinion that's expressed by a vote."

Schack noted that he could not find in the planning document any delineation of the issues that are expected to be addressed by a reorganization of the arts and sciences.

"I don't see how we can have a cogent discussion of the possibilities and the selection of the best alternative (for reorganization) if we don't know what we're trying to produce. There's no way to get faculty support, or reasonable discussion, if we don't know what it is we hope to accomplish."

William Baumer, professor of philosophy, said that he has gathered "from this discussion and reading between the lines of the document" that a major topic to be addressed by the university is the quality of the undergraduate program. "And it appears that a major component of addressing that is something like a College of Arts and Sciences."

Baumer said that more than three-quarters of his teaching load is at the freshman level and most of his students are not from the arts and sciences-they are from programs that would not be included in any proposed realignment of the arts and sciences.

"I fail to see that an arts and sciences college really addresses issues of the basics and generalities of our undergraduate program," he said.

Moreover, the current division of the arts and sciences was not imposed, as some have insisted, but "was urged by the faculty."

"All of the issues that have surfaced in the discussion this afternoon as problems to be overcome were problems that the (previous) College of Arts and Sciences had not been able to overcome," despite a 50-year history, an able dean and much sympathy among the departments, Baumer said.

"All of that leads me to suspect that that (merging arts and sciences) is not a solution that deserves further consideration."

March 6 Department Chairs Meeting

A realignment of the arts and sciences that would feature an even broader view of the sciences than has been suggested by Headrick was proposed at a meeting of department chairs on March 6.

Headrick has proposed two options to reorganize the arts and sciences. One would merge the faculties of Arts and Letters, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences and Mathematics into a College of Arts and Sciences. The other would merge Arts and Letters and Social Sciences into a College of Arts, Humanities and Social Science while merging Natural Sciences and Mathematics and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences into a College of Science and Engineering.

Stuart Shapiro, chair of the Department of Computer Science, and several others favored the latter option, but suggested including in the College of Science and Engineering science departments from other faculties and schools, such as the medical school and social sciences.

This scenario "would make much more sense" than other possible configurations, Shapiro said.

Headrick said he had considered a complicated version of that proposal in an early draft of his report, but had been advised that it wouldn't work and would cause a lot of problems.

For example, the insistence of professional accrediting groups on having certain organizational configurations for such schools as medicine, dentistry and pharmacy might make it difficult to pull out science departments from those schools in order to include them in a College of Science and Engineering, he said.

"But bring it (the proposal) back and let's talk about it," he said, asking Shapiro to submit the idea to him in writing.

Headrick told faculty members that he would consider other recommendations for realignment of the arts and sciences besides the ones he has proposed.

"But what I won't listen to-and I think I've made that clear-that we ought to stay as we are; I don't think that's working," Headrick said, noting the current alignment is too fragmented, with too many issues that now must be negotiated from dean to dean but could be handled much more collegially between faculty members and departments.

Robert Van Valin, professor and chair of the Department of Linguistics, said he thought it was crucial in making a final decision on how to realign the arts and sciences to determine first what the primary problem was that would be addressed by the reorganization.

If the primary concern is undergraduate education, then a particular alignment, such as a large arts and sciences college, might be preferred, he said. If the primary concern is promoting an environment for graduate research and interdisciplinary research, a different alignment might be the way to go.

"One thing that needs to be determined is, what's the main problem that needs to be solved with the realignment?" he asked. "Is it undergraduate education? Is it graduate education? Research? The best alignment for one of those might not be the best alignment for the others."

Headrick noted that although concern for undergraduate education is one of the factors that is driving his effort to realign the arts and sciences, "I don't think you can say it's primarily this or primarily that. What I kept saying in this report is that all of those things are primary, all of those things are important. The question is, how do we put together what we're doing in order to meet all of those objectives?"

John Boot, professor and chair of the Department of Management Science and Systems, criticized the planning document for what he called a lack of "vision" and integration with the rest of SUNY.

He told Headrick he personally "would have preferred a document first of all that puts the university fairly and squarely as an instrument that serves the citizens of the state. Second, as an entity which clearly belongs to a larger system."

He also said he would evaluate success based less on external measures -"how do we compare with Pittsburgh and Virginia"-and more on internal measures such as retention and graduation rates and information gleaned from student surveys-things that "tell us about how well we perform the functions of giving an education to the students."

The programs that the university chooses to emphasize should not depend on "the good departments and the bad departments, but depend on what does society need," Boot said.

He wondered if the "basic philosophy of the Provost's Office" is to "make the better departments better yet" or is it to funnel money to those departments that are lagging behind to give them a chance to catch up?

"Those are basic questions. If you put them that way, you can perhaps paint a picture of how you envision the university," he said.

"You call this a planning document; I view it more as a decision document."

James Sawusch, associate professor and acting chair of the Department of Psychology, expressed concern over what he called "potential for conflicts across different components of the plan."

Centers may have a role in hiring and promotion of faculty, he said. Yet departments, not centers, are rated by the National Research Council (NRC), he added.

"If you're judging the success of departments by those rankings, there's the potential for a little bit of cross-purpose here."

Headrick responded by stressing that programs, not departments, are rated by the NRC.

"I recognize there's a potential for tension and disagreement," he said, but suggested that appointments should be a more "collective" procedure, with authority spread between different localities within the institution "so there's a wider participation in the appointments process."

March 5 Faculty of Arts and Letters Meeting

The concept of "centers" and "institutes" dominated discussion at a meeting Headrick held with the Faculty of Arts and Letters on March 5.

While most speakers welcomed the increased emphasis on interdisciplinary research that the focus on centers and institutes would represent, they expressed concern about what they perceived as a de-emphasis on departments as the defining structures within a faculty or school.

Ken Dauber, professor and chair of the Department of English, voiced concern about what he called "a kind of slippage between a response to the budgetary situationÉand the conceptual issues about the nature of this university."

While he said he understands that where departments have been eroded due to budgetary restraints it becomes necessary for departments to work better together and for faculty in one department to work with other departments as well, it seems that the problem for UB's reputation and programs is that the departments indeed have been eroded.

"If that's the problem, the report seems to make the further erosion of departments almost a goal," he said. "The reason why we have slipped is not because departments have been stubborn in terms of thinking about the nature of the university, but because the budget has simply eroded departments over the course of the last 15 years."

The centers and institutes "are going to function to take power, budget, identity away from the departments and begin to place them in other places," he said.

"It seems to me the conceptual solution that's being proposed is really exactly the conceptual problem that is being addressed."

Headrick said departments have been eroded, but added that that problem has not been addressed by looking for ways in which units can work together. He said that a number of his proposals are ways in which people with common interests can work together.

"One of the values of a university is that you do have a collection of very interesting people with a lot to teach each other. What I'm trying to find are vehicles for those kinds of things to occur on a regular basis," he noted.

Headrick said faculty members will continue to be members of departments-even if they are participating in interdisciplinary endeavors as a more central part of their academic life-with responsibilities to departmental programs and degree programs.

"I'm not trying to completely reshape the university to get rid of the departments and replace them with some other kind of structure. What I'm trying to do is somehow meld two different concepts together in some way that will work," he said, adding that "I don't have a simple administrative formula for doing that."

Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of English, said he welcomed the institutes and centers since an increasing number of faculty work in multiple areas. He added that he did not think they would kill the departments, but rather would take UB "in the direction where most large research universities have gone over the last 15 years; we're way behind."

But he wondered where these interdisciplinary units will be "parked...Who's going to own them? Who's going to be answerable? Who's the power?"

Headrick said he had not sorted out those issues yet, although "they won't grow in our current structure the way it's set. Our history shows us that that doesn't happen. We're going to have to make some kind of organizational changes in order to accommodate them if that's where we want to go."

Carol Zemel, professor of art history, noted that for some time interdisciplinary work has been done through the graduate groups. "Would the graduate groups drain off into the distance (under the plan)? There's a structure in place that is faculty-generated based on mutual desires to converse and needs to develop programs.

"It seems that the anxiety I feel about this plan is (because) I don't know how it's going to run and it seems as if there is not much attention being paid to what is already there and implementing that initiative in terms of the structures that we have seen work."

Headrick said his report "is a direction for the way in which the academic enterprise here operates; that ought to be driving us, not what the administrative structures are. We ought to decide what we want to accomplish academically and then figure out how to put together the administrative structures to support it."

Liz Kennedy, professor of American Studies, told Headrick that as someone who has done interdisciplinary work for 28 years, she was "excited by the vision" of the plan, but worried that under it, two interdisciplinary departmental programs-Women's Studies and American Studies-would lose their departmental status.

In his report, Headrick proposes forming a Center for the Study of Cultures in the Americas to manage the doctoral and master's programs in American Studies. The center would be composed of the African-American, Native-American, and Spanish and Latin American Studies departments and the U.S. Studies portion of American Studies. Women's Studies would become part of an Institute for Gender and Women's Research and Education.

Disbanding the American Studies Department, Kennedy said, "undercuts the work; it means you can't hire, your access to degrees is drastically changed.

"In my mind, we have to work out ways that will preserve the interdisciplinary work that's connected to degrees and hiring now as we move toward this other plan. It doesn't make sense to me why we would want to backtrack on that."

She noted that at the University of Iowa-one of UB's aspiration institutions-the administrative structure includes departments, departmentalized programs, and programs and centers. "They recognize that some interdisciplinary programs need to hire," she said.

"I'm hoping that as this gets worked out, that maybe there will be transitional years when American Studies will be maintained as a hiring unit with control over its degrees and that the transition to the centers will not undercut that, and eliminate that, but will, in fact, build on that as a base."

It doesn't make sense at this time, in light of the recent release of the report of the Task Force on Women, for Women's Studies "to be put into an institute that doesn't have the hiring basis, that doesn't have access to degrees that it has now," she said, adding it is "very important to keep the administrative gains that we have now for our disciplinary programs and let our centers build on that as we move ahead."

Moreover, Kennedy stressed that protections for faculty members in their work come from the departments and those protections must be built into future structures, noting that in the future there could be institutes that exist at the pleasure of the dean and hire only part-time faculty.

Michael Frisch, professor of history and American Studies, noted that the proposed Center for the Americas is "a very exciting matrix" to further collaborative work and move "beyond what has been the limit of many of the models that we now have." But he agreed with Kennedy and Zemel that if the university is to move forward, "we really need to build on the best that we've all accomplished and find ways to work together and go ahead and not go backward in any sense."

Continuing the current departmental structure, including American Studies, while building new collaborative relationships and centers "is terribly important," Frisch said.

Headrick agreed that the power to make or determine appointments is crucial and must be part of any new organization, as well as protections for faculty now offered by the departments.