Triggle stresses need for UB to make choices
Provost tells Professional Staff Senate that roles, areas where university can excel must be defined

By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor

With the 21st century on the horizon, institutions of higher education can no longer be "all things to all people," but rather will have to seek out specific roles and areas where they can excel, Provost David Triggle told members of the Professional Staff Senate at the group's April 22 meeting.

However, defining those specific roles and areas will involve making choices-sometimes "discomforting choices"-something that individuals in higher education are "reluctant to do," Triggle noted.

He pointed out that the call for change comes within the context of an increasing demand for higher education and expectations that colleges and universities will be the "focal points and integrators" of economic development.

But with these expectations come the "'four-letter' words: accountability, productivity and quality," Triggle said.

The provost said that, particularly at the state level, colleges and universities increasingly will be assessed on their educational performance and outcomes, which will lead the institutions to develop new measures of accountability.

But these are issues that faculty, for the most part, "have never dealt with very seriously," Triggle said, noting that he thinks this exercise will require colleges and universities to refocus and revise their campus missions.

"This will bring a great deal of angst to people as we challenge long-cherished and long-held views of what we should be doing and what we are all about.

"Change is a very difficult issue to deal with at a university," he said.

Triggle suggested that institutions of higher learning can be placed into three categories: the "brand-name" institutions, such as Harvard, Yale and Duke; the "convenience" institutions, such as Phoenix and Motorola, and the "mass-market" institutions, where most state universities-including UB-and liberal arts institutions lie. These mass-market institutions, he said, will be "increasingly buffeted by the white waters of change."

They will not survive, he warned, "unless they respond to the changing demands of the marketplace and establish roles and functions and niches they can uniquely satisfy relative to the competition.

"Universities face massive issues of change," he said, adding that UB, as well as other institutions, currently are in the midst of such issues.

Universities will have to establish performance indicators, not only to satisfy the public, but also so that the institutions know internally the success and impact of their programs.

Triggle said that UB is looking at all its programs and asking such questions as: What is the mission of the university, school, department or program? Is the program still worth providing? Would UB offer the program if it weren't already providing it?

Moreover, when establishing new programs, universities must look for "areas of competitive advantage," he said.

But the dilemma presented in cutting unproductive programs and establishing new ones is that the decision-making process inherent in higher education is bad, a process that Triggle described as an "endless loop" of large, participatory committees that meet for months, and which the end result of the process "is, in fact, process, with no decision.

"We need to make decisions, we need to listen to people, we need to weigh the facts, we need to get as much information as we can, but it needs to be done in a timely way; we need to make expeditious decisions that overall are to the benefit of the institutionŠ" he said.

Academics, he said, tend to define success in the following way: "shoot an arrow and when no one is looking draw the bull's eye around it.

"We need to get away from these sorts of decision-making processes," he said. UB first must define the target and the mission, then use performance measures, accountability, productivity and quality "to measure how close we've really come to defining the bull's eye in the center of the target."

Triggle told senators that enrollment continues to be his top priority as provost because it's "the most important, single factor that confronts us."

Failure to meet enrollment targets results in a loss of the tuition revenue from those students who are not attending UB, as well as the loss of state tax support, he said, noting that the loss of the tax support is a permanent base-budget reduction.

Triggle said he also is working to develop a resource-allocation methodology within the university that rewards those units that meet mutually-agreed-upon enrollment and performance targets.

Moreover, UB needs to be able to mobilize resources to take advantage of new demands and new directions. "We can't allow the university to be fixed into a departmental paradigm" that was created in the German research universities of the late 1800s. "Disciplines change vastly since their original creation. We must be able to move into new areas," he said, citing the enormous demand among students for computer-science courses and majors.

Triggle told senators that the topic of research at UB will be another of his top priorities. He said he will be studying the ways in which research policy is set, ways to encourage faculty and staff to take on research projects, reshaping research boundaries to reflect new divisions and disciplines, and ways to provide research incentives.