Four months of speculation ended June 7 with the passage of the 1995-96 state budget. The cuts to SUNY and UB were deep - $64 million and 8.2 million, respectively. As a result, "We're going to have a tough year," said UB Provost Thomas E. Headrick.

Tough times are going to mean UB will be examining its programs and the education it provides to students, its size as an institution and its relationship within SUNY and with government and industry. But the process should be viewed as an opportunity, Headrick stressed.

This fall, the provost said he plans "to engage in discussions with faculty and staff, people in the university and outside, around the question of how UB can be the best at what it does with the resources it can command."

Responsiveness to student interests is going to be increasingly important, with tuition now accounting for 50 percent of SUNY's revenue and more than 40 percent of UB's revenue and heading higher in the future. "The university will have to assure students that their money is being used to provide and improve the education they're paying for," he said.

"UB has been increasingly forced to spread its resources more thinly as successive state budget cuts have been absorbed across the board, without regard to the high quality or special place of UB in the SUNY system," Headrick said.

"We still manage to educate students well and award the degrees they seek," but along the way many are frustrated by a lack of course offerings of their choice.

UB needs to consider the number and the kinds of programs it offers, and begin to develop those that bridge disciplinary boundaries. "We need to define new ways of educating students to fit the changing contours of knowledge and needs of society," Headrick said.

Though SUNY is being pressured to cut duplication in programs among its campuses, Headrick emphasized, "Most of our programs involve an intimate mixture of undergraduate, master's and doctoral education which we can't disengage from. And, if we're the only SUNY school with a master's or Ph.D. degree in a subject, it makes no sense to cut an undergraduate program, just because other SUNY schools offer similar programs."

The university does have some programs that are not attracting many students and in some cases students are finding that the opportunities that prompted them to pursue their education here do not live up to their expectations. Other programs may be operating with outdated equipment and have no prospects for upgrading it. "In those cases, we have to ask ourselves about the viability of those programs over the long haul," Headrick said, "but not without talking to lots of people and looking at all the ramifications."

Headrick stressed that "the current challenge offers an opportunity to fashion new programs, maybe replacing existing ones with programs that are better attuned to the future needs of students. For example, there's been much public discussion about the limited opportunities in academia for Ph.D.s in science and engineering but the strong need for them in high tech industries. Industry wants graduates with broad, high level education. We may have to restructure our Ph.D. programs to allow less specialization."

One of the impediments UB faces is its size. "Our size is problematic. We're trying to do too much with too little," said Headrick, suggesting three different university models UB may need to consider for the future.

"We might become a university that has a strong undergraduate mission and also maintains high-quality programs at the post-baccalaureate level, emphasizing high-quality graduates in specialized research areas, around which we build institutes and centers that have a good cross-representation of specialties," he said.

"Or we could reduce our commitment at the lower-division undergraduate level and set up a network of feeder schools" - community colleges, private colleges and agricultural and technical colleges. "This would produce a stronger marriage of upper level undergraduate and beginning graduate studies. The lines between undergraduate and graduate would become less clearly delineated. By offering high quality undergraduate upper-division education and blending it with graduate education, we'd be an excellent small public research university with a broad array of graduate programs.

"A third model would be to expand ourselves to the range of 35,000 to 40,000 students. This would take a while-maybe a long while-to accomplish. But it would put us on a par with other major public research universities."

Whatever direction UB moves in, these changes are bound to affect the university's relationship with SUNY. "If we had 35,000 to 40,000 students, that would be 25 percent of SUNY's enrollment. Another campus that size would place half of SUNY's students at two large campus centers, and the need for small colleges scattered around the state would be put into question," Headrick said.

Federal support to the university over the past decade has played a significant role in supporting UB's research mission, but that support is probably going to decrease. "Can we make up for that in some way? We're pursuing the possibility of finding private support," he said.

"We'll need closer liaisons with industry and commercial ventures and that worries some people" because the corporate culture differs from that of higher education. Part of that difference, Headrick noted, is the openness of academia as opposed to the desire of a private firm to preserve information and secure its competitive advantage. Adjustments will be necessary on both sides, he said.

"I hope in the long run for more money to flow back into the university from technology transfer. The policies are in place, and we're going to have to count on more revenue from this source. In the professions, such as the medical school and the dental school, revenue from practice has been and will continue to support the educational program. Other professions will have to look to these sources as well.

"We're not in this alone. The university's budget woes are not peculiar to UB. All universities are experiencing the same outside pressures. What makes UB's situation more difficult is that we've been a small, underfunded public research university," Headrick said. "On the other hand we have fewer restraints and a shorter history to contend with, so we can be more flexible in solving problems than a more entrenched university would be."