It seems that Professor John C. G. Boot of the Department of Management Science and Systems has been burdened for some time by UB's policies for handling sponsored projects, since he has quite suddenly decided to unload himself in public. He did so in a letter to the editor of the Buffalo News on Sept. 17.

Boot saw fit to make his point by targeting two sentences in a letter that I had written to the News to address a separate topic, namely UB's involvement in Buffalo waterfront planning. My letter explained my role and that of Bruno Freschi, the dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, in waterfront planning and stated my position on certain waterfront issues, such as the matter of public hearings, on which the News had editorialized. According to Boot, my letter illustrated the ethical problems in sponsored work by faculty.

Perhaps I should answer Professor Boot in the News, but he makes such roundabout assertions, while intimating some unspecified violation of principle, that I need more room to respond than the News' readers could reasonably tolerate.

Boot objected to my sentence explaining why UB has requested funding for our planning work from Development Downtown Inc., the quasi-public agency that is sponsoring the project. My sentence said that Freschi and I as UB faculty needed the funds in order to reimburse the university in case we had to forgo our normal teaching, research and administrative commitments.

Boot retorts that "the state pays the faculty to teach and do research." Faculty should not "sell their expertise to third parties" nor "employ substitutes to do what they are paid to be doing." He goes on to say that "To the extent that some of these third-party payments end up as extra remuneration for the consulting faculty, the construction is grimmer yet." People will wonder "why they should be paid from two sources for work done once."

These assertions are so convoluted and distorted, I barely know where to begin responding, but let me give it a try.

As a faculty member engaged in a sponsored program, I do not employ substitutes. Rather, with the permission of my departmental chair, I engage in professional practice consistent with my role as a professor of urban planning. I reimburse the university for the equivalent of my salary and overhead. It does not take a management scientist to figure out that I am still getting the same salary-I am not being paid twice. I cannot fathom why Professor Boot would want to give to News readers the impression that faculty members are paid twice for the same work.

Then while making no firm assertion, Boot's language gives the impression that faculty receive some kind of underhanded "extra remuneration." Quite to the contrary, the waterfront project will not provide me any remuneration above my normal salary, unless it is for work conducted in the summer, when I am not employed by the state. I resent the unspecified implication that I or my colleagues are engaged in something devious.

Boot goes on to write that "faculty teaching loads have a built-in buffer for research" and that waterfront development is "ideal" for such research. Of course I do engage in research, by which I would hope to make contributions to my discipline. But by participating in planning for the Buffalo waterfront, I am not engaged in research, but rather in an act of professional practice. Like faculty members in other professional schools, I should periodically engage in professional practice in order to develop my skills and maintain links to my profession. The State of New York should not have to pay me for that-my own professional qualifications should be strong enough to allow me to find outside sponsorship for my practice. Surprisingly for a faculty member in a professional school, Boot confuses professional practice and scholarship.

Boot's conclusion is the more remarkable part of his letter. He writes that "in the battle between economics and ethics, economics wins out-but it is unusual that that victory is by default because ethics are not judged to be in play." The tendentious language makes it seem as if there is some ethical lapse in my or my colleague's interest in the waterfront project. The News seized on this newsworthy implication, providing the headline "In UB waterfront dispute, economics overwhelms ethics."

Professor Boot: My understanding of ethics is that in ethical public discourse one does not engage in innuendo. If one sees wrongdoing, one should state it clearly, and give evidence for it. Do not leave your colleagues floundering in unspecified suspicions.

Nonetheless, I must admit that there is something charming in this last part of Boot's letter. It is the idea of a mortal conflict between economics and ethics, as if market exchange were necessarily inconsistent with morals, and ethics necessarily ran counter to the need to make a living. Students of economics and ethics might object that this distinction is gross, but they would misunderstand. What Boot probably really means is that lucre is inherently corrupting. For a professor in a business school, this is, to say the least, an interesting viewpoint.

Sincerely yours,

ERNEST STERNBERG

Associate Professor, School of Architecture and Planning

P.S. A final point. Issues of principle do sometimes arise in sponsored faculty research and faculty practice. I suspect that these problems arise far more when faculty members bypass procedure to do private consulting during the academic year than they do in this case, when Bruno Freschi and I are engaged in a normal sponsored project administered by the Research Foundation of SUNY. Nonetheless, I think the broader ethical issues should be explored. I propose that the Faculty Senate establish a committee to look at sponsored research and professional practice at UB, and compare our procedures to those at other universities. I would be glad to explore these issues further in such a setting.