Graduate Education: Way it's conducted must change, FSEC told

By SUE WUETCHER
News Services Associate Director

In a presentation that was one of a series of such talks he's been giving to groups on campus, Triggle used statistics and quotes from national educational leaders to hammer home the point that business as usual cannot continue.

"We have one more chance; we have to assume responsibility," Triggle said. "We have to define our mission, our objectives and our priorities."

He noted that different choices will have to be made to be consistent with the university's mission, and that likely will mean vertical cuts. "That means you and me," he said.

He placed a familiar, but somewhat altered, quote on the overhead projector: 'Your mission, Mr. Phelps, should you choose to accept it, is to be all things to all people.' "That is not our mission," Triggle stressed.

He began his presentation by noting that after World War II, universities assumed the role of research and scholarship in return for support from the federal government. But "this contract is now in the process of being transformed, or broken, some would have it, and in fact . . . is being broken in some very severe ways," he said.

He offered statistics showing that "changes are about to occur because of what the federal government is about to do."

Although Congressional Budget Office figures indicate that there will be an approximately 5 percent increase for non-defense research and development funding in fiscal year 1996-97-an election-year budget-the figures are not at all rosy after that, he said.

The out years-past 1997-will cause "a very dramatic projected reduction in real-dollar terms in the amounts of funding available," he said. Overall total funding to research and development is scheduled to decrease by approximately 25 percent in real dollar figures, he said, noting the projected reduction is a major consequence of the drive toward a balanced budget amendment.

"Only the most foolish of the optimists would take these figures and believe that we're actually going to head for prosperity, at least in these sorts of R&D figures, in the years ahead," he said.

"I tend not to be an optimist: I tend to believe that the light at the end of the tunnel is frequently that of the oncoming train," he added. "And so I believe that we really ought to be planning for an overall relatively pessimistic projection of federal support for research and development, at least in the science and technologies, over the next decade. And that is going to be one of the factors that is going to shape very much the future of the contemporary research university."

Triggle added that R&D figures over the past 35 years show that when federal support for R&D declines, then industrial support also declines. "So one should not be optimistic in assuming that other agencies are simply going to step automatically into the gap and make up this funding," he said.

Moreover, financial difficulties on the federal level usually translate to financial difficulties on the state and local levels. "A 15 percent tax cut at the federal level sounds great, except that local taxes tend to go up correspondingly equivalently, and so we must not look for support from that dimension," he said.

Triggle noted that the Pew Commission on Health Education and Health Delivery issued a report in 1995 that offers valuable comments on health education that are relevant to higher education in general.

Just as the health-care system will be held accountable for cost, consumer satisfaction and overall quality, these same standards will be increasingly demanded from educational programs, he said. "Education must become demand-oriented: knowledge, skills and competencies. Location of education must effectively meet the needs of the students, and not the lifestyles of faculty," he said.

Other features of the emerging health-care system, as noted by the Pew Commission, that Triggle said could be easily translated to education in general include the intensive use of information, a focus on the consumer, a knowledge of outcomes, the use of constrained resources, a reconsideration of human value, an expectation of accountability and coordination of services-"making sure we're not all establishing our own individual, competitive fiefdoms which tend not to be effectively done."

Triggle noted that in addition to the national issues he had outlined, UB also faces a set of local issues, including an erosion of state funding; enrollment pressures; a decline in a commitment from SUNY; a declining reputation, as noted in the National Research Council's 1995 ratings of doctoral programs, and a lack of a sense of direction by the SUNY system as a whole.

"Put these together, and they make for a heady mix of uncertainty," Triggle noted.

Dennis Malone, Distinguished Service Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and chair of the senate's Academic Planning Committee, which met with Triggle last spring, emphasized three other issues that he considered critical for graduate education:

· Centrality. "There are a lot of sacred cows that perhaps should not be sacred any more.

"We need to understand how the public is viewing the university at this moment," he said. "These issues are critical ones. I believe in peaks of excellence," he said, adding that even some very basic programs may not be excellent.

Michael Frisch, professor of American Studies, noted that change poses a real danger if faculty and staff get defensive about their own programs "and retreat into what they know . . . It will be a real challenge to be non-parochial."

Mary Taub, professor of biochemistry and a member of the Academic Planning Committee, said UB must consider several issues, including whether it should concentrate its resources on one or two areas of excellence, put its resources in the "money-making areas" and examine its image-is its role in New York State to educate the masses?

"When we look at change, we have to think of ourselves as a ship sailing that is not built for these seas," said James Faran, associate professor of mathematics. "We have to rebuild the ship, but we can't take it all apart because it will sink. "Our mission has to be something we can latch onto, something to make the transition possible."

Triggle urged that change be swift and that the university "establish a sense of where it is going" within 18 months.

---