Objections to Provost's Plan: some reasonable; others, less reasonable

Many of the objections that have been raised against the Provost's proposals for the future of the university represent reasonable disagreements. It is perfectly appropriate to differ about the significance of interdisciplinary studies or about how they can best be fostered. It is natural that faculty will have differing views about the proper role of the departments, or about how the Arts and Sciences and the professional schools can best work together to support the university's common mission, or about the proper relationship between graduate and undergraduate education. Faculty always argue about the strengths, weaknesses, and future prospects of particular programs and fields.

Other objections, such as those in the recent letter from Jean Dickson, seem less reasonable. For example, you cannot have a secretly excellent academic program. If your program is perceived as poor, you will be unable to attract good students, unable to attract research funding, unable to attract good faculty. Thus it makes no sense for her to complain that, "The Planning report focuses almost exclusively on public-relations goals."

The President and the Provost have repeatedly emphasized that they are not contemplating retrenchment. The Provost's report makes proposals about how we might better deploy the faculty and staff we have and the resources that we might be able to obtain in the near future. No one's job is on the line. The tenure system is in no way questioned. The report discusses how we might be able to raise the money to hire more faculty and staff in the future. It is dishonest for Dickson to ask, "How many tenure-track or permanent-appointment jobs will be lost as a result of this plan?"

On the other hand some of the objections, such as most of those in the letter from Boot, Dewald, Fischman, Fleron, Sachs, Smith, and Wolf, seem to reflect an inadequate understanding of the main lines of the Provost's proposals. His report, Planning UB's Academic Future, is long and not easily grasped as a whole. It occurs to me, therefore, that it might be useful to write a brief summary of the vision that I extract from his report. Of course the authoritative statement of his position is in his report, not here. What follows is a brief outline of what I take to be the main suggestions the Provost is making:

The effect of more than a decade of budget cuts has been to degrade the quality, both actual and perceived, of the entire institution. We are now having difficulty attracting sufficient good students to achieve our enrollment targets. That is true in every major category: freshmen, transfer students, continuing students, graduate students. We must move expeditiously to improve what we offer our students. Above all, that means we must improve the experience we provide for our undergraduates. They must find UB a welcoming environment, and one which provides an excellent and vocationally relevant education. Since we will not have significant new resources in the short term, that inevitably means that faculty will have to devote more of their time and creativity to the needs of undergraduates. Since most of our faculty are already fully occupied, they will have less time and effort to devote to other activities, including graduate education and research.

We want our undergraduates to receive a coherent liberal education. At one time such an education was sufficient to guarantee middle-class employment. That is no longer the case. We are thus experiencing pressures either to make our education narrowly vocational, which would be to abandon our core educational values-or else to stop pretending that our degree is vocationally relevant, which would be to neglect the felt needs of our students. We can escape this dilemma by recognizing that in many fields the entry-level degree for middle-class employment is increasingly the master's degree. Let us lead the way nationally by making the master's degree the target degree for many of our students. In this way we will have time to combine an excellent liberal education with a vocationally oriented credential.

Most of our Ph.D. programs are also having trouble attracting adequate numbers of good students. This is in part because we are unable to offer competitive stipends, and in part because our programs are widely considered mediocre. We can respond to both problems by having fewer, larger Ph.D. programs. The total number of Ph.D. students will decline, making it possible to offer higher stipends. Moreover, by concentrating our resources, we can have a few programs which are nationally prominent and will attract the very best graduate students. Since the total faculty effort devoted to Ph.D. education will go down, that will free faculty time for undergraduate and master's level education. Moreover, as faculty replace TAs in the classroom, the perceived quality of our undergraduate education will rise. The remaining Ph.D. programs will also have sufficient strength to attract significant external research funding, thereby reversing the recent decline in our research profile. The overall effect will be to improve both the reputation and the actual quality of our undergraduate and graduate programs.

In order to concentrate our faculty resources effectively into a smaller number of larger and stronger Ph.D. programs, we need an organizational structure that transcends the boundaries of the traditional departments. UB is unusual in the extent to which we have divided up our faculty into many small departments, often with similar or overlapping missions. Let us therefore create new, interdisciplinary structures which will serve as the foci for Ph.D. education and research. Undergraduate education is likely to remain centered in the departments, but Ph.D. education will increasingly be organized on a cross-

departmental basis. We need broadly based institutes to provide support for intellectual foci that cross departmental boundaries, and more narrowly based research centers that bring together faculty actively working on common research agendas. These institutes and centers will be the primary academic homes for most Ph.D. students.

In order to provide the incentives for faculty to make the changes in their activities which are needed to improve our undergraduate and graduate programs, it is crucial to tie our budgeting system more closely to the goals we are trying to achieve. Specifically, units must keep most of the revenues they generate-including both tuition and research funding. The resulting budgetary system, called Responsibility Center Management, will still leave room for the Provost to invest in perceived excellence or in unusually expensive but vital programs, since he will allocate the tax support which represents about half of our university budget. Nevertheless, it will provide clear incentives for faculty to make their programs attractive to students, to seek external funding, and to make the quality of their programs visible to students, funding agencies, and donors. It will bring our entire institution more fully in touch with the forces which in fact are shaping our future.

Nicolas D. Goodman
Professor of Mathematics
Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education

Open Letter to Provost Headrick

Whether intended or not, as presently formulated the Provost's Planning Report has further deepened the sense of malaise that exists among faculty members at this university. Already battered by endless cuts or threats of cuts in financial support for the SUNY system and the lack of commitment by the state government to sustaining the existing missions of this university, we are now faced with a document which appears likely to join those other forces in further undermining faculty morale and our commitment to this university. The Provost's Planning document has received pointed critique in the letter from Professors Boot, Dewald, Fischman, Fleron, Sachs, Smith, and Wolf in the Reporter of March 27. The Social Sciences Policy Committee endorses the points raised in this letter.

Provost Headrick's plan seems diametrically opposed to the stated goals of the document, which include raising the national and international reputations of the university for intellectual leadership and enhancing the learning environment for students. Stranger yet, the way the Provost has reacted thus far to criticisms made about the document indicates his unwillingness to engage in a real dialogue about the possible costs of pursuing the directions he has proposed. What seems to be developing, in place of a sense of common purpose, then, is a hardening of lines between faculty and administration that promises an unhappy outcome for the university.

Meeting the challenges faced by the university depends upon UB's primary resource, its faculty, and concentration on UB's unique role in serving its society: teaching, research and creative activity. UB's faculty are developed and maintained by getting the best and supporting them with resources and critical evaluation of their activities. Innovation in teaching, research and creative activity, and service can be pursued, encouraged, assisted and evaluated, but not planned. In universities it comes from faculty insight, foresight and imagination guided by knowledge and experience.

We need to engage seriously in a discussion of where the university is going and how it might get there, but the Provost's Report does not appear to be the vehicle for doing that.

William Baumer, Philosophy

Mary Cassata, Communication

Jan Charles-Luce, Communicative Disorders and Sciences

Matthew Dryer, Linguistics

Christine Duggleby, Anthropology

Mitchell Harwitz, Economics

Stephen Halpern, Sociology

Carolyn Korsmayer, Philosophy

Paul Luce, Psychology

Alan MacPherson, Geography

Brenda Moore, Sociology

Don Rosenthal, Political Science

Simon Singer, Sociology

Tamara Thornton, History

Liana Vardi, History