SENDING LETTERS TO THE REPORTER
The reporter welcomes letters from the readers commenting on its stories and content. Letters should be limited to 800 words and may be edited for style and length. Because of space limitations, the Reporter cannot publish all letters recieved. They must be recieved by 9 a.m. Monday to be considered for publication in that week's issue

Physics instructors do "outstanding job maintaining standards"

Dear Editor:

I am writing to protest, in the strongest possible terms, the following statements which appeared in the April 3 issue of the Reporter:

Shahid Ahmad, associate professor of civil engineering, noted that, for example, in introductory physics classes, students are told to look to their left and to their right, and told that two of them won't pass this class.

"The caring isn't there," said Ahmad.

It is absolutely not the policy of the Department of Physics to encourage or condone any such behavior by instructors in our introductory physics courses. I have consulted with every member of our faculty who has been involved with teaching introductory physics courses, and I find no evidence that such a statement has ever been made in an introductory physics class at UB. Prof. Bruce McCombe has assured me that he has never heard of such a statement being made in the nine years he served as department chairman.

It is simply factually incorrect that two-thirds of students in our introductory physics courses do not pass. I have examined the grade records of all courses taken by EAS majors over the past three years. The most commonly assigned grade in these courses is a C. Fewer than 20 percent of students obtain an F. We would be more happy to discuss these distributions with you in detail.

As to the statement about caring not being there: I respond emphatically that it is the policy of our Department to assign the best of our instructors on a rotating basis to teach the introductory physics courses. Despite the recent loss of two faculty lines, and of all our instructional support staff lines, due to UB's budget woes, I am convinced that our instructors do an outstanding job in maintaining standards and teaching a syllabus agreed upon with the School of Engineering and Applied Science. We do not pretend to be perfect: when problems arise, we would like to hear about them, and we will do our best to correct them.

I understand from communications with Dr. Ahmad and his department that the Reporter failed to mention that he was quoting students, and that his comments were taken out of context. Given the current enrollment crisis, the widespread dissemination of this type of misinformation in the lobby of every building on campus, and on the World Wide Web, is not helpful. Any steps you can take to correct this situation would be greatly appreciated.

Yours sincerely,
Richard J. Gonsalves
Department Chairman

Editor's Note: The article in the April 3 issue of the Reporter accurately represented the comments made at the public meeting.

Point of report is to strengthen graduate, undergrad education

Gentleperson:

Vice Provost Goodman writes that because of the need "above all" to improve undergraduate education, more faculty time will have to be devoted to this task. He thus suggests that, "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." Then he adds the prediction that with fewer and larger Ph.D. programs, "the total faculty effort devoted to Ph.D. programs will go down." One week later Dean Tufariello asserts that the Provost's report, "suggests implicitly the possibility of reducing the size of some graduate programs in order to increase the quality of others."

It does not strike me as a reader of the Provost's report that he believes that any subset of our current Ph.D. programs is so outstanding that other graduate programs should be cut back so these favored ones may prosper. Indeed, were this the point of the Provost's report, I think that it would be well to throw bodies in front of that train. However, as I understand it, the point of the report is to reduce Ph.D. level graduate enrollment generally and at the same time create fewer, but larger Ph.D. programs, most of which can be expected to excel. Fewer, of course, means that some programs will no longer exist as they do now. But the subject matter of those programs may be amalgamated, which admittedly is not to say "included unaltered," in the new, larger Ph.D. programs. This is not taking from the weak to bulk up the strong as Dean Tufariello would imply.

Nor do I gather from reading the Provost's words that he believes that graduate education and research here are so relatively strong that resources should be diverted from them to undergraduate education. Were the point of the Provost's report, I think that it would be appropriate to throw bodies in front of that train too. However again, as I understand it, the point of the report is to strengthen both graduate and undergraduate education by raising the number of upper-division undergraduates and master's candidates. Now if there are fewer Ph.D. theses to supervise, but overall it does not look to me that the net result will be that less graduate education will be offered. So again, this is not a recognition that "above all" undergraduate education must be improved at some cost to graduate education as Vice-Provost Goodman would have it.

I am impressed that the readings of the Provost's report offered by Messers Goodman and Tufariello, individuals with obvious interests in undergraduate education, and graduate education and research respectively, seem to be no more likely or less interested than the readings offered by faculty in the social sciences and humanities that I responded to in an earlier letter. Perhaps we all ought to swear off the indoor sport of telegraphing to others our hopes and fears for ourselves, our disciplines, our departments and our university by using the report in a Rashomon-like fashion. Instead, we might treat the Provost's efforts as a chance to improve education for all of our students here at Buffalo, for that is what it asks us to do when it suggests a reorganization of the structure of our efforts. An organization of our enterprise in terms of the topics that, in their diversity, grab us just might make us all more exciting teachers of our students as well as more exciting researchers in our fields and so deliver a better product in both areas of our lives.

Sincerely,
John Henry Schlegel
Professor of Law