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Cohen urges faculty to pursue community service
By DONNA LONGENECKER
Reporter Assistant Editor
Adopt the City of Buffalo—that's the challenge retired Professor Harold Cohen, former dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, issued to faculty during Tuesday's monthly meeting of the Faculty Senate.
Since his retirement, Cohen has been involved in world health organizations, traveling internationally to improve housing and education in underdeveloped countries. The role and obligations of a public university were the topic of his presentation.
He began by quoting the Talmudic scholar, Hillel: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me, but if I am only for my own self, what am I? And if not now, when?"
"We are citizens first before we are professors. We as faculty have a responsibility to our community," said Cohen. "It is now time that we exercise our rights within a public university to make a difference to a new generation," he added.
Cohen said people around the world talk about the European viewpoint—that its students are extremely informed and often bilingual.
"Our students have very little information about anything—I tell people that I'm going to Brazil and they think 'bananas,'" he said, describing Americans as mostly ignorant about the great intellectual wealth that exists outside this country. America as a country is arrogant and pushy, but it was once special—in part, he said, through the work its citizens accomplished while serving in the Peace Corps.
"We need to develop a new generation that is not insulated, a generation that must deal with multiple nations and a variety of religions. Most people don't understand what's going on—they don't understand Islam; they don't understand Buddhism, Hinduism. Therefore, they listen to the path that's given to them."
Cohen decried the absence of a mandated comparative religion class in UB's general education requirements.
"The way you can control life is by keeping people ignorant. Keeping our children ignorant, will kill us," he said.
"There are a lot of wonderful things we can do—we can teach these young people to be of service to people," he added, noting that faculty has an "interior and public" responsibility to do this. He said that graduate programs at UB should examine their resources to find a way to sponsor the City of Buffalo—and that no one should receive a graduate degree without giving of him or herself. "I think students would learn a lot by giving—by participating with others," he said.
"We do have an obligation as people, as citizens, individuals, as human beings. I was raised to know that you have a responsibility to the public as well as in the privacy of your home," he said. "It's time to decide what you shall be."
In other business, the senators approved the revised academic standards policy, due to be published in the undergraduate spring 2003-04 catalog. The new policy is designed to simplify and clarify the academic probation process and terms for dismissal and removes students from the process who are in good academic standing, but are put on academic probation because they have accumulated 60 or more credits without having been accepted into a major. Those students, which number about 2,000 each semester, no longer will be subject to academic probation, but may find their financial aid shut off until they meet with an academic advisor to begin the process of being admitted into a major.
Senators enthusiastically supported the first reading of two resolutions presented by John Ringland, associate professor of mathematics and chair of the senate's Computer Services Committee, calling for university support of efforts to amend a restrictive copyright law (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and of open computing platforms in university teaching and research.
The resolutions also triggered a brief, but intense discussion about how some faculty members view the university administration as unconcerned and unresponsive to the specific alternative (non-Microsoft) computing platform support needs and hard/software requirements that they feel are necessary for adequate classroom instruction.
Senators will vote on the two resolutions at next month's meeting on March 4.
Also, in a report to the senate, Susan Hamlen, associate professor of accounting and law and chair of the senate's Budget Priorities Committee, reported the findings of a survey and data obtained from the Office of Institutional Analysis on instructional staffing for the years 1996 and 2001 that showed a definite increase in the number of non-tenure track teaching assistants (NTTAs) hired to teach at the university. Some of the reasons for the shift toward hiring NTTAs cited by the deans who participated in the survey are increased enrollment, program changes, faculty recruitment issues and budget cuts.
The purpose of the project, according to the report, was to "establish the facts concerning shifts in instructional staffing at UB, investigate the reasons for any shifts, evaluate the impact on UB's teaching-and-research mission, identify any future planned changes in instructional staffing and provide recommendations related to instructional staffing decisions."
During the period from 1996 to 2001, the report cited an increase of 10 percent—from 41 to 51 percent—in the number of class sections taught by NTAAs, and an increase—from 37 to 46 percent—in the number of credit hours taught by NTAAs. Hamlen says the pattern was observed in every academic unit. Although most of the deans felt that this increase in the use of NTAAs did not bring a reduction in the quality of teaching at the university, most expressed plans to hire more tenure-track faculty, she said.
For a detailed copy of the report, email Hamlen at hamlen@buffalo.edu.