University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: June 19, 2003

By DONNA LONGENECKER
Reporter Assistant Editor

The university must reassert itself and take a seat at the table in the national initiative to redefine the role and responsibility of a public university within the communities it serves, the chair of the Faculty Senate Public Service Committee maintains.

UB must reassert itself into the national dialogue on redefining the role and responsibility of a public research university within the communities it serves, contends Bob Shibley.
PHOTO: DONNA LONGENECKER

Not that long ago, says Robert Shibley, professor of architecture and director of the Urban Design Project in the School of Architecture and Planning, UB held a leadership position in advancing engaged, or public, scholarship, which is defined as work that benefits not only academe, but also the place or region from which the work springs forth. UB was a major player in advancing itself as a public university in service to its community.

However, says Shibley, a longtime proponent and practitioner of engaged scholarship, UB in recent years has slipped to the middle of the pack.

"There is little resource allocation to support either faculty or students engaged in public service scholarship for the future years and no resource allocated for even a documentation of the work that faculty do as part of their definition of engaged scholarship," Shibley notes in a report by the Public Service Committee that he recently presented to the Faculty Senate Executive Committee. He adds that there are no resources available to publish "Connections," let alone improve it. "Connections" is the publication of the Office of Public Service and Urban Affairs (OPSUA) that documents the efforts of faculty members who are engaged in public service.

Shibley points out that former President Steven Sample laid considerable groundwork for UB to become a major public research university, and Sample's vision was embraced and enlarged by President William R. Greiner, who created OPSUA, which at the time of its inception in 1993, had a full-time staff of nine and was funded at a level of about $19.5 million a year. It now expends about $9 million a year in mostly soft-money programs and is down to one full-time staff member and a vice president, Mary Gresham, who also serves as dean of the Graduate School of Education.

"This university went through an interesting transition between former President Steve Sample and President William Greiner," Shibley says. "Sample said, 'I want (UB) to be one of the top 10 public research universities, and during his tenure here, he said it often enough and rewarded it, established benchmarks and peer systems that ultimately established the conditions for a string of thoughtful and careful provosts, deans and faculty to take this university to its AAU status and to begin to put ourselves in relationship to a much more serious and substantial base of universities," he says.

Although UB was a public service leader in the past, it has retreated from that position and as a result, lost a powerful voice in the national dialogue of redefining what constitutes the public university's role in public life, Shibley contends.

While he acknowledges, celebrates and supports the engaged scholarship that continues at UB, he says not enough is being done to promote the efforts of other faculty members who might also devote considerable time to making a difference in Western New York through their work.

It is vital, Shibley explains, that in an environment of scarce resources, UB begins to think critically and creatively, creating value through engaged scholarship that the public sector would recognize and support.

"The university has moved from publicly supported to publicly assisted, and it's a trend that is likely to continue—it seems to me that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that the public sector no longer feels a need or desire to provide substantial support for higher education, nor does it set high expectations for service in return for the support it does provide.

"Imagine, if you will, a redefined public university that understood the possibilities of the kind of engaged scholarship that we're talking about. Then imagine a change in the willingness of the public to support public universities and higher education," he says. "If you're delivering service and touching lives, you are far more compelling to contributors, especially those in public service; that's just one more return on an investment in engaged scholarship—you're building a constituency," he adds.

UB needs to facilitate more scholarship that uses "place" as the site of research, which, Shibley argues, has a very practical and immediate service return. "It is directly tied to the resources it takes to run a quality university," he says. It also embraces the idea of experience-based learning, which has a direct, positive and immediate impact on academe; the scholars, community partners and the learners. It also encourages units within a university to define their responsibilities and identity in relation to many of their peer institutions, Shibley says.

"In some sense, we have been listening to our public-sector supporters' concerns about scarce public resources, assuming they will always be scarce, and looking elsewhere for financial support. That's probably both smart and conservative, but we're a university; we have a responsibility to also continue to create the value that the public would recognize and feel compelled to support. I believe we do routinely create such value in several units across UB, but we don't do a particularly good job of reporting on that work, measuring its impact and managing reward systems that would cultivate it and extend its reach across the campus," he says.

To make public scholarship more palatable, more rewarding and easily recognized as such, many peer universities have tailored waiver policies for indirect costs that encourage faculty to seek funding that otherwise may not have been possible to obtain. Some have gone so far as to enrich some definitions of scholarship within the tenure process—public service as engaged scholarship now counts in the tenure process at many institutions, but not at UB.

"Right now, it is frankly discouraged (at UB) to pursue anything other than full overhead return on any sponsored program, and that has to do with the university trying to get the best return on its investment in faculty and facilities," Shibley says. "You can't blame them (the administration) for that; it's a very important agenda and we are making great progress increasing our indirect cost revenues."

"Other universities have taken an additional approach, embracing a combination of development opportunity, public support and increased entrepreneurial engagement as consultants in their community and region," he explains. "They've realized that there is also gold in them there hills," he says, although he acknowledges that grants supporting engaged scholarship are not always the most lucrative.

Shibley notes that some universities across the country have banded together in a variety of compacts and consortiums to put "cultural work in the public interest at the heart of American higher education."

One such example, based at the University of Michigan, is called "Imagining America."

Places like the University at Stony Brook, a founding member of "Imagining America," as well as MIT, the University of Wisconsin, Yale, the University of Iowa and others have caught on to the notion that an intellectual connection between curriculum/degree programs, research and a service mission of engaged scholarship creates public support and public investment, says Shibley. Consequently, some of these same institutions have also chosen to modify how this type of scholarship fits into the tenure process without watering down or softening the measures used to assess its merit.

He and his colleagues on the Faculty Senate Public Service Committee single out the Campus Compact, a national coalition of nearly 850 college and university presidents committed to the civic purposes of higher education. The mission of Campus Compact is to "promote community service that develops students' citizenship skills and values, encourages partnerships between campuses and communities, and assists faculty who seek to integrate public and community engagement into their teaching and research."

It is the kind of work promoted by Campus Compact that Shibley has in mind when he talks about engaged scholarship and his own work—anyone who knows him knows he practices what he preaches. His faculty office in Hayes Hall on the South Campus is a symbol of public scholarship—a public space, a place in which the Buffalo-Niagara region has his full attention and is the focus of much of his research. It is a place where graduate students and faculty gather to work collectively, to share ideas and concrete plans for helping this region establish a stronger and more valuable identity. Concurrently his work is a model for other regions and is widely published.

UB, notes Shibley, is not a participating member of any of the consortium of universities and colleges concerned with improving the linkages between intellectual engagement and civic duty. In addition, advancing the idea of scholarship as something other than what is conventionally understood as scholarship "brings the conversation to a halt instead of generating the excitement of new invention and challenge" he says.

The short-term aims of the Public Service Committee—which, Shibley notes, has a long, significant and disciplined history of work regarding public service prior to his involvement—are much more modest than his own vision of what constitutes the opportunities of a public research university. Yet, he and others will continue working within the senate to encourage a reconsideration of UB's notable absence from the national spotlight of universities committed to making a difference at home.

Simply put, Shibley says the discussion is about how we use the world as our laboratory.

"One thing we're recommending is that the Faculty Senate prepare a proposal to produce a more flexible and tailored waiver policy for indirect costs. And the second thing is to get a seat at the table in re-imagining, redefining what a public research university is all about. That redefinition is occurring with or without us through vehicles like 'Imaging America,' Campus Compact and others."

Shibley cites the Institute for Local Governance and Regional Growth and its director of research, Kathryn Foster, who also serves as chair of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning in the School of Architecture and Planning, as one of many examples of involvement in engaged scholarship that benefits the public.

"Kate Foster is a wonderful example—she's a scholar of regionalism, she publishes nationally on the subject and at the same time her insights bring the State of the Region reporting and data to the local communities in a way that is extraordinarily useful and helpful."

As an architect, Shibley says he tries to get the most out of each feature of a building and the same goes for scholarship. "Why would I not want as much return for that scholarship as I can get?" he asks. "It's not just that the scholarship is something you do and then apply. It's in the doing of it that you are concurrently applying and developing the scholarship. It's not right for every field; it's not right for everybody. Some of us find a way of inquiring about immediate places and then generalizing from those in an iterative way, one against the other, all the time." The results, he says, meet the demands of good scholarship and good service.

"I took a job in a public university on purpose. The marriage for me of a public service university and a major public research university was an obvious attraction," says Shibley. "I'm not ready to give up on the idea of a publicly supported university. We bring a unique potential to the modern university by combining the best of public and private approaches to financial support."