University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: October 23, 2003

By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor

John Barclay Simpson, SUNY Chancellor Robert L. King's recommended candidate to succeed William R. Greiner as UB's 14th president, was introduced on Friday to the UB community during a press conference that was telecast live via the World Wide Web, and immediately promised to push an agenda that left no doubt that UB "is the premier public research university in the Northeast."

Simpson, currently executive vice chancellor and provost of the University of California, Santa Cruz, is expected to be named president by the SUNY Board of Trustees at its Oct. 28 meeting. Prior to receiving King's endorsement, he won unanimous endorsements from the UB presidential search advisory committee and the UB Council. He would take office on Jan. 1.

"John Simpson impressed the members of the search committee, the UB Council and SUNY leadership with his qualifications, as well as his life-long commitment to public higher education," said Jeremy M. Jacobs, chair of the UB Council and the presidential search advisory committee, and chairman and CEO of Delaware North Companies. "He is highly regarded and I am confident he will be able to lead this university to even greater accomplishments and recognition in the future."

King also expressed confidence in Simpson's leadership qualities. "He will, I predict, be a great leader, not only on campus, but in this community and I believe across our state. He understands that this campus, this university is not an isolated ivory tower, but an integral, active part of Buffalo's cultural, intellectual and economic future," the chancellor said.

President William R. Greiner said that with Simpson, UB was "blessed to have a superbly qualified and really, really nice guy come on board to be the president of this institution."

"How do you persuade a guy with John's track record to leave that place in the middle of the redwood forest and come to UB?" Greiner asked. "First and foremost, you persuade him with what you, the people of UB, have done to make this a great place over the course of our tenure here."

A native Californian, Simpson joked that he had told his daughter that the "monotonous" weather in California was the reason he was coming to Buffalo. And Buffalo's well-deserved reputation for snow served as the backdrop for a gift Jacobs made to Simpson of a pair of snow boots and a snow shovel.

But the tone of the news conference remained serious when the conversation turned to Simpson's credentials and his true reasons for wanting to become UB's next president.

"I'm really delighted to be here; I'm absolutely thrilled," Simpson told the standing-room-only crowd in the Jeannette Martin Room. "As a faculty member, as a university professor, I have known about the quality of the faculty of UB literally for decades."

But, he said, during the past several weeks, as he learned more about the quality, depth and breadth of UB as a whole—its students, educational programs, research programs, extramural support, its bioinformatics initiative—"everything seemed to converge and suggest to me that this is the opportunity of a lifetime."

At UC Santa Cruz, Simpson has been chief academic and budgetary officer as the campus grew from less than 11,000 students to its present size of nearly 15,000 students. During this time, he instituted a number of new graduate programs, among them programs in digital arts and news media, bioinformatics, electrical engineering, politics and an innovative doctoral degree in education with San Jose State University.

Prior to joining UC Santa Cruz in 1998, he had a 23-year teaching, research and administrative career at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1994-98.

Simpson's candidacy as the next UB president has received the strong endorsement from colleagues at Santa Cruz and former colleagues at Washington.

"UC Santa Cruz will be very sad to lose the expertise and talents of our provost and executive vice chancellor John Simpson. On the other hand, we are pleased with the recognition that his appointment as president of the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, brings to the quality of the leadership team at UC Santa Cruz. John Simpson will be an excellent president of the University at Buffalo, and we all wish him and his new institution well," said UC Santa Cruz Chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood.

"John Simpson has exceptional leadership experience and outstanding academic values. He will be a wonderful president for the University at Buffalo," said Richard L. McCormick, president of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. McCormick was president of the University of Washington during the time Simpson was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

A psychologist who received master's and doctoral degrees from Northwestern University, Simpson's research is in the area of the neuroendocrinology of body fluids and the cardiovascular system. He has been a visiting professor of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and Howard Florey Institute of Experimental Physiology and Medicine at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Simpson told those attending the press conference that the U.S. is facing a "watershed moment" in public higher education, particularly for the research university, pointing out that one of his colleagues in California calls the situation "the perfect storm for public higher education."

He noted that at a time of increasing demand for access to higher education, universities across the country are seeing dwindling state support.

And even as universities are experiencing these budgetary and access challenges, he said, "they're more and more seizing opportunities to move in new and interesting and, I might even say, appropriate directions," such as entrepreneurial and economic development activities, as well as assuming more responsibilities for public service activities—"the third stool on which we sit as faculty and as universities."

"So indeed, even though it is a challenging time for higher education…at the same time, there are astonishing opportunities. I'm very interested in playing whatever part I can in helping UB participate, and participate well in this."

Simpson endorsed the university's initiative in bioinformatics, calling the field "very much forward-looking, very much timely, very much the kind of enterprise a university should engage in if it has the right resources in place."

He said he was "quite impressed" with the way UB has "seized this opportunity," the way it's been endorsed in the community, and the kinds of support it's received from elected officials on the local, state and federal levels.

Bioinformatics, he said, "should and will remain a priority of the university. It is something we ought to be doing, we have it in play and I think it's worth pursing and pursing with vigor."

Simpson noted that the job of elevating UB's stature does not lie with the president—that, he said, is a job that should be accomplished by the university's faculty, staff and students.

"What the president has the capacity to do is set a tone for excellence and academic achievement in all that we do," he said. "By doing that, a clear signal is sent through the organization that this is our agenda, this is what we're doing, this is where we're going.

"Any president or any chief executive officer simply cannot do it by his or herself. He does it with the help and participation and achievement of everybody involved."

So what tone does Simpson hope to set?

"I have a sense this is already the best public research university in the Northeast," he said. "I have an agenda—personally and professionally—of academic excellence. That is what I want to push, and I want to make it so there are no questions in the minds of anyone that this is the premier public research university in the Northeast. That's my agenda."