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Simpson endorses SUNY budget initiatives
By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor
President John B. Simpson told the Faculty Senate Executive Committee yesterday that he is pleased with SUNY's proposed $5.6 billion budget for 2006-07.
"At its core, it's very good news," Simpson said of the plan, which the SUNY board approved yesterday and sent to Gov. George E. Pataki.
The proposal leaves tuition at current levels and increases spending by 12 percent, primarily to fund the hiring of more full-time faculty, as well as $500 million in capital projects. The last tuition increase in 2003—of $950 per student—raised rates to $4,350.
Simpson said interim Chancellor John Ryan and the SUNY Board of Trustees had asked institutions to submit proposals of what their needs would be over the next five years and "apparently they are listening to what we are telling them."
"There are several features of (the SUNY budget) which are, I'd say, directly derivative of things we told them we wanted to push, like the agenda we are pushing through UB 2020," he said.
One such initiative is increasing the number of faculty at UB. Simpson has said he would like to hire 250 more full-time professors to be competitive with peer institutions. The SUNY proposal includes a program called the Excelsior Search Faculty Initiative, which would increase the number of faculty members at the system's four doctoral institutions. The plan aims to attract top researchers to develop more sponsored programs at the schools, while boosting the surrounding communities.
"It's intended to sell the notion that good-to-great universities mean good-to-great business for the local economies," Simpson said. "There's another subtle aspect of this which I think is very important and which hasn't been in the conversation before. This takes research institutions and puts them in a different conversation than the community colleges and the other smaller colleges of SUNY. Hooray!"
In other business, the FSEC also heard a report on a plan to offer photo class lists to faculty members to enable them to more easily identify students in their courses.
Carole A. Fabian, director of the Educational Technology Center, said that the photo lists "are really intended for faculty members to use for identifying students to learn their names for exams," and will only be available to the faculty member of record for each course.
The photographs "will not be part of directory information for purposes of FERPA (the federal Family Education Right to Privacy Act)," she added.
"They will not become part of the public information for directory purposes," Fabian said. "Part of what will be in the program policy is if you are going to share photos with students for small group work, that you get students' permissions before you can do that."
Elias Eldayrie, associate vice president for information technology, who joined Fabian for the presentation of the program, added that faculty members will "not need the permission of the student to view the student's picture.
"If we are using that record for educational purposes, we are allowed to do that under the FERPA law. What we are not allowed to do is take a personal record and share it with people outside the university without the student's permission," Eldayrie said.
Terry Mangione, director of student academic records and finances, said a recent survey of peer institutions showed 30 percent already are using photo class lists, while 28 percent more are considering beginning such programs. The responding institutions also reported no problems with student privacy issues.
Eldayrie said the program should be up and running at UB next semester. Faculty will have access to the photo lists in HTML or PDF formats.
Questions about the program included whether teaching assistants will have access to students photos; Mangione said they will "if they are faculty member of record for the course."
John W. Ellison, assistant professor in the Department of Library and Information Studies, asked about sharing the photos among the students in his Internet courses because "they would want to see each other."
Samuel D. Schack, Martin Professor and chair in the Department of Mathematics, responded by reminding the senators of FERPA policies that restrict sharing the photos without students' permission.
"I'm sure you could come up with a million different things that they would like to know about each another. Our attitude ought to be that's not our business; we're not helping people hook up and whatnot. It's just not what this is about. We don't need separate forms for them to give us permission to start spreading their information around our class. We just don't do that. If students want to know what each other look like, even students over the Internet, they have ways of communicating," Schack said.
Faculty Senate Chair Peter A. Nickerson offered the senate's assistance with finalizing policies to accompany the photo list program so that it can begin in spring 2006, saying "We'd certainly expedite giving you feedback."
The senate's information and library resources committee also reported on the progress of the UB Libraries, which are experiencing "active movement on a number of fronts we've been anticipating for a decade," according to acting director Stephen M. Roberts.
Construction has begun on a new storage facility for the libraries at the end of Rensch Road across Sweet Home Road from the North Campus.
"It's going to be a very functional addition to the library infrastructure because it's going to allow us to move some low-use materials off campus, thereby freeing up space for new materials that you folks use and for new study space, hopefully a computer lab, high-tech classrooms, group study areas, quiet study rooms that at present we don't have," Roberts said.
The UB Libraries, like most other research libraries across the country, is "in the midst of moving from paper formats to largely electronic formats" in its collections, he said.
"Owning miles and miles of shelves of aging journals is becoming an economic liability in certain respects," he said. "However, the cost of these electronic products is high, and we're constantly faced with the challenge of finding the money to sustain subscriptions. We're entering the fifth month of this academic year; we've paid for at this point most of our subscriptions for 05/06 and we still don't have an allocated budget."
William H. Baumer, professor of philosophy, noted that giving up current library space "for nonlibrary uses" would waste the construction capabilities of Lockwood Library and Capen Hall, which "are built to 100 pounds per square foot floor (weight) loads, which is what you need to have for library stacks."
"No other buildings on the campus are built for that," Baumer added.
Roberts responded by saying "I don't think we can view it as library space; it's university space. We, at this point, haven't abandoned any of it. We have very aggressive plans for the renovation of any space we clear out by moving materials to storage."
He added that the libraries will be moving "materials that are seldom, if ever, used."
"We're not moving current journals, we're not moving new monographs, we're not moving materials that any of you want to keep here to storage. We're moving materials that are either available electronically, that you're using at your desk, at your office, that students are using from their homes out of this real estate to a place where it's going to be protected and safe and it's going to be retrieved if you need it."
The library staff is still working on the criteria of which materials will be moved into storage, according to Helen A. Booth, collections director for the arts and sciences libraries, who added that "it's going to come down to going out to departments and asking faculty what they use."