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FSEC approves new visual studies department
By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor
The Art and Art History departments in the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) will merge to become a new department known as visual studies, according to a proposal approved by the Faculty Senate Executive Committee yesterday.
The CAS policy committee approved the proposal in September without any negative votes, according to William H. Baumer, professor of philosophy and a member of the CAS committee.
"It is, as has been said, a re-amalgamation of two units that were split many years ago," Baumer said. "I must confess I wasn't close enough to that to tell you why they split. But they are now of the view that they can do a much better job for their programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels if they are amalgamated."
The new department's plan to add a doctoral degree in visual studies will be dealt with separately, and will require approvals from the university, the SUNY system and the state education department, Baumer said, adding that a planned master's program in arts administration will be part of the visual studies department.
When asked how the merger will affect the Department of Media Study, Baumer replied that media study "will continue to cooperate" with the new department.
"It is anticipated that cooperation will increase and it is possible that there will be a further merger," Baumer said. "But the determination was that merging the two units at this point was a big enough step to take and that they did not want to try to make it a three-way parlay at one shot."
According to the proposal, "discussions with the Department of Media Study are just beginning on possible academic alignments and joint-degree programs between the two departments."
Meanwhile, existing degree programs in studio art and art history "will continue as is" in the new visual studies department, while a new master's program in visual studies will be created. At the undergraduate level, the bachelor's and bachelor of fine arts degrees in studio art and art history also will continue. In addition to these, the CAS curriculum committee is considering a proposal for a BFA studio track in visual studies.
The merger proposal now will go to President John B. Simpson for his approval. After that, UB will advise SUNY and all relevant campus departments of the new visual studies department, according to Jan Rogacki, executive assistant to the vice provost for faculty affairs.
In other business, the FSEC heard an update on a program designed to reduce the number of pages printed by students. Richard H. Lesniak, director of academic services for CIT, said the university reached a high-water mark in this area during the 2003-04 academic year.
"Two years ago, it became painfully clear when we were already at 52 million pages, we needed to do something to improve the service. This isn't really about saving money; it's about getting in the hands of the students what they need before classes when they needed it, improving service there," he said.
The new program—iprint@ub—is a system "that will allow us to manage the printing resource for all the constituents that come here to the university" and make use of any of the 190 printing sites on campus, Lesniak said.
Under the plan, students will have an allocation of 1,500 printed pages each semester covered by their technical fee. Students may roll over unused pages in their allocations during the academic year, but not between academic years. Once students use all their allocations, they may purchase additional pages at the cost of five cents for a single page, eight cents for two-sided page.
The figure of 1,500 was arrived at by studying the "actual printing behavior over an entire year" of students at UB, according to Lesniak.
Surveys also showed that 1,500 pages per semester "meets the needs of over 95 percent of students," he said, but acknowledged that some students don't think the allocation is high enough.
"We're hearing an awful lot from graduate students who see the allocation is just a drop in the bucket compared to the number of resources they print out and utilize as part of their graduate studies," he said.
Lesniak encouraged not only students, but faculty to change their printing habits, to "think more about using electronic reserves, think more in terms of perhaps creating pdfs and providing those so students can read them online" rather than printing them out.
When John W. Ellison, assistant professor in the Department of Library and Information Studies, asked why the university provides printing services in the first place, Lesniak replied that students pay a technical fee to cover printing costs, but the service itself "became a lot more expensive over the years."
Karl Fiebelkorn, assistant dean of the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, said his school has attempted to lower printing costs by limiting student printing to 1,000 pages per semester and 100 pages during summer sessions, and that faculty members have taken to posting their notes on UB Learns, as well as providing entire courses on cd rom.
"Because of the high cost, the students are just going to have to go back to taking notes like we did in the old days," Fiebelkorn said.
Jun Xu, president of the Graduate Student Association, asked Lesniak whether his committee had considered setting different allocations for different groups of students.
"We did not allocate by cohort because every student pays the same tech fee, graduate or undergraduate. Because of that basic reality, we don't feel it's fair to allocate more to some than others," Lesniak said. "That is arguable and debatable, and we do want to hear about those issues and we do want to hear about them. Our point of view is, let's see how it works and if we have to make adjustments, let's do that after we deal with baseline data."
The iprint@ub program will be piloted at Lockwood Library on the North Campus beginning in January; during the spring and summer months, the system will also be implemented "throughout the campus without allocation," Lesniak said.
"If all goes well, in Fall 2006, we would then institute the allocation process," he said.
School of Informatics Dean W. David Penniman and Hank J. Bromley, visiting associate professor in the Graduate School of Education and adjunct professor in the communications department, presented an interim report on the Faculty Senate Distance Education Committee.
The committee is looking at "ways in which we can study the credit-bearing courses and programs delivered by various means at UB," Penniman said. The group is preparing an inventory of distance learning at UB, as well as looking at what other institutions are doing in this area, and "finally make some recommendations about policy.
"One of the overriding concerns was that we would continue to try to establish expectations for quality regardless of the means of delivery of a course, whether it's being done online, or by close-circuit television or in a traditional classroom, that the kind of quality standards that we've expected from a classroom experience would be maintained," Penniman said.
The committee has surveyed each academic unit at UB and will present the information it has gathered in formal reports at a later date. Bromley noted that responses so far show that currently there are few policies regarding distance education at UB, and that most units are concerned about the time demands such courses place on faculty and about whether there is adequate technical support available to those teaching them.
Following the pair's presentation, discussion included questions about whether current UB class policies do or should apply to distance education courses; about who owns such courses, the faculty member or the university; and about how UB can make money from offering online courses. Penniman and Bromley said the committee will consider these questions as it continues its work.