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Departments should not halt hiring, provost tells FSEC
By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor
UB departments seeking to hire new faculty members may do so without waiting until the UB 2020 planning process is complete to see if those positions fit into the new plans, the Faculty Senate Executive Committee (FSEC) was told yesterday.
"If you're already hiring someone, go ahead and hire them," Satish K. Tripathi, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, told the FSEC.
Tripathi explained that while deans are submitting reports that detail plans for academics and future hiring in accordance with the 10 strategic strengths identified by the UB 2020 process, they do not have to refrain from adding necessary faculty members now.
"The deans have to think in terms of strategic sense now, how they can maximize resources that are available," Tripathi said, but added that they also "have resources to hire for programmatic needs right away.
"We want deans to succeed and we want to hire people who are really going to make a difference."
The discussion began when William H. Baumer, professor of philosophy, asked whether any new hires this year could be counted retroactively as part of the UB 2020 hiring plans.
David L. Dunn, vice president for health sciences, who was on hand to give a report about his first three months at UB, remarked that his own experience with this matter has been positive.
"What I've noticed in my short time here is that this is not a rigid process," Dunn said. "In each of the health sciences schools, there are carry-forwards available, there are extant New York state lines that have already been committed, and then there's the potential for as many as 40 or 50 new lines from central allocation. So I see this process as almost a mix and match. There are existing folks who are about to be brought on board; we're going ahead with those hires. There are other requests that are outside of UB 2020 and a dean may say to me 'This is mission critical, even though it doesn't fit with nanotechnology.' We're going ahead with those as long as they can make the case for it and we can currently identify resources."
Dunn, an accomplished surgeon who had been with the University of Minnesota and its hospital system for 28 years, most recently as chair of the U of M's nationally prominent Department of Surgery, said he took the job at UB because he sees "enormous opportunity here."
This coming week, the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences will launch an internal campaign for a brand identity—UBMD—"to get every one of the practice plans—all those folks who are taking care of patients, but more importantly teaching medical students, health science students, residents and fellows—on the same page."
"This is something that I saw happen at the U of M. Once the practice plans coalesced, it was absolutely amazing. The clinical care got better and better, the clinical research got better, and quite frankly, the teaching got better because everybody was working together."
Gayle Brazeau, associate dean for academic affairs, School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, commented that she hopes the schools of nursing and pharmacy will eventually be included in such a plan. Dunn said he was "dismayed" to learn that they have been excluded by state law for decades and that he will be discussing a legislative initiative regarding this issue in the coming weeks.
"One of the things that I'm interested in long-term is how do we train health-care professionals and how do we train them as health-care professional teams and deploy them correctly," Dunn said.
Brazeau also said that Buffalo is a place that is "ripe to really advance interprofessional education. I think we've got the resources here; we just have to find a way to do it. I think we could lead the country in showing how it could be effectively done."
"I've got just the committee for you to head up," Dunn replied, to laughter.
Dunn also sees UB's lack of its own hospital "as potentially a good thing, as long as we can have one affiliate or a combination of affiliates act as a university hospital look-alike."
The University of Minnesota Board of Regents divested itself of its university hospital system in 1995, he noted, because "they saw it as an incredible financial albatross."
Marsha Henderson, vice president of external affairs, also spoke to the FSEC about her first two months on the job. She reminded the committee that her division was formed in response to a campus-wide task force that looked at "how the university operated with the external world, how we could do that better and be more effective in those things."
"In particular, they looked at our whole public-service mission, how do we carry that out, what does it mean, what should it mean and how is it perceived in the community," she said.
Henderson said she sees external affairs proceeding in three stages, including public service, "telling our story better" through the university's News Services and Creative Services departments, and gathering resources for the university through alumni relations, development and government affairs.
"We have to tell people better the kinds of things that happen here at UB for a lot of reasons. One, for our reputation, and hopefully appreciation and value in this community and all the other communities we want to influence. Also, because it garners resources for us and helps you do your recruitment and other activities that you want to do, and certainly brings recognition to the great things we do here. It also lets people know that they have resources here at the university that they can tap," Henderson said.
She shared a publication about the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences jointly produced by government affairs, news services and creative services as an example of how external affairs carries the UB message to its many audiences. Henderson said the university also is planning to hire a research firm to survey public perception of the university to determine how best to address constituents.
She said that many people outside the university are not aware of all that UB has to offer because there needs to be a clearer, more central message.
"We have been talking with many voices; we have not been talking in a singular voice. I don't mean to stifle the conversation or the specific needs of school-based messaging, but we have nothing yet that is a UB message, and so it's hard for outsiders to grasp who we are" she said.
Discussion following Henderson's presentation included how UB can better position its experts in the media and other public forums, how athletics can contribute to an institution's branding and the 30-year-old local argument over why UB chose to establish its "new" campus in Amherst rather than the city of Buffalo.
Barbara Rittner, associate professor and associate dean for external affairs in the School of Social Work, said that UB tends to "think very locally," forgetting that the university has a presence in many surrounding communities, not just in Western New York, but nationally and internationally.
"It strikes me that we make ourselves into a small college in a little town if we don't have a more global view about who we are and where we are going to have impact," Rittner said.
Henderson responded that there are "clearly all kinds of communities that we can influence. Our research isn't just in our back yard here; it is all across the country and internationally."
In other business, the FSEC approved a request to change the name of the Department of Industrial Engineering to the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering "to more accurately reflect its educational and research activities and priorities," according to the proposal by department chair Colin G. Drury, UB Distinguished Professor.
The committee also passed a resolution in support of the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, whose faculty seek, among other things, support for their statutory mission; for a stand-alone unit head in the college that is a joint appointment by SUNY and Alfred University.