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Faculty Senate extends course-resignation date
By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor
The Faculty Senate adopted a proposal Tuesday that allows students to unilaterally resign from a course without penalty through the 11th week of the fall or spring semester, and through the first two-thirds of any other academic term.
Any resigned course shall be included in the student's record of study with a grade of R, but no credits shall be accrued, according to the proposal, which was submitted by the senate's Grading Committee.
The proposal also stipulates that neither the grade nor the credit shall be included in computation of a student's grade-point average. The student may enroll again in the course in any subsequent semester or term.
The period was extended because the current midterm resignation closing date does not allow students to consider their performance on midterm exams when deciding whether to resign or not.
The proposal now goes to President John B. Simpson for approval.
In other business at Tuesday's meeting, David L. Dunn, vice president for health sciences, delivered an update on recent events in the health sciences.
First on Dunn's list was the School of Public Health and Health Professions' announcement that morning that BlueCross BlueShield has given $5 million for its researchers to study "how to decrease the epidemic of obesity that's swept really the entire nation, but is prominently figured here in Western New York because of the related problems with heart disease—actually all types of cardiovascular disease—type 2 diabetes and hypertension, which are some of the biggest health threats that we have. (See story in this issue for more details)
"You don't see this sort of grant being deployed by a private-sector company to a university very often and you don't see it being deployed to a public health school," Dunn told those present, including Simpson and Satish K. Tripathi, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. "Maurizio Trevisan (dean of the school) has got his folks working on curing disease from a health-care perspective, not just epidemiology 20 years after the fact."
Dunn mentioned that School of Nursing representatives "are becoming very interested" in one of the 10 strategic strengths in the UB 2020 planning process, that of aging and chronic diseases, which was to receive further input yesterday from them, along with representatives from the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and the schools of public health, pharmacy and dental medicine.
Regarding other strategic strengths, Dunn said that he senses "a sort of a misperception about how those are supposed to emerge, how they're going to emerge."
"It has been an absolutely bottom-up approach. So now we're at the point where we want to execute on hiring plans and there are a lot of questions about 'well, who is going to get this funding line,' 'how is it going to work out,' and the answer is, 'We have to work that out working with the deans and the department chairs, all the way down to the individual faculty level,'" Dunn said. "Where that is working, at least in my area of health sciences, is there are several strategic strengths that have actually come together and are now talking in a fashion that will most likely be synergistic. Synergistic is perhaps an overused term, but I sense that group is probably going to come out with a hiring plan pretty quickly and the questions will be does it match the decanal unit needs in conjunction with that strategic strength."
Dunn, who has toured each of the health science schools, noted that researchers will need to be ever more creative in the increasingly competitive arena of nationally sponsored funding.
"One of our challenges in this day and age, since we're benchmarked by NIH/NCI funding, is how are we going to do better in those areas with the funding cycles being so flat right now. My hope is that the budget does increase over the next couple years. That may be overly optimistic, but, of course, that's really where we're going because that's the payoff for populating the multidisciplinary strategic strengths with individuals who get those grants."
In response to questions following his remarks, Dunn commented on the recent "misconception in the Western New York public eye about what's going on in the medical school" regarding the radiology program being placed on probation.
"Radiology is one program out of 55; the remaining 54 are fully accredited," Dunn said. "This is the only one that is being put on probation and which we may lose, in fact.
"We're actually deciding whether or not we need to voluntarily withdraw the request for re-accreditation." He added, "The medical school is not falling apart in terms of its training program. It's very strong; it's got a wide variety of programs, the vast majority of which, with the exception of radiology, are fully accredited."
Gayle Brazeau, associate dean for academic affairs in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, asked about improving interdisciplinary training for health-sciences students, which Dunn agreed should occur.
"UB could lead the way in that," he said. "The two-fold approach to that would be how do we deploy health-care practitioners into Western New York just to maintain what we've got here because there's a decreasing number of nurses, pharmacists, physicians, you name it, but also how could we do that in a different way, using a different model, in which we're essentially deploying not one individual practitioner, such as a dentist, but a whole team to serve an underserved area. I have lots of ideas about that, but this is something I'm going to need lots of help with from the health science deans, department chairs and faculty members. I think most likely in the next six to 12 months we should put a task force together on that."