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Tripathi unveils plan for undergraduate education
By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor
"No UB undergraduate student left behind" could be a motto for the plan to improve undergraduate education at the university that Satish K. Tripathi, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, unveiled Tuesday at the Faculty Senate meeting.
Tripathi presented "A Framework for the Future of Undergraduate Education" at UB, an area in which, he hastened to add, the university is already performing quite well.
"We do a pretty good job with undergraduate education, we've done a pretty good job, which is similar to what we have done for the rest of the campus in terms of research and other things," Tripathi said. "What we need to do, though, is focus, and be able to tell the students what we do here.
"We do everything with respect to leadership, with respect to the honors program, with respect to international education, but how does a potential undergraduate student or parent know what we do? Where's our focus?" Tripathi asked.
The provost, along with Michael E. Ryan, vice provost and dean for undergraduate education, and Dennis Black, vice president for student affairs, developed the plan to more clearly define what undergraduate education means at the university. At the meeting, he said he also has asked Peter Nickerson, Faculty Senate chair, to form a committee to refine and implement elements of the plan in the coming months.
According to the plan, a UB undergraduate education places importance on many areas, including inquiry and discovery, service to the community, leadership programs and programs in global citizenship.
Tripathi would like the faculty committee to develop and carry out programs for community learning, civic engagement and research explorations. Also in the works is a faculty/student luncheon program.
Starting this fall, the provost also would like undergraduates to learn more about the strategic strengths areas of the UB 2020 plan and what they mean to these students.
"It's clear to see that graduate education fits well with the strategic strengths. One could see how it could impact the graduate education. Where does the undergraduate education come in? How does it impact the planning that we are doing?" Tripathi said.
General education courses on the strategic strengths, featuring the professors who have been involved in developing them, could be held, Tripathi said. The plan also includes creating a Center for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities, which would serve as an overall resource "so that students know from the very beginning what opportunities are available to them."
Those opportunities include the UB honors and scholarship programs, the Leadership House and Leadership Peer Educator programs, as well as the International and Cultural Diversity Center and the study abroad programs.
Tripathi will form an undergraduate education advisory council that will develop ways to attract better students to UB. The council would include an enrollment management team that would be charged with developing strategies to attract more undergraduate students from outside New York State; a marketing team to develop messages of substance about undergraduate education at UB; and a benchmarking team to measure learning outcomes, enrollment goals, persistence rates and graduation rates.
"What we want is to take undergraduate education, which is fairly good—it does most of the things that we want it to do, it has all the elements in it—and focus on those elements, create programs around those elements, improve those programs, market those programs outside and attract better students," Tripathi said. "The faculty is going to play a key role, not only in developing these things, but making them successful as we go."