University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: November 3, 2005

By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor

President John B. Simpson rejected an easier path of merely managing "an already very accomplished" UB when he took office in 2004 in favor of pushing for "an agenda of change that will lead from here to where I see a brighter future for the university."

"Professionally I think my job is, in part, to be provocative," Simpson said Tuesday in his annual address to the voting faculty in the Center for Tomorrow. "My job is, in part, to goad, to cajole, to argue with, to push, to challenge my faculty colleagues about what they do, about where they see themselves and their programs and the university going in the long term."

Taking a more provocative path carries with it risks and liabilities, Simpson acknowledged, but added that "personally, this is how I've always done my job as a faculty member and as an administrator.

"I have, as I'm sure many of you have, had conversations about how the administration is not doing what it should, not doing as well as it could be doing—in short, criticism," Simpson said. "I postulate that any time the leadership of an institution pushes an agenda of change, which is precisely what I want to do, there is going to be resistance, there is going to be criticism and there is going to be some degree of unhappiness on the part of many people in the organization. That's the way it is; I'm happy with it. Indeed, my view is that if there wasn't some good degree of criticism of me and of the provost, we wouldn't be doing our jobs."

Simpson said he is pushing for change at UB because of the current climate in public higher education in the United States, where a decreasing number of people are earning bachelor's degrees, and the number of graduate students also is dropping, partially due to changes that have made obtaining visas more difficult for foreign students wishing to study here.

"We're down 4 percent (at UB). The country as a whole was down substantially more in applications for graduate education for people from foreign countries," Simpson said. "The number of American citizens who are participating in graduate education—particularly in science, mathematics and engineering, technologically rich fields—likewise is decreasing precipitously. The net result is this factor—providing the person power that runs the research enterprise in universities—is declining in the U.S. and it's paired with a parallel rise of this same function in the countries that used to send us their younger people for education."

Visiting Singapore this past summer to talk with presidents of universities in Asia, Simpson said he discovered that Singapore has "a long-term, carefully considered strategy to build among the best research universities in the world."

Here in the U.S., meanwhile, "every state in the country is getting out of the business of supporting higher education," he added.

He said that after studying internal and external factors to decide how best to improve UB, he sees the UB 2020 strategic planning process as the road to a better future for the university.

"The external variables, by and large, such as the state of the U.S. economy, the intellectual property and the growth of universities in Singapore, these aren't things I can do a lot about, but internally I can and will do everything I can to optimize and maximize what we can do as a university," Simpson said. "My belief is that the way we are doing this through the elaborate planning process now going on with which you are all familiar is our way, I think the best way, to actually achieve that end."

But Simpson doesn't rule out external changes as well, beginning with how UB functions as part of the SUNY system, which he called "an interesting amalgam, I might even say a bizarre amalgam, of institutions."

One thing he would like to see change is "the way in which SUNY tends to deal with every institution in its organization as something identical, interchangeable, with the next.

"We do, after all, have four doctoral universities: us, Albany, Stony Brook and Binghamton," Simpson said. "We are as a subset of SUNY discussing among ourselves ways that we can differentiate—especially with the hiring of a new chancellor, which is coming soon—differentiate ourselves in a way that demarcates us as something different, perhaps as something special and unique within the system."

Simpson noted that New York State also has "considerable issues with respect to funding."

While UB, which receives 31 percent of its budget from the state, is in a better position than similar institutions in other states—Simpson's former place of employment, the University of Washington, receives only 12 percent of its budget from that state. "The way New York spends money on education is quite revealing," he said.

"Per capita, the expenditure per student, K-12, in New York is second or third by state rank in the United States," he said. "New York spends very well on education for K-12 students. If you ask about higher education, it falls to 47th or 48th. That is an astonishing turnaround. In fact, it costs more, nearly 50 percent more, for a student in the Buffalo Public Schools than it does for an undergraduate here."

The president said he also will continue to push for the change proposed last year in SUNY tuition, a proposal that would "tremendously benefit the university in terms of the resources that came to us as a consequence of developing a stable and predictable tuition policy." Such a policy exists already in the UB Law School, which several years ago, with state approval, began increasing its tuition in order to raise money for a variety of uses.

"They used it for hiring more and more qualified faculty, they used it for improving their physical plant, the capital expenditures, they used it for improving their library, for improving their staff support, for generating and running a well-functioning development mechanism, and last, and this is important, they used it to increase the amount of money that they had available for fellowships, for scholarships," Simpson said. As a result, he added, "the diversity of the student body is much broader than it was when this process began."

He pledged to use funds raised through a revised tuition policy to enable wider access to UB.

"If we were to be lucky enough as an institution to have a changed tuition policy which brought money into the institution, I would as president set a portion of that money aside and use it specifically for guaranteeing access to our university to people who otherwise would not be able to attend," he said.

Simpson and Satish K. Tripathi, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, also will continue to push for increasing the number of students at UB, as well as the size of the faculty, in order for the university to become a top-tier institution in coming years.

"Through the good work of your provost, we have changed the conversation with SUNY in this way: We are telling them that we need 5,000 more students at this campus and we need them because we need the size and the growth, particularly of the faculty, that accrues to that number of students if we are going to have programs of an adequate size to begin to compete effectively with the programs that are our competitors, that are not sitting still, and will be our competitors in 10 or 15 years," he said.

"I don't want to be in the same place we are right now 10 years from now, because if we don't move, those institutions will be competing for grants and contracts, and for the very best faculty. They will be moving and they will be moving fast and moving strongly," he added.

Simpson ended his remarks with the proposal for a globalization summit, "an aggregation of faculty, of staff and students, perhaps experts of various kinds from outside the university, to think about how we as a university can improve our position in the broad world in which we exist."

"In the United States, educational hegemony is no longer the rule of the day," he said. "We have to begin to interact more and more with institutions overseas if for no other reason than the tremendous advantages it provides us educationally."

When Claude Welch, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Political Science, asked Simpson how UB faculty members can "provide internationalization" through their classes and teaching, Simpson suggested they teach concepts "that transcend a U.S. interpretation," push for opportunities for students to study abroad "as part and parcel of their education," and encourage students from outside the United States to study here.

Marilyn Kramer of UB libraries remarked that in regard to international students, "Once they get here, the aggravation doesn't go away.

"Somehow we need to make them understand that they are indeed welcome guests and they indeed are giving us an enormous gift of their culture," Kramer said. "Anything this university can do to make that better, we should look into it."

Simpson also responded to a question from Samuel D. Schack, Martin Professor and chair in the Department of Mathematics, about promoting the value of higher education by saying that the Association of American Universities (AAU) is one of several organizations planning "a massive campaign on why it is in the nation's interest to support higher education."

The president also promised pharmacy professor Gayle Brazeau that he will not bring in more students and faculty without improving UB facilities in order to accommodate them. She also asked how he plans to help current faculty, to which Simpson responded by suggesting that faculty members visit the Web site of the UB Office of Research to see the programs available to them.

"Remember, we are here as an academic institution. Everything we do is to facilitate your work, your life as a faculty member because you are the university," he said.

Following the meeting of the voting faculty, the full Faculty Senate met to discuss proposed policies for academic integrity and grievance procedures at UB. The policies themselves are available for reading under the documents section of the Faculty Senate Web site. The Web site versions lack only a "summary dismissal" provision added to them during Tuesday's meeting.

Two other amendments—one that allowed students to choose attorneys not acting in their capacity as members of the bar to be their advisors during grievance procedures, and another, which removed language that would disallow students' use of attorneys as advisors—were each defeated.

The policies will be presented to the senate for final action during its December meeting. If they are adopted, they will be forwarded to Simpson for promulgation, which will make them official UB policies.

William H. Baumer, professor of philosophy and chair of the senate's grading committee, told The Reporter that the proposed policies' major features are placing primary responsibility for considering academic integrity violations and academic grievances at the department and college or school level. They also set procedures for academic integrity and grievances that are "exactly the same at the undergraduate and graduate levels."

"Current policies are similar in most respects, but have differences that can confuse with resultant mistakes," Baumer said. "Academic integrity and grievance procedures are very similar, again to reduce procedural errors. The policy governing relations of the academic integrity and grievance policies to other UB policies is new, addressing a significant lacuna and adding specifications for school and program procedures for dismissing students from professional programs."