University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: October 19, 2006

By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor

UB, with three major centers and "a host of affiliated institutions beyond those three campuses," is firmly embedded in several municipalities whose counsel will be critical to the success of UB's master planning process, the Faculty Senate Executive Committee was told yesterday.

Robert Shibley, professor in the School of Architecture and Planning, told the FSEC that he has long wished for a comprehensive planning process during his 24 years at the university, a period during which UB tended to treat each capital project individually, without respect to simultaneous or future growth.

"The invitation here has been, in fact, 'let's do it right' and it's just been music to my ears the last four months to start asking myself what does that really mean for a campus this size divided in three centers with an aspiration to grow by as much as 40 percent," noted Shibley, director of UB's Urban Design Project. "Among other things, it means we have an opportunity to completely reframe the relationship to our surrounding neighborhoods, to our region."

Shibley praised the foresight of the neighboring communities, which each have submitted their own plans for the future to UB.

"Ladies and gentleman, they are way ahead of us in planning for the future of this region. They all have aspirations for us," he said, adding that he looks forward to joining with them "in the adventure to advance the university to a state of excellence and the region to an increased state of health."

Shibley noted that while UB's goal for 40 percent growth is ambitious, "we would need to do this planning whether we have a 40 percent growing kick or not.

"We have got an aging building stock; it's in serious stages of critical disrepair. We know this is not a campus that's easy to love. We know it's got to be better in order to retain the loyalty of students. We know the potential is there for South Campus and we know we would make a much better citizenship in the region if we had a stronger, mission-based presence downtown."

With three centers that can be considered "a full set" of environments—downtown, urban and suburban campuses—UB's timing for beginning its master plan couldn't be better, according to Shibley.

"Locally, we have a body of work on the binational region, on Erie and Niagara counties as a planning framework, the first comprehensive plan on the City of Buffalo in 30 years has just been issued and accepted in February of this year, the Town of Amherst has its brand new centennial plan, and there are both downtown strategies and waterfront strategies in the City of Buffalo as well," he said. "The planning infrastructure is very good. It speaks to managing slow growth. It does not manage for continued decline. It assumes there will be some. But we'll hit bottom and bounce if we are smart about our investments and strategies. And they (the municipalities) all say there's a role for UB to play."

Several of these communities have their own ambitious visions for UB, Shibley added, including extending the current Buffalo subway, a subject that drew the most questions following his presentations.

"Buffalo sees the Main Street corridor all the way out to the South Campus as a primary investment corridor in the future of the city. The Erie-Niagara County planning framework takes that same corridor and presses it out to the Amherst campus as an investment strategy," according to Shibley. "They are looking at and understanding the potential and power of the academy to contribute."

President John B. Simpson has met with the chief executives of these municipalities and Shibley said he and others have met with—and will continue to meet with—their planning officers as the master plan moves forward.

While he presented a draft of a timeline for the process—which begins with selection of a consultant architectural, engineering and planning firm sometime between January and March of next year and puts implementation of the plan as beginning in late spring 2008—he cautioned that this schedule already is changing by several months in each category because of the vastness of the undertaking.

"We are designing for a small city: 1,346 acres, almost 10 million gross square feet of space on just the North and South campuses alone, 200 buildings, 48 off-campus structures in various forms of ownership, 38 miles of road, 28 miles of walkway and we're looking for two more parking lots" to add to the existing 98 now available, he said.

With 40,000 students, faculty and staff, as well two-thirds of the 100,000 UB graduates in New York State living in Western New York, there are many more voices to be heard, Shibley said.

One of the first actions of the planning process has been to begin thinking of UB as one united university.

"One of the things we noted fairly early on in our engagement four months ago is that we almost never saw a map with all of UB on it. We've understood ourselves as fragmented and we always draw ourselves as fragmented and we don't see ourselves as embedded in a larger system. So we've taken to talking about the notion that we are one campus with three centers, we are one University at Buffalo."

Shibley then showed the FSEC a wide-ranging map of Western New York with red dots extending far beyond Erie County representing where faculty and staff members live (click here to see the map), as well as a map of all UB buildings downtown, which has "stunned" several downtown leaders upon viewing it.

"They didn't know there was that much of us down there," Shibley said.

In regard to current capital projects at UB, "we've taken the mantra of late to say to folks that it's unacceptable to stop a project with the phrase 'wait for the master plan.' Every project that's in play right now is important. It's got some kind of mission and the goal would not be to stop it but would be to understand how to frame it as a demonstration project until the plan comes forward."

The campus built in the 1970s has been called "a factory," "ugly" and even "soulless," Shibley said. The goal of the master plan, he noted, is to keep the good and improve the rest, "to bring more life to the core of the campus."

The master plan can be thought of as "the physical embodiment of UB's academic 2020," Shibley said.

He said UB is undertaking the plan to provide academic excellence for its students, but also to bring more jobs, more tax revenue, more research dollars and more commercialization of local innovations to the region.

Ultimately, the plan will enable UB to grow from 25,000-plus current full-time students and 6,200 faculty and staff members to 35,000 full-time students and 7,075 faculty and staff. The process also will allow the university to grow from spending "about a billion dollars" to produce an economic impact of $1.25 billion in the region to spending $1.34 billion with an economic impact of $1.75 billion in Western New York.

"This is about everything we've got. It's about a long-term vision for a great campus in a great region, a 21st-century university," he said, adding that the planning committee will eagerly seek out the wisdom of faculty and staff, and students, as well as UB neighbors, in coming months as the plan proceeds.

"Instead of designing 15 new committees to help put together the first comprehensive master plan since 1972, we said 'let's try something different: Let's use the Faculty Senate, let's use the Professional Staff Senate, let's use the student leadership organizations, let's use the international program, let's use the infrastructure of the university as a way to inquire about what we want to be and how we want to go forward.

"There will be lots of challenges to overcome, not the least of which is our own internal skepticism," Shibley said with a laugh.

Shibley responded to questions about whether the plan will include a subway extension to the North Campus, saying "whether it's transportation vis a vis subway, streetcar...the goal is a seamless campus. We are trying very hard not to predict the conclusion of the plan before we do the planning. There's no question that we'll be looking at that historical artifact, the original intention for the size of this campus. We'd like a walkable, bike-able community. Our neighbors would like a walkable, bike-able community.

"We built the most expensive rail system possible. You can spend $200 million a mile for a subterranean version of ours today. You can build above ground, light rail, for $20 million a mile. You can do streetcar for $35 million (a mile). The question now is 'what's the right thing to do?' We really have to study this very carefully."

For more information on the master plan, go to http://www.buffalo.edu/master_plan/.

In other business, the FSEC met Graham G. Stewart, the new associate vice president for alumni relations who previously was director of alumni relations at Ithaca College. Paraphrasing the adage "it takes a village to raise one child," Stewart said he believes "it takes a whole campus to raise one alumnus who will be loyal to UB."

"It's amazing how many times I've seen alumni disengaged from a university because of a few traffic tickets or just a bad residence hall experience or that bad first roommate," Stewart said. "It never fails to surprise me that they can't overlook it. Generally, it takes just listening and accepting the fact that this will always be with them, then systematically bringing them down the road to reason."

Stewart said he has begun work doing assessment and inventory, and sees "huge potential" for UB's 21 domestic and 11 international alumni chapters. Noting that the international chapters are located primarily in Asia, he said he hopes to establish more alumni chapters in Europe.