University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: October 11, 2007

By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor

Will UB's plan to increase the size of its student body, faculty and staff result in the city subway system extending to the North Campus?

According to Robert Shibley, director of the master planning process at UB, it could.

Speaking to the Faculty Senate Tuesday, Shibley said he recently met with the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority (NFTA) to discuss its taking on the contract of providing transportation on all three campuses.

But the NFTA said it would cost too much to operate.

"They said, 'We'd need increased ridership, we'd need more density.' So I said 'How about 10,000 more students, 1,000 more faculty and 650 more staff?' And they said, 'That would be great. That could actually change our minds about whether we should make the next fixed-rail extension go to the airport and instead make it actually come to the (North) campus,'" Shibley said.

"We're 15 minutes into a meeting about maybe giving them the paratransit and suddenly they're talking about realigning fixed rail. You've got to get excited about that," Shibley said. If UB is still running its own transportation system in 2020, "we'll have failed at public transportation," he added. "If we're still imagining that we're going to bring 10,000 students, 1,000 faculty and 650 staff to UB in single-occupancy vehicles, we are doomed to the asphalt of parking for the rest of our existence. We won't have a beautiful campus."

Shibley said that the NFTA would be discussing the matter this month, and "I think they want to play." In the meantime, Shibley hopes to explore the "resistance" on the part of some faculty, particularly on the South Campus, to using the subway as a quick, convenient mode of transportation to the downtown campus.

Shibley also pledged that the "temporary buildings" that have existed on both the South and North campuses for decades will be incrementally removed. In particular, the trailers on the North Campus used by the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences will be gone by the end of spring semester 2008, he said. Renovations of Founders Plaza, "right down to the artwork and the urns," are in process, he said, with the artwork on a two-year loan from artist Brian Tolle.

When Stephen Dyson, Park Professor of Classics, complained that on the North Campus, "you can't buy a book, you can't get a decent meal and you have trouble getting a decent cup of coffee," Shibley replied that "All three of those things are absolutely on our radar screen as part of our conception of the heart of the campus."

In other business, Lucinda Finley, vice provost for faculty affairs, said the new Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) combines all of the elements of the two former entities merged to create it: the Educational Technology Center (ETC) and the Center for Teaching and Learning Resources (CTLR).

Finley emphasized that TLC will "draw on the strengths of both to create an even better unit."

Recalling that several senators asked last spring that "the CTLR mission not get subsumed under the technology-driven mission of ETC," Finley said, "This was not about removing the focus from general teaching effectiveness, but about improved deployment of resources of both entities. We're trying to deliver on our promise that this would be about new and improved and enriched programming, not about making anything go away."

A search will begin soon for a new director for the center, as well as for an additional instructional designer. Robin Sullivan, instructional designer and program coordinator, has produced a full schedule of workshops for the current academic year.

The Organizational Development & Training unit in Human Resources will pick up some of the more basic technology training for UB employees, Finley said.

She also said that all CTLR resources are in the new center in 212 Capen and can be checked out through the UB library system.

Maureen Jameson, associate professor of French, noted that the Faculty Senate Computer Services Committee had not been consulted prior to the merger, and asked if TLC would continue ETC's aim to help "faculty members master the technologies that they would bring to their teaching."

"I hope that this mission will remain a core part of the new unit," Jameson said, urging that the search committee for the new TLC director include "people in the Faculty Senate who are on the computing side and not let computing be subsumed under a mission of pedagogy."