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Downtown wins in Faculty Senate survey of UB campuses
By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor
UB's growing downtown campus scored highest in an informal survey of how members of two Faculty Senate committees view the trio of UB campuses.
Robert G. Shibley, project leader of the "Building UB" planning process, asked faculty at yesterday's Executive Committee meeting to rate "the physical campuses" from 1 (low) to 10 (high). In addition to the FSEC, some members of the senate's Academic Planning Committee also were in attendance.
When the numbers were in, the average scores of each campus were downtown campus, 6.9; South Campus, 4.9 and North Campus, 3.8.
Bradshaw Hovey, associate director of the Urban Design Project in the School of Architecture and Planning, joined Shibley, who serves as that project's director, at the meeting.
Together, they have logged 110 presentations in the past few months on the comprehensive physical plan under development in support of UB's goal to grow by 40 percent. The pair often asks audiences to tell them what is wrong with each campus. Yesterday, they got plenty of answers.
What do senators dislike about the North Campus?
"The physical layout is such that a student doesn't have time to go from one end to the other end. The linear structure is crazy."
"The isolation from other amenities in the community."
"We're an island in Amherst."
"The absolute mind-numbing tackiness of the furniture. There's absolutely nothing whimsical and on a cold day, God help us, we need color, we need light, we need some whimsy."
"The very poor acoustics in many, if not all of the classrooms."
"It's dingy, it's poorly lit classrooms, it's an unpleasant place to be and it's hard to learn in a place that's ugly. A university campus, more than anything else, should be physically attractive."
"The large lecture theaters that exist are such that you need binoculars."
And, of course, "parking is a problem." Among its positive attributes, the North Campus has "the Center for the Arts," "it's cleaner; there's more light," "there's a combination of both openness and compactness" and "once you get on the campus, walking is reasonable."
Senators' problems with the South Campus included:
"The buildings are run down. The gym is decrepit. The lighting and the pipes are all corroded."
"The older buildings look like bad high schools. They have bad linoleum, outdated colors, windows that don't close so you are freezing in the winter and you can't air-condition them in the summer because there's a gap."
"The Cary-Farber-Sherman complex: We should just blow that thing up."
The positives about the South Campus included "landscaping," "architecture" and the fact that its size "is on a human scale."
But when it came to downtown, it seems the potential of that campus is what garnered the higher marks. As it exists now, UB's downtown campus includes just six buildings, "two of which are on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus," Shibley said.
Among the positives, according to FSEC members, were the campus' "connection to businesses and the Theater District," and its general location, including its access to the routes 90 and 33. On the negative side, one faculty member remarked that the area is unsafe, saying "I wouldn't go there. I'd go to work there, but I sure wouldn't stay there." Another pointed out that the physical distance between campuses could sound a "death knell" for some dual-degree programs.
Shibley and Hovey also asked FSEC members to rate UB's institutional capacity to grow by 40 percent. Averaging their answers, which included conditional votes by several members, the senators rated this 6.6, and offered such remarks as "I would give you a 10 if I knew that we would become a public benefit corporation," "I think we are stuck in the (SUNY) system" and "We can't maintain what we've got." One senator said that if the process is "based on past experience with UB, I'd say a '2,' "but if it was based on the current optimism university-wide, "I'd say a '5 1/2.'"
For the latest update on UB 2020 and the physical planning process, click here.
In other business, Satish K. Tripathi, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, reported on a survey of incoming UB freshmen that has been administered every two years and that this year received responses from 2,600 of 3,200 students surveyed.
The last time the survey was done in 2005, about 15 percent of students cited UB's national ranking as a reason they chose to attend UB. This year, 45 percent gave the ranking as their reason, Tripathi said, adding "As you know, we haven't changed rankings, so you can see the perception has changed."
A greater number of students also cited another reason for choosing UB—"family advice"—which was checked off by almost 45 percent of respondents in the current survey, as opposed to 10 percent in the 2005 survey. And the number of respondents who selected "teacher and counselor advice" as the reason for enrolling at UB more than doubled, from 12 percent in the 2005 survey to nearly 27 percent in 2007.
"These factors are taking a more proactive role" in students' decisions, Tripathi said.
In terms of how they see themselves, a total of more than 63 percent of respondents said they consider themselves above average in creativity, compared to 55 percent in 2005, and those considering themselves above average in mathematics also increased by 8 percent, he said.
"This class is not only the best academically talented class in terms of SAT and GPA scores, but it also is the most confident class," Tripathi said, adding that an increased number of respondents also indicated they expect to communicate regularly with their professors at the university.
"They will be knocking on your doors and want to talk to their professors a lot more. Please don't disappoint," he said to nervous laughter.