Link: http://UBdumb.com

UB serves two communities — a local community that extends little further than Metro Buffalo and a global community that stretches across the United States and around the world. Too much emphasis of the current administration has been on the fantasy of saving downtown Buffalo and thus limited to serving the local community — expanding UB to become an important regional school. This model may work for MBA programs whose graduates might be absorbed into businesses residing in the extended community, (of course that’s assuming that other factors keep the economy and local businesses thriving), but it doesn’t work for building a premier university of national and international repute.

The argument can be made that local businesses can extend outward to hire lots of people worldwide. Consider a food concession empire that employs 50,000 people as workers around the world. Surely this impact is comparable to that of a university professor who publishes a small scientific ‘breakthrough’ or a creative arts person who writes a thought-provoking play? Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t. If some song goes unsung because it’s never written, the world has lost that work forever. But if Acme Hot Dogs, Inc. doesn’t sell hot dogs at Fenway Park, then some other company or entrepreneur steps forward who is happy to fill the vacuum. In short, many (but of course not all) businesses simply compete for who will win the concession, who will get the contract, who will distribute or build the new cell phone that everyone demands. They don’t create markets; they supply markets.

Academic work traditionally creates new knowledge opening up hitherto unexplored territory. It invents the television, the microcomputer, the polo vaccine if not directly, then through those whom it has trained. There is a big difference. And not to malign commercialism and the better standard of living it brings to all of us, these two functions are much, much different. Even commercial enterprises are quick to recognize the importance of developing new technologies for their corporate expansion and for the creation of new emerging markets. But where does the university stand in this enterprise?

Many faculty members ‘play to a larger audience,’ one that the administration seems to have forgotten or perhaps never really understood. Young people (if they’re ‘smart’) are concerned about developing their careers and finding a long-term home to conduct their work, while older, tenured “professors” have the luxury of thinking about things more important than themselves. Of course some young people run afoul of the system by trying to pursue abstract ideals too early in their developing careers, while many more tenured professors never transcend their own sense of self-importance and maintain priorities dominated by career aspirations and personal gains. A good number of those surviving the system to become tenured do, however, move beyond that primitive, self-oriented stage of psycho-intellectual maturation to a ‘calling’ that makes life meaningful, more than just the passage of time or playing “he with the most toys when he dies wins.”

The beginning of the end for the true academy began in the 1980s during the Reagan/Bush era when American university professors started to become encouraged by Federal funding agencies to explore commercial applications of their research. There was a conflict developing between the traditional free and open exchange of research and the development of potentially marketable products from grant-sponsored research. The universities were moving into competition with industrial research centers as new funding sources for university research emerged (e.g., industrial contract research, cf. grant-sponsored research) and as cost-cutting measures for the industrial powerhouses (e.g., the former Bell Laboratories) became a choice method of increasing the “bottom line” on their financial reports. The difference between a real university and a research institute would continue to become blurred during the next several decades until finally commercial development of most university activities became firmly entrenched as a priority in many 21st Century universities.

The transformation of the traditional university into a money-generating, self-sustaining institution culminated with the popular “university as a business” model which seems to partially justify awarding leadership and control to career business-types from outside the academy rather than to traditional academic types that have risen up through the ranks of the university. Even many of the academic administrators who have ‘risen up’ through the ranks are people who were never really very successful in their chosen academic fields and hence might be considered actually ‘business types’ in disguise.

Major universities generally share a tripartite mission — education, research, and community service. Although these missions are not mutually exclusive in principle, an institution often excels at only one or two of these aims. The degree to which an institution excels at the latter to the neglect of the other two determines the degree to which it is simply a local institution. Excelling at only the second makes it a research institute, while excelling at the first makes it a true “university” whether or not it also has strong research or community service components. What does UB truly want to be?

Service to the local community is important and is an obvious obligation of every institution of higher education. At least its importance should be obvious even without the University’s public relations (PR) department constantly touting the impact of UB on the city and on the region. The PR machine loses effectiveness as it tries to broadcast its message further and further away from Buffalo, however. Like the light from a candle or the sound of a voice, the intensity diminishes rapidly with increasing physical distance unless it’s echoed by those far away (e.g., others independent of the university touting the importance of the institution’s accomplishments).

The other audience, the physically distant audience in some respects is often intellectually closer than the local audience. This audience (i.e., the second ‘community’ a university serves) consists of the people who learn and benefit from the work conducted by the scholars ‘hosted’ by a supportive institution. This characteristic (i.e., serving the larger intellectual community) largely defines what people across the United States and around the world consider a real “premier university.”

• A real premier university has impact well outside its region of physical contact.
• A real premier university can even reach further that a well-managed PR department can project its boastful propaganda.
• A real premier university makes ‘contact’ with thousands of people who know no geographic limitations and indeed transcend boundaries of time and space.
• A real premier university reaches the minds of the young and old long after the author's drum beat has died.
• A real premier university transcends itself in influence by supporting its faculty whom perform the university’s mission as a natural pursuit and out of a passion for their work.

In a truly premier university many of the benefits to the local community are incidental to the institution’s ‘higher calling.’ The faculty members simply do what they have trained to do and in many cases have dedicated their lives to do. Many of the consequences of this activity trickle down to the local community as they are broadcast to the larger world stage. A new vaccine for MS discovered by a university’s research faculty may be commercially developed by a pharmaceutical firm outside the local community, but the vaccine finds its way back to the ‘host’ community through immunization of the local school children. Of course smaller contributions are the norm; a discovery in basic science might pave the way for others at another university or in private industry who eventually develop the vaccine. Still, the benefits ultimately find their way back home to the community which supported the work of the basic scientist who published the essential breakthrough that permitted development of the important medical application. In such cases the local population would seldom be aware that their neighbors at the local university contributed a critical piece to the puzzle whose final authors receive the bulk of the public credit for the work. Nonetheless the unheralded basic discovery was critical to the breakthrough which benefited all despite the fact that the original work might not have created any local jobs. Without reaping the rewards (both financial and personal) of the final product, many basic scientists at premier universities find satisfaction in the work itself and in the recognition received from their colleagues for the fundamental contribution to understanding the subject matter and for their astute insight which helped to solve the scientific puzzle, qua puzzle. Would-be academic managers do not understand this process; would-be academic managers focus on the rewards that are tangible in their system of accounting such as grant awards and total research dollars; would-be academic managers through their myopic dictatorial policies suppress the very creative thinking necessary to make the true breakthroughs and leaps forward in knowledge leaving potential critical accomplishments sold-out for the price of adding another dime to the university’s coffers.

The institution is its faculty — no more, no less. The quality of its faculty determines the quality of the institution. No institutional managers can dictate the quality of an academic institution or the impact it will have on the local community. They can only help create an atmosphere where its scholars are free to pursue their intellectual and creative work in a supportive, nurturing environment. Within this context the local community usually benefits. Some professors direct large research programs which hire staff whom help make the scientific breakthroughs. Others write and perform plays or musical compositions which play to a local audience while being rehearsed for a bigger stage. And still others write novels which inspire students, colleagues, and the world alike. All perform their ‘duties’ out of a passion for their work and not from the mandates of some would-be academic manager. The mission of a premier institution is not to hire, entertain, and inspire the local population. These benefits develop out of performance of the institution’s ‘higher’ duties.

As the “University at Buffalo” perhaps it is right that the University focuses on the local community with little concern about its impact or reputation outside the region. However, as the “flagship campus of the State University of New York” the taxpaying citizens deserve better, not only a university which serves local interests, but one that serves the state, the nation, and the world by pushing the frontiers of knowledge through its research, education and training, and through its ancillary service to Western New York and beyond. Perhaps the UB administration’s insistence of being known as the “University at Buffalo” sans “State” is appropriate after all being congruent with redefining the University’s mission as service to the local area.

UB’s descent into second-class university status is heralded by its official department of work and play, or rather, work/life balance. The Buffalo Blog Frog remarked earlier that perhaps this was goaded by the former heir apparent for the interim presidency, a professional businessman who reportedly only resides in Buffalo during the workweek and returns “home” to California during the weekends. It was a tide that was a long time coming – many of UB’s administration staff seem to be absent from the university on a regular basis—some seemingly as much as those professors whom are never found in their offices. Of course many professors do most of their work outside of their offices. They often work in their laboratories or in secluded environments where they are left alone to pursue their creative work undisturbed by ringing telephones announcing textbook salesmen or by the panicky pleas of failing students unwilling to do the minimum assignments necessary to pass a course. Administrators, on the other hand, are on-campus to administer with their work often neatly organized in piles of paper on their desks. They are there to keep the institution running smoothly, to sign documents approving a grant submission or the addition of a new academic course. When they are gone their work most often remains ‘on their desks.’

The 9-to-5 orientation of many administrators is understandable and perhaps appropriate for their work but it is in contradistinction to the academic professors who usually carry their work home, often toiling away into the late hours of the night or early morning, even going to sleep and dreaming about their work which often resumes shortly after awakening. The schedules and the life-styles of businessmen and academics are much different by the very nature of their work and by the types of people attracted to such work. Some businessmen and far too many academics do burn out in part by not balancing their life and work better, but some academics shine very brightly burning-the-candle-at-both-ends before they burn out (i.e., make important, enduring contributions to their respective fields).

A number of years ago the Frog and one of his post-docs took a break from their research and teaching to attend a time-management seminar hosted by UB’s School of Management. Academics, like business people, are always trying to squeeze a few extra hours into a day and to manage their various projects better so that they can be more productive. The opening line of the seminar was: “Remember that you work to live, not live to work.” The Frog and his post-doc immediately looked at one another, the post-doc quietly whispering: “Michael, that’s not true.” Nothing else need be said about the topic; the mutual commitment to our chosen life paths, the decision to make conducting biomedical research in drug addiction and psychopharmacology as the priority in our lives was obvious to both of us. The sacrifices of moving away from family and friends, living in cities not necessarily among our favorites, earning salaries well below those commensurate with our degrees and years of training, even (in some cases) the cost of not having children of our own are all part of the price paid by many academics to pursue an extremely meaningful path for their lives, to accomplish something ‘bigger than themselves.’

Some business people will also confront the classic existential crisis known well by many academics who often circumvent it by engaging in meaningful life work early on in their careers. Such business people usually donate larges sums of money or engage in other philanthropic work to give back something to society, to help humanity, to leave something behind more meaningful than themselves or just their money or the luxuries that it buys. This is usually experienced late in life by the relatively few business people who do experience it; most of their peers never transcend the psycho-developmental stage of simply accumulating wealth for the sake of accumulating wealth and the material objects that it provides. This brief exposé is not intended as an ad hominid attack on the business types who often ‘manage’ a university, but rather simply to acknowledge the great differences between the motives and the lifestyles of academic and business people. No judgmental quality is implied regarding the two endeavors, but these differences often lead to business-oriented administrators misunderstanding the academics who’s work they inappropriately attempt to manage and supervise.

We might need businessmen on our ‘board of directors’ but certainly not at the helm — the guidance of the university, its direction, its very purpose should be dictated by the academics themselves who have dedicated their lives to their scholarly endeavors, not by people who assume a university-managerial role part-time while pursuing their other business ventures (e.g., the current constituents of UB’s Council). It’s not all about the money, Mr. Manager, it’s about EDUCATION — education of the students in pursuit of their degrees and in acquiring continuing education, education of the community through community service and other regional projects, education of the world through research and other scholarly and creative activities.

In too many cases university administrators have become the self-appointed managers of the talent (and the mission) of the academy. This was never their role — they are the groundskeepers, the classroom schedulers, the bookkeepers, the janitors in the enterprise, not the enterprise itself. By doing what many of them do best — playing self-serving, old-boy ‘business-style politics’ — they have assumed control of the academic component of the institution as well as its lighting and heating systems. They not only sell the tickets to the university events, but they have prescribed that ticket selling (of course a metaphor for generating revenue) is the primary mission of the institution with the entire academic enterprise in support of sales.

UB needs to decide whom it wishes to serve as its primary mission — a local audience or the more abstract ideals of a premier university. This institutional mandate then needs to be communicated clearly so that current and prospective faculty members can make informed decisions based on the congruence of their personal aspirations and that of this “university.” The stated goal of becoming a “premier research university” may be ‘false advertising’ to appease many of the current faculty and to attract new (money generating through their research programs) faculty members from outside the region. Indeed it may well be the case that UB rightfully deserves its second-class ranking because it destines itself to play only to a local audience, to serve a single, geographically limited area in a fantasy of saving the community by becoming “the new Bass Pro” — or perhaps having business managers run the university is not such a good idea.

Related commentaries
World University Rankings: Where does UB stand, or not?
University degrees to be signed by a bureaucrat?
Take the money and run (out of state)!

Link: http://UBdumb.comm

Faculty's Score: ??
Administration's Score:

In an 'unpresidented' move (pun intended ) President Simpson has agreed to stay on to oversee the search for his replacement. Originally scheduled to resign (AKA “retire”) 15 January 2011 at which time Mr. Nostaja was formerly designated to become UB’s interim president, it now appears that Dr. Simpson will remain for an unspecified length of time with no mention of Mr. Nostaja assuming (explicit) control. The chances that the students will have a “Ph.D.” sign their degrees (i.e., an individual actually entitled to the title “professor”) this spring are becoming increasingly brighter. Whether the “concerned faculty” actually had anything to do with this decision is a mystery; perhaps they too have scored a point in regaining some influence over UB’s governance; perhaps not, perhaps it’s only an illusion or more likely a small act to pacify the short-lived ‘rebellion’ amongst UB’s tenured faculty. In any case, it’s definitely a victory for the Class of 2011.

In what must be the shortest presidential statement in the past quarter century, President Simpson has announced his intention to remain at the helm of UB (apparently second only to UB Counsel Chair Jeremy Jacobs) for “a limited period of time.” His joy and enthusiasm for ‘his’ decision can be inferred between the lines of his brief message sent 05 January 2011 to UB’s faculty and staff reprinted below in its entirety.

Dear Colleagues:

I was pleased to learn that the presidential search process is moving along well. Following discussions with SUNY officials and University Council Chairman Jeremy Jacobs, I have agreed to continue to serve as president for a limited period of time beyond January 15th while the search process moves toward a conclusion.

Sincerely,

John B. Simpson
President

How this event came about is known only to a handful of people in the “inner circle.” The Frog would like to think that he too had an important influence on this decision (see below). Indeed, the Frog IS the “big fish” in his little lily pond. Like the “little pond” at UB, the “big fish” at the Frog’s pond have two ways to go—one is to escape by jumping over the dam and swimming upriver to the big world outside, and the other is to be eaten by the alligator that is kept in the little pond to prevent the big fish from becoming competition and perhaps even challenging the leadership. (The little fish in the pond are too small to be caught by or to otherwise be of significance to the alligator which is fine because it gives the Frog someone to exploit for doing the real work at the lily pond. Of course this is all a metaphor requiring certain interpretative skills on the part of the reader. )

Behold the power of the blog and the Frog’s grand illusion of having self importance. Some pivotal commentaries related to the ill-planned succession in leadership are linked below:

University degrees to be signed by a bureaucrat?
Recall Simpson as UB's President
Who Will Be UB’s Interim President?

It’s noteworthy that only 6 hours after the Frog’s initial salvo (i.e., publication of the first commentary) Mr. Nostaja announced that he was TEMPORARILY withdrawing from consideration as UB’s interim president. Of course that’s only a correlation, but hey, epidemiologists assert grand thinking, especially in their social engineering of the Great Nanny State, using only such data as the basis for their elaborate theories. So if it’s good enough for them to design a modern society of their making, well then, it’s good enough for the Frog to assert a simple causative effect, no grand theory required. Ah, the power of the blog!

There remains only one point to which the Frog would like clarification for the record: since President Simpson had already announced his resignation to take effect 15 January 2011, did he rescind his resignation (in which case his presidency could extend indefinitely as suggested by the Frog’s commentary Recall Simpson as UB's President) or is HE officially UB’s Interim President? This might not matter to most people, but it certainly would look a bit strange on his résumé should he decide to come out of retirement and take up another post upon his return to California.

In any case score one for the students: they are well on their way to having a real academic sign their degrees in the spring 2011 convocations. How the “concerned faculty” scored is unclear. They superficially appear to have reasserted some small degree of influence over the academy, but this is more likely the death knoll of the “concerned faculty” — the only rallying point (i.e., an issue upon which the “concerned faculty” could reach a strong consensus) is that having a businessman lead the university is simply wrong and is more than any faculty at a (potentially) “premier university” should ever be expected to endure. Now that this issue is seemingly resolved, they can all return to their individual pursuits and leave governance of the academy to the professional bureaucrats. There remains only a small number of truly “concerned faculty” whom without critical mass or even forming a small cohesive group within themselves lack the power to affect change. It’s SNAFU again at UB as “the band played on . . . .”

Link: http://UBdumb.com

With less than a month before President Simpson’s resignation will take effect, there has been no announcement or discussion beyond the inner circle at Capen Hall as to who will temporarily reside as UB’s interim president. Mr. Nostaja is still the leading candidate and the Frog’s best guess as to who will take over UB’s leadership during this period of crisis (FYI: UB is always is one sort of crisis or another, but this one seems extra serious.). Readers will recall that Mr. Nostaja was announced by Capen Hall back in September to replace Simpson until a permanent (at least official, permanence not being a feature of recent UB Presidents) UB president could be selected. The resounding protests among the faculty and heard from a few community leaders led to Mr. Nostaja temporarily withdrawing (i.e., waiting for the clamor to die down) from the position of interim president. But the Frog predicted back then that much like the terminator he would be back, not only to preside over the University and its search for a new president but to also continue cutting faculty and academic departments to streamline the UB business enterprise. After all, why waste time progressing towards transforming UB into a total market-driven institution based on the California business model that has worked so well as evidenced by the current U.S. economy? For example, the administration is rumored to be exploring ways to have classes taught by off-shore professors through modern telecommunications networks (viz., the Internet repackaged to sound like a UB innovation) similar to how customer service and other business functions are now largely based in India and Pakistan for many major U.S. corporations. Hey, they work much cheaper (provide the product for less) and speak English with some degree of clarity.

Running UB on a business model does have its advantages. A few members of the UB faculty are excited about the prospects of UB issuing common stock and are already making provisions to sell short (viz., betting that the stock value will plummet) after the initial stock offering (IPO). Salaries may be dismal for non-administrative professors, but at least some compensation might be found in UB’s management selling out New York’s stake in the Buffalo branch of its high education system. As usual the New York State taxpayers will pick up most of the costs with additional costs being born by the generous alumni and others who have made charitable gifts to the University.

The astute reader will notice that most of this commentary had little to do with directly addressing the topic of “who will serve as UB’s Interim President?” and that’s exactly the point. Throw a couple of red herring out there, digress on other popular themes interspersed with a few outrageous statements and the audience is largely distracted from the most important item currently being decided – who WILL serve as UB’s Interim President?! If you saw through this tactic before reading this paragraph, then perhaps you’ve already seen through the similar types of tactics being used by UB’s administration that has effectively ducted confronting this issue again. And by the time the clock runs out and Dr. Simpson is gone, what choice will there be except to accept Mr. Nostaja?

For those who are now starting to master the subtleties of the Frog’s prose, you have undoubtedly noted that the designation of “Dr. Simpson” was substituted for the usual “President Simpson” or just “Simpson.” That was to emphasize that President Simpson does indeed have a doctorate degree. And why “Dr.” was used in preference to “Prof.” Simpson which might better emphasize his academic standing? Because the title “professor” can be easily bestowed upon anyone who has been given that appointment by the university’s administration—“Mr. Nostaja” could become “Prof. Nostaja” at the stroke of a pen, perhaps receiving his distinguished academic title most appropriately from UB’s School of Management. Similarly UB could award Mr. Nostaja an honorary doctorate degree, but very few people with an honorary doctorate [as apposed to an earned doctorate] are blazon enough to use “Dr.” in their formal title in an academic environment.

Link: http://UBdumb.com

So UB wants to swim in a bigger pond? Hey administration, why not put your money where your mouth is? The World University Rankings published by the Times Higher Education has UB off the list of top 200 schools worldwide. Why? Well, I’m sure there are lots of reasons, but the single biggest one seems to be that UB uses a different scorecard to rate academic quality. UB’s constant emphasis on external funding at the expense of academic and professional quality (pun intended, in case you missed it ) costs UB dearly (oops, two puns in the same sentence; how witty the Frog is today! ). With the Times Higher Education analysis only 5.25% of the overall ranking is based on research funding — often a necessary tool but never a valid measure of an institution’s or an individual’s impact in the larger scholarly community for obvious reasons. In contrast, 32.5% of the overall ranking comes for citation impact — as the man says, “the numbers don’t lie.” Citation impact is a widely used measure outside of UB, including ranking journals for their impact factor often proudly displayed by the top journals luring prospective authors to their pages. The idea behind counting citations instead of the number of papers published is intended to sort out the junk from the articles that have an important impact in their field: Sure, lots of people publish lots of papers, but does anybody actually read all that stuff? And more importantly, does anybody ‘talk’ about it in their own publications (e.g., cite other authors’ work)? That's what citation counts are all about -- they're about other people 'talking about' your work in the professional literature; that's scholarly impact that can be quantified!

Why so much emphasis on quantitative measures? Well, that should be rather obvious to those in the sciences -- quantitative measures minimize the subjective bias in the institutional rankings. Contributions in arts and humanities are unfortunately not measured fairly by these criteria (the criteria used by the Times Higher Education ratings were actually adjusted to place less emphasis on citations and more on "reputation" for these disciplines). But the over-all subjective ratings of reputations by academics also seem to follow the quantitative measures used by the Times Higher Education quite well.

Changing the 'Rules' to Fit the Desired Outcome

Shortly after the Frog moved to Buffalo in 1987, UB had climbed onto the U.S. News and World Reports list of top schools under President Sample’s leadership with a respectable ranking in the top 25% (actual ranking needs verification; check back later). Even the Buffalo News proudly reported UB's new found status among the ranks of the better schools nationwide. Under President Greiner’s tutelage UB slipped off the list again but it was “OK, those reports don’t count anyway.” When Provost Capaldi started getting things back on track in the 1990s UB once again rose up the ratings on the U.S. News and World Reports and, needless-to-say, those ratings were once again deemed important. (FYI: The U.S. News and World Reports ratings are often criticized as being a popularity contest because they are not based on clear objective criteria.)

The administration would like to claim that these types of rankings don’t really count and our ‘peer institutions’ would never rank in the top 200 university worldwide anyway. Wrong again, administration. A number of the institutions that UB claims to resemble are listed and ranked respectfully in the top 200 institutions. You’ll find not only the University of Michigan (#15) and University of Pennsylvania (#19) but also Michigan State (#122) and Pennsylvania State (#109) listed. And what about the other schools in the region from which we're trying to draw an additional 10,000 students? Well, Cornell (#14) which is a pleasant afternoon's drive to the East and Toronto (#17) just an hour's drive North are all top ranked universities. Even little Delaware (population: 885,122 and growing) which has about half the population of the Greater Buffalo-Niagara Region (population: 1,631,418 and declining) is able to support the University of Delaware adequately to make the list at #159. “Harvard” (#1) or “Berkeley (#8) of the East" simply doesn’t work; both of these schools rank very high on the list as expected. Not only are our athletics teams being beaten by “our peers,” but our ‘academic teams’ are as well. So where is all that New York State pride? Does anybody besides the Frog want to do something about it?

UB's Mistaken Emphasis on Grant Support as a Measure of Success

How did the money become primary objective of a university or the measure of a faculty member’s contribution to their ‘host’ institution? There are a lot of factors involved. One of the most important is that business types seem to have taken over governance of the academy. For them, it is understandably all about the money. But who put them in charge and what damage have they done to OUR institution? Money is important and it is necessary to keep the university running and running well. The Frog has no objection to money or to having rich benefactors supporting our institution, and he is proud of his colleagues who have been able to secure substantial funding for their research programs. Furthermore, businessmen can have an important place in guiding the university’s day-by-day operation and weighing in on the feasibility of our academic goals; they just never should have been put in charge of the institution and in setting institutional goals and directives.

Is it better to publish 5 papers per year that nobody reads or one paper every 5 years that people do read and talk about? The administration’s answer is a resounding 5 papers per year. They don’t even consider whether or not any of the papers has an impact in their respective fields! If the ‘bean counters’ in UB’s administration insist on playing it by the numbers, then they should at least know which ‘beans’ to count.

Everyone in the sciences understands the importance of money in conducting their work (with few exceptions where little or no money is required for theoretical or other types of scholarly work). And everyone who submits a grant or other request for external funding knows about indirect costs, but those who don’t write grants may miss one important feature of external funding – it provides the university administration with millions of dollars to spend on their special projects that otherwise would remain unfunded or at least under-funded. These special projects range from building our Center for Fine Arts (I like that, it’s cool, it presents a good ‘face’ to the public, and I’m very fond of the “arts.”) to on-campus student housing (a necessity for bringing in more out-of-town students) and on to building a third, downtown campus (a very questionable endeavor, at best).

The Frog’s last research grant paid 52% indirect costs to the university which gave them roughly an extra $150,000 each year the research program ran on campus. Approximately one-third of the total amount from each grant goes to the university administration ostensibly to support the research program but in actuality to do with as the administration pleases. The research program that was supposed to receive support from these indirect cost funds received no support (e.g., release teaching time, laboratory or office space) beyond that enjoyed by colleagues who had no external funding for their work! Instead much of the money was used for special projects. For example, the President’s office contacted the Frog to see if his sponsor would like to receive recognition on the ‘wall of sponsors’ next to the entrance of the Center for Fine Arts. The Frog’s reply was that his “sponsor didn’t know they made a contribution to that building fund, but that they would probably not mind being acknowledged.” The acknowledgment never appeared; somebody in the President’s office must have explained to the person who contacted the Frog that they weren’t supposed to admit that any of this money was used on that project.

[Dear administration: if you would like to challenge this assertion, I’ll be happy to go over the books with you nickel-by-nickel starting with the residual funds from my direct-costs account when it closed that should have been returned to the sponsor. And if you want to start at the beginning, I’ll be happy to review my state-supplied set-up money account from which $500 [$1,000 in today’s currency] was spent by the Dean’s office to fly in a job candidate’s wife. Coincidentally, that ‘job candidate’ is today a UB administrator and his wife is employed by the University (a seemingly good expenditure but from the wrong account). You left a paper trail, and I have retained many of the scraps of paper myself.]

The University receives, through “indirect cost reimbursement,” millions of dollar each year that are necessary to keep the place running. Much of this money is used for expenses related to conducting research (e.g., physical space costs, library subscriptions, parking lot maintenance), but much of the money is filtered into accounts that are used solely at the discretion of the administration. Some of these ‘other projects’ are indeed great projects that we should all be proud to have contributed to in our small ways; some are not. But the bottom line is that the university needs this extra source of income to function and especially to grow. However, it has never been the mission of university faculty to feed the giant monster’s hunger – at least not until now.

There is a certain irony in the fact that library budgets are being cut and programs are being closed at a time when UB’s research funding is at its highest. The blame is placed on New York State cutting back support but wait, there is a problem with the accounting. The indirect costs from the external research programs are supposed to be used to support library budgets and secondarily to help smaller, under-funded programs that contribute to the overall academic quality and resources of this institution. So why are library budgets being squeezed? What about the football team’s budget? Are the funds being reallocated to support expansion to a third, downtown campus? That wasn’t in anybody’s “research” budget, direct or indirect costs.

The University needs its ‘fix’ of research money to build and to expand -- nothing wrong with that, except when acquiring the money off the back of its faculty researchers becomes the primary mission of the institution. UB’s administration has become too concerned with their special projects and too little concerned with performing the basic mission of an institution of higher learning. Yes, many research programs require external funding which generates indirect costs for the institution, but the volume of grant support was never considered by anyone other than administrators to be a metric of a faculty member’s productivity or (academic) ‘worth.’

Nobody except a businessman would ever think that money is a measure of success at an institution of higher learning or that the impact of a faculty member’s contribution to his ‘home’ university is measured in dollars and cents. Citation counts are not the best measure, but they’re the best single measure of the impact we faculty have beyond the confines of our physical borders. This is part of the mission of a research-intensive university – to ‘spread’ knowledge but acquiring ‘wealth’ for the administrators is not. Indeed, the impact we have in our respective fields will be there a long time after the money has been spent.

The UB Spin Machine

UB counts what they want to ‘count’ to present the best case for whatever they’re trying to sell. Consider, for another example, the listings for external grant support. There are a lot of multi-institutional grants listed in full-dollar amounts as ‘UB grants’ when in fact very little of that money actually shows up on any UB campus (e.g., co-P.I.’s with clinical trials being run in other cities through other collaborating universities). A lot of other "grants" are noncompetitive state grants that outside the region receiving them are referred to as "pork barrel" funding. In the Frog's short hand communication style this is simply “cooking the books” and UB does a lot of this. Like administrative salaries, you have to have inside information or know how to read the ‘signs’ to really see what’s going on in many cases.

Naturally the administration will be quick to criticize these rankings which fail to emphasize their favorite metric of funding level, arguing that they don't really reflect quality of scholarly work or an institution's real reputation. Unfortunately for that argument the rankings are pretty much what most academics might expect, except for the "academics" in UB's administrative tower who will keep chanting the administration's rhetoric! Being positive about ones university is one thing but being delusional is quite another.

With UB's guiding Council composed of businessmen and lawyers, what else would you expect? The UB Council doesn't have a single Ph.D. amongst them and unlike most governing bodies at academic institutions it doesn't have any faculty representation. So perhaps the mistaken emphasis on grant support as a measure of success isn't their fault; perhaps all they need is a little 'education' themselves -- perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps it's the obligation of concerned faculty to remind them of what an academic institution, "research-intensive" or otherwise, is all about. Perhaps if more of them had gone to graduate school they would already understand. (BTW: Ironically the students have an elected representative on the UB Council. Perhaps the faculty could ask the student representative to speak on their behalf.)

Where to we go from here?

Is acknowledging UB’s low ranking degrading the University? From the Frog’s perspective, absolutely not. It’s recognizing that we have a long way to go in order to reach the reputation that UB’s administration purports to desire and that many faculty members and even some departments here deserve. Unfortunately this doesn’t happen by spinning the data and trying to sell a load of Buffalo ‘bull’ to the local community or even to Albany. It simply doesn’t ‘play’ outside of Western New York.

If you find all of the quantitative measures used by the Times Higher Education analysis confusing here's a simple experiment (a type of reality testing) you can perform without any training in the socio-metrics of academic quality. Start driving out of town and stop every 50 miles and ask a random person what they think of UB. Find out how far out of Buffalo you drive before nobody's heard of it. Of course when you reach California people will again have heard of UB, but this time it's because of the University's financial contributions to helping that state out of their economic slump.

The University administration needs to quit ‘cooking the books’ and lying to the public about where we rank; it’s professionally embarrassing to those that see through the ‘smoke and mirrors’ and have a professional presence outside of Western New York. UB as "the Berkeley of the East" is a fantasy that isn't going to materialize any time soon and will never happen with UB's current money-driven Capen-Hall directives. The administration needs to truly understand that UB has some great faculty members and many that aspire to help put UB on the big map, but they need to quit trying to MANAGE the talent and start supporting it. They have to quit killing the goose that laid the golden egg and let things evolve in a supportive, nurturing environment, and that's something that businessman-turned-university-administrators simply don't understand.

The most recent doctoral program ratings by the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Sciences ranks about one-third of UB’s 34 rated doctoral programs in the bottom half of the country’s programs. In fact, only 10% make the top quartile of doctoral programs in the United States by both rating scales used with the NRC evaluations. “Berkeley of the East?” I suppose if the administration chants this enough times some people may start believing it, but it doesn't 'play well' outside the area. (BTW: The “Frog” did his part by participating in the NRC evaluations as surely did many of his colleagues at UB.)

"Satish Tripathi, PhD, UB provost, said he was pleased with UB's overall performance in the NRC report. (UB News Release, 29 September 2010)"

The UB administration has essentially turned this place into a mercenary corporate environment -- money, money, money, money. Every department and every project seems to be framed in terms of how much money it will generate. This is certainly not the intellectual environment that will attract the kind of scholars that build an institution's reputation favorably. Ironically, it's also not the type of environment that could attract an additional 10,000 quality students that would help subsidize some of the scholarly work at UB that ultimately builds its reputation. Corporate management style in academia simply doesn't work because it fails to understand the true mission of a university. “It’s all about the money” is not the theme for a ‘real’ university! (End of Part-I.)

Link: http://UBdumb.com

In short, they pay the bills! The undergraduate student population provides a certain level of financial stability through payment of their tuition and fees and through state subsidies based on the head-count. University reputations are slow to build and slow to lose; thus, undergraduates will continue to be attracted to a school that has historically enjoyed a strong reputation even in times its undergraduate and other programs are suffering. This provides a type of economic inertia that helps stabilize university budgets and permits realistic projections of future expenditures. UB needs a larger undergraduate population to provide this type of stability in funding and 10,000 new students is not ultimately an unrealistic number.

Good graduate students in strong programs are not typically tuition payers -- they are in fact cheap labor (e.g., the proverbial “ghosts in the machine”). For their efforts we owe them tuition remission and a stipend, ever so inadequate compensation for their talents and long hours of dedicated work. They are not revenue-generating sources directly; they financially cost the university in many cases. The undergraduate population remains our main source of stable revenue and they need better “care and feeding.” Yes, our strong graduate programs and graduate students contribute immensely to our reputation and they help us to obtain better and better external funding, but they don't pay the bulk of the bills. And good graduate students in strong graduate programs obviously contribute importantly to our undergraduate educational mission, but they don't pay the bills.

Of course Albany politics can make the pay-off variable through unilateral changes in policy, but undergraduate tuition revenue is still more stable than funding from grant agencies and the professors that hold these grants and contracts. Research-intensive professors are known to abruptly pull-up stakes and leave, taking with them their funding and the all so important indirect costs associated with their large grants. (Remember Jeffrey Skolnick, founding director of the Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, the “rock star" of bioinformatics? He one of a long list of people holding special titles such as "Distinguished Professor" that has abruptly left town.) Many high-profile professors are finicky, others just constantly shopping for a better deal; many have left UB abruptly and many more will continue to leave in the future. This is NOT a stable source of revenue, even in at times it is extremely lucrative. UB simply can't bank on this income. Even the University planners must realize this; otherwise why expand the undergraduate population so dramatically with UB2020? After all, you can pretty much count on at least some undergraduates competing with faculty for parking spaces.

Indirect costs generated from grants and contracts obviously contribute importantly to the University's operating budget and subsidize the cost of our graduate programs. In fact the indirect cost revenue appears to be the major reason the administration is interested in “research.” They’ve seemingly forgotten that the real purpose of research is to advance knowledge not generate revenue for university administrators to spend on their favorite projects, be it football, dormitories, or downtown campus buildings. Research money is the TOOL not the objective of any legitimate research program -- the pursuit of knowledge remains the objective which sometimes costs money and sometimes does not.

UB needs a better plan for building its undergraduate population and not simply the fantasy of build the physical space (and fill it will ‘instructors’), and they will come. Quality is of the utmost importance and UB’s current policies simply leave too many professors out of the classroom and fill the vacancies with poorly prepared graduate-student instructors. UB needs a real plan, with a workable approach to building its undergraduate student population based on attracting quality students to Buffalo for study at a premier institution. Students need to get their ‘money’s worth’ and more, and then they’ll be flocking to UB from across the region and perhaps even across the country.

UB has some strong graduate programs carried largely by the efforts of individual faculty and we have many outstanding faculty members who through their research and creative work contribute immensely to developing a better, stronger reputation for our University. Indeed UB is prominently on the ‘map’ in several areas. The administration needs to learn how to facilitate its faculty and not just dictate new directives based on the desired financial outcome of its faculty's work. Some scholarly activities bring in money, some do not, but they all contribute to building an outstanding university that undergraduate and graduate students alike seek to fulfill their educational objectives. Build that, and they will come!

Reallocating funding from the instructional core into ‘project UB2020’ has been to the detriment of undergraduate and graduate student instruction. In the hurry to build the buildings and to recruit a few ‘star-caliber’ new faculty members, UB has pillaged its very faculty and resources that make a university a university. The University needs to pay more attention to the “care and feedings” of its regular faculty—better salaries (not limiting pay raises just to administrative favorites), better working conditions (That's my office?!), and a better feeling of being appreciated and valued as a University at Buffalo professor, even for faculty members not bringing in the grant money (croak, croak) UB too highly prizes: then “they will come.”

The title UB often uses to describe its perception of itself gives away the administration's ulterior motives: "major research-intensive university" obviously ignores the contributions of the "arts" to the "College of Arts and Sciences" which comprises the single largest portion of our undergraduate population. Why not simply describe UB as a "premier university" or as a "leading university." The descriptor "research-intensive" defines its NEW mission which ultimately is linked with generating revenue from the indirect costs associated with external funding sources. (The passive acceptance of such "New-Speak" around UB has been phenomenal.) Hence, it has become the job of faculty to raise money for the administration (i.e., seek external sources of funding) which is not the job most of us signed on for when we were hired or is it the mission of any credible leading university.

Of course the undergraduate student population does much more than just contribute their tuition money to our endeavors at the University -- they enrich our academic environment by stimulating our thinking and energizing us with their contagious enthusiasm, demand that we explain our latest ideas in simple, logical terms that even a journal or grant reviewer might understand, keep us sharp at fielding questions which come from directions often impossible to anticipate, and enrich our lives in many more ways including helping us remember that knowledge needs to be effectively communicated to those whom would develop pragmatic applications of often very esoteric work and to those whom further build upon what we've 'learned' in our lifetimes' commitment to the pursuit of knowledge. In keeping with the administration's apparent objective of expanding the undergraduate population under "project UB2020," this commentary focused on the financial aspects of their contributions. And for that we faculty are also appreciative.