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

It's hard to believe that in the final analysis UB2020 really was destroyed by an expensive hooker and a blind man. Governor Eliot Spitzer's personal life-style caught on tape with one of his expensive prostitutes abruptly ended what promised to be one of the best governors in the state's recent history. There was even considerable talk about presidential material and possibilities of a White House run. He had been one of New York's more aggressive and more effective attorneys general not only at fighting crime but also at helping the little people with their struggles against large exploitative corporations. The Buffalo Blog Frog liked Governor Spitzer, personal life-style choices aside, and applauds what he was able to accomplish before his untimely demise.

The "blind man," of course, is New York State's former Lieutenant Governor who assumed the role of Governor with Spitzer's abrupt departure. He is legally blind but the reference is not to his physical disability but to his mental blindness as to the potential greatness of the UB2020 plan. Now Governor Paterson simply couldn't see driving New York State into greater debt to bolster the economy in Western New York and obviously had no great love for UB. All deals were off; the commitments made by Governor Spitzer were not going to be honored by the new man in charge. End of the fairy tale, except President Simpson didn't quite get the message as he persisted in replaying the theme from the movie "Field of Dreams" over-and-over to the University and to the local community. Further set-backs came from Albany not passing legislature that would permit UB to set its own tuition rates independent of the SUNY system and to continue building the downtown campus expansion on the backs of increased undergraduate tuition. UB was to remain, at least for the moment, part of the SUNY system under state control.

When did WE decide that we didn't want to be part of the SUNY system. After all, we are the flagship of one of the largest university systems in the country. By shifting our identify to the University at Buffalo we are "the University at Buffalo," nothing more except perhaps a casual relationship with a nearly defunct public eduction system. Few people outside the region have heard of the "University at Buffalo" while "the flagship of the State University of New York" touts some clout.

Like most of the important decisions made in New York State politics, the decisions were all made by executive committees. Nobody ever voted on them or got much of a chance to voice their opinion. But then the whole UB2020 plan was developed largely in executive committee, this time at the university level with outside consultants and the blessing of the governor's office. How did so few people ever get so much power? After all, the governor was promising to support a multi-million dollar project without as much as debate by the state legislature.

I hate "executive committees:" This term has become synonymous with small groups of elite people meeting behind closed doors to decide big issues. The only positive thing I can say about the whole thing (and that's somewhat tongue in cheek) is that it's no longer just "small groups of elite men" but now includes women as almost equal players. Of course that's really little progress; the women players have to behave like the male players and suspend their 'better judgment' in order to gain and sustain admission to this small club -- the "old boys' club" now reads (some) "women admitted."

So what exactly was the flaw? Too much control rested in the hands of a single, vulnerable person who ultimately would drop out of the scenario, and the success of UB2020 relied on paving the way to the promised land with New York State taxpayer money. It's seemingly bad style to state the obvious, but the Buffalo Blog Frog makes his reputation on his candor: this is the sort of thing that you hire a private detective to try to dig up all of the dirt, all of the skeletons in the closet before you rest so much on a single person. Surely some of that extravagant consulting budget could have been spent on a gumshoe. (Hum, did I really say that?) I suppose the UB administration thought Spitzer was already vetted (viz., investigated) thoroughly by his opponent when he ran for governor. I guess UB should have hired a better detective.

Link: http://UBdumb.com

There is a lot of New York State taxpayer money being spent in California these days. A rather amusing irony arises considering the fact that those who would save Buffalo’s failing economy take THEIR money and spend it out of state. UB2020’s chief architects — President Simpson and his would-be interim president — both consider California not Buffalo their “homes.” The actual payroll and continuing retirement compensation moving out of state is hard to track because much of the money comes from ‘hidden’ sources, but some online estimates have put President Simpson’s financial compensation from UB at over $700,000 per year. Ditto Simpson’s interim president designate who reportedly earns $300,000 per year on the regular payroll alone. The #2 man (soon to be #1 if the administration has their way), according to well-publicized sources, only resides in Buffalo during the weekdays and commutes to his California home each weekend. And of course there’s always the money paid to that pricey California consulting firm that helped develop the grand plan with the two masterminds. UB2020 may not help save Buffalo, but New York State taxpayers are sure helping California’s ailing economy.

More on the California connection (just a couple of quick examples to wet your appetite):

• California consulting firm hired to engineer and orchestrate the failed UB2020 plan (no comment should be needed, but just in case you still don't get it, you can start here),
• California architect hired to design UB's new super-sized solar array (come on guys, nobody at UB's School of Architecture could handle the job of laying out a few grids?), and
• California consulting firm hired to locate candidates for UB's new president (OK, you may have had to go out of Buffalo for this one, but certainly somebody in New York State could have managed this task; better yet, how about taking out a few advertisements in the national newspapers, academic magazines, and professional journals read by potential candidates? Do you really think that some high-priced California placement agency has a secret database of people searching for university president positions? Come on, anybody worth leading UB through another one of our crises reads [the Sarah Palin types aside) the professional journals including the employment advertisements!).

The UB administration continues to waste money in despotic give-a-ways that could instead be used to offer more undergraduate classes. The kick-back and patronage game continues unabated, networking being a synonym for corruption, no MBA required.

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.

Link: http://UBdumb.com

This is a working draft of a commentary that is open for public view prematurely because of the urgency of the topic discussed herein. Please excuse the typographic, grammatical, and even possible factual errors of this draft copy which would normally not be made public at this stage. Check back for frequent revisions; this document is 'live,' perhaps even changing as you read this. This preamble will disappear when this commentary is in its final form.

The planning of UB2020 has a number of flaws, among them the notion that students from outside the region are going to flock to Buffalo for an education. The primary source of new students according the administration: California and China. Somebody needs to explain to the emperor that his new clothes aren't exactly what he thinks they are, but nobody has the nerve (another metaphor not to be taken as a derogatory comment regarding the person ). The grand delusion is promulgated from the administrative tower down through the ranks of the academy and on to the local community. Everybody is caught up in the hysteria and anyone not seeing the "new clothes" (i.e., the grand plan), well, they're chastised as blind, belligerent, or just plain naysayers.

Seemingly based on the premise of a movie called "The Field of Dreams," the administration argues that if we built it, they will come. The plan is to build classrooms for an additional 10,000 students and, of course, somewhere along he line hire additional faculty. There are several flaws with this plan, the main problem described here is sufficient to derail the "pipe dream" without assistance from the remaining problems that need not be detailed in this commentary.

Why are 10,000 more students going to flock to Buffalo?

There's really no answer to that question -- "why?" It seems to be only answered by a line from the movie, because "if you build it, they will come." Maybe, but I wouldn't bank on it which is exactly what the UB2020 planners are doing -- they're counting on the revenue generated by this mythical horde of students to boost the local economy (e.g., they'll buy a lot of low-cost food in the supermarkets?) and to provide a solid basis for other projects in the UB2020 plan. Indeed, the tuition revenue is a primary motive behind this aspect of the UB2020 plan. There's no great notion of making Buffalo an educational Mecca, a real intellectual and creative center -- just another 10,000 warm bodies paying tuition rates set by the University operating outside the control of the SUNY system. (The faculty union stands opposed to granting UB autonomy in setting student tuition rates and so far this action has been successfully defeated in Albany.)

Somebody needs to talk to the students and see who they are and why they come here. The answers most often given are that they are local students who come here because it's convenient or New York City area students who come here to get away from their parents for a while. The University does not draw heavily from regions with other SUNY schools; we don't even attract large numbers from around New York State. The chances of having students from across the country come here and abandon what is considered one of the strongest university systems in the country are slim to nil. Perhaps we can recruit their rejects to pay our higher out-of-state tuition but good luck. And a horde of Chinese students? Talk to anyone who rents an apartment to these students and find out how much extra money they usually have to spend? No derogatory comment intended, but most of them are here on a tight budget -- just ask. Furthermore, despite TOEFL scores that are acceptable, the English-language skills of many of the foreign students we already accept are horrible, and accepting even more with a poorer command of English is not going to build our academic reputation favorably. We can't lower the academic bar any lower without becoming merely the back-up school for the talented-students we wish to recruit, and we're already accepting as many students from our existing 'markets' as we can with current academic admission standards.

In all fairness to our University recruiters and our faculty, we are drawing from a larger population today than we were a decade ago. UB is gaining prominence in the region, but it's a slow process that's unlikely to fill our classrooms with 10,000 more quality students any time soon. And it's a regional effect, drawing a few undergraduates away from SUNY campuses which rank higher in national ratings (e.g., Binghamton) but failing to draw large numbers of students even from neighboring states.

Who is going to teach the students?

The University has been working very hard to destroy its true academic and educational core and replace it with money-generating externally funded group of scientists that hold academic titles normally reserved for true "professors" that balance their research and creative work with teaching the students which make a university not just a research institute but a true university. Indeed, my Department has recently denied tenure to one of our strongest, most-dedicated assistant professors whose absence in our classrooms will be greatly missed. Down one more, full course-load carrying "professor," up one vacancy for a potentially self-sustaining fund raiser who can fill the slot for another 5-year 'probationary' term. But how much teaching is in their contract and will they really attract quality graduate students to take their place in the classroom?

My department is down somewhere between 25 and 35% from the number of faculty members we had in the early 1990s (accurate tabulation to follow) and the remaining faculty teach much less. This leaves only graduate students and part-time faculty to teach many of our undergraduate courses, and the budgets for hiring these people are even being cut while the number of our majors continues to increase. In short, we're just barely meeting the needs of our existing student population, how could we be expected to meet the needs of the projected increased enrollments?

The administration proposes to hire 750 new faculty members to help teach the 10,000 new students (a few additional faculty would be nice to teach our students now who often have difficulty getting into required courses and who are being presented with an every diminishing choice of courses to take). Is Albany going to approve 750 state-lines for which they have to commit continued funding? (Last time I checked, my payroll check was still being signed by the State of New York not by Buffalo University [pun intended] ). The promise that these new faculty members will support themselves through external funding does not relieve the State of guaranteeing their payroll will be met with State funds. These are permanent, tenure-track positions (unless the administration really believes that faculty will flock here without the promise of tenure-track positions) that must be approved by Albany.

Qualification is appropriate again: my department has an outstanding Undergraduate Program Administrator who manages to work magic getting students into required courses and completing their major in a reasonable time. Some other departments may be similarly fortunate but many are not. The assertion that some students have problems getting into required courses is in reference to students' reports from outside my department. Our Undergraduate Program Administrator has been able to work miracles with diminishing resources amidst increasing enrollments, and she exemplifies the type of support staff needed for a truly outstanding undergraduate program. Her considerable effort relieves much of the day-by-day pressure on faculty so that they can better fulfill their teaching and other obligations; our department leadership even scores a point here for having wisely empowered her to provide this much appreciated service to its faculty. (Gee, I sure hope this compliment from the Buffalo Blog Frog doesn't cost her a pay raise -- guilt by association? )

Why build downtown?

The University seems to be intent on building many of these new 'classrooms' on its new urban campus in downtown Buffalo. The reason for selecting this site? To revive the staggering Buffalo economy. Local construction jobs aside, will these students really eat enough hamburgers to revive the Buffalo economy? Perhaps, perhaps not. Somebody with a calculator must have 'run' the numbers, but it would certainly be enlightening to know what assumptions are made before everything is multiplied by 10,000.

The previous "master plan" for UB was to move its primary academic core to the suburban of Buffalo, Amherst, where it has sufficient space to expand. Of course this plan developed in the late 1960s through the early 1970s didn't foresee the real-estate vacancies that would become available in the downtown area of Buffalo and the great real estate potential of buying cheap space from delinquent owners, some of whom haven't even been paying property taxes. Even with the sluggish economy, the real-estate market has been booming for a few speculators.

A major reason for consolidating the University's operations on a single campus was to encourage more productive interactions among its faculty as well as make a wider variety of classroom instruction easily accessible to its students. The purpose was to bring UB together. The current plan of physically separating faculty and students even more than what is experienced with two, closely located campuses severely handicaps any such interactions among faculty and students alike. The South Campus is far enough away from the North Campus now to inhibit faculty collaborations and mutual enrichment, and students rushing to catch shuttle buses and showing up a few minutes late for class because of commuting create enough disturbances without confounding the problem by moving parts of the academic core even further away.

And the Band Plays On

UB2020 relies on several key components neatly falling into place for it to work. Any major piece of the puzzle failing to materialize destroys the entire project -- all components are interdependent, like inter-locking pieces of a puzzle. The whimsical projections of undergraduate student enrollments to increase our current size by over 1/3 simply are unlikely to materialize, at least not with the current university focus which largely relegates undergraduate teaching to a task of second-class faculty. And the students know this: talk to an 'average' tuition-paying student and see how they feel about access to faculty and being instructed in key courses by graduate student assistants.

Students from outside the area (necessary to increase enrollment by 10,000) will flock to the University when the University establishes itself as one of the national leaders in undergraduate education. A strong research faculty IS an important part of accomplishing this goal, but the 'care and feeding' of the undergraduate population beyond simply recruiting research-oriented faculty who delegate teaching to graduate student teaching assistants (often not speaking English very well) will not build UB's reputation as a premier undergraduate educational institution. The University needs to take more seriously its role of undergraduate instruction and to genuinely reward "professors" who are spending time and effort to accomplish this mission (including awarding tenure in some cases!). We can afford a "faculty elite" who buy-out or are otherwise relieved of their major teaching obligations only to the extent that we can adequately cover our undergraduate program with quality instruction.

UB2020 falters because it has failed to provide a rational plan for building this population of mythical students beyond, "build it and they will come." And like a house of card, removing one piece from the foundation causes the entire enterprise to come tumbling down. "And so the band plays on . . . "