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

The Buffalo Blog Frog leaps from topic-to-topic without any particular focus in mind. Wherever another 'fly' is to be found (that's the proverbial "fly in the ointment" to those not tracking the commentary already), the Buffalo Blog Frog follows. Sticking out its tongue and devouring the little morsel, the Buffalo Blog Frog follows its basic instincts. So be careful, you too could be the subject of the Buffalo Blog Frog.

Replies to commentaries are welcomed, suggested topics even considered, but the Buffalo Blog Frog is intended simply as a personal forum for ranting and raving about whatever is flying around in the mind of its owner. Enjoy it or get annoyed, it doesn't really matter; this is my (public) psychotherapy!

A special thanks to François Planque (that's a hearty "merci") and the team at b2evolution.net for making this all possible through their freely distributed software.