Concern over UB services dominated Wednesday's "Talk of the University," WBFO's monthly radio show hosted by UB President William R. Greiner and Vice President for Student Affairs Dennis Black.
Callers during the one-hour program raised issues including parking on campus, UB's location in Amherst, the content of The Spectrum and whether Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello should have accepted the offer to teach at UB earlier this month.
The show's moderator, Mike McKay, brought up a recent Buffalo News piece by columnist Donn Esmonde criticizing the mayor's weeklong hiatus from his elected duties to teach an upper-level UB management course during winter break.
"Think about it. The mayor takes a 40-hour week off in the midst of the biggest crisis in the city's history to teach a course on Buffalo's financial woes. UB paid him $8,000," Esmonde wrote in the column published Jan. 23.
President Greiner supported Masiello's decision, pointing out both that the mayor is free to use vacation time as he wishes, and also that student reaction to the class was supportive. Additionally, Greiner said it was not fair to place all the blame for the city's fiscal problems at the mayor's feet.
"I think the mayor is doing a great public service for the region and the city if he's helping people in the private sector understand better the set of issues and problems that the city faces with regard to its finances and the way in which New York state has chosen to divide up the responsibility for providing public service," said Greiner.
Another caller questioned The Spectrum's decision to print profanity in certain instances. The caller asked the president his opinion on the use of profanity and asked whether any of her husband's tuition money funded the newspaper. She identified the "Personals Issue," traditionally printed at the conclusion of each semester and consisting of submissions by UB students, as "the biggest [culprit]."
Both Greiner and Black expressed dislike for the issue and urged the caller to direct her concerns to The Spectrum itself, as they had done.
"I didn't get by the first page [of the personals issue] before I quick dashed off a note to the editor, urging her to maintain the high editorial standard she has set for the paper," said Greiner.
"I don't think they do anything that's in violation of law or their free speech rights and all the rest. It's a matter of judgment about what's your responsibility to the community," the president said. "I will defend, till the end, the right of our students to do that kind of experimentation, even if I personally, from time to time, have some problem with it, which I do."
Greiner also noted that the newspaper is run entirely by students who are learning their jobs as they do them. The Spectrum is funded by an allocation taken from student fees to provide the UB community with a newspaper "paid for by students and funded entirely by students," Black said.
The extent of the university's involvement with The Spectrum is the gift of space for editorial offices in the Student Union, said Greiner.
"I think it's very important for us to have that newspaper," the president said. "It's extremely useful, first for the students, but also for other people on campus."
The recurring theme of UB's community involvement was raised by one caller who was concerned with the university's failure to provide more support to the University Heights district, beginning with the decision three decades ago to situate the North Campus in Amherst rather than downtown Buffalo.
"There was no viable site ever identified for this university downtown," Greiner said.
Building the campus downtown would have involved filling in part of Black Rock Channel and harbor, moving 1,500 people and closing down 5,000 housing units, in addition to figuring out how to incorporate existing structures into the university, he explained.
"It's a no-brainer. The SUNY trustees will flee from the downtown alternative," Greiner said. "I think what we all ought to do is try and move on and ask what's best for the region now."
The caller compared UB's role in the University Heights district to the community roles taken in recent years by Canisius College and the University of Southern California.
"We quietly have gone about investing $200 million in this campus, and we got dissed by people in this community for our involvement in our neighborhood," Greiner said. The president's position is that UB's role in the University Heights and surrounding areas is one of a neighbor, not a guardian.
Does that mean, questioned the caller, that UB's responsibility to the community does not extend beyond its borders?
"Sure it does, but to what extent should that involvement be?" Greiner replied. "Plain and simply, we're not the city of Buffalo. We're not the landowners of the local neighborhood."
"I think it's crystal clear, given that balance, we're going to have to do more at the Amherst campus than we do here, simply because that's the constituency we have to serve first," he continued. USC and Canisius differ from UB in that both have only one campus, compared to UB's two.
Parking at UB, an issue almost as old as the argument over North Campus' location, entered the conversation when a caller spoke of his difficulties parking when visiting his son, a current student, and suggested developing a parental parking tag to allow short-term parking in the lots closest to the residence halls.
"You're polite when you say there's a lack of ample parking for the parents around the facilities - I suspect there's none," said Black. Although some metered lots are available to the dorms, both Greiner and Black agreed that parking for parents was a need that had neither been addressed nor previously raised, but promised to look into the situation.
Continuing the discussion of parking, a UB alumna wondered what happened to plans originally developed decades ago to build a parking garage on North Campus.
Greiner said the cost of constructing a ramp is nearly three to six times the cost of building a flat lot. The lots currently in use, while not aesthetically appealing, meet the current demand for parking, he said.
UB will probably see the appearance of a ramp in the next three to five years, Greiner predicted, to serve the increased parking needs that will accompany the university's long-term plan for additional on-campus housing.
