Op-Ed contributor /100 new faculty

Provost Satish Tripathi recently announced UB will hire about 100 new faculty members, and eight to ten of these will be "highly visible-national academy level" scholars that would, presumably, be selected in large part according to the results of the UB2020 planning process.

That's a terrific thing to do and I wish them well. Many departments at UB have been limping along for years, using whatever lines they could squeeze out of their deans' offices to keep minimally-staffed programs from evaporating entirely.

Tripathi didn't say where the money is going to come from. Some faculty are wondering whose hide it is going to come out of. Have they found places for painless savings or new sources of revenue? If so, he could decrease the anxiety level by saying more.

There is more concern about who is going to allocate the lines and upon what basis. Some faculty say the departments should divvy them up. Maybe, maybe not. I watched the English department-which in the 1960s was one of the two best-known English departments in the nation-become known primarily now for its poetry Web site. During that transformation, I saw three department chairs ignore offers for new full professor endowed chair lines, and a fourth ignore an offer from the president's office to underwrite two lines for prominent African American scholars. I've heard of similar foolishness in other departments.

Which is why I've been interested in UB2020. Some faculty have dismissed it as the administration micromanaging, but that charge bears little resemblance to reality. Nearly all the work in various UB2020 groups has been done by faculty, not administrators. The information on departmental strengths that informed many of those studies was provided by the departments themselves, not by deans.

In late September, Mark Kristal, a former acting dean of social sciences, set up a blog on which he invited people to kvetch about UB2020 and the new administration. I looked at the blog this weekend: in the month it's been up it's drawn a total of 18 postings, all but four of them pseudonymous. Three of the four signed e-mails are from Kristal himself. The other was from Albert Michaels, a professor in the history department, responding to Kristal's claim that he doesn't remember morale ever being so low around here.

There's a lot of fear of change. Most of the noise comes from older faculty. The younger faculty has no investment in old ways, no power they might stand to lose, no new routes they have to learn. Some of the blog's letters are about the Simpson administration disavowing everything Bill Greiner and his administration did the past 13 years. Nonsense. New senior administrations always start off with new management teams, otherwise they're dealing with a staff that is mostly looking back rather than ahead. It's how complex organizations stay vital. The early phase of an administration is often the only time a real reevaluation can occur. After a few years, change is far more difficult.

I've been a UB professor almost 40 years, during which time I've seen a lot of planning projects and events. Very little of it has ever come to anything.

Simpson and Tripathi are forcing on us a process we've always said we wanted: serious consultation. So far as I can see, they're imposing nothing from above that hasn't always been there and isn't part of their job. They've insisted that UB2020 plans be based on faculty input, not deans' dreams or hustlers' hustles. Hooray for them. I know of several lame things that the one dean's office tried to dump into the UB2020 plans just to be sure they got funded later, and the faculty UB2020 committees refused to include them and they didn't get in. Hooray for the faculty.

The grumps are worried that Simpson and Tripathi will really do what they say, that they'll allocate resources based on the UB2020 faculty studies. I see it as a brave and creative venture. Sure, the reports and speeches are full of jargon (every UB administrator should have to pay a fine every time he or she says "excellence" more than once in any speech, letter, or proclamation), but so what? They're managers. That's how managers talk. When the UB2020 process is finished, we'll see whether they're doers as well.

Bruce Jackson is a member of UB's English and American Studies departments. He is SUNY Distinguished Professor and UB Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture and edits the political Web site buffaloreport.com.