New kids on the block

This story is part of an ongoing series about the changing face of UB.

Even Lucinda Finley couldn't tell you exactly what UB means by "faculty."

"The one thing that is clear about faculty is that there is no definitional blurriness over people who are hired on the tenure track," said Finley, vice president for faculty affairs.

Outside of that though, things get murky. Finley is working to clarify the confusion, but with so many volunteers, clinicians, adjunct instructors and part-time lecturers, UB doesn't have a textbook definition of what constitutes a faculty member.

Ever since President John Simpson came to campus, the faculty has been the talk of the town, first for his administrative hires, and now for plans to increase the faculty base by over 100 in coming years. Though a definition is lacking, Simpson knows what he's talking about - as Finley implies, it is the tenure-track newcomers that will shape UB in the long run.

But in the meantime, as UB makes plans to answer the 100-person call and works to better centralize its hiring system, a large number of new faculty members are already here. As Simpson has pointed out through UB2020, the face of a university is the face of its faculty, and this semester alone there are 104 new faculty faces, the first wave of UB's next generation.

A need to centralize

Although Simpson and Provost Satish Tripathi called for the 100 hires, hiring faculty members remains a decentralized process mostly in the hands of the individual departments and schools.

"It's not this top-administration-heavy hand that's running the whole thing," Finley said.

For the 72 tenure-track faculty who are now in their first semester at UB, their arrivals were need- and resource-based, as most hires are.

"A department may decide that their needs right now are for someone who already has an established research program and can bring research funding with them," Finley said, "or they may decide their needs in their program are better served by hiring an entry-level person."

"It's not as simple as in high school when the biology teacher retires and we need to get a new biology teacher," she added.

Most of the searches that brought the recent hires were national ones - mixes of job fairs, advertisements, and meetings, among other venues - and many of the schools they've come from are ones with Ivy League reputations UB aspires for.

The data on them, however, is limited.

According to Finley, "There's no current process that requires any unit to inform the provost when hiring new faculty," but that should change as UB centralizes a few aspects of the system.

There is some concern that taking away some of the freedom departments and schools currently have will slow down the hiring process and hurt UB in the highly competitive academic market, but Finley said much of the individual freedom will remain.

"Nobody is going to tell the English department that they have to hire a sciences professor," Finley said.

First impressions

Many of the future hires, according to UB officials, will come as the ones already done in the past two years under Simpson and Tripathi, and the tenure-track people new to campus this semester are a model for future growth.

"It's these people that get hired with the expectation that they will succeed here, stay and contribute the long-term success," Finley said.

Although much is made over the idea of the arts versus the sciences, especially when it comes to expenditure lines handed to departments from above, the 72 tenure-track faculty new this fall are practically distributed evenly between humanities/social sciences and medicine/sciences/engineering.

Many of them are foreign born, or second-generation Americans, especially in the sciences, which is the result of national trends more than anything UB has done in picking its professors. All of them are either associate or assistant professors, and while some are right out of graduate school, others have come here with impressive r?(c)sum?(c)s to start new and expanding academic programs.

Many of them also say they are keenly interested in research at UB, and it is not just research President Simpson has put such an emphasis on.

"I wanted to get started on the research area and UB was the one attractive place that was a very research-focused school," said Rajesh Shah, 33, an assistant professor in marketing in his first semester here.

Shah, who is originally from India, most recently finished graduate school at Cornell. He was also looking at Dartmouth, Wisconsin, and NYU, but ultimately chose UB and is happy with the way the administration and his department have made him feel at home.

"It's been a great experience so far," he said. "I've been lucky."

Ruth Bereson, an associate professor in art history, is far removed from graduate school, and is equally blown away by her opportunity here, as she's been hired to develop a new program in art management.

"The university itself has a forward-looking approach," said Bereson about what attracted her to UB. "I liked what I was hearing, really. There seems to be a lot of vision on the part of senior faculty."

"I think very much that the emphasis on research and on innovation is extremely important, and I see myself playing an active role in that," she added.

At 47, Bereson comes to UB from Columbia University on a path that has taken her from Australia and through Singapore. She says her colleagues have also shown much interest in what UB is doing, and Buffalo is growing on her as she's already frequented Shea's and the Irish Classical Theatre Company.

At UB Bereson says she has found "the freedom to develop my subject in areas that are important, to push forward programs of research, to be able to develop something that wasn't static."

Damien Keane, a new assistant English professor, found exactly what he was looking for in UB's renowned James Joyce collection and unique Irish literature program. Though to be here he had to leave his dance-punk band in Philadelphia, Keane said he's just here to do good work, be happy with his classes and get students to read something they haven't read before.

"This year there are three new faculty members in (English), and I think that in itself is very typical in universities of this size, and that's exciting," said Keane, 32, who was looking for an east coast job as a Connecticut native. "There are a lot of young faculty in this department."

At the University of Pennsylvania, where Keane was before UB, he didn't teach any classes, so that's been his biggest adjustment.

"It's been very good, a little bit overwhelming in kind of predictable ways," he said.

Looking ahead

There are few who disagree UB needs more faculty, and the administration's plans through UB2020 have been largely well received.

"It's excellent. We need that and more," said Nancy Smyth, dean of the School of Social Work.

"Across the board we are undersized in terms of faculty and have tried to be a much greater and better university than the state has been able to support," said Mark Karwan, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

The next step, among many others, is to find the necessary resources for more faculty, Karwan said.

"One could make a call for as many faculty as you want, but the resources need to be there," he said. "And as far as I can tell, they're not here right now for a net gain of 100 faculty."

Uday Sukhatme, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, believes the example to do even more is already here, especially in his own school, which has grown 20 percent in three years and is serving as an example for UB2020.

Simpson or not, Sukhatme said UB was already on the path to greater growth.

"The issue is: given what you excel in, can you find a niche to make Buffalo and the university really known?" he said. "Are you expanding on what you really have?"