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Commentary 'Jw** Ivory to vinyl tower . . . reduction of old dream United Way/Support UB FOOTBALL Note: Howard Wotf is a full professor on the UB English department faculty. He began teaching here in 1967. by Howard Wolf Saturday, Sept 29th Those of us who came to teach in a democratic, progressive, and enlightened State University of New York (Buffalo) bewcen 1963 and 1970 —when the “old” private, basically local, and provincial University of Buffalo (UB) joined the “new 4 ’ and invigorated State system (SUNY)—arc now something like an endangered species. The idea of building a great university, critical in spirit and committed to its faculty in their diversity, even peculiarity, has been supplanted by the ethos of the trade school. A. vision of becoming a public Oxford (the inspiration of Martin Meyerson who abandoned our tear-gas ridden campus in 1969 for the Hall of Ivy) has given way to the notion of the University as a service station supplying local needs; to the idea of the university as an aggrandized employment agency. Our situation is typical and national* - . , T,U'- We’re now in the business of training Twin Fair Managers, more Hooker chemists (to superintend more Love Canals), airtl Pot Hole Control experts. These are the halcyon days here and across the land for the School of Managenjfnt.Natqral Sciences and Mathematics, and Engineering. How did we come to this reduced version of our larger dreani? Why has' the administration in Buffalo —an administration that came vindictively into power in a backlash after the collapse of the student movement—used the Proposition 13 mentality and recessionary trends of the I970’s to cater to a partially real, and, I hope, somewhat imagined constituency within the University to disable the humanities and the sodial-historical sciences? This vendetta against humane letters, Educational Studies, and the Social Sciences in favor of Management (the “salvationary” field of the 1970’$), Engineering, and the Natural Sciences is aimed both at satisfying Carey’s Division of the Budget (DOB) and bolstering support'for the sustained appointment of this University’s President, Robert L. Kettcr. The President and his staff are making use of our immediate past in doing this. They are trying to get those members of the faculty to hold the line who (recruited like them' mainly from the managerial-technocratic disciplines) were appaled by campus radicalism in the 1960’s, a radicalism that called into question the narrow careerism and governmental affiliations so cruical fo the funded life of the technocratic faculties; that called into question their alliance of academic, coiporate, military, and governmental interests: the joined intersts of America’s academic Power Elite. • V Fillmore Room - Squire Hall HtfltfiO ■ 8:00 pm -f informal meeting with players and coaches & Special \Gilest Former Buffalo Bill - County Executive - Ed Rutkowski • v* 8:00 pm - Midnight - Music with Life After Donation $2.00 Beer and wine will be sold How does this work? The Vice President for Academic Affairs (VPAA), preparing to meet the expected pressures from the DOB, came up with a plan to move SUNY (Buffalo) as a whole to a faculty-student ratio of 17/1 by 1981. This arbitrary ratio put him in a position to do two things: to reduce facul4y lines and to reallocate faculty resources (lines and salaries) among the various and favored units of the University. His ratios put him in a position to make inroads upon Arts and Letters, Education, and the Social Sciences in order to strengthen the technical and vocational areas I’ve mentioned. His figures also made it possible for him both to cut faculty lines as a whole while adding where he chose. His fingers allowed hiih to cut 66 lines and add 19. This became possible by exacting a sacrifice of 39 lines from Arts and Tetters: By taking these 39 lines from Arts and Letters, a virtual bloodbath, was was geared up for Carey’s budget. The VPAA was getting ready in his plan for the imminent 1970-80 budget cuts and was projecting cuts for 1980-81. He was leading us to one slaughter and dressing us for the next. - Tickets a at 111 Talbert Hall. U.B. Carey’s actual budget cut only called finally for SUNY (Buffalo) to absorb 24 faculty line losses; he didn’t specify where cuts were to be itaade. Our administration, with its managerial-corporate goals and policies, with its preference for numbers over ideas, decided where the cuts were to be made. Arts and Letters was told to serve up 12 lines—one half the total Tor the University^ By coming up with his ratios, the VPAS was able easily, as I’ve demonstrated, to absorb the DOB requirements for 1979-80. The boys in the Vinyl Tower had come up with just the “short-fall” (Orwell, where arc you now?) in Arts and Letters that they needed. They knew they could meet a body count—i.c., “needed faculty adjustment on existing base.” The eradication of a distinction between Ivory Tower and “market” place that students and faculty dissidents wanted a decade ago is echoed by an administration (hostile then and now to radical reform) to justify sacrifice in the humantities in favor of “market”-able trades and skills. The President is playing the numbers best calculated for his “re-upping.” Whether the figures are accurate or not and whether we could generate different ones through different bookkeping methods are not the issues. The historic mission of the University has been reversed. Where once the sacred and liberal arts were to be protected in the 19th century against the incursion of materialism, applied science, and mercantilism, now it’s the technocratic and fiduciary sciences (skills?) that ask to be protected from the impingement offhe historical, andliterary disciplines. Th» Dynamo tow looks suspiciously at the Virgin. “‘k'Y *i) OJ What fUlA^f'historicffl 1 «H3H leads luiAJUCftiMiT elsewhere tO support harrow ptofteklbnalism, career training, and corporate style in concert with legislators? The simple answer is, of course, money. The well is dry, we know this. We feel it in our paychecks and at the pump, but this doesn’t explain properly why decisions wkhinavailable budgets fall unfailingly against the Humanities. An unacceptable explanation lies in the method of allocation: something like a Nielscn-rating approach (when it suits the administration) is used to count the student “market.” One Dean here actually talks about the “share” of the ’’market” his department ’’exports” to other departments. We think his metaphors arc mixed, but this substitution of viewers and commodities for students (with all that it implies about the connection of ideas to products) defines the fiscal Philistinism we’re up against. He argues for popularity, relevance, and instant gratifiction (the demographies and statistics of the moment) against value, balanced judgment, and a respect for the past. What we lack here at Buffalo and across the country is a serious debate about the meaning of the arts and humanities within the State University, an open inquiry (in the halls of the Legislature, Congress, Foundations, and, of course, universities themselves) into the long range meaning of budgetary assaults upon the Liberal Arts. Can we let the dictates of today’s job market shape our judgements about the human resources we’ll need to go into the next century? What are the implications of preparing one graduate student to be a scholar of Chinese history and language against the training of 100 students to be accountants? It is more important to produce one humane book on Islamic influence on Western Culture or a guide to laying petroleum pipelines? Do these questions make any sense at all? Gan kind, quality, and style of learning in one field be compared with another along any simple line of valuation? . We’re at a critical point in our history here in Western New York, and we know it’s pretty much the same across the country. We re letting the men in the Vinyl Tower (no women, of course) produce ratios that may have little to do with the national, international, and inter-stellar realities that we 11 face at the end of the twentieth century. J*1 ' bl sfn '<1- ilno' UNITED WAY BENEFIT 7 - 8 PM “an informal get-together” with players, coaches, families, friends (and special guest, former Buffalo Bill - County Executive Ed Rutkowski) 8 — 12 midnight Rock With “Life After” Saturday, Sept. 29 $2.00 Donation Fillmore Room Drink§ Available Sponsored by: UUAB and SA
