UB feels pressure to keep up with its peers

Simpson pushes for more students and facultyBy STEPHEN T. WATSON News Staff Reporter6/21/2005

The University at Buffalo needs to hire 250 new faculty and bring in 5,000 more students if it wishes to successfully compete with other public universities, UB officials said Monday.
Expansion is necessary, but it won't come cheap, UB President John B. Simpson said in outlining his vision for the university's future at a University Council meeting.
"We are just a lot smaller than we should be," he said.
As part of this effort, UB must improve its fund raising, which also lags compared to peer institutions, he said.
But Simpson offered few details about the initiative, including when the expansion will begin, how much it will cost and from where the money will come.
This expanded vision for UB comes out of a yearlong review of the university's operations. This planning effort sought to identify in what areas the university should focus in the years ahead.
Simpson told council members that faculty who participated in the planning process had two major complaints: UB is too small, and its facilities are inadequate.
In some cases, an academic unit at UB will be half the size - in faculty and students - of the comparable unit at large public schools in Ohio, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
In terms of faculty, Simpson said the school - which now has about 1,900 full- and part-time faculty - should hire 250 new instructors, though he did not say when that effort would begin.
Provost Satish K. Tripathi said the university is working with the deans of its various schools to hire approximately 50 new faculty by redirecting existing resources within the budget.
"A lot of programs are just too small to have a critical mass to really go anywhere," Tripathi said.
UB also pales in size in terms of its student population. Overall, UB has the equivalent of 25,000 full-time students. That figure is 30,000 at the University of Pittsburgh and 50,000 at Ohio State University.

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