Four months after President John Simpson said he would like to increase both UB's faculty and enrollment, Provost Satish Tripathi has announced plans to hire 110 new faculty members over the next three years.
Tripathi made the plans officially public in an Oct. 11 report to the Faculty Senate, where Tripathi said the hirings would be at a level beyond what is traditionally done.
"It shows the administration's commitment to the academic strengths identified in the UB2020 project," said Lucinda Finley, vice provost of faculty affairs.
The new faculty members will be placed based on the areas of strategic strengths identified in reports from the UB2020 project. Each area's needs would determine what aid it receives, Tripathi told The Spectrum Tuesday.
"We will determine the focus of these areas," Tripathi said. "We will find gaps in our strength and invest in weaknesses."
Currently, only four strategic strength areas have submitted their "white papers", which give assessments on the focus and deficiencies of the program. These areas are nanostructured systems, molecular recognition in biological systems, bioinformatics and life sciences, and artistic expression and performing arts.
New faculty will not be limited to the areas indicated by the UB2020 project, but will also be made by the academic departments.
"Hiring will be done in terms of need," Tripathi said.
Among these newcomers, Tripathi wants to include eight to ten "national-academy level" scholars.
These distinguished faculty members will be only be considered if they qualify to enter nationwide institutions like the National Academy of Math or the National Academy of Science. UB currently only has three people who are members of these programs.
"It's kind of a benchmark," Tripathi said. "Those are the kind of people we need."
Although a larger faculty could also lead to more students at UB, the reasons cited for faculty expansion include the belief that there should be more teachers available to better serve the students of UB, according to Peter Nickerson, chair of the Faculty Senate.
"We are understaffed at certain positions in terms of our student population," Nickerson said.
The decision was based on comparisons with UB's peer universities and the size of their faculties.
"Our faculty size is currently smaller than that of our peer universities," Finley said.
But Nickerson said it is still unclear how UB will use the new hires to point itself in a certain direction.
"There is a question of should we copy other universities, or finding a niche in a certain area," Nickerson said.
While the call for a larger faculty has been largely greeted positively, some students said they are cautiously optimistic about the speed of the planned progress.
"Students rarely see change over their four years on campus," said Andrew Ziembiec, a sophomore mechanical engineering major."
Photo: Courtesy of Mitchell Kish
