a thaumaturgical compendium

A letter from Jeff Carballada appeared in the Buffalo News regarding UB killing the School of Informatics. As a member of the Founders Committee, he concludes “Informatics at UB needs to survive, and UB needs to rethink its decision.”

I doubt they will. While the business reaction to the decision is giving the administration a black eye, the president was brought in for just this. A couple of people have noted that there is some dark conspiracy in John Simpson coming in and killing programs, but he has made his career on cutting through bureaucracy, and making universities into profit centers. There can be little doubt that the UB, as with many universities, was stifled by an ineffective and top-heavy administration, and many faculty were quietly pleased about what appeared to be slash-and-burn administrative changes.

But that wasn’t enough at previous universities and hasn’t been enough here. I noted in an earlier post that as a two-department college, Informatics probably didn’t look great on a balance sheet. The dean had recently centralized the staff under the college (rather than department)—much to the consternation of the faculty. However, this concentration did not, I believe, substantially reduce the number of employees or hours being used on the staff side. And at least as one of the clients of that staff, it also didn’t seem to increase effectiveness. To the contrary, the faculty were being asked to take on work that had been done by the staff.

I have no idea what the staff sizes of the other Colleges are, but my guess is that they are proportionally much smaller. So, an adjustment of resources may have been necessary. But this hardly necessitated the killing of the School. While the costs of doing so may not show up on the balance sheet right away, I suspect the two Schools who will be “absorbing” the faculty and students of Informatics are going to be wasting a good deal of time and energy figuring out how to deal with these new programs. And the faculty of the effected programs are going to end up spending a lot of time they could otherwise be devoting to funded research instead re-organizing their curricula and policies to fit their new homes. All of this means a lot of invisible costs, with little discernable payoff.

In any case, suggesting that such slashing and burning approaches were somehow unexpected is a bit disingenuous. But it certainly looks as if they cut heavily into their own foot on this one. They perhaps did not anticipate that the local business community actually likes the idea of a School of Informatics, and our informatics programs, and that they had supported the School financially. The administration has tried to suggest that support from business and alumni are really for UB as a whole, but that simply is not true in the minds of those giving the money, and those are the minds that matter. One of the reasons people were willing to put money behind the School is that they thought that there was some promise there, that the School was a worthwhile venture.

In order to deflect criticism, Provost Tripathi has claimed that the programs and departments of the School will continue to be supported. Until he clearly states how this is to occur, these are empty promises. Especially for the Masters and BS programs in informatics, which were largely supported by the School itself, rather than a department, there has been no indication of how funding or faculty lines will be applied. Apparently, the administration has wasted no time in contacting alumni and encouraging them to continue giving money, but this is a lost cause. Librarians are not going to continue to support a library school not supported by the University, and the same is true of each of the other programs.

As I noted in an earlier post, I can understand the administration’s reasoning in targeting the School. There was room for improvement. But the way that they decided to end the program showed not only a lack of understanding of how decisions should be made collectively in a university, but a lack of business judgment. In three or four years, they will leave UB worse than they found it, off to another university under a mandate to control costs. They will show that they have cut costs at UB, while maintaining a rhetoric of excellence, backed up with little more than words.

The timing (summer) has ensured quiet acquiescence from most of the faculty and the students. Even if there were a more substantial outcry, university administrations’ have always had the luxury of time. They will remain ambivalent about the non-affiliated programs long enough to see them whither and die quietly, slowly strangled by lack of funding, and blamed for their own demise. Communication may weather this a bit better than the others, if only because they continue to have a substantial number of undergraduates, and continuing demand for the major. Meanwhile, a group of young faculty and new students will scatter to the four winds, leaving behind the refrain in another field that you already hear too often: “Buffalo—they used to be a top university. Whatever happened to them.”

Interesting piece in Tomorrow’s Professor about a hypothetical interview with a top engineering student:

Interviewer: “... First, what do you think your strengths are outside of math and computers?”

Student: “Well, I’ve always been good in physics.”

I: “How about social sciences and humanities?”

S: “I did all right in those courses-mostly A’s-but I can’t honestly say I enjoy that stuff.”

I: “Right. And would you describe yourself as a people person?”

The point? The purely procedural pieces of doing good engineering can be outsourced. Indeed, the first questions are about the engineer’s language skills.

As a social science guy, especially as one who made an early shift from computing and engineering as an undergrad, I relish the recognition of the importance of the “soft” sides of engineering. The idea here is that the real needs, and the real jobs, are in having enough engineering or programming skill to manage a project effectively, but also the social skills in order to engineer human processes.

The question remains, is it enough for these students to take a smattering of social science and humanities courses—to be well rounded—or is there a particular social curriculum that would be beneficial to students.

The Masters in Informatics was created to answer precisely this issue. In fact, for better or worse, it was created after a study of employers in New York State to determine what skills were most needed.

Update (6/16): The official word has come down. Communication will be going to Arts and Sciences, Library Studies will be housed in the Graduate School of Education. The informatics programs will continue, it seems, though where they will call home is still in the process of being discussed.

I’ve been at a couple of workshops lately, and I’m surprised at how quickly news travels. Last week, David Penniman, dean of the School of Informatics was promoted to teaching and research as regular tenured faculty, and an “Interim Dean” appointed. Speculation was rife that this was a prelude to dismantling the School, and the scuttlebutt is that this is—at least at this stage—the plan. Several people I’ve spoken with at other universities have mentioned that all it takes is me leaving and an entire college falls apart.

I was in another program that was scheduled for the chopping block, and the experience of that program, which is now often ranked among the top five communications programs in the US, demonstrates that the best laid plans of university administrators can sometime go awry. Nonetheless, the current president and provost were brought in largely to “clean house,” and as the newest college on campus, and (I believe) the smallest, it is hardly surprising that the School is caught in the sights of the administration.

More importantly, it is difficult to clearly articulate the successes of the School. I think that the Department of Communication improved in the time I was there, though—as I have noted in earlier posts—it took a direction that didn’t really mesh with my interests. One of the reasons that I came to Buffalo is that I was excited about the School of Informatics. I had seen what had happened at the iSchool at the University of Washington and at similar programs, and I always considered myself to be an informatics guy. So, when a Communication Department within a new School of Informatics sought me out and recruited me for the program, it sure felt like a perfect match.

Sure, there were some gaps in vision. I remember meeting with Gary Ozanich and explaining that I was excited about the Masters in Informatics program. I saw it as an opportunity to develop a professional program with a strong practical, creative component: a kind of MIT Media Lab, with a focus on social technologies. Not right away, of course, but that was the ultimate vision I had in mind. “No,” he said, “you’ve got it all wrong: the program is a cash cow.” The idea was that it would be a large-enrollment program with a set curriculum that would fund our Ph.D. program and keep everything afloat with tuition dollars. The provost at the time had placed a funding amount on the head of each new student we could bring in, and so emphasized large class size over anything else. Eager to please, we quickly grew our undergrad program in size and started up a Masters program on little more that a hope and a prayer.

The trick is, the program was never properly resourced. I was under the impression that it was something of a bootstrapping operation—we get things rolling and then hire a faculty to teach in the program. But that wasn’t the plan: the MI program never got a regular faculty, it had to borrow from the library school and from the communication department. As a one-year program, it didn’t do as much as we would have liked for the students, and there was always something of a disconnect between their expectations and our own. Perhaps worst of all, the capstone project (which was required by the state during the approval process) might have made perfect sense in a two-year program, but in a one-year program with little in the way of advising, it led to some really embarrassingly bad work.

I have a feeling that when I look back on my life in a few decades, the MI program will be one of my greatest personal failures, and Buffalo not the smartest move I could have made. As the Director for the last couple of years, I went from idealism, to merely wanting to shore things up and keep them running. Initially, I was to be taken off the tenure track for a couple of years to help administer the program, but was told by someone in the School that this wasn’t possible—once the paperwork was already filed. Luckily, thanks to this staff person’s willingness to step forward, I managed to move myself back to the tenure track, but it was a bit of a mess. Here I was alienated from the department in which I was appointed (Communication), spending way too much time teaching and trying to formalize a program that seemed to run largely on rumor and crisis. My own future at the university was tied closely to the success of the School, largely because I made the mistake of putting the School ahead of my own career from an early stage. We had a reputation in the Graduate School—well earned—of ineptitude when it came to managing the flow of students, and we didn’t have anything approaching a faculty culture within the program. Largely in spite of this, we have graduated some really excellent students. Particularly in the early years, we also graduated some people that had no business receiving a graduate diploma.

I gather that the faculty and staff of the School has made a united plea to the provost to keep them together as a School. Frankly, I think that would be great if, and only if, the university was willing to make a concerted effort to place social informatics at the core of its mission, and provide the necessary resources. That means faculty hires, physical facilities, and a new dean that is willing to make the School her mission. The university has not to done this so far, and instead arrived at a set of areas of focus that it thinks will make UB’s reputation. Good for the president; the university needed shaking up. Too bad that he, and the provost who is a computer science guy, missed the boat on social computing. There are some interesting people in this area at Buffalo, and they are not being well supported. If they are not going to fish, they need to cut bait. Dragging Informatics out while starved for resources won’t work.

Part of this was that the School failed as an entrepreneurial project. While I like Dr. Penniman personally, his management style was not one of leading from the front, breaking new ground, and battling things out in public. His style was evolutionary change, and I think he may have tried too hard to make friends rather than to make waves. The success of other schools has required a rain maker, as well as a visible leader with a clear vision. Penniman knew we wanted a vision, but thought that it had to come organically from within. I applaud his democratic approach, but particularly for a School that was struggling to survive (and I don’t think the idea of us struggling was well conveyed), we needed a general, not a general manager. Too much time was spent trying to bring everyone under the tent—it wouldn’t have hurt if a few people got wet, as long as we were making good speed.

The other thing that I think would have helped very early on is a set of quantifiable performance measures. Strangely, for a department that prides itself on quantitative approaches, my fellow faculty in communication did not seem interested in charting our own progress. I think so much could have been accomplished if we clearly indicated what our goals were and measured progress toward those goals. This wasn’t done, though, and as a result the progress of the School seemed always to be measured in negatives. Why weren’t we attracting more funding? Why weren’t we publishing more? Why weren’t we doing more of everything? At the same time, we were sprouting new programs, a legacy in many ways of a previous provost.

It is much easier to think about this when no longer part of the School. As I noted, I came to UB in the hope that the School of Informatics would be the thing that people thought about when they heard “University at Buffalo,” and that the Masters in Informatics program would be the jewel in that crown. When I look at it now, particularly from the perspective of the university administration, I see redundancy, inefficiency, and lack of focus. I only wish that we could have gotten our own house in order when the writing was on the wall. I am sorry for whatever turbulence this causes in the programs, but in the end, it may very well be the best thing for each of them. UB will have missed its chance for a strong informatics program, and may, two decades down the road when they realize that they missed the boat, end up trying again. But what is needed now is either a commitment to excellence in social informatics, or to remove it from the agenda. Half-measures do no one—students, faculty, staff, or administration—any good.

An attack by nasty hackers meant it was necessary to move the schoolof server that hosted blogs at UB for several years. I still haven’t decided what to do with that—whether to set it up again for students at Quinnipiac or whether to rely on existing blog servers. Nonetheless, a few people requested that they hold on to their schoolof accounts, and you may want to visit their blogs:

Infomancy, which Christopher Harris defines as “1.The field of magic related to the conjuring of information from the chaos of the universe. 2.The collection of terms, queries, and actions related to the retrieval of information from arcane sources.”

BizBrary, run by Charles Lyons, a Business Librarian at UB.

Epa’s Blog Place, from a student doing a Masters in Informatics, focusing on Health Informatics (who also has the scoop on my former dean stepping down, which isn’t a very big surprise).

Andrew Gianni, who is also completing an MI while working as an applications developer at UB.

Rolcoco, a blog by my final MA student at UB.

Been mid-move for a bit here and all but totally cut off from the world. No net, no mass media of any sort. Our cable/phone/internet bundle should be up by Tuesday, but it means that I’ve been kind of in the dark for a bit.

Here are some promised items for my classes. First copies of the syllabi for the communication theories class (pdf) and the systems class(pdf). I did a quick “what I am interested in” talk for the systems class, and some folks requested the slides from that (pdf). Sorry about the color and one-per-page nature of the pdf on that one. Normally I use the Adobe Distiller to convert PowerPoint slides to PDF, but I’m on the road so I am using the (otherwise excellent) PDF Online.

Both of the classes are blogging (naturally), and if you are interested in following along, please check them out in the coming weeks:

• Communication Theories Aggregator

• Systems Class Aggregator

You will see that I am experimenting with a new aggregator for my classes this year, a souped-up version of lilina. I’ll report back as to how well that works out.

That time again… The following capstone projects are being defended this Wednesday:

• Daniel Frey, Web-Based Comic Reservation System

• Kristen Frey, The Mambo Community Component

• Amal Harb, Implementation and Customization of Open Source Software
  to Meet Organizational Goals of a Web-Based National Arab American
  Event Directory

• Jason Myszkiewicz, OneVote: Voter Relationship Management

• Edward Robb, Metal Cladding, Inc.: An E-Business Strategy

• Robin Vail, The Informatics – Public Relations Hybrid: Gilda’s Club
  WNY Goes Geek

• Charlynda Winkley, Redesigning the UB Graduate School Website: A
  User-Centered Approach

Aries (Godess) points me toward an OCLC report on Staying in the Game. It suggests, among other things, zoning your library for boomers and for gamers:

Gamers are technologically savvy and can take in multiple streams of information while they socialize. They multitask! They need a space with all kinds of simultaneous activities—music, television, video streaming, computers. They thrive on all of the commotion. The Boomer zone should be much quieter. They need technology and service but not the noise.

This, along with a number of the bulleted points of advice in the short article, seem to be equally valid in designing a web site. Or, for that matter, a college course—especially in a grad program that gets an equal mix of Gamers and Boomers.