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.”

Those voices are bit difficult to make out in places, but if you are interested in what is happening with the School, this makes for interesting listening. I hope some of the administrators take the time to listen to this. The students are pretty expressive about their concerns, and the provost and president have been far less articulate in their responses. The main thing these students want? Transparency. What decisions are being made? Why are they being made they way they are? The corporate double-speak doesn’t cut it.

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.

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.

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.

The defense is open to the public. If you are in Buffalo and interested in blogging research, stop by.

banned commercials
chris harris blog
dancing raisin
hypercommercialism
afleet alex
carolyn hurley
human dependency computers technology
mambo event
necessity of sociological imagination
smithiegirls nude photos
little boy porn
naked fighting
symbolic interactionism
sociological imagination
lindsay evens
nude fighting
raisin
smurf unicef video
communication theories
david loertscher
defintion of communication
prettiest horse
sociolotron
amtrek
girls gone wild commercial
smurfs
capstone seminar
cyberporn
hans christian von baeyer
firefox trick
nigeria porn
numa numa

Here’s a quick bio, stolen from the IR 6.0 Agenda:

Ang Peng Hwa is Professor of Media Management and Law at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. A lawyer by training, he worked as a journalist before going on to pursue a Masters in communication management at the University of Southern California and a PhD in mass media at Michigan State University. He is a central committee member of the Consumers’ Association of Singapore and is the legal adviser to the Advertising Standards Authority of Singapore. He has consulted for government and private bodies in Singapore, as well as international agencies such as the United Nations Development Program on law and policy issues regarding the Internet.

UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO
SCHOOL OF INFORMATICS
Department of Library and Information Studies
TENURE-TRACK FACULTY POSITION
INFORMATION SYSTEMS & TECHNOLOGIES

The Department of Library and Information Studies in the School of Informatics at the State University of New York at Buffalo is seeking a colleague to teach and conduct research in the area of information systems and technologies. Candidates should have an extensive understanding of the use of information technologies in the design and delivery of information services. Appointment will be at either the Assistant Professor or Associate Professor rank.

The School of Informatics is made up of the Department of Library and Information Studies and the Department of Communication. In addition to the MLS, the School offers undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Communication and a doctoral degree in Communication with a cognate specialization in LIS. The School also offers a Master of Arts in Informatics, and a pending BA in Informatics.

The School has a dedicated Instructional Technology Laboratory complex. Classrooms have a full array of computer and Internet connections and faculty receive instructional support from the Educational Technology Center. The School also offers an increasing number of courses through the Internet and over interactive video.

The School of Informatics has been identified within the University as an important leader in developing educational and research opportunities for the digital age. The School is poised for growth, and we seek a colleague to add to our strengths in this area.

The University at Buffalo provides numerous opportunities for collaboration with colleagues in other disciplines addressing the challenges of the digital age. The University was rated as the 13th most wired campus by Forbes Magazine in 2004. The University’s Center for Computational Research is one of the world’s leading academic high-performance computing centers, and the University is the leading partner in a 200 million dollar public/private initiative to create a new Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics in Buffalo.
RESPONSIBILITIES
Responsibilities include teaching and research in some combination of areas related to information needs assessment, organization of information, information architecture, information retrieval, human computer interaction, networking, systems analysis, and the applications of technology and new media in service delivery. Course load is two courses per semester.
QUALIFICATIONS

Qualifications include the MLS (preferred) and Ph.D. in LIS, Communication, Computer Science, Information Systems or a related area, finished or nearing completion. A cross-disciplinary orientation and the ability to work at the interfaces of these disciplines are very desirable.

For appointment at the Associate Professor rank, a record of funded research and publications commensurate with rank is required, along with evidence of excellence in teaching. For appointment at the Assistant Professor rank with credit for years in rank, evidence of a promising research program is required, along with evidence of teaching proficiency. For appointment at the entry level Assistant Professor rank, evidence of promise as an active member of a research and teaching community is necessary.
BENEFITS

Salary is negotiable and competitive. Excellent fringe benefits equal to 31% of base salary. Summer teaching is available with additional compensation. For more information about the School, the University, and Buffalo see:

http://informatics.buffalo.edu
http://www.buffalo.edu/home/aboutub.shtml
http://www.ci.buffalo.ny.us
APPLICATION PROCEDURE

Letters of application must include a resume and the names of at least three references. Applications should be addressed to:

Neil Yerkey, Professor
Department of Library and Information Studies
School of Informatics
University at Buffalo
534 Baldy Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260-1020.

You can also attach a letter and resume to yerkey@buffalo.edu. Informal inquiries are also welcome. You can call Neil Yerkey at 716-645-2412 ext. 1167. Applications will be reviewed until position is filled. The University at Buffalo is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer/recruiter.

We will (once she gets through the red tape) be looking at ways of extending this research. More to come.

I also like the example this course — taught by one of our graduates, Paul Chacko — sets for the program. This is the second time he’s taught the course (the first time was also a success), and he has done a great job of bringing down the walls of the academy and engaging our students in projects that have a significant positive impact on the community and place our students in contact with the private and public sector in Buffalo. Now we just need more courses like this in some of our other areas of instruction.

But another part of our meeting was spent talking about the reputational rankings recently released by the National Communication Association. I think many of us were disappointed by where we stood in the reputational rankings. Others saw it as a positive indicator that we were ranked in the top 20 in Communication Technology, Org Com, and Intercultural/International. Nonetheless, it’s hard to (in Com Tech, for example), get excited about being 16th.

The most common excuse for this ranking was that we had a much smaller faculty compared to almost everyone else on the list. Stanford, with 14 regular faculty, and Cornell, with 15, were the closest, but at 9 regular faculty, we are comparably tiny, especially considering we rank in four or five different areas. Because we are smaller, we have less of a chance to build a reputation: we have fewer publications, less funding, fewer personal contacts, and produce fewer Ph.D.s. But there is only so much we can blame on being small.

It’s a little unfortunate that such rankings exist at all. It is a bit of a shortcut for students looking for a “top 5” school and for others who are looking for a way to evaluate programs. Especially for graduate school, it really ought to be more of an issue of “fit.” Worse yet, I suspect many faculties have spent time sitting around a table trying to decide whether we should care about the ranking, and what, if anything, we should do about it.

The Oxford Internet Institute (OII), in association with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, plans to hold its 2005 Summer Doctoral Programme (SDP) in Beijing from 7-21 July.

The SDP is designed to support advanced doctoral students engaged in dissertation research on the economic, political, legal and other social aspects of the Internet and related information and communication technologies. The Beijing SDP will not only be of greater value to students from Asia, but also students from around the world who wish to better understand the growing role of Asia, and China in particular, in shaping the development of the Internet and its social implications.

The programme will be conducted in partnership with: The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania; The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School; the Center for the Digital Future at the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California; the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology; the School of Informatics at SUNY Buffalo; the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of
Hong Kong; and the Singapore Internet Research Centre at Nanyang Technological University. All of these institutions will contribute to the teaching faculty.

More information about the OII’s SDP and this year’s programme in Beijing is available here.

I would encourage doctoral students who are interested in this programme to e-mail the OII at sdp AT oii.ox.ac.uk to register their interest and to begin speaking with their advisors about the potential value of this programme to the successful completion of their dissertations.

Thanks to the support of the Higher Education Funding Council for England and OII’s collaborating partners, a limited number of bursaries (scholarships) will be available. I would greatly appreciate your help in bringing this opportunity to the attention of doctoral students who might benefit from working with other advanced doctoral students and researchers in the field of Internet studies.

Because of this, I was especially taken by this article on 10 things the Chinese do far better than we do. I also need to start learning Chinese, something I’ve wanted to do for some time. I speak absolutely none.

I’ve thought about taking a summer class, but I’m thinking it might be better to just study on my own, in the standard graduate student style. If I can learn to read and write well, I can rely on some of our many Chinese-speaking grad students to coach me on pronunciation. Anyone know of a good introductory Chinese text?

(There are other exciting developments in the program I direct. I know I promised to be transparent about this — and I will — only it takes time even to get a core of faculty members to agree on change.)

We’ve just hired two new professors (Pauline Cheong, from USC, and Arun Vishwanath, who returns to Buffalo after teaching for a while at Indiana University), and plan to continue to grow slowly over the next several years. Buffalo is a good place to live: we actually get less snow than much of upstate New York, despite what makes national news, and Amherst (where UB is actually located) is the fastest growing city in New York, with an influx of high tech businesses. If you have questions, I’m happy to answer them privately. I’m not on the search committee this time around, but if I know you and you are applying, please do drop me a note so that I can make sure your application gets the attention it deserves.

Here’s the official listing:

University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

The Department of Communication in the School of Informatics at the State University of New York at Buffalo invites applications for one tenure track position in communication/information technologies beginning Fall 2005. Emphasis in communication/information technology preferred with an additional focus on information science, small group, organizational, mass communication, media economics, or health communication. Applicants should have a Ph.D. in Communication, Information Science, or related disciplines and an active research agenda. Ability to seek research funding is desirable. Rank is open. A curriculum vitae, a cover letter describing research and teaching interests, and the names of three references should be sent by December 1, 2004 to Thomas Feeley (thfeeley@buffalo.edu), Search Committee Chair, Department of Communication, 359 Baldy Hall, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-1060.

Composed of the Department of Communication and the Department of Library and Information Studies, The School of Informatics was formed in 1999, in recognition of the changing role of information technology in human communication. The School offers a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in Communication, a M.L.S. in Library and Information Sciences and a M.A. in Informatics. The University at Buffalo (SUNY) is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. The Department of Communication is interested in identifying prospective minority and women candidates and professionals with disabilities. Qualified individuals with a disability may request needed, reasonable accommodation to participate in the application process. No person, in whatever relationship with the University at Buffalo, will be subject to discrimination on the basis of age, creed, color, disability, national origin, race, religion, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, or marital or veteran status.

I am hoping that my role in this new position will be as transparent as possible. There is always risk in such an approach: it lets the world see not only our strengths but the problems that we are working on. That said, I think such transparency can only help an organization, and while there are certainly times when discretion will limit my blogging on a topic, I hope to be as open as possible in describing what we are trying to do and how we are trying to do it.

In broad strokes, I am hoping that over the next year, we will:

* Become more entrepreneurial. Part of that means importing the spirit of “demo or die” from the MIT Media Lab. I want to create an environment that encourages risk, especially of the intellectual variety, and that unites thought with practice.

* Solve problems. That is, I want our curriculum and our students to be making a practical differences for the community and for businesses. I want businesses and other organizations that share our entrepreneurial spirit to partner with us and to provide a space in which shared resources yield shared benefits.

* Tell our story. Buffalo is off the beaten track; not everyone comes to visit us up in the “silicon tundra.” The diminution of distance that technology allows is not automatic. We need to pursue the networks and connections that new technologies provide. We need to do a far better job of telling people what we are doing, and paying attention to how this might lead to new connections, partnerships, and exchanges. At the very least, we need to make sure likeminded institutions in Western New York and our neighbors to the north see value in exchanging ideas, particularly when it comes to the social impact and use of communication technologies.

It’s busy at the beginning of the semester, and I have enough projects in full swing that my time is short. Over the fall semester, I hope that we can regroup as a faculty, and decide how to make our masters program a model for other universities to learn from.