October 2006

Dear Colleagues,

I want to share with you some news now that the school year is underway.

New Faculty

I am pleased to welcome the 28 new tenured or tenure track faculty members who join us this semester. In the School of Public Affairs, we are joined by Linda Bailey, Deborah Balk, Bin Chen, Sarah Ryan, and Dorothy Shipps. In the Weissman School, we welcome Isolina Ballesteros in Modern Languages; Carla Bellamy in Sociology and Anthropology; Rebecca Merkin in Communication Studies; Thomas Teufel in Philosophy; and Kyra Gaunt and Elizabeth Wollman in Fine and Performing Arts.  In the Zicklin School, new faces include Craig Brown, Sean Crockett, and Victor Martinez in Economics and Finance; Ho Chao Chen and Elissa Grossman in Marketing; Micki Eisenman, Thomas Lyons, and William Millhiser in Management; Rong Huang and Carol Marquardt in Accountancy; Ronald Neath in Statistics and CIS; and Gerd Welke in Real Estate.

And finally, the library faculty is enhanced by David Brodherson, Stephen Francoeur, Harold Gee, Joseph Hartnett, and Jin Ma.

Faculty Development

Last year the Baruch College Fund allocated $500,000 to support faculty research and teaching. This was the first time that funds were allocated to the Provost to support research and teaching excellence as a College-wide initiative. Slightly more than half these funds went to fund travel to academic conferences – 173 individual faculty members were supported on 193 separate trips to present research papers at 165 conferences.  In addition, these funds supported 28 graduate assistants and summer research support for 29 faculty members.

On the teaching side, the provost’s office sponsored eight workshops on pedagogy, with 240 attendees, and 14 members of our full-time faculty attended nationally-sponsored teaching conferences. Another 20 faculty and administrators attended assessment conferences sponsored by our accrediting agencies. And 18 members of our faculty used the BCF support to receive one-on-one tutoring in accent reduction and to attend workshops focused on issues related to teaching.

I am pleased that the BCF has renewed this faculty development funding for this fiscal year. Associate Provost Dennis Slavin sent an email last month outlining how these funds will be distributed. $350,000 of the $500,000 total will be allocated to support research, in the form of travel support, graduate assistantships, and summer research funds, all available via application to the individual school deans.

Grants

Members of the Baruch College faculty and staff generated over $5 million in awards for grants and contracts at the CUNY Research Foundation for the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2006. The $5 million mark represents a significant achievement for Baruch; as recently as fiscal year 2000, comparable awards to the College totaled only $1.7 million.

This increase will have a major impact on the working lives of many faculty, as the $5 million will translate into approximately $320,000 in faculty summer salary; $100,000 for faculty release time, and $2.9 million in research assistantships and other program staffing. In addition to these personnel services, more than $800,000 will be expended on travel, supplies, and equipment; the remainder will be used for sub-contracts to other colleges and universities.

The Baruch College community at large accrues additional benefits from these grants and contracts. The College is expected to recover almost $640,000 in indirect costs. These recoveries will fund more than $250,000 in Research Foundation fees, and almost $200,000 in research support to SPA, Zicklin, and Weissman. The balance will be used for the Office of Sponsored Programs and Research, IRB administration, matching funds, and proposal development.

Awardees for the 2005-06 year include: Stan Altman, Arthur Apter, Anne Austin, Neil Bennett, Stanton Biddle, Greg Chen, David Cheng, Ann Clarkson, Christine Daly, Hector Cordero-Guzman, James Coyle, Monica Dean, James DeFilippis, Arthur Downing, Kathleen Eads, John Elliott, Barbara Fife, David Gallagher, Liz Gewirtzman, Thomas Heinrich, Barry Hersh, Pat Imbimbo, Stephen Immerwahr, Ted Joyce, Caroline Kasnakian, Judith Komaki, Sandra Kraskin, Karl Kronebusch, Karen Luxton-Gourgey, Anne Morris, June O’Neill, Rita Ormsby, Paul Russo, Carroll Seron, David Shanton, Helen Scharff, Robert Smith, Shoshanna Sofaer, Gregg Van Ryzin, Don Watkins, Lynne Weikart, Henry Wollman, and Christina Yunzal.

Finances

The University proposed – and the State has accepted - a funding “Compact” that would provide additional State support to the Colleges, to be augmented by fundraising and productivity savings. This represents a new funding mechanism for the CUNY schools and a commitment on the part of the State to fund or allow modest increases every few years. The CUNY Compact was passed by the state legislature and as a result Baruch will receive an additional $2.4 million this year. These funds will be spent on nine new faculty lines, as well as significant investments in the library, Writing Across the Curriculum, student academic advising, enrollment and registration services, and other areas.

We will shortly begin the planning process for 2008 Compact funds, and I look forward to your input, ideas, and guidance as to the investment in our college.

We also had an excellent fundraising year and, for the first time, the assets of the Baruch College Fund climbed to over $100 million. Included in the fundraising was the $5 million gift from the Starr Foundation to support our undergraduate career development efforts. We received $2 million up front, with a promise of $1 million per year for the next three years provided we obtain matching funds, a challenge we are confident about meeting.

Campus Facilities

I am pleased to announce that we have gone to contract with a consultant to create a new campus master plan. The last time Baruch College went through a full-blown master planning exercise, the result was the creation of our spectacular library building, the construction of the Vertical Campus, and the exodus from our leased space in neighborhood office buildings. Master Plan work began last month and will end by early May; the results will be reviewed by the College’s Facilities Committee before going to the CUNY Board of Trustees for approval. The centerpiece to the plan will be the renovation of the Larry and Eris Field Building, also known as “17 Lex.”

Strategic Plan Implementation

After the adoption of the Baruch College Strategic Plan 2006-2011, we created a strategy implementation document that laid out timetables and areas of responsibility for a number of specific tasks associated with the plan. In some areas, additional funding has already been allocated and tangible progress is underway. For example, at the end of FY2006, we allocated funds for the established of computer research labs to be housed in the departments of Statistics/Computer Information Systems in the Zicklin School and Psychology in the Weissman School. The Stat/CIS Lab will be up and running for the start of the Spring semester, and will serve as a college-wide consulting resource for faculty members doing research involving statistics; the Psychology lab will follow thereafter.

We are beginning to receive and review proposals from a number of different programs targeted for enhancement, including the graduate program in financial engineering, the undergraduate program in journalism, and the departments of psychology and real estate. In addition, the library has completed its strategic plan, and plans are underway for the undergraduate honors program, for growing the learning communities, for creating a substantive pre-law advising program, and for improving the quality and rankings of business programs at both the MBA and undergraduate levels.

Education Trust

The Education Trust, an independent nonprofit organization, issued a paper, entitled “Promise Abandoned: How Policy Choices and Institutional Practices Restrict College Opportunities.” It sharply criticizes trends in federal, state, and colleges practices that discourage low-income and minority students from enrolling and graduating from college. Despite the perception of progress, the report says, gaps in college-going and college completion for poor and minority students are actually wider than they were thirty years ago.

As dismaying as these findings may be, there is a bright spot. Baruch College features prominently in the report as an institution that is bucking the trend. In fact, only twenty colleges in the country have student populations where more than fifty percent are eligible for Pell grants and where six-year graduation rates exceed fifty percent. Only one of them is large – Baruch College. We are lauded for practices that include adding special tutoring for traditional “killer courses,” videotaping lectures and making them available online for students to review, early intervention efforts for struggling new students, learning communities, and extensive summer and growing winter intersession offerings.

You may read the entire report here http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/facultyhandbook/documents/EducationTrustReport.pdf

Coverage of the report, and quotes from our provost, David Dannenbring, have already appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education and we expect continued attention to the report and to our programs in the weeks to come. I am very proud of the work you do for the students who entrust their futures to us.

Sincerely,

Kathleen Waldron