 Meanwhile, in 1963, he assumed the chairmanship of the English Department in the University at Buffalo, a formerly private university which had just then become a flagship research institution of the State University of New York.His mandate was to substantially expand the Buffalo English department (it increased from fifty to almost eighty members in the first five years of his tenure) and to turn it into a cutting-edge, world-class literary institution.He was given free hand to hire and fire, and to bend or break conventional academic rules at his discretion.