For Those Just Tuning In

This post is a response to a colleague and friend in another state university system who asked for "a paragraph or two about your struggles that I could crib for my union email blast," as well as a way of organizing my thoughts before I meet with the Buffalo State College Senate's leadership team on the SUNY Buffalo State campus this afternoon.  It's also going to be a reflection on the ways that union and governance leadership roles, goals, and interests overlap, as well as on some approaches for coordinating efforts even when they diverge.  It draws on and distills my messages to Senators since becoming Fredonia University Senate Chairperson on July 1, 2022, as well as previous posts on this blog.

So here's the recap for those just tuning in.

Instead of funding and pricing the State University of New York (SUNY) and the City University of New York (CUNY) like the public goods they are, New York Democrats have engineered a massive decline in real-dollar direct state aid to both systems.  New York State had a Republican governor (George Pataki) for roughly the first 10 years of my career at SUNY Fredonia until Eliot Spitzer was elected in 2007.  Not long after a sex scandal in his first year in office brought Spitzer down, David Paterson had to deal with the Great Recession and then Andrew Cuomo had to deal with the deal the Obama administration cut with Republican leadership to send a large portion of the federal deficit down to the states.  Despite Democrats finally winning a majority in the New York State Senate in 2018 (long story) and supermajorities in both the Senate and Assembly since 2020, SUNY has been underfunded on the order of $8B (inflation-adjusted) in direct state operating aid since the 2007-2008 state fiscal year.  SUNY campuses have been covering the shortfalls by burning through both their reserves and federal pandemic funding.  With both running out on many SUNY campuses, Governor Kathy Hochul (who moved up from Lt. Governor after Cuomo's own sex scandal) has begun moving the needle in the opposite direction from her predecessors, but not as far or as fast as supporters of public higher education in the Assembly and Senate have pushed for, and nowhere close to what SUNY or CUNY need.

At SUNY Fredonia, real-dollar cuts to direct state aid not only preceded drops in enrollment, but were steepest while our enrollments were growing:

And those cuts add up, to the tune of over $167M in inflation-adjusted dollars, and almost $120M in enrollment- and inflation-adjusted dollars:

SUNY's faculty-professionals union, United University Professions (UUP), the SUNY University Faculty Senate (UFS [track recent resolutions here and older resolutions here]), and many campus union chapters and governance bodies, including the Fredonia University Senate, have been sounding the alarm on these deepening budget holes on many campuses for many years.  SUNY Chancellor John B. King, Jr., and SUNY System Administration warned in a report released at the end of 2023 that without an increase in revenues, SUNY would face a $1.1B deficit in the coming decade.  Governor Hochul's Executive Budget proposal for state fiscal year 2025 did nothing to change that trajectory (although to be fair she has supported System efforts to increase enrollments across SUNY), nor did it include any provisions called for in the SUNY Fredonia University Senate Executive Committee petition that ran from December 6, 2023, to January 17, 2024, which drew on the SUNY UFS October 2023 Executive Budget resolution.

So where do we stand now?

• UUP is fighting a multiple-front battle at Potsdam, Fredonia, and Downstate to preserve historic gains in its latest round of contract negotiations with New York State, defend its members, and advance SUNY's mission and the students, patients, and communities its campuses and hospitals serve.
• SUNY UFS is pushing for meaningful faculty involvement in curricular decision-making, even in conditions of financial stress.
• The Fredonia University Senate Executive Committee and President's Cabinet have agreed on a timeline for what we're calling a Program Deactivation Review Process, which develops a process for consultation on these administration-initiated proposals that were announced on December 6, 2023, as part of President Kolison's Roadmap to Financial Stability.

Going forward, many issues need to be resolved:

• the overall balance of public and private revenue sources for public higher education in New York State, which has shifted sharply toward the latter since the Rockefeller years;
• the net cost of attendance for SUNY students, the percentage of students going into debt to cover that cost, and the amount of debt they accrue, all of which are much higher for recent than older generations;
• SUNY System Administration's approach to allocating state operating funds to different sectors and campuses at a time when Governor Hochul seems intent on turning UB and Stony Brook into flagships.

Most important, proponents of Public Good U are going to have to develop an effective inside-outside game plan and execute it in the coming months during state budget negotiation season and admissions season:

• Inside:
• develop a coordinated advocacy strategy advancing shared objectives
• develop and implement System-level and campus-level strategic plans
• Outside:  through student-community-labor coalitions and campaigns,
• put public pressure on elected officials in an election year for every state legislative seat;
• encourage prospective students to choose the right SUNY for them.