Where to Begin?

Apologies for the radio silence the last several months here at CoSE.  Obviously there's been a lot going on, but between the end-of-last-semester rush, the lure of summer in a new town, and my new responsibilities on campus (I ran for and was elected Vice Chair of the SUNY Fredonia University Senate in the spring, effective July 1st), blogging here fell off my personal radar.  So here's a quick rundown of issues I haven't been commenting on but will try to be more diligent about doing so here in the coming months.

Et Tu, SUNY?

As my regular readers may know, I've been concerned about the possibility of retrenchment (layoffs of tenured faculty members by shutting down their department) at SUNY Fredonia for several years, and as Chair of our University Senate from 2009-2010, I took several steps to begin serious dialogues well in advance of any number of worse-, worser-, and worst-case budget scenarios that might face our campus.  Because my successor Dale Tuggy, the Executive Committee of the Senate, and the Planning and Budget Advisory Committee were doing such a good job last year continuing down that path, I basically decided to sit on the sidelines for the most part but also work behind the scenes on helping to improve the funding of public higher education in New York state.  Rather than simply update my older posts here, I wrote and spoke to state legislators and their staffers in both Chautauqua and Erie counties on many of the topics raised in them, sometimes by myself and sometimes with colleagues like Ziya Arnavut and Junaid Zubairi (to name just a couple).

To make a long story short, it's looking like all our collective efforts across the state have helped avert a worst-case scenario for SUNY Fredonia.  It appears that Governor Cuomo is not looking to cut SUNY any further (barring a future fiscal emergency that he and both houses of the legislature agree exists), that the fair, rational, and predictable tuition reform that was passed as part of NYSUNY 2020 legislation will help SUNY campuses begin to become healthy enough to get off life support, and hence that the worst of the crisis may well be behind us.  But--and didn't you know that word was coming?--that doesn't mean we're even close to getting out of the woods.  I'll talk about the Governor's war on public employee unions in a moment, but for now I want to focus on how SUNY turned this small victory into an even larger structural deficit for SUNY Fredonia this current academic year.  Here's what the Chancellor's Office came up with:

• Confiscate the reduction on the state's tax on tuition.  Yup,  we didn't see a penny of our students' tuition dollars that by every right should be helping to improve the quality of their education at our campus.  SUNY System Administration took them and redistributed them to other parts of the system.
• Divert state dollars we otherwise would have received to University Centers and Health Science Centers.  That's right--what we gained via our tuition increase for in-state undergraduates was more than wiped out by the nearly $1M we should have gotten but didn't because Chancellor Zimpher and CFO Monica Rimai believe other campuses needed to be cushioned from the 10% cut imposed by Governor Cuomo on all state agencies.
• In short, we were penalized for the very fiscal prudence, foresight, and planning that enabled us to ride out the worst of the crisis while minimizing pain to our students and faculty.  It seems almost like it was because we have well-run a Residence Halls program, a strong Faculty-Student Association, and have taken so many measures to cut spending and find cost savings wherever possible that we were singled out to bear this extra burden.

Fortunately, it looks like we'll be able to weather SUNY doing to us almost exactly what the state has been doing to SUNY--well, for this year.  But unless SUNY looks hard at how they treat the four-year campuses, we may yet face retrenchments at SUNY Fredonia.


Why Differential Tuition Isn't the End of the World

This leads me to my next point, a pragmatic argument for allowing the University Centers to charge more in tuition than other campuses in the system--provided that SUNY provides the legislature and Governor with a plan to gradually rebalance the distribution of state dollars away from the University Centers and toward those other campuses.  Because the doctoral programs and their research needs do cost more than the master's programs and their research needs at campuses like mine, SUNY has for a long time diverted more state dollars to the more expensive campuses and programs than to places like SUNY Fredonia.  But if by the next time NYSUNY 2020 comes up for revision and renewal more of the responsibility for funding research were to be covered by the federal government (which is better able to invest in basic research than cash-strapped states), I wouldn't be opposed to undergraduates at UB, Binghamton, Albany, and Stony Brook paying more for their educations than those at places like Fredonia, Brockport, Geneseo, Cortland, and New Paltz, provided they and other non-University Centers in the system were to get more of their fair share of state dollars.  The better able the University Centers are to support themselves via student and federal dollars, the more state dollars should be able to go to the rest of the system.  And if they happen to overshoot and price talented students out, then all the better for the rest of us who can provide them with a high-quality education at much lower prices.

What about UUP?

Now, let me be clear that probably nobody in my faculty and professionals' union, United University Professions, is very likely to agree with me on this.

There's a strong contingent in UUP who believe SUNY higher education should be tuition-free and 100% publicly-funded. There's an even larger number of my brothers and sisters who want to see tuition remain as low as possible, so as to ensure that SUNY continues to fulfill its mission of providing access to higher education for all NY's citizens. Most delegates look with great suspicion at the claims of high-tuition/high-aid advocates in SUNY's doctoral-granting institutions and across the country that the way to a great public university is to follow the lead of the University of Michigan and the University of California's state-wide administration.  In fact, virtually everyoneat every DA I've been to believes that differential tuition is a trojan horse for privatizing SUNY, helping richer campuses get richer, helping bigger ones get bigger, and putting the poorer ones in Darwinian competition against each other for their very survival. 

Certainly the two rivals for leadership of UUP, President Phil Smith and Vice President for Academics Fred Floss, have other plans and priorities.  While Smith has gone on record as saying that "UUP supports a rational, reliable, sustainable, and predictable tuition policy," he pledged at the spring Delegate Assembly that he won't put UUP's weight behind the current bills before the Senate and Assembly unless the legislature commits to raising the TAP limit to match tuition increases and SUNY leadership stops using language about the state taxing tuition.  At the fall DA I just left, he simply noted that UUP ended up supporting rational tuition.  Meanwhile, Floss, who narrowly lost in his bid to unseat Smith last spring, argued to me back then that UUP shouldn't even enter into the tuition debates, since they distract from the core problem of convincing legislators to commit state funding to SUNY and ensuring that the state continues to sustain labor protections.

In response, I would argue that once the legislature commits to maintenance of effort, stops reducing state funding every time they pass a tuition increase, and commits to supporting SUNY's mission, there'll be no need to criticize the way they have been systematically defunding SUNY over the past few decades, because they'll have stopped doing so.  If we can get a similar pledge from SUNY not to grow the University Centers at the expense of the rest of the system, I just don't see why differential tuition is such a dirty word.

In any case, right now every officer, negotiations team member, and delegate is united behind the common goal of fighting off efforts by the Governor's Office of Employee Relations to bully UUP into accepting massive cuts in our benefits during the current negotiations for a new contract.  And the DA just approved a vitally-important series of constitutional amendments that bring our union into the 21st century when it comes to ensuring representation of colleagues who are neither on the tenure track nor on the path to permanent appointment as professionals.  We created new subcategories of membership, "Contingent Academic" and "Contingent Professional," ensured that every chapter would have an elected Officer for Contingents, converted the statewide standing Part-Time Concerns Committee into the Contingent Employee Committee, and guaranteed at least one seat on the state-wide Executive Board to a contingent academic or professional.  It's all about making sure that the 40% of our members who are contingent employees have a seat at the table during the decision-making process of their and our union.

Speaking of which, I'm proud to report that our own Vice President for Professionals, Idalia Torres-Medina, will have seat at that very same table.  She won the seat on the Executive Board vacated by now no-longer-acting Vice President for Professionals J. Philippe Abraham, winning a 3-round election against three other worthy candidates.  More on this when I get back to Fredonia.  Time to get ready to hit the road again and leave Clinton!

Crowd-Sourcing Academic Peer Review: Sympoze

A colleague of mine in philosophy has started an on-line peer-reviewed journal called Sympoze. They're looking for peer reviewers in every discipline. Here's their FAQ page, where they explain how crowd-sourcing academic peer review works and why they believe it will fix the bugs in traditional peer-review. I've signed up as a reviewer and I encourage you to, too.

The Arts and Humanities Strike Back!

At places like Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Brandeis.... And this will stop this--

"If, because of cutbacks and lack of support from the federal government, literature and the arts and other aspects of the humanities become just parlor musings of the wealthy, we would have made a huge mistake," Dartmouth's president, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, said in an interview. "Literature and the arts should not only be for kids who go to cotillion balls to make polite conversation at parties."

--how?

I mean, more power to y'all, but now it's time to throw your weight behind public higher education and try to influence state and federal governments' decision-making and resource-allocating, right?

SUNY Under Siege

It's fitting that my last post as chair of the SUNY Fredonia University Senate would tie into my first this semester, in which I don't do much more than call your attention to the fine SUNY Under Siege site. I'll leave it to you to make the connection!

On Asking the Right Questions: A Response to David Hollinger

David Hollinger, holder of an endowed chair in American history at the University of California at Berkeley and President-elect of the Organization of American Historians, just asked the proverbial $64,000 question in the Townsend Center for the Humanities's Point of View Series: if forced into a choice between being really public and being really good, what should Berkeley faculty choose? Here's his own answer:

My experiences at Berkeley as a graduate student in the 1960s were transforming. I owe almost everything to Berkeley. I was able to come here because it was really public. But that is not what changed me. Many places were really public. I was changed because Berkeley was really good.

I now believe the risks to quality are more dangerous than the risks to public access. To be sure, if fees go up, fewer people like me could come, but what these people would get will be of greater value. Perhaps I am wrong to prefer this alternative? I hope those who lean the other way will publicly defend the taking of the risk of diminished quality, rather than ignoring the question.

Those of us wondering about similar questions and choices in New York ought to keep in mind the fiscal and structural differences between our situation and California's. Lisa Krieger provides a useful primer over at the Mercury News. The core problem she identifies is the same one that Hollinger focuses on:

Plummeting state support: Since 1990, state spending per student has dropped by half in inflation-adjusted dollars. While the state paid about 90 percent of a student's education 40 years ago, it now pays 69 percent for California State University students and 62 percent for those in the University of California system.

Here at SUNY Fredonia, our president recently posted a powerpoint slide at a press conference on the SUNY strategic plan that showed a 2/3 decline in inflation-adjusted state spending per student over the same time period, while a few weeks earlier our chancellor's office published statistics that showed that state support for the SUNY equivalents of the CSU and UC systems has dropped to about 35% and 50%, respectively. One way of understanding how much worse SUNY's situation is than CSU's and UC's is to blow up the charts on "Shifting the cost of education to students": at CSU, CA still contributed over $8700 per student in 2008-2009, while at UC, CA contributed over $14500 per student. By contrast, if Governor Paterson's education cuts are not restored by the NYS legislature--and it's looking very unlikely that we'll see any restoration to any sectors but K-12 and community colleges--SUNY Fredonia will be getting around $2500 per student in 2010-2011.

Given our experience in NY, I think it would be fair to question one of the premises of Hollinger's argument. Fee increases at public universities don't enhance quality, as his "if fees go up, fewer people like me could come, but what these people would get will be of greater value" might seem to imply. They don't even maintain it. The key question is "greater value" than what? What fee increases allow for is "greater value" than would exist without them. They slow the bleeding, but they don't stop it.

Hollinger identifies the source of the bleeding with great precision:

even the most optimistic of souls usually will grant that the project of reversing the anti-tax politics of California is a formidable one, and not likely to be achieved prior to the time that the excellence of the UC system in general and of Berkeley in particular will be severely challenged by diminished state support. We need to remember that a recent, credible poll found that 69% of California voters prefer to keep Proposition 13 in place. Other polls reveal that opposition to increased income tax for high earners is sustained by the belief of 19% of the American public that they are in the top 1% of income earners, and by the belief of another 20% that they will join that 1% within their lifetimes. California politicians who win elections do not mention services and taxes in the same sentence.

While he supports the efforts of colleagues like George Lakoff to change the way California voters think and vote about public universities--not as education factories, but as economic engines, quality of place engines, and moral engines critical to American democracy--Hollinger wonders what UC Berkeley should do in the meantime. Should they hold the line for Berkeley's publicness and run the very real risk of no longer "being one of the world's leading centers of learning"? He believes this is "hollow bravado and wishful thinking." He is not willing to run the risk that "Being really public--above all keeping fees low and access high--might require a diminution in the intellectual quality of the services that UC in general and Berkeley in particular offer the state of California."

Now, Berkeley is one of the few public universities in the nation that may be in a position to raise its fees high enough to survive the tuition trap that Christopher Newfield and others have identified. If state funds that had gone into supporting Berkeley were to be fairly distributed across the rest of the UC system, or, more generally, if all the UC campuses were able to offer differential tuition rates and the savings in state support were reinvested in the CSU system, then there would be little problem with Hollinger's argument. If certain UC schools were to shift wholeheartedly into the high-tuition/high-aid model to do as much as they could to preserve their quality during a fiscal crisis, and if the savings in state support were reinvested in other UC and CSU schools to do as much as possible to preserve access to public higher education during the downturn, then what's the problem?

Well, there's no guarantee that Sacramento politicians would instead choose to reinvest such savings in state support for Berkeley and other UC campuses into roads, or prisons, or K-12, or Medicaid. In fact, with CA's budget deficit on the order of $20B last I checked, it's almost certain that reductions in state support would go straight into that particular budgetary black hole. So accelerating the path to privatization means that access is very likely to be diminished across CA's higher education systems (even if administrators in UC and CSU were to do a little redistribution of the ways state funds are allocated across their systems to the lower-tuition schools). It seems there's no evading the horns of Hollinger's dilemma.

Again, New York's experience is instructive. UUP President Phil Smith was at his most convincing during his visit to Fredonia when he pointed out that over the decades, SUNY's health science centers have been sending more and more of the revenue they generate not to the rest of the SUNY system but to the state general fund:

Phil gave a very specific example of why he is convinced that augmenting existing SUNY revenue streams and developing new ones won't result in net gains for SUNY. He pointed out that when he arrived at Upstate in 1978, state support was around 47%--and now it's down around 10%. The state saw an opportunity to take advantage of the income the health science centers were generating: first they forced hospitals to pay for their own debt service, then their own fringe benefits, then the cost of collective bargaining increases, and finally this year they asked for over $20M to make up for retirement fund losses. If that opportunism is extended to the entire system, and the doctorals see state support drop from around 50% to around 10%, the comprehensives see state support drop from around 35% to around 10%, and so on, then eventually the question will arise of whether UUP should be negotiating with the state or with the entering freshman class and their families. Furthermore, if even UB and Stony Brook see state support drop faster than they can raise tuition, it's likely that the imbalances caused by SUNY's own formulae for distributing state funds to campuses--where Stony Brook has 57% state support and UB has near 50%--are going to be exacerbated even further, as more state money is sent to them than to the comprehensives.

Since it's hard to imagine that quality hasn't suffered at Upstate Medical Center in the last 32 years, however, Smith's long-term perspective shows that the picture is even grimmer than Hollinger portrays it. Even if California limits the damage to quality at a pair or a handful of campuses by switching them over to a high-fee/high-aid model, both quality and access would go down sharply at the rest of them. Accelerating the pace of privatization at a few campuses in one state digs the structural hole deeper for public higher education across that state.

This is why I believe that every campus in the UC, CSU, SUNY, and CUNY system should be given the responsibility of managing its own tuition. So long as each system sets a standard tuition rate for all its campuses according to a rational, fair, equitable, and predictable policy, so long as every major constituency and stakeholder has a seat at the table and is looking at the same data in the setting of both system and campus tuition rates, and so long as any special tuition increases by individual campuses are approved by their local student government, faculty governance, and college council or trustees, then I am confident that affordability can be maintained and revenues from increased student fees can be reinvested directly in trying to maintain campus quality.

But this is also why I believe that California and New York need to establish floors beneath which state funding for public higher education will not fall. The current system of cutting state support for public colleges and universities faster than tuition has increased at them--which has been in place for roughly two generations in both states--is unsustainable. UC, CSU, SUNY, and CUNY simply can't keep increasing the numbers of students they serve without their revenues keeping pace with enrollment increases.

The question, then, is not whether partial privatization should happen--it has been happening for a long time now and reversing it will take even longer--but instead how far partial privatization of public universities should go, and to what ends.  Former SUNY chancellor D. Bruce Johnstone suggests that it be harnessed to the goals of providing "genuine equality of opportunity" and "widening higher education access" (SUNY at 60, 296). Here's his argument why some student fees are justified:

Elsewhere (no more so than in Africa, where I have spent much of my recent scholarly attention), accessibility is too often thought of as flowing naturally from free tuition, free room and board, and pocket money--even though no country (least of all in Sub-Saharan Africa) can afford this without greatly limiting both the capacity and quality of their college and university offerings. And the consequence to the severe limitations on capacity is that there is room only for those who pass very rigorous entrance examinations, which in turn is possible mainly for those who have had the advantages of extensive tutoring and private secondary schools. The consequence, of course, is free higher education mainly to the wealthy, who could and would pay at least some tuition if they had to, and very little opportunity to the poor, the isolated, or ethnic and linguistic minorities. In the State University of New York, as in public systems in all states, we expand our resources and our capacity with the combination of state tax revenues and modest public tuitions. (296)

Johnstone goes on to argue that efforts to "expand opportunities"--including "abundant means-tested financial assistance, admissions practices that are sensitive to backgrounds and the nature of our diverse secondary schools, special programs of counseling and academic assistance to the educationally disadvantaged, a range of initial opportunities differing in academic selectivity, and second chances"--help "lessen the essentially unmerited simple transmission of opportunities from privileged families to their children" and make "American higher education...one of the truly good deals to the American taxpayer" (296).

Another former SUNY chancellor, John B. Clark, goes one step further in his summary of CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein's proposed "New York Compact":

In the Compact, there would be a broad partnership among the State, SUNY, CUNY, faculty, staff, students, alumni, industry, and private benefactors in a united effort to raise funds for public higher education....

Under the provisions of the compact, the state would be responsible for the so-called "mandatory costs" of operating the public systems of higher education (e.g., personnel costs, fringe benefits, utilities, etc.) and a set percentage of additional funds to invest in SUNY and CUNY for educational purposes. SUNY and CUNY would be responsible for their portion through fundraising, commercial partnerships, and generating additional monies through savings and efficiencies on their local campuses. Students would pay modest tuition increases on a rational and predictable basis based upon an agreed upon price index, with the important provision that no qualified student would be denied admission or matriculation to SUNY or CUNY because of the lack of financial means. (220)

So once again the questions of the proper ratio of public to private funding and of a base level of public support for public higher education arise, this time with other revenue streams than student fees added to the equation.  It is these questions that faculty should be putting to politicians, citizens, and taxpayers in their states, as well as to each other.  In this sense, Shannon Jackson's contribution to the Townsend Center's Point of View series provides a clearer accounting of the choices we all face than does Hollinger's essay.

Still, although Hollinger is wrong to accept the terms laid out by the forced choice between quality and access--both in terms of how he formulates the problem (CA's and NY's fiscal crises are of such a large magnitude that we're going to see both quality and access go down in the next few years at least, no matter what choices we make) and imagines solutions (we need to build support for new public higher education compacts in CA and NY, not just assent to raising tuition at a few campuses more than the rest)--his mistakes point the way to still larger questions:  just what should the role of the federal government be during and after the great recession? what shape should a national compact for public higher education take?

I would suggest that there are at least three paths by which we may arrive at some good answers to these questions:

• Updating the Land-Grant Tradition: Newfield showed in Ivy and Industry that there have been times in American history when political and corporate elites understood that basic research is risky, expensive, and invaluable and hence that its risks, costs, and benefits should be spread as widely as possible. This consensus translated into serious federal support of research at public universities. Newfield makes a strong case in Unmaking the Public University that the pendulum needs to swing back from Bayh-Dole and updating the land-grant tradition is one key way in which the federal government can make it happen. State and federal investment in creativity and innovation offers real returns.
• Generalizing the G.I. Bill: There should be other forms of national service than military service that also provide tuition vouchers to those who choose to perform them (Teach for America comes to mind).
• Growing Pell Grants: Since inflation alone dictates that tuition will rise indefinitely, the federal government needs to index the Pell Grants to cost-of-living increases; if more states follow NY in creating their own versions of TAP to supplement Pell Grants, then the most financially vulnerable students could stop seeing debt as a barrier to applying for and entering public colleges and universities (and even some private ones).

In a nutshell, state and federal governments should collaborate in making the public option as attractive as possible--not just to students, but to higher education institutions, as well. It's only when well-endowed private universities see it in their interest to join state systems that we'll actually be able to adjust the ratio of public to private support of public higher education downward without hurting quality and access and destroying educational capacity.

[Update 1 (5/15/10, 1:45 pm): Charles Schwartz from the University of California is having trouble leaving a comment, so I'm adding what he emailed me to this post itself:

You quote data from University officials (east and west) that shows sharp declines in per-student funding from the state to public universities. That data can be very misleading, for research universities like UC and SUNY, since it refers to the whole I&R budget. There is an old habit of hiding the cost of faculty research and related graduate programs under the rubric of expenditures for "Instruction". Research is a great public good; but undergraduate education is seen, nowadays, as mostly a private good, to be paid for by the students (and their families). So by pumping up what we call "the per-student cost of education" we give state officials an excuse to cut our public funding; and the resulting increase in student fees has bad effects on access.

By my calculations, undergraduate student fees at UC cover just over 100% of the cost of providing undergraduate education. (See details at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz/.)

I know many colleagues are afraid to "separate" research from teaching. I don't want that but I do ask for honest accounting; if we can have a decent public understanding about who now pays for what, then we can go on to a decent debate about who should pay for what.

Charles Schwartz

My own inclination is to ask for more baseline federal support of research--and not just at a few "national research universities," as some at Berkeley have called for--and more state support of teaching at all public colleges and universities, so I think separating out the costs makes a lot of sense. As Schwartz's colleague Christopher Newfield has shown in Ivy and Industry, the idea that research deserves public support precisely because it is difficult, risky, and its benefits are so widespread but diffuse was a common-sense consensus at different periods of American political history in the twentieth century. In an age when so many nations are investing in their own research capacity, I would love to see the Obama administration put American research excellence and innovation on the front burner.

The point that's worth making about the costs of teaching is that most colleges and universities in the U.S. (and indeed around the world) are skimping here in order to fund their research by relying on exploited and underpaid graduate student assistants and contingent faculty to do more and more of the actual teaching on campus. I'd like to see a calculation of what the costs of teaching would be with full-time faculty covering about 75%-85% of all sections. All our hard-working colleagues off the tenure track who want to get on it need to be moved onto it by whatever means necessary. All teachers, whatever their employment status, should be given compensation befitting their contribution to the success of their students and institutions.

Finally, most of the institutions in SUNY are not research universities (only 4 of the 64 are), although of course important research takes place at virtually all of them. Given that SUNY has over the years chosen to shift state dollars to the doctoral-granting institutions in the system to fund their research activities, and that our own Faculty-Student Association at my own regional university contributes more to the campus operating budget than does the state of New York, we've become more and more reliant on tuition and fees paid by students to avoid layoffs. If the NYS budget turns out to be as bad as I fear, we may not be able to keep this up.]

[Update 2 (5/19/10, 3:00 pm): In their own way, Peter Brown, Tenured Radical, Christopher Newfield, and Marc Bousquet each helps us begin to account for the costs of neoliberal universities' skimping on the real costs of active teaching.]

Stan Katz, Meet Nancy Zimpher

Over at The Chronicle of Higher Education's Brainstorm blog, Stan Katz reports on last Friday's forum on state-supported higher education co-sponsored by the Princeton University Policy Research Institute for the Region and the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities. His post, provocatively titled "Can We Afford Our State Colleges?" is worth a read. As is the draft strategic plan for SUNY.

With a week to go before the official launch of the plan, the second of a mere two-week window for comments, the call for further participation rings a little hollow at this late stage of a very inclusive process, but I've already emailed them some editing suggestions and will soon have more substantive feedback (some of it on this blog). What's worth noting right now is that the draft plan precisely reverses the priority of Katz's question: its rhetorical strategy is classic "ask not what New York can do for SUNY; ask what SUNY can do for New York." Rather than analyzing or agonizing over the state of New York's commitment to public higher education, the draft plan lays out a roadmap for doing something about it. I'm curious to see what the state-wide University Faculty Senate makes of it at New Paltz later this month!

Dear Deborah, Herman, and Sheldon....

Here's the text of the SUNY Fredonia University Senate resolution that's about to go out to everyone with responsibility for the New York State budget.

Be it resolved, the University Senate of the State University of New York at Fredonia supports four key provisions contained in the recently passed New York State Senate Budget Resolution:

1. Allow the Board of Trustees to set undergraduate tuition within the confines of an annual "cap." Further, the Senate recommends that a fixed "cap" in the range of 8% to 10% be utilized in lieu of a HEPI-generated limit to provide for better predictability and to avoid excessive fluctuations.
2. Eliminate the "tax on tuition" by returning to the campuses 100% of the tuition they collect.
3. Move SUNY funds from State Assistance to Local Assistance, thereby placing SUNY into the same budgetary category as CUNY and community colleges.
4. Support the elimination of unnecessary duplication in the pre-approval process for construction and "goods" contracts.

Be it further resolved, the University Senate of the State University of New York at Fredonia urges the State of New York to make a commitment to “maintenance of effort” in the provision of state dollars, and to avoid using tuition increases as a mechanism for moving away from covering mandatory costs, especially during normal budget years.

Be it further resolved, the University Senate of the State University of New York at Fredonia urges the State of New York and the State University of New York to make a commitment to mitigating the effects of any tuition increases on financially vulnerable students at SUNY.

And, Be it finally resolved, the University Senate of the State University of New York at Fredonia directs the Senate Chair to forward this resolution to the Governor and to all members of the New York State Legislature.

The ball's in your court now. If you won't support the following minimal measures that the SUNY Fredonia University Senate, United University Professions chapter, and administration all agree we need right now to keep SUNY afloat--and which mirror our Student Assembly's previous resolution on every matter except the size of the cap on tuition increases and the locus of control for tuition policy--then it will be clear for all to see that you three are to blame for trying to sink SUNY.

[Update 1 (4:49 pm): The Executive Committee of the state-wide SUNY University Faculty Senate has also come out with their own letter and resolution. You can find them--and track everything that's been going on since January 2010--by going to the Fredonia University Senate ANGEL group and following the Content --> Campus Initiatives --> 2009-2010 --> SUNY Flexibility/Budget path.]

Senate Update: We Did It!

With explanatory comments from UUP chapter President Bridget Russell, Student Assembly President Kevin Wysocki, and Fredonia President Dennis Hefner, with the addition of a new "resolved" calling on NY state and SUNY to mitigate the effects of any tuition increases on financially vulnerable students at SUNY, with a focused discussion, and with only one dissenting vote, the SUNY Fredonia University Senate just passed our resolution. The Governor and all state legislators will be receiving it by fax at both their Albany and local offices by noon, after the Senators and I have finished the final edits on the new language (which we resolved not to wordsmith in senate). So I don't have the text to report to you all.

But I can report that our meeting ended in precisely this way:



I'll post the final text of our full resolution tomorrow morning.

Go Time! We're Having a Special SUNY Fredonia University Senate Meeting on the Budget

I'm calling a special University Senate meeting (next Monday, March 29th, at our usual time and place), to discuss and vote on a special budget resolution that the Executive Committee has developed in concert with leaders from both the Fredonia administration and the United University Professions chapter, and which parallels key provisions of a resolution being voted on by the Student Assembly this evening.

The impetus for this special meeting and resolution came from yesterday's visit by state-wide UUP President Phil Smith. Even though my strong suspicion from the end of last week that the Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act is dead in the State Assembly has a 99.99% chance of being confirmed tonight or tomorrow morning, Phil indicated in both his public address and in private meetings that he supports certain aspects of the budget resolution from the State Senate. Given that the Senate and Assembly have to reconcile their budget bills in conference committees, and that everything in both is on the table, there's one last chance to push for measures that everyone here agrees would be good for the SUNY system and the hundreds of thousands of people it educates and employs.

The final draft of the resolution is scheduled for final wordsmithing tomorrow morning, but what's unlikely to change is its conclusion:

Be it resolved, the University Senate of the State University of New York at Fredonia supports four key provisions contained in the recently passed New York State Senate Budget Resolution:

1. Allow the Board of Trustees to set undergraduate tuition within the confines of an annual "cap." Further, the Senate recommends that a fixed "cap" in the range of 8% to 10% be utilized in lieu of a HEPI-generated limit to provide for better predictability and to avoid excessive fluctuations.
2. Eliminate the "tax on tuition" by returning to the campuses 100% of the tuition they collect.
3. Move SUNY funds from State Assistance to Local Assistance, thereby placing SUNY into the same budgetary category as CUNY and community colleges.
4. Support the elimination of unnecessary duplication in the pre-approval process for construction and "goods" contracts.

Be it further resolved, the University Senate of the State University of New York at Fredonia urges the State of New York to make a commitment to "maintenance of effort" in the provision of state dollars, and to avoid using tuition increases as a mechanism for moving away from covering mandatory costs, especially during normal budget years.

And, Be it finally resolved, the University Senate of the State University of New York at Fredonia directs the Senate Chair to forward this resolution to the Governor and to all members of the New York State Legislature.

This is still very much the art of the possible, but if state-wide UUP throws its influence behind these 5 ideas, relations between the State of New York and the State University of New York could start heading in a better direction.  Oh, and we might be able to avoid having some very difficult discussions and decisions here at Fredonia and across the SUNY system.

Dr. Smith Comes to Fredonia, Part I: The Bright Side

Sorry to disappoint anyone who expected fireworks between United University Professions President Phil Smith and me during his visit to Fredonia today. He knows very well that as the month has gone on, I've grown more and more convinced that SUNY System Administration needs to address the legitimate UUP objections to specific provisions of the Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act--in fact I've gone further than any public positions UUP has taken in calling for specific changes to the bill and to the SUNY draft policies on tuition and asset management. We both know that the resolution the state-wide University Faculty Senate is preparing supports every part of the PHEE&IA except those portions that UUP has most strenuously and rigorously objected to. We both know that it's very likely that the State Assembly is going to kill the bill. And most important, he knows that I know that his own rhetoric and logic have moved much closer to mine over the course of the month.

Case in point: Phil's emphasis that we all need to work together to keep the Governor and legislature's feet to the fire when it comes to state support for the state university. He identified two strategic miscalculations by the new SUNY administration in their late-January budget testimony: first, failing to join UUP in advocating for restorations to the Governor's cuts and for a commitment from the state to "maintenance of effort" in the language of the PHEE&IA; second, volunteering $147M in 1-time reserves to help keep SUNY afloat should the PHEE&IA not pass. He stated directly that the Assembly Ways and Means Committee allowed the Governor's cuts to stand because of SUNY's positions. While some of this came off as finger-pointing and derriere-covering (on which more in a second), it is possible that the Chancellor's office came to see the importance of presenting a united front on the indispensability of state support only very belatedly, reluctantly, and mainly rhetorically, and that Smith's accusation that the Chancellor's notion of negotiation is you coming over to her side has merit. I'm more willing to keep an open mind on these points than I was before Phil came to campus, even if at best it means that there's plenty of blame to go around in Albany for the sorry state SUNY might be left in at the end of this year's budget process.

Case in point: Phil's repeated assertion that UUP supports specific provisions of and principles underlying the PHEE&IA. This may be revisionist history and it may be retroactive PR, but it's possible that behind closed doors UUP leadership has all along been as reasonable as Phil sounded today.

For instance, Phil's support of post-audit oversight being quite enough for purchasing goods on the open market is welcome. His example from Upstate of an expensive piece of medical equipment almost doubling in price while his campus waited for pre-audit approval was very telling.

Even more important, Phil's assertion that "UUP supports a rational, reliable, sustainable, and predictable tuition policy" is quite welcome. His point that HEPI fluctuations in part based on the inflation rate mean that at times its 5-year rolling average (at any multiplier) would be close to 0% and at times could be 20% or more is well-taken. In fact, that lack of reliability and predictability is a big part of the reason why both my campus president and I have been advocating for a clear upper limit on both general and special tuition, not to mention why the state-wide Student Assembly specifically called for a firm 6% cap--precisely to guard against swings in the multiplied rolling HEPI average on the high side and to close the gap in the cap that UUP warned against. What all of us recognize is that small, incremental increases are the only way to ensure that the state doesn't take advantage of a rational tuition policy to engineer massive cuts to taxpayer support for SUNY, not to mention drive away prospective students who would no longer be able to afford a SUNY education. We're not sure that UB or Stony Brook understand this or care, nor do we know which way SUNY System Administration is leaning. This was one of the key reasons why the sector representative from the comprehensives spoke so strongly against the PHEE&IA at the UFS winter plenary and why there was so much confusion and uncertainty during the state-wide conference call among UFS leaders on differential tuition. So the ball really is in SUNY's court at this point: when the Senate and Assembly try to reconcile their budget bills, will SUNY make serious concessions on tuition policy?

Finally, his detailed explanation of why UUP opposes granting SUNY wide-open flexibility to form public-private partnerships--solidarity with non-academic/professional unions; uncertainly of how the NLRB would rule on new employees' right to organize; fear of unit erosion should a department be moved into a non-union building run by a private organization, particularly as UUP members move or retire; the fact that in the current system campuses have an incentive to seek UUP support for any public-private partnerships, so that UUP can offer guidance, troubleshoot, and if necessary refuse to offer support to a project that doesn't look promising, for whatever reason; and the fact that several projects that didn't do this turned out to be boondoggles (at Farmingdale, Stony Brook, and Morrisville)--was quite welcome, particularly with his examples of projects at Purchase and Stony Brook for which UUP helped write the contract language. Why? Because he stated publicly the conditions under which UUP would support greater SUNY flexibility to form public-private partnerships. He treated the membership like adults, laying out his reasoning and seeking to persuade us, rather than delivering marching orders from on high. He tried to make the case that in the absence of serious money coming in from other revenue streams, SUNY would be forced to rely on tuition increases alone to try to compensate for declining state fund. Given that the UFS Executive Committee resolution addresses some of these concerns and I have addressed others, once again the ball is squarely in SUNY's court.

Case in point: Phil gave a very specific example of why he is convinced that augmenting existing SUNY revenue streams and developing new ones won't result in net gains for SUNY. He pointed out that when he arrived at Upstate in 1978, state support was around 47%--and now it's down around 10%. The state saw an opportunity to take advantage of the income the health science centers were generating: first they forced hospitals to pay for their own debt service, then their own fringe benefits, then the cost of collective bargaining increases, and finally this year they asked for over $20M to make up for retirement fund losses. If that opportunism is extended to the entire system, and the doctorals see state support drop from around 50% to around 10%, the comprehensives see state support drop from around 35% to around 10%, and so on, then eventually the question will arise of whether UUP should be negotiating with the state or with the entering freshman class and their families. Furthermore, if even UB and Stony Brook see state support drop faster than they can raise tuition, it's likely that the imbalances caused by SUNY's own formulae for distributing state funds to campuses--where Stony Brook has 57% state support and UB has near 50%--are going to be exacerbated even further, as more state money is sent to them than to the comprehensives.

So am I saying there aren't any problems left with UUP's positions and strategies? No way! But it's time to pick up my girls from day care and my wife from the airport. Stay tuned for Part II!

What the State University of New York Needs from the State of New York

As the 2010-2011 budget process in New York State enters its endgame, those concerned about the future of SUNY must necessarily play the art of the possible. But we shouldn't lose sight of what the State University of New York needs from the State of New York. It's not so different from what any system of public higher education needs from its state government.  Here are some of those things:

Funding/Financing

A general understanding that funding SUNY is an investment with both tangible/measureable returns and real but less quantifiable effects on the quality of life and culture in the regions surrounding each campus. Public higher education is a foundation for democracy, engine of economic development, magnet for population growth, key to the middle class, generator for creativity and innovation, and so much more. This understanding should inform every funding decision that affects SUNY.

A general commitment to footing the bill for the actual costs of SUNY's mission. This wouldn't prevent NY from seeking augmented federal baseline support for SUNY's research mission (even if only for certain campuses that could be designated "national research centers"). And it wouldn't prevent NY from demanding better accounting of the real costs of teaching, research, and service, not to mention less waste and more efficiency and innovation, from SUNY.

A statutory commitment to set a floor beyond which SUNY won't be cut, according to 5 standard measures. Here's hoping the floors in SUNY shares of the general fund and of per capita personal income in NY would be set above 0%. And that the minimum level of state support for SUNY per capita, per $1000 of personal income, and per student would be somewhere near national means. Tracking these stats from SUNY's formation to the present and comparing them to national and even international trends might even help the state find a sustainable equilibrium. But what SUNY needs at the very least is a legally-binding commitment to some level of maintenance of effort from New York state government, irrespective of any other means or levels of support.

A statutory commitment that the state government will stop using SUNY as a cash cow. At this point, I'm agnostic on the means: redefining SUNY campuses as local, not state, agencies; defining SUNY not as a state agency but as either a "public benefit corporation," "public-interest non-profit corporation," "educational NGO," or some other category everyone agrees is an improvement; ending appropriation of tuition dollars or, in other words, recognizing that tuition dollars are user fees paid to an individual campus rather than the equivalent of taxes paid to the state; preventing the Governor from unilaterally mandating cuts to SUNY or taxing tuition; committing the state to "maintenance of effort"; or some combination of the above.  But, to switch metaphors in mid-stream, the bottom line is that the state needs to put down the chainsaw if it wants to avoid killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

Mission/Management/Governance

A general understanding that New York government ought to limit its role to consulting with SUNY on how to define and execute its mission, insulating SUNY from the worst dysfunctions of the New York state political process, and demanding transparency, accountability, and results from SUNY in return. The state should focus more on working with SUNY's various constituencies to rewrite SUNY's mission and vision statements than on micromanaging SUNY. As much as possible, it should use reporting and auditing rather than regulations and pre-approvals as its oversight tool of SUNY management. If it conceives of its role as helping to set up a system of checks and balances within SUNY that assures each constituency has a real voice and seat at the table in goal-setting and decision-making at both system and campus levels, then it should step back and let them hash out how to make SUNY a great state university system. As I've argued before, this involves specific concessions from both the Governor and the state legislature. But it could also involve setting broad performance expectations for SUNY.

A general commitment to helping SUNY combine the greatest access with the highest quality. Part of this involves baseline funding and state financial aid via TAP and low-cost loans direct from the federal and/or state government; part of this involves giving SUNY some flexibility to determine its own tuition and asset management policies; and part of this involves setting up a SUNY-wide endowment in which each campus's non-restricted funds are pooled, augmented by state-level fund-raising, and managed by Ivy-League-quality money managers so that each campus receives a portion of the returns each year according to an agreed-upon formula that's larger than what they could have generated if they had managed them on their own.

A statutory commitment to ensuring that the SUNY Board of Trustees is made up of nationally-recognized higher education leaders with a real commitment to excellence in public higher education. I've argued before for the creation of "a non-partisan panel of state- and nationally-recognized higher education leaders to recommend new appointments to the SUNY BOT" and the lodging of appointment authority in "a 7-person board consisting of the Governor and the majority and minority leaders and the chairs of the committees in charge of higher ed in the state Senate and Assembly." But I'm agnostic as to how this goal ought best to be accomplished.

A statutory commitment to a data- and mission-driven funding process for SUNY at the earliest stages of the state budgeting process. I've argued before for the formation of a "working group on the SUNY component of the state budget consisting of representatives from DOB, SUNY System Administration, UUP, UFS, and campus presidents and business officers from each of SUNY's sectors" that is empowered to make recommendations to "a 7-person board consisting of the Governor and the majority and minority leaders and the chairs of the committees in charge of finance in the state Senate and Assembly" with the authority to "revise the working group's recommendations and insert them directly into the Governor's budget bill." But again I'm agnostic on the forms/means here. What I'm really after is the front-loading and depoliticizing the real work of setting a SUNY budget from June to January rather than back-loading and politicizing it from January to June. This would entail setting up some system of consultation/negotiation among representatives from all relevant SUNY constituencies and state government bodies that focuses on analyzing the kind of data I discuss above and determining mission-critical needs during this front-loaded period. I'm open to good ideas on what kind of system and who participates at what stage.

A statutory commitment to vesting authority to determine tuition and asset management policy in the SUNY BOT, within certain limits, under certain conditions, and following certain principles and procedures. As I've argued before at great length, the key provisions of the Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act are worth supporting and improving. I'm not going to reiterate those arguments here. The basic idea is that SUNY needs to be a responsible partner to state government; if it commits to transparency, accountability, and results, and if it is provided the kind of infrastructure and framework laid out in this post, then SUNY should be able to augment existing revenue streams and generate new ones. So long as their forms, goals, uses are consistent with its mission, in the best interests of and agreed upon by each of its various constituencies, and aimed at making SUNY as sustainable and as self-supporting as possible over the very long run, what's to worry about?

***

I'm sure I'm missing many pieces of the puzzle here.  I'm hoping my readers will help me find them--and assemble them!

[Update 1 (4:44 am): Here's what the state-wide SUNY Student Assembly wants to see with regard to tuition policy.]

[Update 2 (5:45 am): Interested in tracking the UC Commission on the Future's activities and recommendations.]

[Update 3 (5:50 am): Chris Newfield is not that impressed.]

[Update 4 (5:55 am): Neither is Bob Samuels.]

[Update 5 (2:05 pm): Neither is Rei Terada.]

[Update 6 (3:33 pm): Check out UC Regent Live(Blog)--nice play-by-play from the UC student regent.]

[Update 7 (3/26/10, 2:48 am): Nice op-ed by former UC state-wide Planning and Budget Committee chair and UC San Francisco professor Stanton Glantz.]

[Update 8 (3:11 am): Chris Bray piles on the UCOF. His satire convinces me that Nancy Zimpher's SUNY-wide strategic planning initiative is a lot better way to generate ideas than what UC's chancellor came up with. For a systems-theory-influenced take on the difficulty of system-wide strafegic planning and crisis management, check out Viviane Michel.]

[Update 9 (3/31/10, 5:00 pm): Dean Dad makes a strong case that community colleges need to be funded according to a "we will pay you x dollars per student/credit/graduate" model. He adds, "If the 'x' is high enough, then the college could combine it with tuition/fees and more than cover the costs of growth; it would have every reason to grow to meet demand. (Ideally, 'x' would be indexed to some relevant measure, so its value wouldn't get inflated away over time.)"]

When It Rains, It Pours: Keeping up with Albany's Budget Process

The Middle States reaccreditation team has certainly chosen an interesting week to visit the SUNY Fredonia campus. We're all scrambling to keep up with the latest news from Albany and figure out what, if anything, we can do to influence the outcome of the New York state budget process as it nears its endgame. I'll start off with a quick recap of reactions to the budget resolution the of the New York State Senate.

UUP President Phil Smith sent the following email blast a few minutes after I posted my own reaction:

Today, the Senate released a Resolution on the Executive Budget and the Article VII Bill. To say that the language of this resolution is confusing would be an understatement. Nonetheless, there's several parts of this Resolution that would be harmful to us.

Examples:

Resolution recommends a tuition increase of 1.5 times the 5-year average of HEPI, but doesn't provide appropriation authority for that increase.

Resolution does away with the Asset Management Review Board, but then goes on to allow public-private partnerships ONLY at Stony Brook and University at Buffalo. Does this mean there's NO oversight?

Resolution recommends differential tuition for Stony Brook and University at Buffalo, but protects CUNY students from differential tuition by campus.

Resolution lets stand the Governor's cut to SUNY appropriations! And....it calls for an additional cut of $15.4M to unspecified "university-wide programs."

Resolution supports the Governor's plan to eliminate funding for NYSTI.

In view of the dangerous nature of the Senate Resolution, I ask that you visit our Web site http://uupinfo.org/ and send a message to your Legislators to SUPPORT SUNY funding...and OPPOSE the PHEEIA. While at the Web site, please send a letter of SUPPORT for our SUNY hospitals and the New York State Theatre Institute.

It only takes a moment to send these four letters....and it WILL help protect our University....and our JOBS!

State-wide SUNY University Faculty Senate Chair Ken O'Brien sent the following email this morning to campus governance leaders:

Since we are constrained by our By-laws from an electronic vote of the Senate, we have adopted a procedure that will have the attached resolution as an action item of the Executive Committee of the Senate, that is the 5 sector reps, the Vice President and the Chancellor's representative. They, like all committees, can vote by electronic means.

I am distributing the resolution, as we did the revised chart (after UUP leadership sent me their complete file, along with an apology for their error) with the letter, the charts and graphs depicting the recent history of NYS funding, and the letter we sent to the Chancellor following our phone meeting last week. It is the item of the agenda for sector phone conversations that will be scheduled this week for each of the UFS sectors. These are intended to give your elected sector reps a better feel for where you stand on the issues raised by PHEEIA.

Is our action too late? Maybe is the honest answer, but probably not, inasmuch as the houses of the legislature are just beginning to report their staff positions on the legislation, and it appears they are coming to somewhat different conclusions, at least as far as initial public positions are concerned. Which means for us, having a voice in this process may have some small degree of influence.

As I have indicated before, we have taken this issue step by step, awaiting relevant information, which we then distributed. Along the way, there may have been missteps, but I think I have been true to the commitment that I made at the winter plenary, that you would have a voice in the public position taken by this organization, and frankly, the resolution is our best reading of where we stand as a group, not where I stand. At least the process has been as open and transparent as we could make it.

Carol Donato will be scheduling the phone conferences and the EC will then meet (electronically) next Monday.

Thanks again, and I look forward to seeing you all one more time at the Spring plenary in New Paltz next month.

As always, you can go to the SUNY Fredonia University Senate web site, click on the link to our ANGEL group and enter our Content area, Campus Initiatives folder, 2009-2010 folder, and finally our SUNY Flexibility folder for a copy of the draft Executive Committee resolution that Ken references.

SUNY Fredonia President Dennis Hefner summarized the resolution in an email to campus leaders this morning, noting that

The "cap" of about 6% for tuition increases will be the lowest in the nation (Oklahoma and several others are next lowest at 8%, most are between 9% and 10%); however, this resolution represents the first time any part of the New York legislature has indicated a willingness to move some tuition authority to the Board of Trustees....

Overall, the Senate resolution represents some good news.  We still have a long way to go, but at least there is a “fighting” chance.

President Hefner passed along an email from Jim Campbell, SUNY's director of legislative relations, who noted that "The Assembly has not yet announced their 'one house' priorities. They have adjourned until [this] afternoon and we will update you as we learn more information. Both the Assembly Majority and Minority have called for members only conferences, which might lead one to believe they are discussing budget priorities."

So, yeah, lots going on in Albany and here at Fredonia, as I'm discussing with other campus leaders whether we want to try to pass a joint resolution on the NYS budget. Nothing can happen sooner than Thursday, as tomorrow the chair of the Middle States visiting team and Phil Smith will each be addressing the campus.

My 15-Minute Reaction to the State Senate's Budget Resolution

Picking up my girls from day care in 15 minutes from the time I started writing this, so here's my rapid-fire response to the New York State Senate's Budget Resolution.

What I Like
1. The call for a statutory change that would allow SUNY to receive and retain all tuition revenue, even if it is via state appropriation.
2. The elimination of the tax on tuition.
3. Allowing the BOT to establish a rational tuition policy, with a cap at 1.5 times the five-year rolling HEPI average: #1-#3 help the comprehensives, which are very tuition-dependent.
4. The rejection of a cap on out-of-state enrollment: this seemed unfair to non-residents and xenophobic when it comes to international students; NY and American students ought to learn about taking college seriously by competing with students from other states and countries who choose to enroll in SUNY; moreover, many of them might decide to live and work in NY after graduation.

What I Don't Care About
1. The rejection of land-lease authority to the BOT, as approved by a new SUNY Asset Maximization Board: didn't really matter much out here in Western NY, anyway.
2. Only allowing the shift to a post-audit system for the procurement of goods: hey, if the state Senate wants to waste taxpayer money, that's their call.
3. Hitting SUNY System Administration with a $5.5M cut: drop in the bucket that looks like payback for daring to challenge legislative control.

What I Hate
1. The privileging of UB and Stony Brook when it comes to setting a campus-wide differential tuition rate: why identify 2 flagships that'll now most likely move to the high-tuition/high-aid model and screw over the other 32 state-operated campuses? The only way this helps the other 32 is if state support remains constant and what would have gone to those 2 schools gets spread throughout the system.
2. Allowing differential tuition by program and campus only for out-of-state undergraduate and graduate/professional students: everywhere else, limiting special tuition rates to a small pool of students guarantees most campuses will receive very little actual benefit from the work involved in determining the special rate. Plus, it's unfair to those groups of students.

More later!

[Update 1 (7:52 pm): And of course the biggest thing I hate about the Senate's budget resolution is its support of the Governor's cuts to SUNY! Looks like the state senate is getting the chainsaw ready for 2011-2012, while putting a dollop of whipped cream on a bread-and-water diet for the vast majority of 4-year institutions in SUNY as a special treat while we languish in the state budget dungeon.]

What Can New York Learn from Michigan and California When It Comes to Public Higher Ed?

In Unmaking the Public University (2009), Christopher Newfield takes a careful look at the fortunes of the University of Michigan and University of California as they have responded to "declining public money" by "increasing private funds" (174). He takes direct aim at the failure of Robert Zemsky, Gregory Wegner, and William Massy's Remaking the Public University (2005) to provide evidence of a "causal relationship between 'going to market' and new revenues" (175). Since this is the fundamental ground of dispute between the leadership of SUNY and UUP over New York's Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act, it would make a big difference whether Newfield's analysis proves that it is structurally impossible for the PHEE&IA to produce new revenues for SUNY or simply identifies problems to avoid. Today, I'll follow up on my earlier response to Newfield by arguing that Unmaking the University actually supports the latter view.

I'll start by focusing on Newfield's attempts to rebut Zemsky, Wegner, and Massy's portrayal as a success story of the University of Michigan's strategy to "diversify its income sources" in response to a "deindustrializing state economy and falling tax revenues in the early 1980s" via "increas[ing] private fund-raising, continuously rais[ing] tuition, and support[ing] entrepreneurial faculty members in their quest for larger shares of both federal money and industry sponsorship" (174). To do that, Newfield points out that

• UM was a "principal beneficiary" of a boom in public research funding from the early 1980s through the mid-2000s, sparked by federal research money for the health sciences, which is one of UM's areas of great strength (175);
• even though UM already had a strong fundraising operation and the largest alumni base in the nation, its "receipts did not outpace philanthropic growth for American universities as a whole" (176);
• even though UM raised tuition and the percentage of out-of-state students in each entering class sharply and often, "much of these revenues replaced lost state funding rather than offered new money" (176); and
• UM's rank in "U.S. News & World Report's infamous reputational survey" declined from 8th in 1987 to 25th in 2003; its selectivity did not improve; with so many out-of-state students in the system and especially at Ann Arbor, UM failed to advance its original mission of "educating the population of Michigan itself" (which is "well below the national average in the percentage of the state's population that receives bachelor's or advanced degrees"); its share of African-American students declined so sharply that even after years of improvements, its 2005 freshman class's proportion of Africans Americans was about half the state's; and its share of students from lower-income families as measured by the percentage of students with Pell Grants was about half of UC Santa Barbara's (176).

Thus, it should be no surprise that Newfield concludes: "While UM has done an effective job of protecting its Ann Arbor flagship, it has not protected the quality of the UM system, of Michigan higher education overall, or of higher education access for the residents of the state" (176).  Highlighting the costs of the UM model is part of Newfield's larger strategy to convince other state systems not to try to imitate it.  His core argument that declining public funds can't even be replaced, much less augmented, by private fund-raising (in the form of tuition and private philanthropy), can be found on pages 183-189 of Unmaking the Public University, but for the greatest impact I suggest turning to the May 2006 study Current Budget Trends and the Future of the University of California by the UC Academic Council's University Committee on Planning and Budget, on which Newfield was a principal co-author.

I'll hit the high points for you via reference to both:

• their report confirmed UC's own data (in which UC's share of California's general fund declined from 7% in 1970-1971 to 3.1% in 2006-2007) with "a dismal tale of an overall trend of declining education funding in a state with one of the largest concentrations of wealthy individuals and industries in the world," buttressed by such measures as "declining state share of 'UC Core Funds' (down to 45% around 2005 from 60% in 2001), and the state's declining contribution measured as a share of personal income" (UPU 185; cf. CBT 6 for a great chart that illustrates that state support for "that portion of the campus budgets that are directly concerned with the everyday educational mission" has declined from a peak above 75% in 1985-1986, to around 60% in both 1991-1992 and 2001-2002, to around 45% in 2005-2006; cf. CBT 18 for a chart that compares projected state support of "UC Core Funds" under the Compact to a restoration of 2001-2002 levels; cf. CBT 7 for UC's share of CA's general fund charted from 1985-2006; and cf. CBT 8 and 13 for UC's share of state personal income from 1985-2006, which declined from a high of near .38% in 1987 to near .20% in 2006);
• their report projected that the May 2004 "Higher Education Compact" among UC, California State University, and the governor of California, would leave the UC system in 2010-2011 "about $1.2B a year behind its extrapolated 2001 funding level, and twice as much behind its extrapolated 1990 funding level (on a base of about $3.3B in state general fund money in 2001)" (UPU 185-186);
• their report projected that under the Compact state funding per student would decline from a little over $13K in 2001-2002 to a little under $10K in 2010-2011 (UPU 186; cf. CBT 18-19 for more detail); and
• their report noted that using private philanthropy to replace the lost state support under the Compact would require UC to raise $30B in new funding for its endowment--that is, pass Harvard within 5 years (CBT 22-23).

Unfortunately, the most recent national data that I could find used different measures than Newfield's committee's study--state support for higher education per $1000 in personal income and per capita, for FY 2008-2009 and FY 2009-2010--so without knowing CA's total personal income in those years, I can't determine how on-target its projections were (of course I'd have to ignore the bump from federal stimulus support). But even if the study overestimated the decline in public support of UC, its basic point that the Compact locked in post-9/11 cuts to state support of public higher education in California and put UC on a private fund-raising treadmill whose pace would be unsustainable for most schools in the system looks pretty prescient today.

Even more prescient, however, was the worst-case scenario that the study contemplated, which it called the "Public Funding Freeze" model. What does it entail?

Another downturn in state finances and continued political opposition to tax increases prompts state and University leaders to reluctantly concede that it would be better to conduct an organized shift away from public funding than to suffer further uncertainty amidst a new cycle of budget crises. They decide to become a "state-assisted university" and to "privatize" centrally and systematically. State leaders agree to cap the General Fund at 2005-2006 levels (in nominal dollars), to allow the General Fund share to decline to 15% of the university's budget (or about 1/3 of the "core") by the end of 2010-2011. (CBT 29)

In this situation, "the public spends half the share of its income on UC tha[n] it had a decade earlier (down to 0.15% of per capita personal income by 2011)" (UBU 187; cf. CBT 29 for the summary table). The report's executive summary explains the ramifications of such a freeze:

The state continues to carry a structural deficit, remains politically polarized, has expensive needs in health and human services, and awaits new budgetary surprises such as unfunded health care obligations for retired state employees. These problems may encourage some to move UC toward a "high-tuition/high-aid" model in tandem with aggressive private fundraising, increased industry partnerships, and expanded sales and services. This fourth scenario, however, cannot actually be achieved with private fundraising: to obtain the billion dollars that will be lost by comparison with the Compact, and to obtain it in unrestricted payouts, the University would need to raise $25 billion in unrestricted gifts. To reach the 2001-02 funding level, more than $54 billion would be needed. Alternately, tuition increases big enough to fill the gap would shrink enrollments and, at the same time, reduce the quality of the university’s student body. The overall UC system would continue in name but not in reality, as the most prestigious campuses draw on a national student pool and collect large amounts of non-resident tuition while other campuses struggle with diminished resources, fewer programs, and reduced research capacity. Wasteful intercampus competition may arise, in part in the form of the budgetary fragmentation that the Master Plan had in its time brought to a close. Since undergraduate instruction is disproportionately dependent on the state General Fund, such changes would seriously damage the assumption of a high-quality curriculum for all qualified students. The Public Funding Freeze would end the UC system as we know it. (CBT 2; cf. 29-34 for the gory details)

Newfield's commentary in Unmaking the Public University says it all: "The outcome would be something like what Michigan, New York, and Texas have now: systems where relatively poor and academically struggling institutions coexist with one or two research flagships in a ph[]ase stratification" (189).

In other words, following the UM model would mean that California would move from a situation where all eligible high school graduates could attend a public research flagship to 84% of them making do with "the more limited opportunities of a regional state college" (189). This would entail "major economic and sociocultural losses" (190):

State colleges have fewer resources, offer less or little research, and generally place fewer of their students in positions of social or professional leadership. Students coming out of them have lower incomes than students from major research universities (public or private) and pay less in taxes back to the states that educated them. On average, state college graduates have more limited prospects. States that send a higher proportion of their public university students to regional rather than research universities have lower average incomes, and, we can infer, more socioeconomic stratification within their college-educated middle classes. (190)

Newfield argues plausibly that what the majority of students gain at research universities via exposure to "both the results of advanced research and the process through which research creates knowledge" (190) and from the resulting "practices of intellectual independence" (191) are "more developed capacities to innovate and restructure systems on an ongoing basis" (192). But for a public university to successfully combine the quality of teaching at small liberal arts colleges with the exposure to advanced research methods and results of Ivy League universities, it needs significant state support for such an expensive and labor-intensive endeavor. When that support is withdrawn, "faculty are not hired or replaced, more teaching is done with less expensive lecturers and teaching assistants, class size is increased, and classes are dropped" (192). Private giving, by contrast, "is almost always restricted, and goes to targeted research, sports, trademark-building projects, and the special interests of donors" (192):

Private funding does not come in sufficient supply to support core operations: teaching lower-division courses, writing tutorials, calculus and bench laboratory experience, language instruction, seminar interaction, independent study, and well-staffed large lectures in which students continue to get adequate personal attention. Personal attention is the core element of high-quality mass higher education: the brilliant top will do fine on its own, but the other 95%--with plenty of potential but less experience, training, entitlement, and confidence--need the kind of highly developed teaching infrastructure that costs serious money. (193-194)

In both his co-authored study and book, then, Newfield has built a strong case that core university operations--high-quality mass teaching and research--couldn't be well-supported across the UC system in a budget freeze, even were tuition to be raised to $15K per year for in-state students. 

Now, in showing that Zemsky, Wegner, and Massy are wrong to accept both "the shift from general public funding to a 'user fee' model in which students and their families pay privately for their education" and the notion that "higher education [should seek to] replace[s] lost public funding with higher user fees" (175), Newfield does leave himself some wiggle room when he acknowledges that "[i]ncreasing 'user fees' is a traditional strategy that is fully compatible with public funding and does not in itself signal a new adaptation to market forces" (176). Sure, it's an effective critique of Zemsky, Wegner, and Massy's choice of UM as a key supporting example--rather than being both "market-smart" and "mission-centered," Newfield's analysis suggests that it is neither--but it also allows him to implicitly accept the existence of some tuition at public universities.  If it is invested directly into enhancements of teaching and research, if it augments a firm base of public support for core operations, and if it remains low enough to not act as a barrier to student access, then some tuition is justifiable.

But how to identify what a firm base of public support for public higher education ought to be?  Newfield's analysis suggests that we track the following measures in New York over long periods of time:

• SUNY share of NY's general fund
• NY general fund share of SUNY's operating budget
• NY general fund share of SUNY's core operations
• SUNY share of per capita personal income in NY
• per capita personal income in NY invested in SUNY
• amount per $1000 in personal income in NY invested in SUNY

If we use data trends and national comparisons to ask ourselves where we would like to see these numbers go in the future, why, and how to get there, then we can take a debate over the PHEE&IA that's so far relied mostly on tall tales, overheated rhetoric, and emotional appeals and turn it into something that will be useful to all concerned about the future of SUNY, whether or not the PHEE&IA passes.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to track down my favorite figure, the 4th on the above list. Knowing SUNY's share of NY per capita income would be the best way of comparing levels across the region and the country.

Some of this data is publicly available, though. From the Grapevine study I linked to above, I found out that I'm paying a little bit more than the state average into the SUNY system this academic year. But even if I broke into six figures (and I'm not even close), my total commitment to SUNY via taxes would be just over $525 per $100K. That's a lot more than I donate to Hamilton College each year (Princeton doesn't need my money). Restoring progressivity to NY's tax system would allow those who benefitted the most from their own higher education to contribute their fair share to provide opportunities for the next generation--and an incentive to reduce their taxes via private giving to higher ed.

In addition, SUNY has been sharing some of this data with state-wide and campus governance leaders.  Assuming they're using the same calculations as Newfield for "core operations," the level of state support for SUNY core operations is comparable to his figures.  General fund support bounced around in the high 60% and low 70% range in the early '90s, declined sharply into the low 60% range in the late '90s, climbed into the mid-60% range for the first 3 years of the 2000s, plunged sharply again for the next 3 years into the mid-50% range, recovered for the next 3 years into the high 50% and low 60% range, and then dropped sharply again this academic year to near 50%.   But all signs suggest that 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 will see us fall into the low-to-mid 40% range. So in a sense UC's fortunes could be understood as the "canary in the mineshaft" for SUNY. While both systems suffered large cuts in 1995 and 2003, SUNY managed to keep significantly more state support for core operations. But we're approaching where UC was back in 2005-2006.

It's worth noting, however, that university colleges like my own institution have been bearing a disproportionate share of the costs of declining state support within the SUNY system. The average share of state support for the comprehensives tends to lag about 15 percentage points behind the doctorates in SUNY. Whereas the doctorates have fallen from the high 50% range to the low 50% range in the last 3 academic years, the comprehensives have declined from the mid-40% range to the mid-30% range. And in fact at SUNY Fredonia, the state's share will fall below 20% for next academic year if the Governor's cuts go through. This is because we gain revenue not only from student tuition and fees (along with a relatively low level of financial aid compared to our peer institutions in SUNY), but also from residence halls, food services, and the campus bookstore. It's often quoted that our Faculty Student Association's activities generate more revenue for the campus than does state support. I wouldn't be surprised if the average regular at our campus Starbucks (a franchise run by our FSA) spends more in a year than she is taxed by the state to support SUNY Fredonia.

And that trend is likely to accelerate here and across the state in the next several years, whether or not the PHEE&IA passes. If it does go down in flames, students are likely to see a much higher tuition increase than they otherwise would have gotten. If they think they have a better chance of influencing New York's dysfunctional political system than their local campus leadership, more power to them. They'll need it.

We'll all need it, in fact. We'll need a range of tactics and a concerted effort to craft an overall strategy to bring the figures Newfield suggests we track back to equitable and sustainable levels.

Are You There, Albany? It's Me, the Constructivist; or, An Outline of a Political Settlement on the Empowerment Act

All right, enough with the despair over the prospects of passing the Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act (PHEE&IA). Even if it's quickly getting to the point where serious cooperation between the leaders of organizations representing almost the full range of SUNY constituencies can make little if any impact on the legislative process, there's still a lot that can happen as the budget bill is finalized. If the rumors I'm hearing are true that it's going to be rushed through, here are the outlines of a compromise that the infamous "3 men in a room" in Albany can understand, and perhaps sign off on.

It's pretty clear that the PHEE&IA sidelines the state legislature while keeping the Governor firmly in charge of SUNY. After all, the legislature would have to give up control over SUNY's tuition were the bill to become law, but nothing in it changes the fact that SUNY counts as a state agency (and so is subject to unilateral funding cuts from the Governor), or that the Governor appoints the SUNY Board of Trustees, the initiates the budget-setting process for SUNY (via the Division of Budget), and negotiates with the unions representing SUNY employees (via the Governor's Office of Employee Relations). Even when the bill appears to include the state Senate and Assembly, the Governor retains control. For instance, the State University Asset Maximization Review Board it creates is appointed solely by the Governor, with only advice on voting members from the majority leaders of the legislature and on non-voting positions from the minority leaders. (Although at this point there's a chance the bill will be amended to revise the existing State Asset Maximization Review Board, unless the draft of the SUNY Comprehensive Asset Management Policy that I've seen simply has a typo.) Simply on balance of power grounds within New York's system of separation of powers, then, the state legislature has little reason to support the Governor's proposal.

Herein lie the seeds for a political settlement. If the state legislature is willing to concede that the campuses and the system can do a better job handling tuition policy than it has, what is the Governor willing to concede?

How about his unilateral authority to mandate cuts to the state-operated campuses' budgets? As local institutions, SUNY's community colleges and the City University of New York are not subject to this gubernatorial power, so why should the rest of SUNY? If the PHEE&IA were to redefine the state-operated campuses as public legal entities, such as "public benefit corporations," as the State University Business Officers Association has called for in "The Case for Enhanced SUNY Flexibility" (September 2008), then the Governor would be demonstrating his willingness to give up this control over SUNY budgets and setting an example for the state legislature. Or if the bill redefined his budget-cutting authority over SUNY as subject to legislative approval (within a certain period of time), he would at least allow time for the democratic process to vet his decision-making.

How about his power to appoint SUNY Trustees? If the PHEE&IA were to create a non-partisan panel of state- and nationally-recognized higher education leaders to recommend new appointments to the SUNY BOT, and if they made recommendations to a 7-person board consisting of the Governor and the majority and minority leaders and the chairs of the committees in charge of higher ed in the state Senate and Assembly, which had final authority to approve or reject the panel's recommendations, the governance of SUNY would be insulated from New York's political processes and the power to affect the membership of the ultimate authority in SUNY would be shared.

How about the initiation of the budget-setting process for SUNY? If the PHEE&IA were to create a working group on the SUNY component of the state budget consisting of representatives from DOB, SUNY System Administration, UUP, UFS, and campus presidents and business officers from each of SUNY's sectors, then they could look at historical patterns in the share of state personal income devoted to SUNY, the level of state support for SUNY per capita and per $1000 of personal income, and the share of the state general fund devoted to SUNY, and compare them to regional, national, and international data, and make a better-informed recommendation as to SUNY's funding in a given fiscal year. And if a 7-person board consisting of the Governor and the majority and minority leaders and the chairs of the committees in charge of finance in the state Senate and Assembly had the authority to revise the working group's recommendations and insert them directly into the Governor's budget bill, a consensus on an appropriate level of funding for SUNY could be developed by January of each budget cycle, which would give the committees and members of the state legislature plenty of time to double-check the board's recommendation and consult with their constituencies as they finalize the budget bill.

After making all those concessions, the Governor wouldn't have any reason or need to give up the authority granted him under the Taylor Act to bargain with state employee unions. I don't think anyone in the legislature would fault him for that. With these concessions in place, the "3 men in a room" could figure out what else needs to be improved in the PHEE&IA to make it work better for everyone in SUNY and in New York State. And perhaps be ready to listen to a united advocacy effort from SUNY, UUP, and UFS.

Get Out Your Secret Decoder Rings, Ken, Nancy, and Phil!

I've been hearing from various sources that New York state's political "leaders" are going to try to rush through a 2010-2011 budget bill, perhaps as soon as this coming week. If this is true, I have some more unsolicited advice for SUNY's University Faculty Senate, System Administration, and UUP leadership. But why put it in my own words when I can borrow from the greats?

Robertson Davies:  "If you don't hurry up and let life know what you want, life will damned soon show you what you'll get" (Fifth Business).

T.S. Eliot:  "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME" (The Waste Land).

William Shakespeare:  "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well/ It were done quickly" (Macbeth I.vii).

Abraham Lincoln:  "Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle" (possibly apocryphal).

Yeah, I'm reduced to listing motivational quotations whose contexts often undermine their apparent message (and embedding a link to an analysis of a Guinness ad in lieu of an actual source for my last one!). I could add Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "fierce urgency of now" from "I Have a Dream," but that would be going over the top, wouldn't it?

Why all the silliness? Well, I'm 95% sure the Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act is already dead. The only scenario I can imagine for a revival is if there's an announcement from SUNY, UUP, and UFS early next week that they've come to an agreement on what it should become, followed by a full-court press on all relevant legislators and a mass appeal to New Yorkers across a variety of media. Now, if UUP President Phil Smith cancels his planned visit to Fredonia to stay in Albany and make this happen, then I'll see some glimmer of hope. But I put the odds that all 3 organizations will be able to come to an agreement and synchronize their message at this late stage of the game around 5%.

Guinness, anyone?

[Update 1 (6:06 am): Listening to Nancy Zimpher's interview on WBFO from the 18th.]