First Principles of Shared Governance, Part I: Buckle Your Seat Belts, Kids!

I'm heading out to Albany in the middle of next week to be on a panel with SUNY Fredonia University Senate Chairperson Rob Deemer and Governance Officer John McCune at the SUNY Voices 1st Annual Conference on Shared Governance.  Its theme is "Shared Governance for Institutions of Higher Education in the 21st Century:  Beyond Stereotypes"; my focus will be "Improved Shared Governance through Strong Bylaws."  I've been playing a lead role in upgrading the SUNY Fredonia Faculty and University Senate Bylaws off and on ever since I was 1st elected Vice Chairperson in 2008, but we developed, approved, and ratified the most comprehensive set of revisions to the Bylaws last year.  Since I have only about 10 minutes to summarize our emerging vision/theory of shared governance, survey the most significant changes to the Bylaws in the past 5 years or so, and identify as-yet-unresolved questions, I thought I'd better use Citizen of Somewhere Else to work through my ideas and provide some perspective on the debates we're currently having in departments and on the Senate at Fredonia.  My girls are just about done with Japanese school this morning, though, and we have a birthday party in Fredonia to get them to by 2, so this post will have to serve as a heads-up to come back here the next week or so, check in on my progress, and weigh in in comments!

What SUNY Fredonia Needs from New York State's Leaders

The SUNY Fredonia Administration, Student Association, University Senate, and United University Professions and Civil Service Employees Association chapter Executive Boards issue the following urgent appeal to western-region and state-wide leaders as the New York State budget process enters its end game.  We agree the following legislative priorities would benefit our campus, our students, our local community, our region, and our state.

Enhance and Invest in SUNY State-Operated Campuses

• increase state funding for SUNY’s operating costs
• fully fund all contractual increases
• fully commit to maintenance of effort
• provide relief to campuses for winter emergency utilities charges
• develop a short- and long-term solution to the hospitals crisis that avoids harm to the academic and teaching mission of SUNY and its medical schools and two-year and four-year universities
• increase capital funding to repair, maintain, and enhance SUNY’s infrastructure
• support full funding for Fredonia’s NY SUNY 2020 proposal
• engage and support SUNY Fredonia’s START-UP NY plan
• think of SUNY if one-time funds become available

Commit to Quality, Access, Affordability, and Student Success throughout SUNY

• invest in New York’s students, maintain SUNY’s affordability, and reduce student and family debt by taking concrete steps to reverse the chronic state underfunding of SUNY’s operating costs
• adequately fund SUNY’s opportunity programs
• extend the DREAM Act to undocumented SUNY students
• invest in current students and veterans as strongly as the Governor has committed to offering higher educational opportunities to prisoners
• if we’re going to do Open SUNY, ensure that it does not compromise educational quality and access, shared governance, or the mission of SUNY

Contacts
Ziya Arnavut, President, Fredonia United University Professions arnavut@fredonia.edu
John Baughman, President, Civil Service Association Local 607 baughman@fredonia.edu
Robert Deemer, Chairperson, SUNY Fredonia University Senate deemer@fredonia.edu
Virginia Horvath, President, SUNY Fredonia horvath@fredonia.edu
Antonio Regulier, President, Fredonia Student Association regu0674@fredonia.edu
Bruce Simon, Western Region Co-Coordinator, UUP Outreach Committee simon@fredonia.edu
Idalia Torres, Western Region Co-Coordinator, UUP Outreach Committee torres@fredonia.edu

For more, see our joint statement!

Here's the list of leaders our letter and statement went out to electronically.  Anyone who wants to help us out by making calls or sending emails, we'd welcome the support!

The 4 Men in the Room
Governor Cuomo, https://www.governor.ny.gov/contact/GovernorContactForm.php, 518-474-8390
Jeffrey Klein, jdklein@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3595
Sheldon Silver, speaker@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-3791
Dean Skelos, skelos@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3171

Higher Education Budget Conference Committee
Deborah Glick, glickd@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-4841
José Rivera, riveraj@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5414
William Colton, coltonw@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5828
Amy Paulin, paulina@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5585
William Barclay, barclaw@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5841
Michelle Schimel, schimelm@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5192
Gary Finch, finchg@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5878
Kenneth LaValle, lavalle@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3121
James Seward, seward@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3131
Joseph Robach, robach@nysenate.gov, 518-455-2909
Mark Grisanti, grisanti@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3240
Toby Ann Stavisky, stavisky@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3461

Other State-Wide Leaders
John DeFrancisco, jdefranc@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3511
Herman Farrell, Jr., farrellhassembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5491
Liz Krueger, lkrueger@nysenate.gov, 518-455-2297
Robert Oaks, oaksr@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5655
Andrea Stewart-Cousins, scousins@nysenate.gov, 518-455-2585

Other Western Region Legislators
John Ceretto, cerettoj@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5284
Jane Corwin, corwinj@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-4601
David DiPietro, dipietrod@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5314
Patrick Gallivan, gallivan@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3471
Joseph Giglio, giglioj@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5241
Andrew Goodell, goodella@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-4511
Michael Kearns, kearnsm@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-4691
Timothy Kennedy, kennedy@nysenate.gov, 518-455-2426
Crystal Peoples-Stokes, peoplesstokesc@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-5005
Michael Ranzenhofer, ranz@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3161
Sean Ryan, ryans@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-4886
Robin Schimminger, schimmr@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-4767
Raymond Walter, walterr@assembly.state.ny.us, 518-455-4618
Catharine Young, cyoung@nysenate.gov, 518-455-3563

[Update 1 (9:33 am):  I'm reading on twitter that budget bills are being printed on education and higher education.  Trying to find out how often they get amended on the floor....  Follow me @citizense for breaking news.]

[Update 2 (12:34 pm):  Here are some links to articles and blog posts coming out with highlights of the budget:

• Capitol Confidential Overview
• Capitol Confidential:  No Raises for Management-Confidential

Waiting for specifics on SUNY.]

[Update 3 (12:42 pm):  The New York Times article doesn't add many details but is good on context on pre-k and charter schools.]

[Update 4 (1:35 pm):  TWC has what they tweeted was a full budget, but looks like highlights to me.]

[Update 5 (1:47 pm):  The Albany Daily Gazette has a few more details, but SUNY remains off the radar.  Hasn't come up in conference call yet, either.]

[Update 6 (1:55 pm):  Lots of details in this lohud.com post, but still nothing on SUNY mentioned.]

SUNY Fredonia Coalition to Issue Urgent Appeal to Western NY Legislators and State-Wide Leaders on NYS Budget

More on this tomorrow, but here's a sneak preview of what's coming out of the Wild West on the New York State budget's end-game!

And here's the first of many cover letters.  Pass it on!

28 March 2014

The Honorable Andrew M. Cuomo
Governor of New York State
NYS Capitol Building
Albany, NY 12224

Dear Governor Cuomo:

Thank you for the work you are doing to ensure that New York once again has an on-time budget that reflects the commitments of the state and responsibly ensures the future of New Yorkers.

The attached joint statement, which we have also sent to Western New York and other state-wide leaders, clarifies our priorities and asks for your support as the New York State budget process enters its end game. In the name of the administrative, governance, and union constituencies at SUNY Fredonia that we represent, we call on you and other leaders to support these 11 action items aimed at

• enhancing and investing in SUNY state-operated campuses;
• committing to quality, access, affordability, and student success throughout SUNY.

These themes and action items have emerged during months of discussion, debate, and decision-making. We are proud to speak with one voice, united in our commitment to the future of New York by investing in this generation of college students, and we urge you to join and support us.

http://tinyurl.com/mflrc2p

We look forward to continued good work with you and our state leaders as we all make the critical choices for New York’s future.

Recommended Reading: On Open SUNY

Here's a recently-updated Phil Hill post at e-Literate on Open SUNY--it's a great intro to the recently-announced initiative by SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher.

I'm here at UUP's Academic Delegates meeting hearing from a panel on issues raised by Open SUNY, such as:

• academic quality/academic integrity
• pedagogy
• intellectual property/work-for-hire agreements
• extra service/workload/on-call-recall designations/compensatory time
• outsourcing
• who is involved in curriculum change, when, and under what conditions
• pace of change

Of course, UUP must be involved in discussions of any changes to salary, benefits, or other terms and conditions of employment, which are mandatory subjects of bargaining.  These include:

• change in length of workday
• increases in duties
• work-for-hire requests
• on-call/recall issues
• extra service issues

UUP is available to consult with members whenever there are changes in work life and is looking for ways to  collaborate with SUNY governance bodies, both state-wide and on different campuses.  Vice President for Academics Jamie Dangler recommends:

• forming chapter committees
• using chapter web sites and newsletters to engage members
• working with campus governance bodies
• developing positions on specific changes/issues
• developing guidelines for UUP representation on campus and statewide groups

Other ideas that came out of our discussions include:

• workshops/training
• what are legitimate and inappropriate standards/procedures for evaluation of online teaching? (UUP's Technology Issues Committee has a report entitled Best Practices in Online Learning that addresses this [available here], but may not adequately deal with evaluation of contingent faculty.)
• vulnerability of contingent faculty to be pressured into designing or teaching in Open SUNY
• increased workload that comes with changes in online learning systems
• UUP resolution/statement (Chief Academic Officers and Faculty Council of Community Colleges have made them)
• who profits from Open SUNY? (often with MOOCs, it's private corporations)
• conflicting definitions of "consultation" and management abuses of the concept (such as at CUNY)
• what's going on in other systems, states, and nations so we can help, learn, gain allies
• defining what's optimal, what's working, what ought to be happening
• thinking about how to connect with student groups to push for broader/better support for quality public higher education

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!