Feds to the Rescue?

Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education report on new federal initiatives to stabilize public higher education in cash-strapped states (i.e., just about every one). I'm starting to get a little more hopeful that the contingency-planning working group I'm in the final stages of putting together here at SUNY Fredonia (consisting of 4 appointees by me and 3 by the campus president) won't have to put all the cost-cutting ideas it generates into immediate action, but I'm still going to charge them with preparing for a range of scenarios, from bad to worse to dire to disastrous.

I'm all for emergency stabilization, but we also need to look beyond the immediate crisis, revisit fundamental assumptions about the financing of public higher education, and search for longer-term solutions. It's not enough to stop on the edge of a cliff: we've all seen enough Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner cartoons to know that that's the moment when the cliff collapses under you. I've purposely put off focusing on the longer term in the midst of NY's budget battle, but by this time next month I'll be all over it.

Governance Matters: What Should the Core Functions and Goals of the University Be?

Michael Meranze hits the nail on the head once again. He argues:

The UC faculty needs to assert their own vision of the core functions of the University.... If the faculty do not become more involved and assertive in defining the University, its definition will be made by market-share and balance sheets....

The budgetary crisis has meant that unless we do a better job of defining what we think to be the core mission of the university, the financial managers will do it for us. And we have yet to do that in a systematic way.

Similarly, his critique of the University of California's Commission on the Future's "marginalization of faculty" strikes exactly the right note:

the marginalization of faculty has sidelined what we might have thought would be the central question facing the Commission: how best to preserve the educational core of the University. Instead, the Commission has been primarily concerned with how best to produce revenue lines and lower costs. Increasing revenue and effectively spending money are obviously central concerns; but they can only be addressed once we have made clear what the central ends of the University itself are. The danger is that the question of the purposes of the University will be decided without real debate....

Furthermore, he's right that putting the shared back in governance is one key way to get that real debate going.

The Senate, both system-wide and the Campus Divisions, must take the lead in pressing for far greater transparency in the budget than now exists. The faculty throughout the system is being asked, or will be asked, to reexamine priorities, administrators are looking for ways to cut costs, and the burdens will ultimately fall upon departments and programs. But if real budget reform is to occur it has to be through knowing participating and shared responsibility between administration and faculty.

Finally, he's right that

[B]udgetary transparency can only accomplish so much. It can make clear the structures of funding and costs, and clarify the choices that are being made. But in order to reverse the relationship between educational and budgetary decisions faculty will need to do a better job of indicating what we believe the core goals and functions of the University should be.

This is what makes me so curious about what he and other activists in California would say about the process and rhetoric of SUNY's new strategic plan, The Power of SUNY. Chancellor Zimpher's approach has been much more inclusive than Chancellor Yudof's, she's made a big effort to convince the state-wide University Faculty Senate that she's committed to shared governance, and her strategic plan seeks to put SUNY's research and teaching squarely in the service of New York state's people, communities, and economy.

Being so outwardly-directed, SUNY's strategic plan doesn't directly address Meranze's interest in a "renewed vision for undergraduate education" or his attempt to start conversations about the relation between general education ("provid[ing] students with diverse and complex intellectual literacy: conceptual, cultural, experimental, historical, linguistic, and scientific") and departmental majors ("Students would still get the concentration they need in order to continue to further and deepen their learning; but they would also be given the general competencies needed to contribute critically to the world"). But by making SUNY's general education requirements more flexible and putting more responsibility for assessing it in individual campuses' hands, Zimpher clearly wants to see the faculty take more ownership of general education. And I wouldn't be surprised if the strategic planning process generated a whole lot more ideas than made it into the glossy brochure, ones more directly about the educational mission of SUNY.

Here's what I'm hoping comes out of the launch of the SUNY strategic plan and the last push this year to influence New York state budget politics:

What I want to see from SUNY leadership, in short, is a commitment to doing everything in their power to convince all concerned parties that the system and the campuses are prepared to handle the responsibility and take advantage of the opportunities the PHEE&IA would grant it. The key part of that commitment is being open to amendments to the PHEE&IA and revisions to their draft policies that enshrine such principles as collaboration across constituencies and organizations within SUNY, power-sharing from day one and ground zero across SUNY, and robust checks and balances on all involved. If this happens, I'm ok with the fact that many things would still have to be worked out in practice. Because ultimately that experience of working together in a common cause, treating disagreements as a normal condition to be addressed openly and frankly at all levels of decision-making (not as treason or disloyalty), and trying to develop revenue streams that enhance the educational, research, and service missions of SUNY without providing rationales for further cuts in state support is all preparation, to my mind, of the larger state-wide, national, and even international consideration of the following questions that SUNY can take the lead on: namely, why public universities ought to continue to exist in the 21st century and beyond, how their roles, functions, and uses ought to be defined, what their value is (in non-economic as well as economic terms), and where their financing should come from. If all of us concerned about the future of SUNY and of public higher education were to systematically revisit these fundamental questions, consider why traditional answers to them have been losing support from citizens, taxpayers, and politicians (among others), and develop new, more compelling, answers (when needed), then we might find ways of moving out of crisis mode and into growth mode. If we can't even commit to this much, what hope is there of anyone else doing it for us?

Yup, I still haven't changed my mind from mid-March. Glad to see others are raising similar questions and proposing their own answers.

[Update 1 (12:54 am): Check it out! Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg's The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age is available as a download from MIT Press!]

SUNY's "Fortunately, Unfortunately" Strategy: Turning Up the Heat on NY's Political Establishment

With the Passover-Easter recess over in Albany, New York's political leaders have been greeted by a renewed pushback from SUNY. Let's call it the "Fortunately, Unfortunately" strategy.

Fortunately, SUNY is launching its new strategic plan over the next two weeks across New York State. [Update (10:44 am): here's The Power of SUNY page and a link to the strategic plan (of the same title) itself.]

Unfortunately, Stony Brook University "leaked" and then announced and explained their plans to virtually shut down their Southampton campus, which they had recently purchased from Long Island University. Key sound bites from President Samuel L. Stanley, Jr., include the following:

"I would say that we did fundamentally believe that the financial model didn't work essentially as outlined, and that to try and run a very small campus--essentially a very small liberal arts campus--on a $5,000 a year tuition, is very difficult."

"You can do the math and figure out without significant state allocation and support, this campus loses money."

It remains to be seen whether students, UUP, and local legislators will direct their anger at the Stony Brook administration alone, or whether Sheldon Silver and other State Assembly leaders will become the target of their ire.

Fortunately, SUNY is celebrating its most exceptional students by announcing the recipients of the 2010 Chancellor's Award for Student Excellence last week and holding a poster session today in the Legislative Office Building showcasing top undergraduate research and creative work.

Unfortunately, the University at Albany has announced their plans to prepare for a "substantially lower resource base over the next two years," according to an email that President George Philip sent to the campus last week, which made its way to the Times Union's Capitol Confidential blog. The other key line from it is even more specific:

[W]ithout long-overdue flexibility/autonomy and critically important funding restorations, I remain deeply troubled and concerned about the University's ability to maintain the size of our faculty and staff, the breadth of our academic programs, and student enrollment.

Last week at SUNY Fredonia, President Hefner and I were interviewed on "High Noon Friday" on the Fredonia radio station, right after Student Assembly leader Kevin Wysocki's interview, on the SUNY budget and the Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act. Yesterday, the Fredonia University Senate overwhelmingly endorsed the resolution that the Executive Committee of the state-wide University Faculty Senate passed at the end of March, which lays out their qualified support for the PHEE&IA. (While they didn't go as far as I wanted them to in clarifying what SUNY needs from NY, they did a good job of addressing the legitimate objections that have been raised by UUP and others by calling for further revisions of SUNY's tuition and asset management policy drafts.) This Friday, SUNY Fredonia will be holding a press conference to do what we can to continue turning up the heat on NY's political leaders. And I'm hoping that the governance team we're bringing to the state-wide plenary in New Paltz at the end of next week can help the UFS put further pressure on SUNY and UUP to finally present a united front to NY's political establishment.

While we at Fredonia are hoping for the best and fighting for any good to come from New York's budget process, we're preparing for all likely eventualities, from dire to disastrous to catastrophic. I've been consulting with President Hefner and members of the University Senate Executive Committee and Planning and Budget Advisory Committee over the last several weeks on putting together a Budget Priorities Subcommittee of PBAC, a small working group to be made up of faculty and administrative leaders, whom I will charge with deciding on a process and criteria for making recommendations on how Fredonia should deal with a range of budgetary scenarios and presenting their recommendations to the PBAC after they have concluded their data collection, analysis, and deliberations. A loose model for the BPS's work will be the kind of projections that UC's state-wide University Committee on Planning and Budget produced in the middle of the last decade, but with specific suggestions for difficult decision-making at a public regional university in NY rather than a survey of general paths CA's research universities might take.

More on all these matters as they unfold....

[Update 1 (10:59 am): I give the New York Times's first pass at summarizing the plan a B-.]

[Update 2 (1:39 pm): Frank Mauro and Ron Deutsch suggest that alternatives to continuing to cut SUNY--and ways to fund them--both exist and will be better for the state in the near and long term.]

[Update 3 (5:01 pm): The Legislative Gazette included the first comprehensive overview of the plan that I've seen.]

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!

Michael Meranze, Meet Jean-Francois Lyotard

Here's hoping the faculty at SUNY's doctoral-granting institutions read Michael Meranze's response to the University of California's Commission on the Future's first public hearing.

As I read it, I kept flashing back to key moments in Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition. Not quite the parts that Michael Berube focused on in What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? (having to do with legitimation via paralogy and narrative rather than consensus)--well, at least not immediately. No, the parts that go like this:

The decision-makers...attempt to manage these clouds of sociality according to input/output matrices, following a logic which implies that their elements are commensurable and that the whole is determinable. They allocate our lives for the growth of power. In matters of social justice and of scientific truth alike, the legitimation of that power is based on its optimizing the system's performance--efficiency. The application of this criterion to all our games necessarily entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear. (xxix)

And this:

By terror I mean the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language game one shares with him. He is silenced or consents, not because he has been refuted, but because his ability to participate has been threatened (there are many ways to prevent one from playing). The decision makers' arrogance, which in principle has no equivalent in the sciences, consists in the exercise of terror. It says, "Adapt your aspirations to our ends--or else." (63)

And this:

the process of delegitimation and the predominance of the performance criterion are sounding the knell of the age of the Professor: a professor is no more competent than memory bank networks in transmitting established knowledge, no more competent than interdisciplinary teams in imagining new moves or new games. (53; see more generally "Education and Its Legitimation through Performativity," 47-53)

Yeah, I know, many a digital diploma mill has sprung up from the last quotation, particularly when combined with Lyotard's bizarre semi-celebration of "the temporary contract" (66). But it's the prior two passages that concern me here today. What Meranze helps make clear is that Lyotard's target in The Postmodern Condition is not simply Habermas's commitment to legitimation by consensus, with its "violence to the heterogeneity of language games" (xxv). Actually, it's more specific than that: the supplantation of appeals to truth and justice by appeals to efficiency and performativity. I wonder if by this criterion Lyotard would find the UCOF to be a terrorist organization?

Be that as it may, it's worth noting that Meranze's critiques pick up where Berube leaves off in his discussion of tuition, circa 2006:

your average state university now receives only a token amount of financial support from the state. Institutions like Penn State and the University of Michigan are nearly off the public books altogether, receiving only a tiny fraction of their budgets from state funds. The state provided 45 percent of Penn State's budget as recently as 1984-1985, when in-state tuition was $2,562; that figure is now down to 10 percent, and in-state tuition is $11,508. The correlation speaks for itself. The costs of college, in state after state, have been passed along to individual families, as higher education has gradually been reconceived as a private investment for individuals rather than a social good for the entire nation. (281-282)

And here:

That's what "partial privatization" is all about: passing the social costs of public goods onto individuals, leaving students and families to fend for themselves as best they can. If this is fine with you, so be it: you're a conservative or a libertarian. If you think this is a suspect or foolhardy enterprise, you may already be a liberal or progressive. (283)

And if you think it's a terrorist attack on truth, justice, and the heterogeneity of language games, then you're probably a French postmodernist.

Neither Berube nor Christopher Newfield are, but they both argue, in What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts? and Unmaking the Public University, that the attack on public universities and the attack on public institutions of all kinds have gone hand-in-hand in the dominant forms of conservative and libertarian politics of the past generation. What remains to be seen, in both California and New York, is whether some other politics might be possible.

[Update 1 (5:40 am): Sarah Amsler takes on managerialism in British higher ed.]

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.