Now We're Talking: An Open Letter to Joel Miller

Joel Miller
Member of the Assembly
102nd Assembly District

Dear Dr. Miller:

Thanks for your letter of April 14th. The SUNY Fredonia University Senate and I share your opposition to the privatization of the State University of New York and your dismay at the tuition roller coaster students and families have been riding for the last generation. My colleagues and I are particularly gratified to hear that you have a plan to bring more state support for SUNY. To tell you the truth, we've been under the impression that everyone outside the Western New York delegation in the Assembly has it in for SUNY.

I'd like to hear more about your plan to stabilize SUNY's funding, as your description is a little fuzzy:

My plan links [tuition] increases to no more than the CPI for the entering freshman which then stays flat for 5 years with the State annually increasing support by the Higher Education Price Index (HEPI). A percentage of these increases must go to increase the number of full-time faculty.

Are you saying that your plan calls for tuition for each entering first-year class to remain the same for 5 years? (Even if they transfer to another SUNY school? Would students transferring in from outside SUNY pay the same tuition rate as entering first-year students?) And that each year the Legislature would have to limit tuition increases for that particular entering class to a cap set by the previous year's Consumer Price Index? (Would they be required to mandate a tuition decrease if deflation occurs?) And that each year the Legislature would commit to increasing support for SUNY by the Higher Education Price Index rate? (Is that a floor or a ceiling?)

Since your letter refers to the "SUNY Fredonia College Council" in its opening paragraph--which is an entity something like a local Board of Trustees, nothing like the campus governance organization that I lead--I'll take the liberty of reminding you of the actual content of our March 29th resolution by comparing your plan to the elements we've identified, in conjunction with the Fredonia Student Assembly, UUP chapter, and administrative leadership, as key campus needs.

We all agree that a rational, equitable, and predictable tuition policy is necessary, although only the students agree with you that the Legislature should continue to control it and that increases should be capped according to a variable inflation rate. By contrast, the faculty, staff, and administrators of SUNY Fredonia believe that the Board of Trustees should be entrusted with the responsibility to manage small, incremental tuition increases under a flat percentage rate cap (on the order of 8% to 10%). Have they mismanaged the residence halls, construction, or the setting of fees? Why shouldn't they have the same authority to set their own tuition rate that community colleges in New York already have? Don't the taxpayers of NY also own the community colleges? Have they been privatized?

Putting aside the additional administrative costs of different tuition rates for different students in attendance at the same time (by date of entry in addition to resident/non-resident status), which probably would not be high enough to deter the faculty, staff, students, and administrators of SUNY from supporting this aspect of your plan, what's the real difference between yours and ours, and how big is it really? How much does it really matter if the Legislature or the Trustees are managing a rational, equitable, and predictable tuition policy? Since we both agree that tuition increases shouldn't be offset by decreases in state support, can't we come to an agreement on this last little difference between our plans?

Like your plan, our resolution also seeks to freeze the state's long-standing disinvestment in SUNY. But whereas your plan focuses only on the state covering inflationary costs, ours goes much further. (1) We seek to end the Governor's power to unilaterally "claw back" funds the Legislature has dedicated to SUNY by moving SUNY from the "state assistance" budget category to the "local assistance" category, just like community colleges and CUNY schools. (2) We seek to end the practice of cutting SUNY's operating budget by a greater amount than any tuition increase with both a formal end to the "tax on tuition" and a commitment by the state to "maintenance of effort" (which normally includes covering both mandatory and inflationary costs). (3) And we seek to protect SUNY's most financially vulnerable students from the effects of tuition increases by getting a commitment from the state and SUNY to develop new financial aid measures or enhance existing ones (like TAP).

Can we have your support on these three elements of our resolution? Without them, your plan is open to Gubernatorial sabotage and the students, faculty, staff, and administrators of SUNY Fredonia are still vulnerable to continuing disinvestment from the state of New York.

Forgive me for asking, but is your letter an individual initiative, or does your plan have support from the majority of your colleagues on the Higher Ed committee? Is yours the official plan your team is putting forward in conference committee with your counterparts in the State Senate, or are you freelancing this? (I ask because I don't understand why it didn't make it into the Assembly's budget resolution.) What do Deborah Glick and Sheldon Silver think of your plan? How about Phil Smith and Nancy Zimpher?

As you know much better than I, time is getting short. I encourage you to discuss your plan with Bill Parment and the rest of the Western NY delegation. If SUNY's supporters in the Assembly don't get organized and figure out how to act effectively, I fear the consequences for my students and colleagues. If I can help in any way, please don't hesitate to let me know.

Sincerely,

Bruce Simon
Chair
SUNY Fredonia University Senate
[phone number]
[address]

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.

Weekend Update

Here's where we stand heading into the special University Senate meeting at SUNY Fredonia in just under an hour.

Movement from the state-wide SUNY University Faculty Senate: The UFS Executive Committee is holding a conference call tomorrow morning to decide whether and how to revise their resolution, and on what other actions to take, with regard to the PHEE&IA and the NYS budget more generally.

Movement from SUNY System Administration: Chancellor Zimpher has sent a letter to the Governor and leaders of the State Senate and Assembly (majority and minority), laying out "what SUNY requires, at a minimum, to alleviate draconian cuts in program closings, retrenchments of faculty and layoffs of staff at our campuses." For the full text of her letter, as well as of SUNY's summary of and response to the Senate and Assembly budget resolutions, please head on over to our ANGEL group, dive into our Content area, enter the Campus Initiatives folder, click on "2009-2010," and look through the rich collection of documents in the "SUNY Flexibility/Budget" folder.

No public movement from UUP: Beyond what Phil Smith said at Fredonia, that is.

What does this all mean? Basically, Nancy Zimpher has decided to fight for as much of the Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act as she believes in salvageable. In essence, she's betting that NY's Executive (whether Governor Paterson or Lt. Gov. Ravitch) will fight hard for their own bill. Phil Smith is serenely confident the Assembly is on his side. What I hope SUNY Fredonia does is say with one voice that however the state-wide controversies play out, all parties involved can agree on the items that our Student Assembly and University Senate have identified in our resolutions as what our campus absolutely, positively needs. In essence, we're betting that the State Senate can broker a principled compromise on SUNY's budget needs.

Reading the Tea Leaves

Here are Sheldon Silver's remarks on the New York State budget and budget process. Is it a bad sign that he didn't mention SUNY and SUNY students as groups the Assembly is out to protect, or a good sign that he didn't attack SUNY? I'm assuming that the Assembly specifically mentioning Lt. Gov. Ravitch's plan and calling for the Governor to resubmit his budget bill is an attempt to pressure him to be flexible with his emphasis on long-term spending restraint and lasting fiscal reform and state spending caps.

I'm also assuming SUNY benefits from the State Senate's New Jobs New York campaign, given Zimpher's emphasis on recasting SUNY's service mission as an economic and community development mission. And that 2 of the 3 men in the room during the endgame of the New York State budget process will be in favor of the provisions and principles the SUNY Fredonia University Senate will hopefully be endorsing on Monday, virtually all of which the Student Assembly already endorsed last Thursday.

But beyond that, I'm at a loss here. UUP hasn't changed its public position against cuts (yay) and against the Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act (even the parts Phil Smith says they support). Predictions, anyone? How much of what SUNY needs will we get from NY this year?

[Update 1 (5:24 am): I'm surprised that so few people are checking out Generation SUNY's youtube channel. The latest convocation recap features Chancellor Zimpher dropping the news that the new SUNY strategic plan will be rolled out on April 13th and taken on a two-week tour of New York. Here's hoping that the New York State budget process grinds slowly, so that everyone in and outside Albany has time to register the significance of the enduring and new directions in which she wants to lead SUNY.]

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.]