On Increasing SUNY Revenues, Part 3

So far in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I've attempted to be a generous, charitable close reader of the SUNY Report on Long-Term Enrollment and Financial Sustainability.  I've pointed out how rhetorically and politically effective it is likely to be and praised its customization toward its primary audience:  Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.  In both posts, I've argued that Chancellor King and SUNY System Administration are putting the ball exactly where it belongs at this stage of the budget season:  firmly in Governor Hochul's court, within days of her State of the State Address on January 9 and release of her Executive Budget proposal by January 16.  The essential function of the SUNY report is to make the following question unavoidable:  what mix of additional public and private funding sources will be needed to put SUNY on sound financial footing over the next decade?

As further evidence of Chancellor King's political savvy, consider how the report is being covered in the media thus far.  This Spectrum News headline says it all:  SUNY System Sustainability in Doubt without More Tax Support.  Eileen Buckley quoted a UB student and United University Professions President Fred Kowal as being firmly in the pro-public funding camp.  I believe Kathleen Moore's headline writers improved her story's headline (check me on that!):  "SUNY warns of future $1B deficit without higher tuition or more aid" (although that "or" remains misleading).  Janet Gramza went more into summary/paraphrase mode, but, in echoing the report's emphasis on SUNY proactivity and fiscal responsibility, reinforces the notion that SUNY is good investment material.  (I mean, show me anything else with a return on investment of 817%!)

I've been doing my part to bring some momentum to the pro-public funding camp.  The Fredonia University Senate Executive Committee's petition has been going a little viral in the last 24 hours, thanks to an x-twitter thread I posted yesterday morning and updated in the afternoon and evening, setting up a little friendly competition between my friends in public colleges and universities and private ones in promoting our petition.  In less than 12 hours, I would guess all my tweets promoting our petition earned on the order of 30K views, 250 likes, 125 reposts, 12 quote tweets, and close to 60 new signatures on the petition itself.  As of this posting, we are approaching 600 signatures, more than doubling the previous high-water mark of our original "New Deal" petition to Governor Cuomo from Spring 2019.

In today's post, I'm going to share some of my own thinking on the proper mix of public and private funding sources for public higher education—thinking that builds on and goes beyond the resolution-crafting I've led for the Fredonia University Senate (archived here) and SUNY University Faculty Senate (October 2023) as well as previous posts on this blog (you can trace the evolution of my thinking over a decade ago by looking at posts from 9/24/2011, 5/14/2010, 4/27/2010, 4/17/2010, 3/24/2010, 3/22/2010, 3/21/2010, 3/17/2010, 3/16/2010, 3/10/2010, 3/3/2010, 3/1/2010—this is just a selection of the meatiest from the "On Funding Public Higher Education" tag; the entire timeline from March to May 2010 is pretty revealing of what's remained consistent [often frustratingly] in New York State budget politics and processes!).

Why am I in the pro-public funding camp?  Many reasons!

• I believe the pendulum has swung way too far, both conceptually and fiscally, toward the flawed notion that the value of a college degree should be measured solely in terms of the lifetime earnings boost it provides the degree holder over the average high school graduate, and that therefore students and families should bear an ever-increasing share of the cost of operating public colleges and universities.  When the total annual price of attending SUNY Fredonia approaches $25K and when 91% of Fredonia's Class of 2019 graduated with student debt, something is out of whack!
• I believe that public higher education is a public good.  While I don't believe every public higher ed sector or degree program should be free, I do believe students at public colleges and universities and their families should be contributing on average approximately a third of their institution's operating costs, in line with the proportion of "personal monetary benefit of a college degree" to its "overall value" (Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake, pg. 71):

According to higher education scholars Walter McMahon and Christopher Newfield, decision-makers consistently underestimate higher education’s private non-market goods (on a degree holder’s health; longevity; happiness; human capital; working conditions; job type and benefits; control over consumption, savings, and family size; and children’s education and cognitive development), indirect private market benefits, nonmarket private benefits (both direct and indirect), and social goods (both direct and indirect), leading to an overemphasis on the “personal monetary benefit of a college degree,” although this is really “only about one-third” of its “overall value.” (paraphrasing and quoting Newfield, pg. 71; emphasis added)

• I believe in funding public higher education like the public good it is, not just because it is the right thing to do or because it advances fairness and equity, but also because it gets results.  The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) has also studied the impacts of state higher education appropriations and financial aid and I highly recommend their report, which found "clear evidence that increased financial investments—specifically, increased state general operating and student financial aid—are directly tied to student success in higher education" (pg. 5).  So, too, have the authors of Metrics That Matter, who argue persuasively that "the quality of a student's education has very little to do with what percentage of applicants their college rejected and a lot more to do with how much money that college spends on each of its students," concluding that "serious investments" in instruction and student services "help students learn, advance, and graduate" (pg. 47, 50).
• I believe the oft-mentioned "demographic cliff" militates against broad-based tuition increases.  While ECON 101-style supply and demand arguments are no doubt oversimplified, a shrinking pool of new high school graduates who are choosing college at a lower rate than previous cohorts (the SUNY Report is admirably precise about these factors; cf. pp. 36-37 in particular) means three things: (1) there is lower overall demand for higher education, which (2) leads to a tuition discounting war among institutions that are (3) competing more intensely to convince these in-demand students to attend their institution.  In this situation, which is projected to last more than a decade, public higher ed is not in a strong position to raise prices across the board.
• In fact, lowering prices does not just make economic sense, it also may help change the narrative about higher education being too expensive, not providing enough of a return on investment, failing in its traditional role of providing pathways to the middle class and beyond—and in so doing bring high school graduates who delayed starting college off the sidelines and back into the higher education game.  The SUNY report acknowledges this reality by identifying a large range of types of students who either have not been served well by higher education or who have not been actively enough sought after, and lays out SUNY's strategies for recruiting them (cf. pp. 31-43 and the brief overview on pg. 2 of the Executive Summary).

I'll have much more to say in later posts about the SUNY report's emphasis on increased enrollments at most SUNY campuses signaling "renewed interest and confidence in the value of our educational offerings" (Executive Summary, pg. 1) and on the foundational claim that "Our rapidly changing economy and society require institutions of higher education to be nimbler than ever to meet student demand, deliver on the promise of upward mobility, and invest students with the broad knowledge and skills to be leaders, innovators, problem-solvers, and citizens" (Report, pg. 44).  But I want to advance another argument for the pro-public funding camp that builds on what United University Professions (UUP) and SUNY University Faculty Senate (UFS) have been advocating for in their own ways.  Unlike SUNY's forward-looking argument, this one is historical, and it will be very familiar to people who have been reading the Fredonia University Senate's October 2023 and November 2023 State Fiscal Year 2025 (SFY25) resolutions or my October 2023 message to Senators.

Here are the corrected figures from the November resolution.  The blue line represents Fredonia's change in enrollment since Fall 2007; the green line represents the change direct state aid since SFY08, adjusted for inflation (many thanks to Rob Deemer, Fredonia University Senate's Governance Officer and University Faculty Senator, for making these infographics):

There is simply no getting around the fact that the decisions of previous governors undermined Fredonia's financial sustainability.  Even as Fredonia enrollments were increasing during the Great Recession, New York State was responding to the federal government's decision to transfer federal deficits down to the states by deeply cutting real-dollar direct operating aid.  UUP has shown these cuts totaled on the order of $8B over a similar time period across the entire SUNY system.  At Fredonia, these cuts were so deep that even as Fredonia's enrollments began falling from their Fall 2011 peak, it took until SFY17 for the accumulated drop in real-dollar direct state aid to exceed the accumulated enrollment-adjusted real-dollar direct state aid shortfall.  Even in the current fiscal year, after two years of investments by Governor Hochul and the state legislature, the decline in real-dollar direct state aid remains greater than the decline in enrollment at Fredonia.  Whether you focus on the accumulated real-dollar shortfall of $167.1M or the accumulated enrollment-adjusted real-dollar shortfall of $119.8M or the fact that real-dollar direct state aid fell below 60% of its SFY08 state direct aid real-dollar allocation for the first time in SFY12, below 55% for the first time in SFY19, below 50% for the first time in SFY22, and remained below 55% in SFY24, even after historic investments by Governor Hochul, the only conclusion to be drawn is that multiple Democratic Party governors have contributed at least as much to digging Fredonia's budget hole as declining enrollments.  In fact, by making Fredonia more tuition dependent each year, these governors have made Fredonia more vulnerable to those declines.  And if students really are following the money and paying attention to investments in student learning and supports, then you could even build a strong case that New York State's disinvestments in Fredonia have helped cause our declines in enrollment.

So what is New York State going to do to redress these damages to Fredonia?  Here's where the Fredonia University Senate and SUNY UFS answer diverges slightly from the UUP answer, and where my answer is different from both.

UUP points to recent actions of the SUNY Board of Trustees and SUNY System Administration touted in the SUNY Report (pg. 23) as the key source of the financial problems facing nearly 20 SUNY campuses (cf. examples from October 2023, November 2023, December 2023, and December 2023).  To understand why there is a lot of justice to these claims, consider this infographic (which Governance Officer and University Faculty Senator Deemer also put together):

• Why weren't those four large green lines reduced slightly and redistributed to campuses in need?
• Why weren't administrators at the Big 4 SUNY campuses charged with cutting costs of administration so that they could continue to invest in new faculty hires with slightly reduced direct state aid (3% like everyone else) than they would have received had the 6% differential tuition proposal by Governor Hochul ended up in the SFY24 Enacted Budget?
• Why was the same old funding formula used to disburse the vast majority of direct state aid to campuses, even as a new formula was developed to ensure that funds were targeted to students in need for a much smaller pot of money devoted to supporting students with disabilities, addressing student mental health and food insecurity, and providing students with research and internship opportunities?

When I emailed similar questions to Merryl Tisch, the chair of the SUNY Board of Trustees, Chancellor King, and SUNY Acting Chief Financial Officer Josh Sager on October 26, 2023, I never received a reply.  Here are a few highlights from that email:

• If the SUNY UFS resolution asking System to conduct a cost of administration study had been an urgent priority and action had been taken to reduce M[anagement]/C[onfidential] costs equitably and strategically across the system, the savings in operations at larger campuses could have easily obviated the need for any conversion of planned tuition increases to direct state aid increases at University Centers, as less M/C spending (when justified) could have funded full-time faculty hiring, particularly when already existing tuition and funding disparities between larger and smaller campuses are taken into account.
  [A]nother effect of the 3%/6% compounded direct state aid disparity is the impact on public opinion, attitudes, and confidence: parents and prospective students know SUNY schools like UB are hiring and growing while they believe SUNY schools like Potsdam are cutting and shrinking (just look at the incoherent coverage of the latest Potsdam news here). This investment disparity can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, driving more applications and admissions to University Centers and away from smaller SUNY schools, particularly as news spreads of others facing Potsdam-like situations. The example of Emporia State shows how hard it is to shake these kinds of perceptions, at least in the short run.
• Couple all this with the University Center endowment match and University Centers are and will be even better positioned to lower the net cost of attendance for students who have also been accepted to wealthy private institutions that are engaged in deep tuition discounting (a good thing), but this strategic decision has the knock-on effect of, say, making the net cost of attendance at Fredonia and Buffalo State higher than at UB for many qualifying students accepted to all three this year.  This, too, is precisely backwards.  Every SUNY institution should be at or close to the lowest net cost of attendance for their institutional type.

In response to the lack of response to my email, Fredonia University Senate passed an augmented and corrected SUNY state funding allocation formula resolution a little over a week later, and on November 16, 2023, I sent the following transmittal email and letter:

Dear Chairperson Tisch, Chancellor King, Acting Chief Financial Officer Sager, and President Landa,

I'm sharing the google doc link to, and attaching a pdf of, the transmittal letter for four recent resolutions from the Fredonia University Senate:

• our corrected and augmented November 2023 New York State Fiscal Year 2025 Executive Budget Resolution (which includes an endorsement of the October 2023 SUNY UFS Resolution 195-02-1)
• our October 2023 SUNY Cost of Attendance and State Financial Aid Resolution
• our November 2023 corrected and augmented SUNY State Funding Allocation Formula Resolution, and
• our October 2023 Public Good Index Resolution.

I'm hopeful that there is still time to assemble the teams called for in the last three resolutions and to continue working with Governor Hochul and her staff on the goals of the SFY25 Executive Budget resolutions.

To his credit, Chancellor King indirectly responded to many of these questions and critiques at the UFS Fall 2023 Plenary at SUNY Geneseo in mid-October 2023, on the Capitol Pressroom at the end of October 2023, in the SUNY state budget request from early December 2023, and in the January 2024 SUNY report that's been the subject of these three blog posts, among other places.  And there is a good deal of justice in his responses.

• Chancellor King is right that one-time "bailouts" will not solve the structural deficits facing many SUNY campuses, that a mix of methods is needed to get all SUNY campuses on firm financial ground (yet I still agree with UUP President Kowal that openly guaranteeing bridge funding for a period of time while those methods are developed and implemented would provide a vote of confidence in those campuses while allowing for more orderly, strategic, planful action).
• Chancellor King is right that there is no solution that doesn't involve ensuring that any enrollment declines are stemmed at every SUNY campus (and nobody disagrees with this!) and that a targeted, stable enrollment range is arrived at on every SUNY campus (and where to set the targets, how wide a range is acceptable, and how growth is to be achieved are all hot topics).
• Chancellor King is right to put program discontinuances and tuition increases on the table (and while Fredonia faculty and students are grateful that UUP has pledged to fight both—and are taking the initiative on those fights themselves—Fredonia University Senate Executive Committee has been working with the Fredonia administration to develop a Program Deactivation Program Review [PDRP] timeline and I'll have more to say about the SUNY report's observation that "Reasonable, predictable, ongoing increase[s] in resources could be achieved through (1) modest, differential tuition increases; and/or (2) modest, consistent increases in annual state operating aid" [Executive Summary, pg. 3] after a tiny digression/preview of future posts here).

Before I connect all these debates with the question of increasing SUNY revenues, then, let me quote here a key paragraph from a special message I sent to Senators on December 21, 2023 regarding one key milestone in fleshing out President Kolison's Roadmap to Financial Sustainability:

What has Executive Committee been trying to achieve over the past 16 days in particular? We have been working hard and moving ahead with all deliberative speed to protect the integrity of Fredonia’s shared governance system, follow approved processes, and, when necessary, establish processes that similarly incorporate respect for academic freedom, peer review, and the exercise of professional expertise, judgment, and responsibilities. In developing the PDRP timeline, Executive Committee and Cabinet sought to maximize opportunities for departmental, standing committee, Senate, and campus engagement with President Kolison’s curricular recommendations—to set aside sufficient time at each stage of the process for observation, reflection, analysis, and input-gathering, so as to ensure, as I put it on December 6, that the campus community has “considered every possible angle on” and “vetted every promising alternative to” degree program deactivation. But we also sought to design an orderly and expeditious process for providing input to the Cabinet on real, pressing, challenging financial dilemmas. At no point in the PDRP will any governance body be taking a vote on any degree program deactivation proposal. Governance body input will be strictly limited to providing observations and analyses—never crossing the line into making a recommendation or offering advice on what has been, and remains, solely an administrative responsibility to formalize program deactivation forms, follow the PDRP, and submit them to SUNY System Administration, certifying that the appropriate and established governance process has been followed. (pg. 2)

I will be returning to the reasons why Executive Committee has taken this tack in a later post. But the bottom line for this post is that at this point it's extremely unclear what effect on the bottom line any program deactivations or other outcomes from the PDRP might have. Certainly effects will take time to be realized, whether they are savings, efficiencies from redeploying faculty and transforming curricula, or enrollment growth that might come from redesigning programs instead of deactivating them. The PDRP itself is only one small part of the Roadmap to Financial Sustainability, which is one part of the financial sustainability and stewardship goals of Fredonia's overall strategic plan. There is much work to be done at Fredonia to flesh out, synchronize, and coordinate all the components this spring semester. The timing of Governor Hochul's State of the State Address and release of the Executive Budget could not be better, in this sense, as both will help all of us at Fredonia understand what to expect going forward from New York State, and figure out what actions need to be taken to influence the final shape of the State Fiscal Year 2025 (SFY25) Enacted Budget come April 2024.

So to sum up the points I've been making about increasing revenues for public higher education in New York State, Governor Hochul and the New York State Legislature have only so many levers to pull when it comes to funding SUNY and CUNY.  Raising tuition, as I've argued, is a political and economic non-starter:  when demand goes down, businesses lower prices; when the supply of students goes down, expect the ongoing tuition discounting arms race only to heat up further.  If New York State and SUNY leadership don’t commit to increasing direct state aid and indirect state operating aid significantly, but instead keep digging SUNY institutions ever-deeper into their real-dollar budget holes of the past 17 years, it will become even more difficult for those institutions to climb out of those holes by growing their enrollments.  If Governor Hochul’s SFY25 Executive Budget proposal does not extend a ladder to campuses like SUNY Fredonia, if she does not throw away her predecessors’ shovel, then legitimate questions will be raised about whether she is digging the graves of at least some SUNY campuses.  Is that the legacy she wants to take into her next election?

For these reasons, I am fairly and increasingly confident that Governor Hochul's Executive Budget will include the following SUNY proposals, as they overlap significantly with core UUP and UFS priorities. If anything, UUP and UFS will push the New York State Legislature to build on this foundation and make larger commitments to increasing direct state aid and indirect state financial aid over time. Here's a selection of proposals from the closing pages of the SUNY report (pp. 66-71) that I think have an strong chance of being incorporated into Governor Hochul's SFY25 Executive Budget, with rationales from SUNY System Administration:

• Maintain Investment in Four-Year Campus Operating Aid Increases: $54.0M

The 2023-24 Enacted State Budget Financial Plan, as well as its Mid-Year Update, includes additional incremental direct operating aid to SUNY’s State-operated campuses and statutory colleges of $54.0M in each of both 2024-25 and 2025-26, a total incremental add of $108.0M from 2023-24 Enacted levels. These monies will serve to advance student success and support vital investments in support of student completion and high-demand program offerings. It is anticipated that funds would be allocated consistent with the Executive’s 2023-24 initial proposal for differentiated tuition increases supporting all State-operated campuses as well as continued mitigation of the cost of student fees to compensated graduate student workers.

• Provide Support for State-Negotiated Collective Bargaining Agreement Implementation: $86.5M

In recognition of the vital work of faculty and professional staff across SUNY’s State-operated campuses, SUNY has requested support from the State to financially aid in the implementation of the new contract. In 2024-25, the agreed-upon 3% across-the-board salary increase and increase in adjunct minimum compensation together total approximately $86.5M.

• Maintain the 100% Community College Funding Floor: Avoidance of $85 Million in Lost Direct State Tax Support

The 2023-24 Enacted State Budget continued the maintenance of a 100% “Funding Floor” for the 30 community colleges operating under the program of the State University of New York, putting these unique local/state entities on the same financial footing as all institutions of postsecondary education in New York State. The floor, if included in the 2024-25 Executive Budget as reflected in the Mid-Year State Financial Plan, will ensure that these essential institutions avoid nearly $85M in lost direct State tax support.

• Maintain 2023-24 Investment Levels: ~$7.5M

The current State Financial Plan posits several reductions to existing programs that support distinct areas of the SUNY System, including the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP), investments in nursing programs, and the Maritime Scholarship Program. SUNY requests that these programs be maintained at 2023-24 levels, ensuring that there will not be any interruption in their offerings and support to the constituent base.

• Investment in Critical Maintenance Capital Needs: $1.0B

Necessitated by immediate asset renewal needs and a deferred maintenance backlog totaling $8.6B, increased construction costs, and planned demolitions at select campuses to reduce SUNY’s physical footprint, which will achieve operational savings and permanently reduce the deferred maintenance backlog, this request item seeks an increase from the current $550.0M in the State Financial Plan to $1.0B per annum, a $450.0M per-year increase.

• Clean Energy Implementation Fund: $100.0M

To aid in SUNY’s contributions to New York State’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLPCA) goals, SUNY is proposing the creation of a “SUNY Clean Energy Implementation Fund.” These funds, seeded by bonded State capital and supplemented by existing funds such as the Clean Energy Bond Act, state, local, and federal grants, and ultimately reimbursed to the State through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) Direct Pay benefits, would accelerate the implementation of the Clean Energy Master Plans developed at the SUNY State- operated Campuses. Funds would support through the design and construction of geothermal networks, energy efficiency retrofits, full campus electrification, and other clean energy projects.

• Community College Capital Program: ~$53.0-$196.0M

Community College sponsors must first support and provide documentation for 50% of project cost (Local Share), which then drives a 50% State match. Documentation of the local funding commitment must be provided to the Division of the Budget by mid-December each year. The current range reflects the State share driven by community college projects that have secured local sponsor support ($53.0M) as of October 12th, as well as potential projects identified but that have not yet secured local sponsor support. The likely requested State match will likely be ~$100.0M.

• Expansion of Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) Income Thresholds and Award Levels

SUNY is an extraordinary value proposition, and thanks to Governor Hochul’s leadership, 53% of full-time resident undergraduate students attend SUNY tuition-free. In addition, fewer SUNY students take on debt—and for those who do borrow, their debt is lower than their peers. Nevertheless, affordability remains a challenge for many students. The income thresholds for TAP have not been updated since the year 2000, which has significantly limited access to affordable degrees for New York State students.

• Sustainable funding for ASAP/ACE

The 2023-24 enacted budget included $75 million for the SUNY Transformation Fund as a one-year allocation. Currently, 25 SUNY campuses have elected to use their Transformation Funds to support the ASAP and ACE college completion initiatives described in the Student Success section. There is a robust body of research that supports ASAP/ACE as an evidence-based strategy validated by randomized controlled trials to increase retention and completion for students. An external evaluation led by MDRC found that involvement in the ASAP program nearly doubled graduation rates, both at CUNY and when it was replicated in Ohio. For CUNY, 22% of students not in the program earned a degree within three years, compared to 40% of the students participating in ASAP. Similarly, in Ohio, 19% of non-ASAP students earned a degree compared to 35% of ASAP students. Results from CUNY’s ongoing quasi-experimental evaluation of ASAP find participating students graduate at more than double the rate of non-ASAP students: 53% vs. 25%. SUNY has made it clear that one of the best enrollment strategies that SUNY will engage in for long-term success is increasing retention. ASAP/ACE has been demonstrated to have a strong effect on retention, and that is why to support SUNY’s long-term success, the ASAP/ACE program should be funded at a sustainable level to support student success.

• Continued TAP modernization

As noted above, expanding college affordability in New York State is important for students, families, and SUNY. The current maximum income threshold for a dependent student to receive TAP is $80,000—while the state median income for a family of four is $116,765. If TAP had kept pace with inflation since it was last updated in 2000, the current threshold would be $145,000 instead of $80,000. In addition, the situation for independent students—essentially including working adults—is even more dire: the $10,000 threshold for single independent students without dependents has never been updated since it was created in 1986, and independent students who are married with no dependents have an income threshold of $40,000. A person who makes the New York minimum wage of $15 per hour would likely have too high an income to qualify for TAP as an independent student, including the new part-time TAP for workforce credential expansion. SUNY supports the strategic, and much-needed, adjustments to these thresholds as well as increases in award levels as a pivotal tool to aid New York State students succeed in their higher education journey.

• Predictable and sustained operating support for SUNY campuses

As described in the Financial Sustainability section, SUNY’s fiscal health depends in part on additional revenue following completion of the three-year increase for State-operated campuses included in the current State Financial Plan. Two potential sources of revenue are 1) implementation of differentiated tuition increases that would maintain SUNY’s competitiveness, provide additional support to all State-operated campuses, and recognize the unique mission and costs of the University Centers; and/or 2) additional annual recurring increases in State operating funds.

• Doubling Pell grants

Pell grants help nearly 7 million low- and moderate-income students attend and complete college annually. Systemwide, about one-third of SUNY students receive a Pell grant to attend college. Increasing the maximum Pell award to $13,000 would help more students afford college, earn a degree, get a good-paying job, and achieve a brighter future.

Since I've already made the case for increased direct state aid, and the task of building on SUNY's proposals will become clearer after the State of the State Address and release of the Executive Budget, let me focus on differential tuition and expand on previous arguments I've made (including the Fredonia University Senate's October 2023 resolution) in favor of a certain version of it.  This, by the way, is where my position may diverge from UUP's, which historically has opposed creating disparities in tuition for undergraduate New York State residents.  Fredonia's University Senate's resolution attempts to address these concerns by calling for

• SUNY Board of Trustees Chairperson Merryl Tisch, SUNY Chancellor John King, SUNY Acting Chief Financial Officer Josh Sager, and SUNY University Faculty Senate President Landa [to] assemble a broad-based team that includes leaders or designees of SUNY shared governance bodies and charge it to develop a plan for incorporating a more equitable and differentiated system of tuition and fees and robust system of financial aid into SUNY’s SFY25 Executive Budget request.
• Such a team to propose a system of differential tuition that makes each SUNY campus in each sector among the most affordable public higher education options for their sector in the nation.
• Such a plan could include:
• eliminating tuition at SUNY “regional” two-year institutions and covering all costs of attendance through a combination of federal, state, and local funding and aid;
• allowing SUNY “regional” four-year institutions to eliminate or reduce non-resident tuition;
• allowing SUNY “regional” four-year institutions to set regular resident tuition and fees up to half the sum total of the maximum Pell, TAP, and Excelsior awards, SUNY “national” institutions to set them up to three-quarters that amount (up to the full amount for non-resident tuition), and SUNY “global” institutions up to the full amount (up to 1.5 times for non-resident tuition);
• requiring SUNY “national” and “global” institutions to cover at least half the ensuing difference from the “regional” institution with the highest regular resident tuition and fees within a 100-mile radius through their own sources of student financial aid.
• The team to consider proposing a further tuition differentiation by degree program that:
• increases direct state aid and/or indirect state financial aid for degree programs that lead to socially beneficial, understaffed professions with traditionally lower starting salaries and career earnings (e.g., arts, education, mental health counseling, nursing, social work), so that their net price is lower than the regular resident tuition rate at any SUNY four-year institution;
• utilizes SUNY and other data (such as from Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce) to identify high-return-on-individual-investment, high-demand, and/or high-cost degree programs for which their resident tuition may be set higher than the regular resident tuition rate at any SUNY four-year institution in their sector (with a maximum per sector set by System Administration).
• The team to consider proposing:
• expansions in financial aid eligibility for New Yorkers;
• increases in financial aid amounts for New Yorkers;
• extensions in the applicability of state scholarships and grants so that they may be used on any cost associated with attendance at any SUNY campus.

Keep in mind that SUNY already has differential tuition between New York State residents and non-residents, between undergraduates and graduate students, among graduate degree programs, and, if you count differences in broad-based fees, even among undergraduate residents.  SUNY's differential tuition proposal on page 61 of the report represents one possible direction Governor Hochul could go in, while leaving it up to her to decide which revenue increases should come from direct state aid and which should come from differential tuition.  My point is simply that following through on some version of the Fredonia University Senate solution—lowering net costs of attendance for most students and only increasing net costs for students with the ability to pay for college without going into a significant amount of debt (or any at all)—only requires political will.  The core question is therefore political.  Will Governor Hochul commit to making New York State the national leader in college affordability?  Will she "propose a system of differential tuition that makes each SUNY campus in each sector among the most affordable public higher education options for their sector in the nation"?

Time will tell, but personally, I'm encouraged that Governor Hochul deployed "national leader" language yesterday in her unveiling of multiple proposals to improve maternal and infant health in New York.  If you watch the video, fast forward to the 8:00 mark and listen to her lead up to the point that "I want to be number one.  This is New York.  Why aren't we number one?"

So how close are we to #1 when it comes to measures of college affordability and state operating budget support?  Here's a list of where New York State ranks nationally, according to the latest figures from SHEEO, as listed in the SUNY UFS October 2023 New York State Fiscal Year 2025 Executive Budget resolution (some of which are presented in a different format in this spreadsheet):

• #40 in appropriations for public and private higher education per $1K of personal income in 2022 ($3.96, down from a peak of $5.70 in 2008 and a peak rank of #32 in 2015)
• #22 in appropriations for public and private higher education per capita in 2022 ($300.35, down from a peak of $315.45 in 2020 and a peak rank of #16 in 2015, 2018, and 2019)
• #44 in public and private higher education allocations as a percentage of state revenue in fiscal year 2019 (3.5% when the national average was 5.5% and Texas was 6.8%, California and Illinois were 6.4%, and Florida was 6.2%)
• #30 in public and private higher education allocations per $1K of personal income in fiscal year 2019 ($4.89 in constant 2020 dollars, compared to California at $6.90, Illinois at $6.86, and Texas at $6.15)
• #12 in public and private higher education allocations per capita in fiscal year 2019 ($361 in constant 2020 dollars, compared to California at $493 and Illinois at $432)
• #6 in public higher education allocations per full-time equivalent student in fiscal year 2021 ($12,428, compared to Illinois at $18,752)
• #10 in state financial aid per public full-time equivalent student in fiscal year 2021 ($1,231, compared to Florida at $1,479)
• #38 [13th-lowest] in net tuition revenue per public full-time equivalent student in fiscal year 2021 ($5,763, compared to Florida at $2,301 and Texas at $5,567)
• #41 [10th-lowest] in net student share of public higher education revenues in fiscal year 2021 (31.7%, compared to California at 20.4% [3rd-lowest] and Florida at 21.7% [4th-lowest])
• #29 in state support (mostly actual tax revenues and lottery profits) in constant adjusted dollars for operating expenses of public higher education per $1K of personal income in fiscal year 2020 ($4.89, compared to a peak of $7.73 in 1980 and a peak rank of #28 in 2018 and 2019)
• #13 in state support (mostly actual tax revenues and lottery profits) in constant adjusted dollars for operating expenses of public higher education per capita in fiscal year 2020 ($369, compared to a peak of $371in 2019 and a peak rank of #11 in 2018)
• #12 in state support (mostly actual tax revenues and lottery profits) in constant adjusted dollars for operating expenses of public higher education per full-time equivalent student in fiscal year 2021 ($11,735, compared to a peak of $12,014 in 2020 and a peak rank of #6 in 2016, 2018, and 2019)
• #44 in state support (mostly actual tax revenues and lottery profits) in constant adjusted dollars for operating expenses of public higher education as share of total state revenues in fiscal year 2019 (3.5%, compared to a peak of 5.7% in 1980 and tied for peak rank with many prior years)
• #10 in net tuition revenue as a percentage of total state revenue in fiscal year 2021 (31.7%, compared to a valley of 19.6% in 1980 and a peak rank of #8 in 2018 and 2019)
• #9 in state financial aid per public full-time equivalent student in fiscal year 2021 ($1,703, compared to a peak of $2.005 in 2010 and a peak rank of #1 in 2001)

These metrics are the tip of the iceberg.  SUNY UFS proposed a much larger set of metrics in October 2022 and the Fredonia University Senate called on SUNY to develop a "public good index" in October 2023.  There is so much that SUNY System Administration and the SUNY Board of Trustees could be doing to better track inputs and outputs, real revenues and real costs—but even with the data we have at hand, it's clear that New York State is not close to becoming the national leader in college affordability or in sustainably and equitably supporting and advancing the mission of public higher education.

We're only days away from finding out how rapidly Governor Hochul wants to advance every SUNY sector and every SUNY campus in this direction.  How ambitious does she want to be in advancing her 2022 "plans to revitalize the State University of New York system and make it the best statewide system of public higher education in our nation"?

On Increasing SUNY Revenues, Part 2

Picking up where I left off last night, I could go on for many more pages about what a rhetorically effective political document the SUNY Report on Long-Term Enrollment and Financial Sustainability is.  In addition to what I already noted, I would point to the report's yoking large-scale SUNY research endeavors to state economic development goals, positioning SUNY to leapfrog others in those emergent fields and industries, framing SUNY as the workforce development answer to needs in "high-demand sectors," and the sheer poetry of

SUNY’s commitment to excellence in operational and fiscal stewardship on behalf of the students and taxpayers we serve anchors SUNY’s success and enables us to provide extraordinary value. Fiscal sustainability requires both ongoing revenue increases and continuous attention to operational efficiency, along with a commitment to the difficult decisions necessary to ensure financial health. (Executive Summary, pg. 2)

as key examples, among many, of how thoughtfully and persuasively the report is directed toward and customized for its primary audiences:  Governor Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

Not being part of those audiences, however, I tend to distrust my judgments about the report's rhetorical and political effectiveness, and not just because the ripple effects of its release last Friday are only just beginning to be felt.  I fully admit I have a lot to learn from Chancellor King—who after all has risen to the highest level of state and federal education agency leadership before winning a national search to become SUNY's next leader—when it comes to navigating relationships with elected officials.

So instead of giving more and more reasons why the report is certainly A-range material, I'll turn to analyzing it as an example of negotiating the constraints and parameters on political speech in New York State's political environment as we enter 2024.  Of course, as a campus governance leader, I have a lot more freedom of speech than a university president or system chancellor, and I haven't been shy about using it.  But before exercising it, there's a lot to be said for close reading the report's ambiguities, gaps, and other modes of drawing readers in, making them active participants in the construction of its meaning, and deftly wielding the power of suggestion.

Let's start with a simple question:  why did it take until page 51 of the report for teacher education to be featured?

On the projected growth in education, it is important to note that SUNY is the state’s largest educator preparation provider and that these programs are vital both to SUNY and to the success of New York’s K-12 public education system. (Report, pg. 51, emphasis added)

Or rather, first featured as a general topic, rather than tied to a specific SUNY campus?

The UB Teacher Residency Program seeks to increase the ranks, diversity, and retention of teachers in Buffalo amid a looming teacher shortage, increasing the university’s ties to BPS and improving student outcomes. (Report, pg. 37, emphasis added)

Or rather, why did only one former "normal" school—a campus originally founded with teacher education as its core mission, a campus listed in the "University Colleges" or "Comprehensives" sector by SUNY and UFS—make it into the report specifically regarding its teacher education mission, and then only with respect to a privately-funded microcredential?

SUNY New Paltz’s Science of Reading Center of Excellence has also launched SUNY’s first-ever science of reading fundamentals microcredential. This fully online, self-paced microcredential supports New York State teachers in enhancing literacy instruction. A generous scholarship funded by philanthropy is making the microcredential available to the first 5,000 participants for just $50 per educator. (Report, pg. 21)

One of the reasons, it seems to me this afternoon after watching the livestream from Watervliet Elementary School of Governor Hochul's second preview of next Tuesday's State of the State Address, is that a proposal to invest $10M in new funding to advance the science of reading through SUNY/CUNY microcredentials will be part of the Executive Budget for State Fiscal Year 2025.  Thus, while the SUNY report is certainly politically canny, I can't help but be worried that its emphasis on new initiatives in other areas will put the everyday work of meeting the national and statewide teacher shortage through the teaching and learning and clinical experiences gained in elementary and adolescence education programs at places like my own home campus of SUNY Fredonia on the back burner—or worse, left out in the cold. 

These rhetorical roads not taken trouble me, as they are likely to have financial implications.  Yesterday, for instance, Governor Hochul's first proposal on consumer protection and affordability could have—and, I would argue, should have—included college affordability (hello, Fredonia University Senate resolution and UFS resolution!) and protection from for-profit higher ed (hello, Tressie McMillan Cottom's 2017 classic, Lower Ed:  The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy!) as central initiatives in her agenda.  IF they are actually part of her agenda.  And that, now, is apparently a big if.

Which leads me right back to the central dilemma that the SUNY report so masterfully and confidently and diplomatically tiptoed around:  when the political reflex of so many in your primary audience is to raise tuition for public higher ed students to offset or at least mitigate real-dollar cuts to direct state aid, when this pattern has held in New York State for decades, when many states are reporting downturns in tax receipts, when the prospect of a "soft landing" (the Fed taming inflation without triggering a recession)  is still in doubt, when the New York State Budget Director and Comptroller have been faithfully playing their fiscally conservative roles (alongside the Citizens Budget Commission) and the joint Quick Start Report has continued in that vein, closing with "The Governor will propose a FY 2025 Executive Budget by January 16, 2024, that will include a plan to provide for balanced General Fund operations on a cash basis in FY 2025" (pg. 14)—when all that history and context shapes how the SUNY report will be received, interpreted, and responded to—how to help the very decision-makers who have put SUNY on a path toward a billion-dollar operating deficit by 2034 understand the choices facing them in State Fiscal Year 2025?  How to both suggest that something has to give and defer to the very Governor whose constitutionally-mandated role in the state budget process is to be the fiscal conservative in the room at the end game of budget negotiations?

Here are some hints:

• "Thanks to the generosity of the State, and as shown on the following charts, SUNY State-operated campuses have relatively low tuition and fees compared to other states. This reinforces SUNY’s incredible value and creates space for SUNY to enact moderate increases in tuition while remaining extremely competitive with other states" (Report, pg. 57).
• "As the following chart shows, System-wide expenditures are projected to grow to $6.9 billion by 2033-34, accounting for both collective bargaining agreements and cost controls intended to promote efficiency. With no investment in resources beyond the committed increases in the State’s current financial plan, SUNY would face a $1.1 billion annual shortfall at the end of this period. With reasonable, predictable, ongoing increases in resources, SUNY would instead face an $89.1 million annual shortfall by the end of this period" (Report, pg. 60).
• "Without reasonable, predictable, and reliable increases in resources over the next decade, SUNY will fail to achieve operational sustainability and be unable to meet the needs of New York State’s students, families, and employers. While the above model uses tuition increases to create projections, there are effectively two revenue sources that can serve this vital role: One is sustained and predictable tuition and fee increases, and the other is continued increases in Direct State Tax Support" (Report, pg. 61).

I'll pick this up in another post tomorrow!

Update (1/6/2024)

Please see Part 3.

On Increasing SUNY Revenues

Quick note that I'm working on a response to Kathleen Moore's Albany Times-Union story on SUNY's revenue issues that will take more than an x-twitter thread to develop, as it represents the media's first pass at digesting a SUNY report on Long-Term Enrollment and Financial Sustainability that was submitted to Governor Hochul and the state legislature last Friday (and that I am seeing for the first time right now).

Why should you care what I think about increasing SUNY's revenues?  Well, not only am I the Chairperson of the Fredonia University Senate and Immediate Past Vice President/Secretary of the SUNY University Faculty Senate and an active member of both governance bodies' Executive Committees, but I have also been intimately involved in developing their—our—approach to state budget advocacy for many years.  Many of the ideas first explored on this very blog, dating back to my first term as Senate chair (2009-2010), have made their way into official resolutions and statements from campus, and SUNY-wide, governance bodies.

As you probably can imagine, I'm incredibly hopeful that ideas we've been pitching for years and that I've been researching for decades—most recently summarized in a UFS Fall 2023 resolution and the Fredonia University Senate's website and online petition—have been incorporated into this report.  I'm worried about the consequences for Fredonia if they aren't, or aren't picked up and run with by Governor Hochul and the legislature.

After I digest some lunch, I'm diving into the SUNY report.  I'll update this post with my first pass at it before dinner!

UPDATE 1 (7:54 pm) [yes, after dinner]

On the whole, I would give SUNY's 80-page document/74-page report a solid B+, and probably an A- if I were feeling generous.  You'll see why I'm not by the end of this, but let's start with what's really really really good in this report—why it may well be the best piece of research, analysis, and writing to come out of SUNY System Administration in my 25-year-plus career at Fredonia.

(1) Start by reading the initial 3-page Executive Summary for yourself.

• Check out how economically it references so many items from the UFS's list of Public Good U metaphors that emphasize how well SUNY contributes to the public good and serves New York State:  anchor of community, foundation for democracy, platform for civic engagement, engine of economic development, pathway to the middle class and beyond, magnet for population growth and private investment, generator of creativity and innovation, seedbed for human health and flourishing, and catalyst for sustainable communities and ecosystems.
• Check out the places it refers to the same Rockefeller Institute report UFS has been using in its resolutions for years (Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Winter 2020, Winter 2019):  "According to the Rockefeller Institute of Government, SUNY’s economic impact in 2018 was $28.6 billion, or 1.9% of gross state product. For every $1 the State invests in SUNY, there is an $8.17 return" (Executive Summary, pg. 2; see also Report, pp. 54-55).
• Check out how effectively it updates language from Chancellor King's Summer 2023 State of the University Address and sets up the expanded rationale for SUNY's December 2023 state budget request, all organized in the form of a very short story that SUNY is on the move and, with the right support, poised to accelerate its progress.
• After you finish it, how do you feel about SUNY?  How eager are you to help SUNY get to the promised land by doing your part to "ensure its place as the nation’s leading statewide comprehensive public system of higher education"?

If you were a state decision-maker, how would you feel about the choice the Executive Summary presents you with (near its end but not at it)?

With no investment in resources beyond the committed increases in the State’s current financial plan, SUNY would face a $1.1 billion annual shortfall at the end of this period [the decade]. With reasonable, predictable, ongoing increases in resources, SUNY would instead face an $89.1 million annual shortfall, which could be readily managed through efficiencies, collaboration, and other actions. Reasonable, predictable, ongoing increase in resources could be achieved through (1) modest, differential tuition increases; and/or (2) modest, consistent increases in annual state operating aid. (Executive Summary, pg. 3)

Note the "and/or" (which the Times-Union headline writers missed):  it raises the question of what combination of public and private revenue sources SUNY should be running on over the next decade.  And since only the Governor and the Legislature control direct state aid, tuition, and indirect state aid (including the Tuition Assistance Program [TAP] and the Excelsior Scholarship), this is a very high-stakes and delicate question, particularly for Chancellor King and his team in SUNY System Administration.

(2) Consider what answers to this question are suggested and implied by the main report.

• Mix, Leaning Public:  "Building on SUNY’s longstanding reputation for excellence, SUNY will lead the nation in timely degree and credential completion for all students and provide the academic, financial, and wraparound supports students need to thrive" (2, emphasis added).  Great goal, which implies most likely a combination of direct state aid, indirect state financial aid, and redistribution of tuition—which some students pay at higher levels, some lesser, and some not at all—to help all students graduate and succeed (with the understanding that higher family income and wealth are correlated for most students with higher retention and graduation rates, although as the report carefully observes, those correlations often break down for specific student populations, such as many of the ones listed on page 2 of the Executive Summary and detailed on pp. 31-43 of the Report).
• Mix, Heavily Leaning Public:  Check out every time ASAP (Accelerated Study in Associate Programs) and ACE (Accelerate, Complete, and Engage) are mentioned in the report (see especially pp. 3-4, 31-32, 34, 69-70) and how often these CUNY-originated, highly successful and verified-effective programs are associated with "scaling up" or "making sustainable"; this is Albany-speak for turning one-time state performance funding into repeating direct state aid.  Depending on how quickly and at what scale the Governor and Legislature follow through on this, less tuition dollars will need to be redistributed to accelerate these proven programs.
• Mix, Slight Lean Public:  Check out how effectively the Report deploys statistics to support its overall point, most notably with respect to enrollment (pp. 24-30) and return on investment of direct and indirect state aid (pp. 23, 54-61).  The stats overall lean public because the vast majority of recent and proposed efforts to increase recruitment and retention cost money in the short run to implement but should end up being a large net positive over time; the more new state direct aid is put into these efforts, the larger the return on investment is the implication.
• Neither:  Check out how often a hidden, third thing intervenes—operational efficiencies that allow SUNY System and campuses to be more effective at what they do while saving money doing it.  These include academic portfolio optimization, operational collaboration, and addressing structural imbalances summarized on page 2 of the Executive Summary and explained at greater length on pp. 44-51, pp. 52-53/62-63, and pp. 63-65, respectively, of the Report. (Also note how comparatively vague or even incomplete these sections are, compared to other sections. More on this soon.)

(3) Consider how adroitly the Executive Summary and Report navigate the highly charged issues that have roiled national higher ed politics and policy in recent days, weeks, months, and years.

• Directly:  See pg. 1 of the Executive Summary and pp. 13-17 of the Report for specifics on race-conscious admissions; diversity, equity, inclusion; and antisemitism and Islamophobia.
• Indirectly:  See pg. 1 (on student success) and pg. 2 (on enrollment) of the Executive Summary, along with pp. 31-43 of the Report, for specifics on realizing the principle that "There is a place within SUNY’s diverse and dynamic system for every New Yorker, and we believe that for so many New Yorkers, claiming that place and capitalizing on it is the singular experience that can expand their horizons, better their lives, and cement their futures" (Executive Summary, pg. 2) and fleshing out the overall plan: "In order for every student to know there is a place for them at SUNY and a pathway to success once they get here, SUNY will continue to advance our four priority pillars—student success; research and scholarship; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and economic development and upward mobility—alongside an equally urgent commitment to excellence in operational and fiscal stewardship on behalf of the students and taxpayers we serve" (Report, pg. 1).  

Check this for yourself by searching the document for "place":  almost every single time this word appears on its own, it's for a very specific purpose!

OK, gotta take a break from this close read of the positives in the report to run an errand with the family.  More coming!

Update 2 (1/4/2024, 1:57 pm)

Please see Part 2.

On SUNY Fredonia's Program Deactivation Review Process (PDRP): A Teaser

Posting a link to my latest message to Senators as chair of the Fredonia University Senate.

After I get a good night's sleep and lead a meeting of the SUNY University Faculty Senate Governance Committee late morning tomorrow, I may have the energy in the afternoon to put Senate Executive Committee's approach into a broader perspective, as I see it personally—not only in my official role as spokesperson for Executive Committee and Senate.

Or I may wait until Executive Committee and Fredonia Cabinet have had more time to take further steps to fully restore trust.  It depends!

Clearing My Throat

All right, I'm back.

Why am I back?

Long story short, I need a way to express myself as an individual in ways that are clearly distinguishable from my official role as Chairperson of the Fredonia University Senate, and particularly from the messages I send to the campus and post on the website as Senate Chairperson.

Bottom line:  I need a space to explore ideas, rather than issue carefully calibrated statements.

But there's more!

Executive Committee has agreed the stakes are too high the rest of the academic year for me to freelance my official messages, so I won't put anything out as Senate Chairperson that hasn't been approved by the team—every member of the team.  We each need veto power over my official messages, down to the "line item."  If you've been following what's been going down at SUNY Fredonia, you'll understand why.  And if you haven't, well, CitizenSE will be my outlet for explaining things as I see them and taking action on my own when I think it's important enough to take my Senate Chairperson hat off and speak for myself.

For now, check out one of Executive Committee's attempts to influence Governor Hochul's January 9 State of the State Address, and consider signing and sharing our petition.

OK, back to the why.

Given that my term as Senate Chairperson ends on June 30, 2024, the countdown is on to when I lose the keys to the @FredUnivSenate x-twitter account and go back to using only my personal @CitizenSE account (which started as an offshoot of this blog).  So I need to reestablish that connection between blogger and x-twitter.

Now, on July 1, 2024, my three-year term as SUNY Fredonia's Senator on the SUNY University Faculty Senate will begin.  So I'll still be on the Fredonia University Senate Executive Committee.  But somebody else will be in charge of speaking for Executive Committee and the Senate.  And I'll be back in the much more comfortable role for me of advising, supporting, deliberating and strategizing with whoever that turns out to be.  Yet another reason to try building back some kind of audience for this blog.

It's also highly likely I won't be on the SUNY UFS Executive Committee by the time Fall 2024 begins.  I mean, it's possible SUNY Potsdam's Jan Trybula decides to run for another term and is elected Vice President/Secretary; in that case, I would still be UFS's Immediate Past Vice President/Secretary.  And it's possible that Executive Committee would choose me to serve another term as chair of the UFS Governance committee for AY 2024-2025, and that I'd accept.  But as I'm going back to a full teaching load next academic year, I'll have to think through the pros and cons and let folks know my decision before they even start seriously considering who should lead that committee next academic year.

In the matter of a few short months, then, my relation to both my campus governance body and the UFS will be changing.  So I need to change with it.  And that means getting back to this blog.

I don't think I'll use it as much as I did during my Fulbright year in Fukuoka, Japan (2006-2007).  Nor do I think I'll use it as much as when I was last Fredonia Senate Chairperson (2009-2010).  But who knows?

Anything that's too personal or too political, too raw or too hot or too spicy, overlapping too much with my roles as a faculty member and a union member (UUP Fredonia; UUP; NYSUT; beyond), too exploratory, too questioning, too tentative—that's the kind of stuff you might see here.

For the really personal and more playful stuff, I'm bringing Mostly Harmless back, too.  That's my after-hours, off the clock, non-work, not-professional blog.  When I get personal here, it'll be to make some kind of point.

Let's just say I'm going back to my roots.  And that means coming back to this completely outmoded platform.  I'm not on Tumblr, insta, or TikTok.  I'm not on Substack or Bluesky or however you spell them.

I'm back, baby!

Let's see what happens next!!

Hello, Hello...Is This Thing On?

 Might need to fire up the old blog again! Let's see if this works....

We're on the Move!

I'm happy to join Sandra Lewis, Idalia Torres, Dan Smith, and Anne Fearman in running for leadership positions on the Fredonia UUP Chapter's Executive Board from 2017 to 2019.  For more on our slate, please see our letter to Fredonia UUP members and our web site, which includes links to our candidate statements.

Here's an excerpt from our letter:

Now more than ever, we must organize together, stand together, and fight together with allies on and off campus to uphold Fredonia’s and SUNY’s mission, to improve our working conditions, and to support our students’ learning, engagement, persistence, and professional, civic, and personal success. 

My candidate statement is not as quotable, so I'll let you read it for yourself.  And please feel free to share any questions, concerns, demands, statements of support, advice, or other feedback!

Is It Just Me, or is Google Weird When it Comes to Guccifer 2.0?

How is it possible that a few posts scattered here at CitzenSE and on some of my other blogs last night led to their being more easily findable on google than anything Studio Dongo has posted on Guccifer 2.0 over the last several weeks?  Anyone who understands google search algorithms better than me, please feel free to explain!

I get that my blogs are older and have many more posts and that my posts cumulatively have many more views than anything he's done on his blog, but I've basically been neglecting mine for years while he's been using his to actively pursue an ongoing story that's received international attention, and he's raised important and interesting questions and connected dots in the process that I, at least, think deserve a much wider audience than my little social media experiment.

What gives, intertubes?

This Is A (Guccifer 2.0) Test of the Google Search System

Quick questions to my remaining readers:

• are you aware of the Guccifer 2.0 story?
• have you been trying to follow it?
• have you been able to find any good sources on it through google searches?

Just to be clear, I had not been aware of or following the story until one of my best friends started blogging about it in mid-June.  As he's been writing about his experiences going down that particular rabbit hole, I've started looking for other sources.  Not very hard, to be sure.  And I know that I've been on leave from blogging for awhile, but what ever happened to google's blog search?  Back in the bad old days, I was at least able to find a wide range of voices on almost any topic, no matter how obscure.  But when I search "Guccifer 2.0" on google, I get nothing interesting or new.  If I didn't know about posts like this, I would never be able to find them.

There's got to be more out there, right?  Are you there, google?  It's me, The Constructivist.

This will have been a test of the google search system.  This will have been only a test.

Yet Another Reason to Read Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird

Given my interest in fairy tales and fairy tale re-visions, Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird was at the top of my summer reading list.  I'm so glad I read this slim, sly novel for so many reasons, but the one I'll put the spotlight on here and now has to do with the evocativeness of Oyeyemi's Hawthorne allusions.

At first glance, the scene where 13-year-old Bird and her 15-year-old friend Louis Chen team up to challenge the classmate who wrote "LOUIS CHEN IS A VIETCONG" in yellow chalk to fight them at "the corner of Pierce Road and Ivorydown" in Flax Hill includes what some might see as a fairly conventional Hawthorne invocation:

After ten minutes, we decided, with a mixture of disgust and relief, that Yellow Chalk Guy (or Girl) wasn't going to show, and we were ready to leave when three hefty boys from the eleventh grade showed up.  These three didn't take lunch money; they were less predictable than that.  They might stop you and give you a stash of comic books, or they might rip up your homework.  We knew their names, but never said them in case it made them appear.  One of them was directly descended from Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote The Scarlet Letter; that one's mother had mentioned it at one of Grammy Olivia's coffee hours.  Mom says everybody immediately began to feel oppressed by their humble backgrounds because they'd forgotten (or didn't know) that anyone who's descended from Nathaniel Hawthorne is also a descendant of John Hathorne, the Salem judge who put just about as many innocent people to death as he could, so was it any wonder that Hawthorne was so good at describing what it felt like to be racked with guilt day and night. (182-183)

Bird's mom is Boy, and she and everyone in her family knows a lot about "what it felt like to be racked with guilt day and night," but she doesn't know that Bird and Louis are soon "caught in a circle of sniggering kids, without a single one of our so-called friends in sight," or that "the eleventh grader with the witch-hunter's blood," as Bird describes him, becomes the group's literal ring-leader, counseling "Patience, my friends, patience," as he refuses to allow the two friends to leave (183).  Fortunately, before they try to fight their way free, Grammy Olivia breaks the circle, leading Bird to reflect:

It put me in awe of Grammy Olivia's Saturday morning coffee hour, because that was part of the reason we went in peace--everyone's mother, aunt, grandmother, or great-aunt goes to Grammy Olivia's coffee hour.  Also Gee-Pa Gerald regularly plays golf with the Worcester's chief of police, et cetera.  Also Grammy Olivia's tone of voice offers you ten seconds to do as she says or the rest of your life to be sincerely sorry that you didn't. (184)

I won't go any further into this scene right now, because unpeeling some of its layers would give away too much of the characters' back stories and entanglements to avoid spoilers, but trust me that Hawthornean themes of family, descent, inheritance, and guilt invoked by this scene are at the heart of Oyeyemi's novel--in quite surprising and revealing ways.

And these themes carry over into the relationship between Bird and her older half-sister Snow, whose correspondence starts not long after this scene and eventually moves into trading stories (literally twice-told tales) about a figure they call La Belle Capuchine.  I'll skip the one Bird writes to Snow, which has a distinctly Chesnutt feel to it, and jump straight to the Snow's story, which might be read as a rewriting of "Rappaccini's Daughter," with a twist of "Earth's Holocaust":

La Belle Capuchine has a wonderful garden filled with sweet-smelling flowers of every color.  She plants all the flowers herself, and she tends them herself, and every single one of those flowers is poisonous enough to kill anyone who comes close to them, let alone picks one.  La Belle Capuchine is beautiful like her flowers, but she's a poison damsel.  She eats and drinks poison all day long and she can rot a person's insides just by looking them in the eye.  I don't think Mother Nature likes us much.  If she did, she wouldn't make the things that are deadliest so beautiful.  For instance, why does fire dance so bright and so wild?  It isn't fair.

So far La Belle Capuchine has ended the world seventeen times.  She does it by making her poison garden bigger and bigger until it's the only thing in the world.  After that she takes a nap.  But the world starts again from the beginning.  And every time a few days after the new beginning somebody comes across a beautiful flower and picks it.  That wakes La Belle Capuchine up, and then there's hell to pay.  I think we'd better get used to La Belle Capuchine, since she'll never be defeated. 

The End. (230)

Again, to close-read either this story or Snow's reading of it or Snow's reading of Bird's La Belle Capuchine story would be to give too much away to readers who haven't yet had a chance to enjoy Boy, Snow, Bird and its revelations for themselves.  So of course it's even more premature to use that close-reading to explore how and to what ends Oyeyemi is re-envisioning Hawthorne texts as much as she is re-envisioning "Snow White" and "Sleeping Beauty."

Consider this post, then, a promise to continue that exploration later!

I'm Baaaaaaack!!

Hey folks, my apologies for the radio silence for most of the spring semester.  I decided to keep a low profile after helping organize Fredonia's answer to National Adjunct Walk-Out Day for a variety of reasons:

• I was teaching over 30 novels, graphic novels, short story collections, and other books this semester and meeting regularly with students on their writing and other projects, so keeping up that pace required me to sleep whenever I could (yep, I'm really in my mid-40s now!);
• negotiations over the appointment, reappointment, and promotion of contingent faculty at Fredonia went into an even higher gear and I didn't want to come close to skirting our ground rules of keeping negotiations confidential while they were ongoing;
• thanks to an extension, the first draft of a  group-authored article on university-level shared governance I was working on got submitted almost in time;
• the election/appointment process for Chairperson of my department ground away this academic year and I chose to devote my time to meeting individually with all my colleagues after my department held an election and recommended me to the Dean to prepare for the transition and assemble my leadership team;
• I got appointed to a Title IX and Sexual Violence Task Force and an Academic Affairs Review Committee, both of which were (and are) vitally important and added to my time commitment;
• my younger daughter broke her forearm in two places on the same day my Nissan Versa's engine melted on the Thruway;
• I tried keeping up with as many new graphic novels as I could (including Saga, The Unwritten, Black Science, Morning Glories...) along with classics I missed by Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, and Kurt Busiek....
• I tried keeping up some semblance of an exercise schedule and family life outside work....

No wonder I needed to sleep so much!  But it all came together.  My students kicked much butt this semester, particularly in my Major Writers course on Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.  Negotiations concluded successfully and our new Handbook on Appointment, Reappointment, and Promotion goes into effect 8/1/15 (on which much more later).  The President appointed me Chairperson and the department approved new minors and restructuring of the major.  Imoto's cast came off and she's working hard to get full range of motion back in the joints of her left arm.  I might even find out soon if Nissan USA will replace an engine that didn't even make it to 50,000 miles in just over 6 years, despite consistent and quality service from my Nissan dealer in WNY.  Plus, I won an election to become the new University Faculty Senator for Fredonia, representing the campus on the SUNY University Faculty Senate and returning to the Fredonia University Senate's Executive Committee.

I'll close this post with my election statement:

I ask for your vote in this election for University Faculty Senator. I welcome the opportunity to represent Fredonia in Albany as a voting member of the SUNY University Faculty Senate. I am prepared to shoulder the official and unofficial responsibilities that accompany such a privilege. The former are defined in Fredonia’s and the UFS’s Bylaws. The latter can be learned only by experience.

As a former Chairperson of Fredonia’s University Senate, I have attended multiple UFS plenaries and UFS-sponsored conferences in the last seven years. I know many Campus Governance Leaders, Senators, and current and former members of the Governance Committee--and the UFS Executive Committee. And they know me.

They know that I can be counted on to do my homework, to pull my weight, to step up to the plate, to listen to and engage my colleagues with respect and care, to remain calm and constructive in the midst of chaos and controversy, to develop reasoned positions on complex issues, to generate innovative solutions to pressing problems, to use persuasion, diplomacy, and charm to move the body and its leaders to speak and act on behalf of SUNY’s mission and faculty, and, above all, to do what it takes to make shared governance and public universities work--better and better.

They know that I wouldn’t become Fredonia’s UFS representative only to stay on the sidelines. They would expect more from someone...

• ...who challenged a newly-appointed Chancellor to consider incorporating into her campaign for the power of SUNY Christopher Newfield’s case in Unmaking the Public University (2011) that robust state investments in public higher education were crucial to America’s post-WWII prosperity and expanding middle class.
• ...who pushed a then-President of United University Professions to risk opening a window of opportunity for strategic partnerships with new SUNY leadership.
• ...who encouraged UFS leaders to stake out common-ground positions that could bring all the organizations representing SUNY together to change Albany politics.
• ...who helped upgrade Fredonia’s Bylaws and helped Fredonia win SUNY’s first-ever Shared Governance Award.

If you don’t know me, I invite you to examine my c.v., web page, academic blog, and twitterfeed. If you don’t know what to expect from me, I invite you to find out from the Fredonia University Senate Executive Committee (on which I served from 2008-2010 and 2011-2014), the Executive Board of the Fredonia Chapter of UUP (1999-2006, 2009-up), and the English department (1998-up; Chairperson as of this fall).

If you know me, I hope you share my confidence that my decades of experience in department-level and university-level shared governance, as well as chapter- and state-level union service, will serve you well in--and keep you well-informed about--system-wide shared governance. I hope you trust me to bring your views and voices not only to the UFS but also to the Chancellor and Chairman of the SUNY Board of Trustees. I hope you’ll make me your advocate for affordable quality public higher education in Albany.