Inside Higher Ed interview
July 20, 2009


Inside Higher Ed - Since becoming Chancellor of The State University of New York on June 1st, Nancy Zimpher has been on a listening tour of the 64 campus system.  This week between stops 29 and 30 of that tour, she visited Inside Higher Ed�s office to discuss what she has seen and heard so far and her early sense of the job in front of her at SUNY.  So, tell me about your tour, what inspired it and defined it?

NZ � Well, I think I would have to backup and say I saw The State University of New York as one of these once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to provide a leadership role for one of the, arguably, largest systems under one umbrella. So how large? Did I really understand that it was 64 campuses? Did I really know how big the state of New York was? Not really. But I sort of acted on my instinct as a University President, and the first thing you do is you go visit the colleges. If you have regional or branch campuses you go visit. And I did that in a golf cart at Cincinnati. This is a little bit more complicated, but on the face of it was to get to know the people and spend time with campus Presidents and other constituencies. So we have invited each of the Presidents to bring faculty, staff, students, alumni, community leaders, legislators who are home in their districts.  And after 29 visits, the 29th being recently last Friday, we have gotten that kind of constituency and provoked the interest of the local media and beyond. Getting all of this �getting acquainted,� the real purpose is to be Phase One of a comprehensive strategic plan.  So it is about listening, it is about recording, it is about getting people to go to our website and to the Chancellors email, to start weighing in. Already things are emerging.  We are almost halfway of the 64 and we see some fantastic continuity.

Inside Higher Ed � Now SUNY of course took a long time with its search and then had, previous to that, had some shorter term Chancellorships than maybe were expected.  Is it necessary for you to redefine the role a little bit after an extended period where there wasn�t a sense of a strong Chancellor?

NZ � Well, it is interesting because given the length of the search I think it is fair to say I probably met several people who were candidates along the way. So first of all I have to establish that there is new permanent leadership.  Secondly, I do present myself as an academic administrator.  I�m totally born and raised in public higher education and that has not always been the case as well, so I think all of that takes some getting used to.  And again very much out there to say �this is a new day.�  I have happily the full support of the Board of Trustees to do what I am doing.  Not just the tour that has caught people by a bit of a surprise, but the idea that we are laying groundwork for strategic planning.  That is job one, they asked for that.

Inside Higher Ed � You said you have started to see some common threads.  What are some of the things that are coming up?

NZ � Well, they are at two levels.  One, I would call systematic feedback.  I would say there is a great deal of interest in �access� and �success.�  Everybody is �articulating� with everybody else.  Not in an organized way necessarily, but at the campus level it is pretty clear that the four�year schools have two-year partners.  

We are seeing an emerging partnership among and between the academic health centers, that is a good thing.  Partnerships around health care, around access and success.  We have an emerging partnership around energies and sustainability--so that�s a theme on many of the campuses. Some have signed on to the President�s Climate Commitment initiative. Some were actually early architects of that initiative.  

International exchanges and global affairs is certainly emerging, and then probably the biggest of all is what these campuses are doing to drive economic revitalization in their various communities. And diversity is a huge issue as you work from south to north, or downstate to upstate. The diversity changes. You would expect to find it in a downstate New York, which tends to be in New York City, and maybe Westchester County (although on certain days I am not sure how to define downstate). But upstate it is immigrant populations and sort of an enclaves of diversity that you might be surprised to find, but how do we get that working for the whole system?  So, that is a half-dozen substantive themes. 

Then if you thought about this as a matrix, if those are topical headings, then the threads through the cloth would be a needed for more strategic enrollment planning. We currently plan institution by institution--that does not a whole make. Communicating about ourselves, telling the story, you might call that �brand identity.�  The unevenness of annual budgeting on the operating side of the house, where on the construction side of the house, we are on a five-year cycle and try to move to operating under the same.  There are some issues, really big issues around the regulatory role of the Legislature vis-a-vi what the campuses need to be more adroit -- and issues of contracting and land leasing and tuition flexibility.  So, I would put all of those on the horizontal, those are administrative issues that really need the attention of the Chancellor�s office.

Inside Higher Ed � Do you need a Master Plan a la, California?

NZ � Well, we are heading towards a strategic planning process, as I said, the tour being Phase One.  So what I have done and what I have said publicly is we would like to use July through February/March as the strategic planning period.  Promising all of those people who are anxious for us to move forward, that by early Spring we will have that plan.  That is a little nerve wracking because you are promising a date certain for a very comprehensive process.  So if the tour is Phase One, the second phase is around Town Hall meetings, and bringing constituents together across the state and incorporating reports on higher education both in New York and nationally that matter to us and really coming out with a major statement of aspiration in the Spring.  That would have not only strategic action around the kinds of themes I have mentioned, but also very strategic action around enrollment, and operation and management.

Inside Higher Ed � Now the commission that the former Governor put in place, he devoted a lot of discussion to flagship universities and to how many there should be and to building them up and turning Buffalo into Berkley.  How do you view those goals?

NZ � Well first of all, the Commission on Higher Education report is a really great piece of work. It extends beyond any Governor or any administration because these are ideas for decades that have needed attention and so I am confident that report is going to be a building block for our future.  As I understand it, much toward the end of the game, the notion flagship came up and believe me, I had to articulate my position everywhere. I sort of landed on the relationship between the doctoral institutions and the medical academic health centers, because we have two free standing medical schools, and two  embedded in the universities and a College of Optometry, a College of Dentistry, Schools of Public Health.--.  I don�t see the advantage of lifting up two and leaving some number behind. This is all about aspiration and it is all about collaboration and a kind of integration that SUNY probably hasn�t seen in the past. But we can achieve it and I think to use a term that implies that those doctoral institutions that can�t aspire to flagship status is an unnecessary diminution of aspiration. I don�t want that. I also think that we need to create our own model. Yes, there has been a good bit of looking West, but we are unique, we are different than California.  California is divided into three sub-systems that I am sure work collaboratively together; nothing is like having it under one umbrella.

Inside Higher Ed � But of course you�ve got them all under one umbrella, and so do your colleagues at CUNY have from graduate education through community college.  Is part of this plan the process of looking at how the two systems inter-relate?

NZ � Actually it is.  Another charge of the Board of Trustees is that I be a good partner, and play well in the sandbox and I believe that Matt Goldstein who is the Chancellor of the CUNY system feels exactly the same way.  He needs a partner, it takes two.  And I would add something that is different from my experience in the Midwest, that is there are some substantial private institutions in the state of New York that are and need to be our partner. The one really unique thing about New York is that the land-grant institution is at Cornell which is a private institution -- save for the fact that four of Cornell�s colleges are SUNY-funded and supported colleges-SUNY college at Cornell. So that is an instant partnership that makes absolute sense and to be able to work more effectively with New York University, or with Columbia and already the relationship with Syracuse is so interesting because when you are there and that is where we were last week, there�s Syracuse and there is Upstate Medical University and there is the College of Environmental Science and Forestry, you can not tell where one ends and the other begins and I think that partnership is working well.  So Cornell and Syracuse are already good partners with us.  

Inside Higher Ed � True to New York City, one of the ways that SUNY is unusual and you have this massive university system without as much as a presence in the largest city and the state, you have all around New York City, is SUNY going to be more visible in the city without encroaching on what CUNY does?

NZ � Well again, I think we will partner with what CUNY does. I do not know exactly what the means yet, but I do think that already there are partnerships where joint programs are already working, but yes, people say to me, �well SUNY is not in New York City or they just say New York, or they say New York City but they really mean Manhattan and I am just learning what all this is. But actually we have a College of Optometry on 42nd Street, which serves about 85,000 people there and another 60,000 in the boroughs.  We have Downstate Medical Center which is squarely in the heart of Brooklyn.  We have The Fashion Institute of Technology which has a comprehensive preview of Manhattan.  We have a center, which I hope will be a much larger concept, called The Levin Institute, at 55th Street between Lexington and Park that I hope will become a center for global affairs--a much broader umbrella that can connect other international programs at Stony Brook and Buffalo, Albany, etc � and then of course there is a Long Island presence that includes community colleges and a comprehensive research institution and medical schools.  So I think part of this is messaging and the other part is just growing our presence.  We send teachers to New York City, we send doctors from Upstate and from Buffalo.  We have 2.4 million alumni and what I�m about discovering is exactly what part of our alumni live and work in what parts of the state.  So it is just not about the storyline, it is about the fact that we are quite present in New York City, but it is not widely known.

Inside Higher Ed � I wanted to ask you what you think about President Obama�s Community College Plan which he announced last week.  I talked to some of your community college Presidents about that.  What do you make of it; do you see it having a big impact on the community college of SUNY?

NZ � Well what I think I would most like to make of it, is to see this incredible investment in access work down the line and up the line.  So obviously The State University of New York is going to play in this arena and hopefully be very aggressive in presenting a plan to the Obama administration that really sets our community colleges in a position to step up.  It won�t work however if it is not fed from the early childhood into K-12 pipeline.  And it won�t work if associate degree and certificate completion isn�t a reality and we send people onto baccalaureate institutions, or to the workforce with the kind of skilled confidence they need.  So I am a birth-to-career person, I am not going to change my stripes now.  So no matter what we submit as part of the major investment of the Obama administration and community colleges, it has got to work through the pipeline because that is what is really wrong. The pipeline is leaking at every juncture and fixing one part of it without connecting to the pier and what happens afterwards in terms of the pathway, a pipeline has pathways, it won�t work.  So that will be our perspective on that opportunity.

Inside Higher Ed � What should community college graduation rates look like?

NZ � Well, I am taking no prisoners.  Why wouldn�t you expect that we are all working towards a 100 percent graduation rate?  If it�s an associate degree or certificate driven, one of the things I learned in Ohio was about the concept of stackable certificates that ultimately translates into associate level demarcation and then the next thing that really has to work for you is the student mobility that comes from an easy transfer from a two-year to four-year colleges.  Backing up, increasingly high school students are taking dual enrollment courses and coming to college with a year under their belt--some with two years.  There are even examples around the country of kids who graduate in two years from high school and college.  So I think the graduation rates are critically important, they should be as high as possible.

Inside Higher Ed � And do you see suggested changes to the four-year institutions and how they treat those graduates?

NZ � You mean how they create a seamless transition from two-to four-year?

Inside Higher Ed � So it only take two years at the four-year institutions.

NZ � I think that depends; we are all learning the lines.  In Ohio, as you know, we had a program called, �seniors to sophomores,� which was an effort to turn the senior year in high school into the freshman year in college and more and more of that is going to happen.  Distance Learning is going to happen more and more, multi-campus enrollment is going to happen.  So one of the real high priorities for me is the issue of student mobility and I mentioned access and success at the beginning of our conversation.  That is the code for ultimate student mobility.

Inside Higher Ed � Back in Ohio in the last couple of years, strengthening of the central eye, of the central body, in terms of how much do you see SUNY? You have talked about SUNY central, the connection between the campuses, the legislature, ensuring there is not overregulation . . . how much strengthening do you see the SUNY system taking on? I assume that has been a point of tension for a long time there.

NZ � I guess I think we�ve gone through phases of centralization, decentralization and what I have tried to say is that I think The State University of New York ought to puzzle over the question of the whole and how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  So I would think the role of SUNY central is to maximize those things that together we can do greater than anything the individual campus can do, which is why I�ve been a quick study on what the campuses are doing relative to this birth-to-career pipeline.  I applaud the emerging of the academic health centers to think of academic health as an integrated opportunity and tomorrow I will be meeting on the Hill around an energy initiative that involved five or six campuses. I did mention earlier one of the big themes that is emerging is around sustainability and I did mention the President�s Climate Commitment, but boy do I see how the SUNY system can encourage green campuses and the kind of sustainability that needs to embed in our various communities and regions.  So I just can�t believe that there are things that need to be done, can be done, scaled up to be done at the system level without intruding or limiting the works of an aspiration of an individual campus.

Inside Higher Ed � What do you think of the push in Buffalo for more control over tuition policy, other policies so that they can build up their research infrastructure.

NZ � Well I think the important thing is to understand where that came from. It takes you right back to the report of The Commissioner of Higher Education, that is where flexibility was discussed at length. Apparently earlier this year, Buffalo suggested or proposed it would be the pilot, or the litmus test, for whether these concepts could be championed. Having spent six days in the Buffalo region in Western New York, believe me I was asked on multiple occasions did I support this Senate, Assembly bill, typically called UB2020 and my answer was yes, and yes I support the concepts. Yes I do support the concepts of tuition flexibility and other flexibilities necessary enough for us to be an economic leader, but I represent the whole of The State University of New York and you have to understand I want the same flexibility for the other doctoral and medical centers and since I have been to 29 campuses, I can see where tuition flexibility might enable some of the comprehensives as well, maybe even a community college or two.  So it is a concept that I will champion for the whole system.

Inside Higher Ed � The budget situation, how difficult has this been for the campuses?

NZ � I think we�ve all had some very difficult times.  When the budget was moving through New York, of course I still had my Ohio hat, I really couldn�t look at both simultaneously, but I guess the thing I would want to say, given this economic crisis and the downturn and the economics of New York, I don�t really want to start with the numbers, I would like to push the reset button and have us speaking with the Legislature in partnership around what we could do together to turn around the economy in the State of New York.  It can�t be done one budget year at a time, although there are some short-term issues we will be dealing with this year, and next year undoubtedly. You know Ohio was on a bi-annual budget, this is an annual budget in process.  If anything, my desire would be to get us to a five-year window where again this was addressed in the Commission on Higher Education for the State of New York, but I want to start with what the return on investment would be, had we a strong economic development plan that SUNY is a primary leader in with its partners at CUNY and the privates and how that can be a win-win for the Legislature and for SUNY.  That, I think, is different than starting with �Is our budget this year going to be two percent more, or two percent less than what the number is going to be.�  This is not quite yet about the number, this is about the plan.