University Faculty Senate			
Proceedings of the Winter Plenary 
SUNY-System Administration
January 27-29


Friday Morning Session

President Joe Hildreth:
And our first order of business will be our call to order which I’ve just done and 
introductions and roll call by our vice president Jim McElwaine

Jim McElwaine: Thank you Joe, we’ll begin with the senators, good morning. . . .
<Roll call>

Joe: Well, I’d like to welcome you to our winter meeting of the university faculty senate; 
I was informed its minus thirteen degrees is Albany this morning so, uh…(applause). So 
thank you very much for braving the uh elements to make it here, its always good to see 
you, and I’m glad that we have some new faces as well as the familiar faces that we all 
know. I know that we have great deal to talk about today, so I’m sure that you will find 
our meeting interesting. We have three objectives for the meeting, first of course is to 
provide you with an understanding of the major issues that are being acted on by system 
administration today, and the second is to provide our senators and our campus 
governance leaders with an opportune to present your campus concerns to chancellor 
Kane, and the third is the nomination of two or senators to run for the position of the 
university faculty senate president. 

Now we will have meeting this afternoon with the nominating committee, at 4:30, and 
following the meeting the committee with contact the people that they wish to nominate, 
then we will be announcing the names of the candidates to the senate, and if I can get 
permission and support from the executive committee, I’m going to try and see if we can 
find a little space on Saturday morning to let the nominees have an opportunity to make a 
brief statement to the group so that you can know who they are.  

For this meeting we’re going to have Chancellor King, University Provost Salins, and 
Dan Shepard from the office of finance and business. They’re going to provide us with 
presentations on system activities, provost initiatives, and of course, the 2005 executive 
New York state budget. In addition SUNY student trustee Stephanie Gross, is going to be 
with us and we have an award that we’re planning to give her tonight and I think she’s 
going to be giving an brief report as well. Now, one of the things that we’re going to 
encourage you to do is to take good notes, now, we’re going to do our best to get a 
summary, some sort of executive summary of the meeting, but nothing would take the 
place of you’re own notes, and just to ensure that things runs smoothly, remember that 
when you go back to your campus that if its system news that the senator should report, 
in the campus governance meetings, but we would like to have you coordinate the 
reporting activities with each other. So just talk to each other, but make sure that when 
you get a chance that when it’s system the senator reports on that, and work together. The 
idea is that we would to have this continuous loop, where we communicate what’s going 
on in the system, you communicate that to your campuses, and then in return you bring 
that back and communicate it to us and Chancellor King and Provost Salins.

I want to as I do at every meeting, we have a summary of activities that I have been 
involved with since the last meeting, I believe those are in your folder, if they’re not in 
your folder they’re on the handout table, so you can see what we’ve been doing. I’m 
going to go over some brief items.   I’m not going to spend a lot of time on them, cause 
others will, but this would be a kind of a summary that you can talk about. On January 
18th, Governor Pataki submitted the 2005 executive budget for SUNY. And I’d like to 
share with you some major components. The budget assumes that SUNY will increase 
tuition by 500 dollars and generate 85 million dollars in revenue to support mandatory 
costs increases such as collective bargaining in energy. 

SUNY tuition plan is included in the budget with a statutory in language necessary to 
implement that. There's going to be much more discussion on that later today in the 
meeting, please take good notes, this really has to the potential to really help stabilize the 
funding of the university if its adopted. On half of the TAP awards for first time students 
in the governors budget would be deferred until degree compellation. State tax dollar 
support for state operated and statutory campuses is reduced by 24.9 million. So that the 
state tax dollar support for the core operating budget goes from 979 million down to 954 
million dollars. And in the executive budget Pataki’s Partnership to Accelerate 
Completion Time, known as PaCT, will award colleges with 500 dollars for each student 
who graduates in 4 years. If this program is approved by the legislature it will be 
mandatory for all SUNY and CUNY institutions, and also colleges will have to guarantee 
the availability of courses required for degree completion within 4 years, and I should 
note that in order for this to be in effect, if it is passed, that a student would have to sign 
up for the program. This is not going to be an automatic guarantee for all the students, but 
you have to be a part of the program to do that. Let me talk a bit about the new budget 
allocation process. 

The BAP is not new, its been used for the past few years, and its used to distribute the 
core operating budget money. For the past…off and on for the past year, we’ve had a 
committee working on this and trying to develop it, and its undergone some changes, we 
have not had an recent meetings, so let me just summarize where we are right now. As it 
stands now, the process would have six funded functional categories or baskets. It would 
take the core operating budget money, which is close to a billion dollars, and it would 
divide them into these six baskets. The first and the largest, and the one that’s probably of 
most interest to us, would be the Undergraduate basket, the second is the Graduate 1, 
which involves masters’ degrees. The third is Graduate 2 that involves doctorate degrees. 
Four is professional/medical degrees, five would be research, and six would be special, 
which refers to money given for special missions, or colleges that have an extremely 
small size. And, you should know that most of the money, probably 98-99% of the 
money in the undergraduate basket is going to be distributed according to cost in the 12 
sale matrix, which is what your campus is already familiar with, so its not going to be 
that different then what we’re dealing with now. And you have to understand that one of 
the reasons for going into the BAP and trying to rework it is that a couple of years ago 
when tax dollar support was reduced and that money was made up in crease of tuition, it 
caused problems for the BAP because not all of our colleges are equally dependant upon 
tuition dollars, so there's a mix there. Some of our colleges, such as the university centers, 
are more dependants on state support, than is the case for comprehensive colleges. So in 
the minds of the legislature, when state tax dollar support goes down, but they allow 
tuition to go up, it seems like it’s a wash, you should have a flat budget, but wouldn’t 
work, or it didn’t work when it was run through this formula for that reason. So, that may 
very well be the case this year, and I expect that you’re going to have some sort of hold 
harmless situation in terms of the eventual distribution of the budget money. I do not 
expect the new BAP to be implemented this year at all. I am positive that will occur 
sometime down the road. 

Um, let me talk briefly about the SUNY assessment initiative…a little bit of background 
for those of you that might not be familiar with it. In 1999 the provost established a task 
force on the assessment of student learn outcomes. In 2000, the taskforce released, which 
recognized to functions for assessment: Assessment as improvement, and assessment as 
accountability. This report led to the implication of campus-based assessment, of general 
education, and the assessment of the major, and I’m sure you’re familiar with that. In 
2004 the faculty senate agreed on the specifics for the assessment as accountability, our 
strengthened campus based assessment. One of the guarantees that’s in the taskforce 
report that was published in I believe November of 2000, is that assessment result should 
never be used to punish, publicly compare, or embarrass students, faculty, courses, 
programs departments or institutions, either individually or collectively. So when a 
reporter I believe late in the fall early this year filed a freedom of information request for 
the assessment data collected so far by SUNY, it cause a great deal of concern. After 
checking with SUNY legal council, the system administration felt that they would be 
forced to release the assessment data, and it has been released. I have a copy with me of 
all the articles that have appeared since the release of this data, if you’d like to take a look 
at them. It’s my interpretation that they are not harmful to any institution at all, but I’d 
like to make them available to you if you’d like to see that for yourself. And for those of 
you who’d like to have a summary of the terms of the strengthen campus based 
assessment, We have extra copies of the faculty senate bulletin last year which was 
published before we voted on it, and that’s a nice summary of that whole agreement. 
Provost Salins is going to be here today, and I’m certain that we can continue that 
discussion with him, and he would be a better person to do that with than I would be. 

  Mission Review 2 is underway; this is a SUNY system planning effort. It is basically 
used to create a strategic planning agreement between the system and your individual 
campus. Last fall campuses were asked to complete a Mission Review survey, and 
develop a framework document for the memorandum of understanding. You’ll recall that 
our fall plenary meeting this received a great deal of attention, and with the emphasis that 
we were encouraging faculty to be as involved in the development of that framework 
document as possible. Well these have been received, and system administration is 
currently preparing for campus visits. They hope to visit each of the campuses by next 
December. You should try to be involved with these campus visits. IN the announcement 
provost Salins is sending out, he’s included wording to the effect that he encourages 
campuses to include faculty. SO you have support from the Provost office for your 
inclusion, and of course the senate wants you to be included.   You should look for points 
of agreement on your campus niche and distinctiveness, admission selectivity, faculty, 
future academic programs, and maybe future capital construction plans.   let me talk 
briefly about teacher education. Campus reports on the status of the implementation of 
the new vision of teacher education have been submitted to system administration, and 
most campuses are in compliance with the new requirements. For those of you that may 
need a little bit of memory jogging, the new vision requires an academic major for 
secondary education teachers as well as additional hours of field experience. A new 
development that’s recently been implemented with the teacher education template has 
been transferred and is active on the provost website. This would allow a student in a 
Community college to determine if a lower level course will transfer and satisfy 
curricular requirements for the education degree in the senior institution they were 
interested in transferring to. I know this is a project that’s been in development for a 
number of years, and it seems to me to be a very good thing for all of our student. I think 
everyone wants to see transfer occur as seamlessly as possible. Um, we talk a little bit 
about the honors taskforce. This is a taskforce that’s been charged with trying to promote 
best practices in the honors programs across the systems. It’s met several times, it’s 
surveyed campuses on their approach to honors programs. The surveys have been 
collected, and they will be used to develop a report, that will be a “best practices” on 
honors. There’s also an interest in establishing a SUNY wide guidelines for honors 
designation. But there’s also uncertain as to whether the committee will adopt these 
guidelines. So at this point I think you can expect a set of best practices, but I’m not sure 
what you’ll get beyond that. 

Last week, I met with Garrick Utley of the Levin institute…had two colleagues form the 
senate, Hakim Koedderman, and Carl Weizalis, who had been a member of the 
curriculum committee for the Levin earlier. And we got an update on where Levin is at 
the moment from president Garrick Utley. The institute has hired a provost, and a few 
other administrative staff members. And they are in the process of finalizing the 
agreement to purchase a vertical campus, that is a building in downtown Manhattan. We 
don’t know the exact location but it’s in midtown, and I think the final signatures are 
expected at the end of January, so right now. So I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw an 
announcement of this next week. AT the present time, Levin has offered a few graduate 
courses, using faculty from other institutions. They’re trying to determine there, the 
specifics of their mission, or their niche within SUNY. They know, that they’re going to 
be working at a graduate level. They know that they’re going to be involved with 
international trade. They need to have the last part of it finalized. And what they’re doing 
is offering some coursed to try and determine where the greatest need is for the state, and 
once they have they’re going to proceed with faculty hiring, and president Utley was 
questioned on that, and in a nice way indicating the faculty are the ones that really see an 
institution through, that have the institutional memory. That administrators come and go, 
but the faculty devote their careers to a place, and it’s important to get them on board as 
soon as possible. Let me talk a little bit about our website, its active, and you can get 
there. 

We have things for public information committee. This is the look of the homepage for 
the system administration website, and you can get to our website, by going to Faculty 
staff and employment, by putting your mouse over that, and when you do that up will pop 
up faculty senate, and if you click on that you’ll go right to homepage. Or, you can go 
directly to our homepage by typing in this address www.suny.edu/facultysenate no space 
in-between faculty senate, and that will get you there. We have the following features at 
the time, president’s corner, calendar, plenary meetings, committees, the committee 
reports, charges etc, copy of the bulletin, our bylaws, other publications, and archives that 
contains some past resolutions. There's virtually additional content being added weekly, 
and we need to thank Carol Donato and the public information committee for their hard 
work on this project, so if we could just give them a round of applause (applause). And 
we are always listening to suggestions to make it better, but I think we’re moving in the 
right direction. 

I’m going to talk a little bit about SUNY’s response to the nursing shortage> This week I 
met with Bill Murabito, who is the associate vice chancellor for university life, and we 
discussed the nursing shortage. He’s been in charge with developing the SUNY response 
to this, so we talked about the fact that there's a need for involving community colleges, 
because they have an interest in this. Our comprehensive colleges, four year degree 
programs, because they’re obviously involved with this, and even our graduate 
committee, because there’s going to be a need to retrain teachers that are teaching these 
programs, so hopefully we can get together with all these parties and come up with some 
form of a group that can work with bill to ensure that faculty are represented in the work 
that he does. 

 Since we’re meeting system, I now get to show some of the art that I’ve talked to you 
about. Last fall we organized the fall student art exhibit, and it was the biggest exhibit to 
date. I think it consisted of 109 works from 25 campuses across the system, and in 
addition to that we’ve mounted a faculty exhibition from SUNY Rockland community 
college faculty. The current 2005 exhibit is not finished but the work is up. We don’t 
have the labels that will identify the artist, or the medium, or the college up yet, but we’re 
working on that. Also the next faculty exhibit will be from our colleagues at Alfred 
University, and that's going to be going up next week. It’s a shame it couldn’t be up now, 
that’s the schedule. That’s has been one of the things that I’ve been involved with that 
has meant the most to me, and I’ve been fortunate to work with Andrea Benshoff on this 
project, she’s been an enormous help, in a great many ways. Sarah Weist who’s been 
great in developing the brochures, and Maggie Claremont, and Beth Buckner, and 
Derrick Walz, the people in the design area.  What we’ve been able to do is mount 
exhibits that are probably wider in scope than any that I know of in terms of campus 
gallery programs, but we’ve been about to do it with people who all have fill time jobs in 
other areas but have been willing to work together on this project, and it couldn’t have 
happened if we didn’t have all these people that were willing to do that, so I’m most 
grateful for their help, and glad that you can be here so you can actually see the work for 
a change. 

And lastly I wanted to talk to you briefly about a subject that came up during our 
executive committee discussion last night, and that’s the listserv. During the discussion, 
several people noted that the volume of the messages on the listserv was just getting out 
of hand, and   in many cases people thought that they should just imply be between 
individuals. We have certainly, I’ve had, again and again and again it’s a good thing the 
taxpayers of New York don’t see this listserv, because they wouldn’t be so interested in 
funding what faculty do if they’ve got this kind of time. And also people said they’ve just 
stopped reading the listserv that it’s just too big. Well, and they’re just hitting delete. 
Well, that’s not good…so…. (Laughter) look, here’s what we need to do. I think what we 
need to do, just to try and keep your messages short and concise, and to think about it. If 
it should really just go to an individual, send it to and individual, if it really need to go to 
listserv, by all means use it, but lets see if we can cut down the volume, cause the last 
thing we want is to have people stop reading the listserv, cause when we need it, we need 
it. And its great to have, and we have that, and I think if we can all work towards that, 
we’ll make sure that the luster’s effectiveness is not going to be compromised by 
inappropriate use.

And then I’d like to conclude my report by thanking you, for allowing me to represent 
you during the past four years. Its certainly been and opportunity that I’ve appreciated, 
and I’ve tried to work as hard as I can to increase communication between the senate and 
faculty, and between the senate and the faculty, and senate and administration. And I’ve 
also tried to increase the influence of the senate on the policy decisions of the system 
administration, and just in the same way with the art exhibits, there's no way I could have 
done that without the help of the people I mentioned before, there’s no way that we could 
have had the success that we’ve had in influencing policy without your support, and I 
wanted to thank you for that, and that’s sincere on my part, and I hope that we can 
continue along this path, and with that, I’d like to answer and questions that you might 
have. Well, I’ve either put you to sleep, or I answered all your questions so, I’m going to 
assume it’s the better answer of the two, and we’re going to move forward.
And now lets move to Jim McElwaine.  Jim, would you give the executive committee 
report?

Jim: It’s because of Joe’s good reports that mine go on about two minutes, so here we go. 
The executive committee, your executive committee met yesterday and let me summarize 
what went down on that report, during that session. We meet, for those of you who are 
new senators, we meet the executive committee meets before each full plenary to preview 
certain reports, and either recommend, or not recommend motions to you for your 
deliberation. 
We had a presidential report that began the meeting yesterday; we convened at about 
2:10. President Hildreth reported on the recent board of trustees meetings, and the various 
maneuverings going on there. We will learn more about this today. We had a report from 
system administration via Chief of Staff Dr. Betty Capaldi, who talked briefly about 
recent budget developments in the tuition plan. She specifically referred to the governors 
article seven bill, the language therein, and several grassroots plan to garner additional 
support for the chancellor, and I should point out the university faculty senate budget 
plan rational tuition policies. Those would include local campus presidents meeting with 
students, as well as, other grassroots efforts. 

She also reported that the SUNY strategic plan is now being synchronized with 
community college plans, that both the 4-year programs and the 2-year programs are 
synchronizing their strategic plans. As well as a continuation of marketing and PR public 
research initiatives to discover a logo for SUNY.  There was apparently a meeting with 
students which informed some of the people that our current logos apparently resemble 
the empire state building was one quote. She also commented on federal funding 
research, teaching technology and business partnerships as expressions of the strategic 
plan. Executive vice provost Ann Hoot gave us a report which provost Salins will give in 
his address to you to day…I’m going to skip over those details. The executive committee 
spent a considerable amount of time discussing strategies, and contingencies relative to 
the board of trustee’s changes, both the changes and their language currently being 
issued. There was much talk…discussion about how we should express our support for 
the Chancellor, or indeed whether we should, or mostly how. And I’m sure that will 
surface later today as we continue with the plenary. Membership of the disciplinary 
panels, that is those disciplinary panels that are part of the strategic campus based 
assessment movement were approved. Meaning, there are now three discipline specific 
panels in the areas of mathematics, critical thinking, and writing or basic communication. 
Those who are approved will be referred by the executive, will be referred to you, and is 
that correct Joe? Ok…we’ll announce them. And the executive committee also received 
reports and potential action items from the various standing committees. Again for those 
of you who are new senators. This senate moves . . .this senate exists through the hard 
work of its committees. We may be the ultimate deliberative body, but it is our standing 
committees, that do most of the work of this body. And without them, I’m not sure this 
senate would function nearly as well as it does. We received reports from the awards 
committees. There will be three action items coming from this committee. One concerns 
time limits relative to certain awards. The executive committee passed that. There as 
another action item coming from the awards committee that surveyed that referred to 
multiple awards and ranks, and that motion was passed without dissent and referred to 
you, and there was another, a third action item that we’ll deal with…the chancellors 
award legibility patterns. That was also passed without dissent. 

The governance committee brought in an action item relating to academic misconduct. 
That recommendation was passed and referred to you. There was no report from the 
graduate research committee. 

The operations will present a report; will present finished reports on administrative 
faculty overhead and library expenses with coming April. The public information 
committee had gone over website detail, and also we discussed at that point certain 
details of the website but also the possibility of taking local newspaper clippings and 
making them available to senators via email, as a means of making sure all of us have the 
clipping service that exists. We’ll discuss that I believe during the public information 
committee report on Saturday. 

Student life and undergraduate committees have reports forthcoming, and the committee 
was adjourned at 5:55. In closing Joe I would like to mention that subsequent to many of 
your requests, I have prepared a prototype of a plenary summary for you…some of you 
wanted a list of what went on at the plenary I have prepared a prototype of that report, 
that will be issued to you I believe, presented to you for possible approval, and I will 
need your advice guidance as your secretary on what time frame should we approve that 
process. That was not brought before the executive committee last night, because quite 
frankly its not their business, its your business. And that concludes my report. Questions? 
Ok, I put them back to sleep Joe (laughter)

Joe: Yes, on the news clips, I think that we’re probably willing to do that, and if you 
don’t want to have those news clips, you can simply let carol know and she’ll see that 
you don’t get them > but now its my pleasure to get to introduce our next speaker. 
University Provost Peter Salins. He is the architect of Mission Review which is a, as I 
mentioned earlier a strategic planning effort that I’m a big supporter of, as well as 
numerous initiatives that we’re all familiar with, and he’s going to give you and overview 
of those, and answer any questions you might have…it’s a pleasure to welcome Provost 
Peter Salins to the podium.

Peter: Good morning it’s a pleasure as always to be with you and a particular pleasure to 
do it here in Albany. I mean its not that I don’t enjoy traveling hundreds of miles across 
the state to one of our many remote campuses to join you there, and I think I’ve been 
pretty good about doing that, but it is nice to once in a while to just be able to walk down 
the corridor to join you that way. I know there's a swirl of issues and concerns that you all 
have, and I don’t know whether you are going to talk about those things today, if you are, 
I’m happy to engage in any kind of dialogue that you want, but in my report I’m going to 
stress the high points and basically the positive points that we’re engaged in right now. 
Joe mentioned Mission Review, that is a terribly important initiative and we’re right in 
the early stages of it. All of the guidance documents, all of the campuses are now in, 
which its self is kind of a minor miracle. I’m very pleased that we were able to have all of 
the campuses respond as quickly and effectively as they did. We are in the process of 
developing a schedule for campus visits right now. I know you’re very concerned about 
faculty involvement in the process. We not only have made it very clear to campuses that 
the faculty are to be involved, that faculty   members must be in the interlocutor teams, 
the discussion teams on the campuses when we come to visit, but we will in the letter that 
we’re sending outlining when we’re coming and what to expect to happen when we 
come…in those letters we will again reinforce the notion that faculty must be active 
participants in the process. Now interestingly one of the issues that Mission Review 
is…both in Mission Review 1 and 2, one of the issues that are targeted is a graduation 
rate. 

Now, every campus MOU has a graduation rate table from Mission Review 1 and will 
have another from Mission Review 2, with presumably higher aspirational graduation 
rates. IN the meantime, this has become a big issue. Note that it wasn’t always an issue, 
but it waxes and wanes in terms of both local visibility and national visibility. Well, it 
gain a lot of local visibility recently partly because the education trust, together with the 
national association of system heads put a website online, just a couple of weeks ago 
which has the graduation rates, 4,5 and 6 years for every higher education institution in 
the united states. OS that gave it increased visibility. The New York post had an article 
about the city university’s graduation rates, which by the way, aren’t so hot, quite 
frankly, but never the less. There incrementally better than they were some years ago, so 
that editorial or article in the post animated some discussion, so be aware of the fact that 
this became an issue at the board meeting a few days ago. 

The problem with the graduation rate issue, its not the…there's you know a dozen reasons 
people give why graduation rates aren’t optimal, students cant get courses, people have to 
work, individuals have family responsibilities, but the problems really are more 
fundamental, and they are mainly statistical. The official rate is the number of students 
who come and go from the same institution, in a 4,5,6 year period. If they left the 
institution to go to another, even if the combined time is still 4 years or 5 years, or 6 
years. At least a third of students coming into our state operated campuses, come form 
one of our community college. None of them count, even if they graduate within a four-
year timeframe. If you added together their community college and their state operated 
college experience. On top of that, the numerator is the . . . or the denominator is all of 
the students taking at least 12 credits of coursework. Since 12 credits times 8 is 96, 
you’re not going to graduate in four years if you take12 credits a term. So we have one 
statistical artifact, the full time student taking 12 credits and another statistical artifact, 
the four-year graduation rate. It’s just not going to mesh. Anyway, every time this come 
up, my office, everybody’s office has to go through march, through this statistical thicket 
once again, and we will try to reassure everybody that SUNY is really well positioned in 
the set of public higher education institutions in the country. That said, we will when we 
come to all of your campuses………..

<Tape change, transcript interrupted>

Dr. Salins: . . . which did exactly what you suggested, indicating first of all that our rates 
were better than anybody else’s, secondly that if you added intra-SUNY transfers and 
successful outcomes for the intra SUNY transfers we would kick up those already fairly 
good rates by another five or six percentage points. And we also introduced the 
mitigating factors you mentioned at the beginning of your remarks. So we did do that, we 
will do it again, its one of those things that we have to do again, and again, and again. 
I’ve asked my IR staff to organize this data even beyond the kind of presentation we 
made the last time, working with vice chancellor Capaldi and Jennifer king, on how we 
might present this at an upcoming meeting at the board of trustees. You’re right, we do 
have to tell the story correctly, and we have to tell the story in a way that indicates all the 
positive things there. On the issue of some of these litigating factors. One of the problems 
with this issue of the work, first of all, the statistical experience is very clear both in 
SUNY and certainly in CUNY, that the extended study time of the working students 
almost guarantees that they don’t get a degree. 

Actually, if we had a really decent student loan program in place and I think for the most 
part we do, even financially it is smarter for the student to take out the student loans that 
they need and then to have a much much higher salary when they have completed the 
work and have the degree. My wife teaches in the CUNY system still at Queensboro 
community college, and so she, her students very much fit the profile of the kind of 
student that you may have been referring to. And its not as simple as just needed to do 
this in order to afford to go to college. A lot of the students that she teaches have 
ambivalence about the importance of college, and no ambivalence about the importance 
of work. So, jobs are good, they put money in your pocket right away; school is a highly 
questionable proposition. I don’t mean whether we have students like that it probably 
varies, we have some students like that we have other students with high degrees of 
motivation. In any case, we’ve done way too much, I don’t mean we here, but I mean the 
universe has done way too much speculation, and I think we need more research, more 
solid data on what actually inhibits these graduation rates. 

By the way, in terms of your campus, Rudy, your campus is one of the prime examples of 
the problem with the statistical artifact, the only students that show up in your admittedly 
quite low graduation rates, are your entering first time students. Your campus has an 
enormous percentage of entering transfer students, none of whom get counted who do 
have successful outcomes. So that roughly half or more of your student body in Old 
Westbury that actually does graduate on a timely basis but they graduate after coming 
from Nassau Community College, or another, none of them get counted. And the other 
thing which is a matter of mixed interpretation for old Westbury. You have a lot of 
student that have successful outcomes even though they come in the first time, but they 
leave before completely to go to another institution. They are successful graduates of 
Hofstra, Adelphi,  CW Post, I do question why are they leaving Westbury to go to 
Hofstra, Adelphi, CW Post, but they are not failures, so even for old Westbury, your sort 
of successful outcome rate is many times higher than the officially posted graduation rate. 

Next questioner is Marvin

Marvin: This isn’t exactly a question peter, Marvin LaHood, buffalo state. After 14 years 
on the senate, every time somebody comes up with a question now it graduation rates, we 
get annoyed, but in my experience now, every time it is something we can use, something 
we ought to be thinking about something we can use to greater advantage. We the Gen. 
ed came up in 98, yes we did have a smorgasbord, yes we all, indeed we had a 
symposium before that, and yes indeed we ought to look and say we could never do this 
very well on an individual campus because of turf problem. What is it that we think is 
<inaudible> for college graduates.  Should they be able to write, should they be able to 
do some mathematics, should they be able to do critical thinking. So out of that first we 
react angrily, then we got involved in it, and I think probably its have a salacious effect 
on us. I think its something we ought to been talking about always. Then there’s 
assessment from the outside, and we all get very annoyed, cause we all think we’re 
assessing, but we weren’t exactly, there wasn’t a culture of assessment, certainly not in 
our institution. And probably not in a lot of others. And now we have moved forwards 
and its painful, but its also given us the opportunity to do the kind of thing that we ought 
to have been doing and probably thought we were doing very well. Now this question of 
graduation comes up, and all we’re doing is arguing about the fact that oh well, the 
figures….and you’ve done a wonderful exposition of why the figures can be skewered. 
But the point is we don’t do retention as well as we might do it. Ok, if you talk to our 
students, they’re going to tell you don’t offer the courses that we need in order for us to 
get out of here, so I go around to chairs and I say how come we’re not doing that, we 
have a computer system which we can put our majors into, and pretty much think through 
what it is we really offer. You know that they tell peter, “oh, the faculty doesn’t want to 
teach this bread and butter course” I’m sorry folks, the faculty wants to teach this…I was 
a provost for ten years I sort of know a little about how that works. Secondly, how many, 
everybody in this room who thinks we do academic advisement really well on our 
campuses raise your hand (laughter). I am, wow, fantastic; I’ll send my grandchildren 
there. Advisement, academic advisement, I’ve had students that were crippled by the kind 
of advisement they got. Come to me and say, I'm not going to get out of here in four 
years, I'm not going to get out of here in five years because I couldn’t find my advisor, or 
he or she told me to do this, which turned out not to be the thing I should have done. We 
should now say to you, lets get together system, and the faculty senate and the faculty, 
and say how can we improve retention rates. We had a symposium on that, gentleman 
from north Carolina state about four or five years ago when I chaired the undergraduate 
committee. Which was spectacularly brilliant. That’s the kind of thing we ought to be 
doing, yes our graduation rates could be improved. Never mind comparing us to Oregon 
central, yeah we look better than they do apparently on some thing that Joe carries around 
with him…. a comparison with similar institutions. We could do better in retention, we 
could do graduation rates, this is an opportunity for us after we get over the fact that 
somebody is pushing us on this, and saying lets do this better.

Dr. Salins: Absolutely, Marvin, I couldn’t agree more, and I think that you put very 
effectively and very succinctly. You’re right, a lot of these issues that come in from the 
outside, we get frustrated by, although some of the issue probably I guilty of bringing in 
to the mix. So you get frustrated with some of the things that I bring in to thing. But 
you’re right there is something behind a lot of these even if the perception by the lay 
public s simplistic, there are issues behind all of these things and yes we can do a better 
job of retention. We can do a better job in advisement. There are some things that are 
statistical, but there are some things I said all along that are substantive, and we should 
work on those. I welcome your raising that issue, that it isn’t just the nasty crazy world 
making us do all kinds of stupid things. That actually some of these issues really do have 
a basis in a substantive…legitimate substantive concern. We should address it. Mission 
Review by the way, has done that, even Mission Review one, did look at that I think the 
really issue is to try to understand better what the underlying factors are. Advisement is 
an enormous area, in advisement I was glad to see the dozen or so hands that popped up 
when you asked the question, but again, in my experience at hunter college, we talked 
about advisement, every semester of every year, it never got better, maybe its better 
today, but advisement is a huge problem, as afar as the issue of who wants to teach what, 
one of the data displays I was asked for just a few days ago, was the faculty student ratio. 
And so we produced a table which showed that faculty student ratio for SUNY overall.   
This is the state operated sector, its approximately 18, which is not terrible, if you take 
that and divide into upper division and lower division its 25 in the lower division, and its 
12 in the upper division.   its probably the reverse, it terms of wanting to have good 
retention and graduation rates, it probably should be in the very least 18, or it should be 
in the reverse. The most vulnerable students in term of retention are the freshman and the 
sophomores; the least vulnerable are the juniors and the seniors. But whether it’s the 
structure of our majors, or because the faculty prefer teaching, the senior faculty prefer 
teaching small sections in specialized subjects, but whatever the various reasons are, its 
something that we can look at, and I think that we need to pay more attention to lower 
division classes and to make them smaller, and to assign more of our senior faculty to 
teaching them. But this is the kind of thing we can look at in greater detail.

Joe: let me kind of just go through the cue so that you know that I got your name, and I'm 
looking at the amount of time available. I’ve got Janet, Ken, Dick, Rose, Maureen and 
Colin. So I have a feeling that will probably be the list of questions that we can 
accommodate. SO with that go to Janet.

Janet: Thank you Dr Salins for your presentation, or for your thoughtful approach toward 
retention. I have I request for information, and I have a question. The information can 
you give the URL for the retention data you were telling us about. 

Dr. Salins:   Go on my Mission Review website. Go to the provost website, couple clicks 
later you’re at the Mission Review. Mission Review 2.  Mission Review 2has a submenu 
item called Data Repository. Get to that, and that has 57 tables, you can find out what the 
faculty earn at every campus in the system if you’re interested in that, but you can also 
get retention and graduation rates for every single campus in the system from the website.

Janet: Thank you, and for your information, and leading into my question about retention, 
cause it will undoubtedly effect your own reflection on my campus I teach only upper 
division level classes, average class size 70-75, so I agree with you about the need for 
smaller classes, at the lower division too, which simply need more faculty. On my 
campus also, if you put every single class at 8am, or 3 am or whenever, I wouldn’t have 
enough classes, I still need more classes than I have to get my students pushed though the 
system in 4 years. It is a genuine problem, though maybe not in every campus, and I'm 
sorry to hear the problems are so massive, indeed shocking at Marvin’s campus. With 
regard to retention, the undergraduate committee which I coach here had a fabulous 
presentation by Gary Bellows for John Porter a couple of months ago, one of the things 
that was great about it was that he or his department are evidently gathering, not on or 
two fields of information, for example did the student get out in four years or not, Mr. 
Bellow’s contention seemed to be that its silly to compare campus to campus on these 
sort of data, commuting campuses should not have the same retention rate as a four year 
school, which should not have the same retention rate as a school whose purpose is 
different…that made sense to me. He had 35, or 40, or 50 fields of data which he was 
collecting, and felt that soon he’d be able to accurately predict whether a student would, 
how long it would take a student to get out. It seemed to me that this is a logical approach 
to take for retention. And I hope that under your supervision it will do that and it might 
result in a retention goal for each campus, as part of its MOU so that all the 
comprehensive colleges would not have the same goal.

Dr. Salins: Absolutely, first of all what you’re talking is Gary, Gary’s done a lot research 
on what's called the predicted graduation rate and we’re probably the leaders in probably 
developing that artifact. I had a whole provost office symposium a few months ago, I try 
to have a symposium every month to just sort of do a little bit of free thinking and to 
bring some sort of intellectual content to our otherwise bureaucratic exertions. And so we 
had a whole provost office forum on this whole issue of what is the optimal retention, 
graduation rate and should it be consistent and so forth. And Gary was the one that led 
that forum, and he did bring in his research on the predicted graduation rate.   There was 
a lot of, by the way, disagreement on that, even in my own staff, because people thought 
that this would almost guarantee them to have sort of low expectations for some of our 
campuses. But I think it’s a valid issue, and we certainly at Mission Review 2 are not 
going to have uniform aspirational graduation rates for all of our campuses. We will 
recognize that Buffalo state and Old Westbury are different than Geneseo, and Fredonia, 
or even for that matter that the university at Buffalo is different than Binghamton. We 
will recognize that in this work.

Janet: As a parting comment, if I may, these difference between campuses and their goals 
and their mission do not represent I think mitigating circumstances for why a school has a 
lower retention rate. Instead they represent an intelligent look at the data, and following 
up on what Runi said if we are not very proactive to the point of aggressiveness in simply 
letting these data become public, in making them become public in a way that the public 
in fact wants to read, rather than a dry and boring report that many of us might not read, 
if we are not quick to do this it give others the opportunity to jump in with reason which 
are not related to fact and which make us look bad. For example, we…SUNY deserves 
better than what they’re doing in retention rates.  That’s a terrible quote and further more 
inaccurate. 

Dr. Salins: Well one of the problem is that this is…I participate in national higher 
education meeting as perhaps many of you do. This is a bedeviling issue across the 
country. And like a lot of things, it’s almost casual the way we back into them. In 1990, 
there was a federal law that required the publication of data on higher education 
performance and that’s what results in the IPEDS system. At the time, the john porters of 
America you know from around the higher education community got together in 
Washington, and they agree on data elements and definitions. A lot of them are sorry 
about what they agreed to. They could have redefined one of…the transfer issue came up 
at that time. There were IR officers that said we have to incorporate transfers. It’s so 
hard, it’s complicated, and its different in difference places and so they let it go. There 
was a great question about the institutional….the coming and going from the same 
institution issue, very hard to keep track of so they let it go. The inconsistency of the full 
time student being defined as 12 credits but then having a 4-year graduation republished, 
was identified as a possible issue, but they let it go. So some of these things really do 
probably have to be addressed by the national higher education community, because 
when I go to meetings of provosts and chancellors or others. You know, <inaudible> or 
ASCU, or these other organizations, everybody’s tearing out their hair because they will 
have had experiences like our board meeting on Tuesday where either trustees, or in 
many states legislators, because this is a big legislative issue in many states such as 
Colorado, and Florida, and Texas, and California, this has gone beyond the regents and 
the trustees, all the way to the state legislature, and you get legislative mandates on these 
issue. Its high t9ime I think for the national higher education community to sit down 
again, and to redefine some of these issues collectively.

Joe: Ok now, let me just share with you, because I want to encourage you to be as concise 
and to the point as you can so we can get to the last group of questioners. We are on 
the…at the time where we need to break for our sector concerns, so we’re starting to eat 
into that time, I just encourage the remaining questioners to be as brief as possible. Those 
would be ken dick, rose, Maureen, and Qalid. So, ken….

Ken:   in interest of brevity, Marvin, when we belly up ton the bar tonight, you and I can 
sort of have a discussion as to whether we honestly believe that general education 
throughout SUNY is better today than it was 8 years ago (laughter) I think that’s 
debatable topic.

Marvin: It’s a deal if you buy, (laughter)

Ken: You got it!   I…what bother me is that a success story is being taken by the chair of 
the board of trustees, and turned into crap. “I think that calls for improvement” says the 
quote that comes out of the newspaper, “I want you Bob, and something from you Peter 
on this subject. I’ve been asking for it,” I think he has, and I think it may be time to give 
it to him (laughter) Here’s the problem; we have a SUNY rate that we have reported at 
40% that’s twice the rate of public institutions. More over, we have publicly indicated 
that from that 95-97 period, the rates have improved, and in fact since the single greatest 
predictor of the graduation rate is retention rate and the single greatest predictor of the 
retention rate is incoming SAT and high school scores and that kind of data, there’s every 
reason to believe that these data will continue to improve, as we look at 98, 99, and the 
2000 cohorts. What bothers me is that instead of any kind of discussion that is 
numerically based, or data based, what we have is a public row with the chair of the 
board of trustees, once again attacking the administration, the faculty, and the state 
university in all of its components. When are they going to treat us as they say they wish 
us to treat them? With a modicum of respect so that we can have a discourse that is in 
fact data based. That one question that I'm not going to ask you to answer, but there is 
one that I will (applause). What are the targets peter? We’re at 40%, how do we then 
establish again any kind of reasonable target from here to there. There are…at least based 
on the reports there was no indication of that. Second issue it seems to me and its related 
is the Five hundred dollar head count bonus that the governor, which probably will not be 
in the final budget, but that the governor has offered for the four year graduation rate. Is 
that new money? (No) Or is that money that’s going to be taken away from other parts of 
SUNY.

Dr. Salins: Its probably not new money, but that’s not the issue, Ken, I think that, first of 
all, I don’t know if you were at the board meeting or have an accurate summary of what 
happened actually at the board, but actually there was a lively discourse even among the 
trustees, and trustee Gross whose stand in the back of the room, who is one of the 
participants and I remember quite clearly what trustee Gross, but trustee Stevens, and 
trustee Daniels and others also said things, so that even though the chair was quoted that 
way, after all the press likes to quite the most controversial or interesting elements, it was 
actually a lively dialogue, and some of the issues that we’ve discussed here, were raised 
there. The deeper point though that you make, is that we actually have a good story to 
tell. So, why are we, we who…this business of the 40% is in this world that we occupy is 
a high rate and you’re right we have gotten better. I do think it can get better yet, and it 
will, vice chancellor Capaldi shared with the senior staff just yesterday or the day before 
a table of the Florida system when she was in Florida, she was at the university of Florida 
in Gainsborough, and when she was there, she worked very hard on this course 
availability issue, and the advisement issue on the Gainesville campus. And at 
Gainesville, within a relatively short period of time, she documented in a table 
Gainesville’s went from 35 to 50% 4-year graduation rates, with the greatest progress 
being made by the minority students on that campus. The African American and Latino 
students on that campus, so it shows it can be done, we shouldn’t simply be negative on 
that, and we’re being challenged to improve the rates. I have said to the chairmen and 
other members of the board, we will improve the rates, it’s an issue in Mission Review, 
the BAPS natural funding structure which funds upper division courses more richly than 
lower division course creates a strong financial incentive for campuses to get more 
students from the lower division to the upper division. But part of your statement, even 
though it expresses great frustration, I think aligns with what Runi said earlier, in that we 
do probably have to take more of a proactive position in terms of the presentation of the 
data that shows we’re actually doing quite well in this area. 

Thank you

Joe: ok, now once again I’m going to encourage people to get the point as quickly as they 
can because we’re now into the sector meeting section.

<Tape change, transcript interrupted>
First I want to react to what Marvin said in that you agreed with Peter concerning the 
advisement phenomena. If you look at the problems with advisement, you think of the 
number of students who are misplaced, placed in loads they really couldn’t handle, wrong 
courses, insufficient support when they start having problems, placement in courses they 
don’t need, and failure to convince the student to take the right curriculum that will allow 
that student to stay on track. That suggests to me, since we seem to be stuck with metrics 
that have been decided in the past nationwide. Certainly that doesn’t stop up from adding 
a metric. You mentioned earlier that the word efficiency was raises, to me efficiency in 
this issue would consist of the rate of completion of courses, so the students who graduate 
presumably to X number of credits at the institution, and satisfactorily completed so 
many of them. To me the percentage rate of completion of courses solves the sort of 
problem also that Janet had mentioned, in terms of the many…the total lack of a pattern, 
not only among campuses, among types of programs but even the individual student, who 
sometimes takes 12 credits, sometimes 18, sometimes drops down part time because he 
or she is working etc. 
Just another suggestion. 

Joe: Our next question is from Rose Rudnitski

Rose: (Not audible)

Dr. Salins: I don’t think that was a question either; let me just sort of make brief 
comments. Notwithstanding the fact that this is now the 21st century, actually our rates 
are actually better than they were in the later years of the 20th century. Not withstanding, 
we are actually, as Ken pointed out, we’re actually getting better were not getting worse.  
As far the issue about the faculty mix, you’re absolutely right, and that is an issue in 
Mission Review, Mission Review tackles a lot of things. That faculty mix is in there, and 
for all of our institutions we're going to encourage a higher ratio of full time faculty, and 
a higher percentage of doctorally-trained faculty. We have all that in there. As far as the 
trustees, there are 16 trustees, again, one of them is standing in this room. And frankly 
you have 16 individual opinions on this and on other issues. The press may not quote all 
16, or not all  165 may comment at every meeting, but I wouldn’t lump them together in a 
single characterization. They have, there is a lot of variation among the trustees, they 
have a lot of different opinions, and they’re all I think very dedicated individuals with 
their respective viewpoints.

Joe: Once again we’re into our sector reports, so try to be as brief as possible; we have 
two questioners, Maureen Dolan

Maureen:   thank you Joe, I do have a question on the issue of resources, course 
availability, and graduation rates. I appreciate your comments provost Salins about the 
Westbury campus. Some of the successes we have that aren’t captured in the data. Just 
with the limited resources that are available, we do enroll classes up until what’s 
considered the legal fire code, set by the fire Marshall set to what a room can hold. And 
that holds in particular for the school of business which tends to be very large that math 
classes that I teach there, and it has happened that we have had some sympathetic faculty 
members who might hear that a course has been closed, at 35 or 40. And lines of students 
will beg and plead and say they need this course to graduate on time, if they cant get 
signed an over tally they’ll have to stay an extra semester to take it. So what has 
happened is last year actually the fire engine showed up, and the fire Marshall did fine 
the college for enrolling some classes so that students could graduate on time, and we’re 
under strict instructions not to do that anymore.   The resources are not available to split 
the sections, as you might see on some more financially viable campuses, or in the 
private colleges, you see once it gets to 40 they split it into two sections we don’t have 
the resources for that. And I know that comments that have been attributed to some of the 
trustees, especially trustee chair Eagan indicating that he doesn’t see graduating on time 
in terms of resources, or its just a questions of doing more with less. My question to you 
Dr Salins is do you see a connection between the ability for campuses to let students or 
facilitate students graduating on time in terms of course availability, and the faculty that 
are available and the space that is available.

Salins: Absolutely, I have said all along that right now in the state of New York, 
elementary secondary education has 12,000 dollars per student across the state behind it. 
In the better suburbs, more affluent suburbs, that number approaches 20,000 dollars per 
student, but even in New Cork City its around 12,000 dollars per student, even if you 
include the hidden subsidies in the SUNY budget, meaning fringe benefits that don’t 
show up in the regular college budgets, and debt service, because the facilities are paid 
for out of statewide debt, even if you include the hidden subsidies that average 
expenditure per student in the sate university of New York is 10,000 dollars. The 12,000 
that is spent is spent right now in elementary secondary is not considered enough, and the 
counts on fiscal equity is pushing the state and new York city to add another 2 or 3 billion 
dollars which would drive that 12 up to 14 or 15,000 dollars a student. I say to every 
legislator I meet, to every public official I meet if you don’t think 12,000 is enough for k-
12, which includes 3rd grade, which is not hugely expensive, if you don’t think 12,000 is 
enough for k-12, why do you think that 10,000 is enough for, you know, 13 and above. 
There is a resource issue. I don’t think we have been effective in trying to connect the 
dots. CUNY has been starved for resources for decades, and I was in CUNY during the 
period when the resource situation became more extreme, How did we respond at hunter 
and in CUNY generally? More adjunct sections, adjuncts cost, at least most of the time I 
was at hunter 2,500 dollars, even a poorly paid faculty member costs much than that, not 
to count the cost of the administration of the institution, and the maintenance of facilities, 
and the rest of it. That we do not even try to make the connection between some of these 
output variables and resources that you need. At the state board meeting that has been the 
subject of discussion chancellor king did note the resources issue, again I don’t know if 
any of you were there or heard him but chancellor king very clearly identified resources 
as an issue. This global resource issue we’re not going to tackle, not this group, and not 
even the senior staff, this is a larger political fiscal thing. What we can do thought is to 
try to better coordinate resources that we do have. And I Mission Review 2 now more 
than in Mission Review 1 will include the construction fund in the discussions, and will 
include the finance office in the discussions. So when we meet with every campus, we 
will be talking not just about academic issue, we will be talking about facilities, so if Old 
Westbury doesn’t have enough classrooms in order to teach the courses that you need, 
that can be brought up there, and Phil wood, or somebody from Phil wood’s staff is going 
to be at that meeting to note that. If there are financial issues, those are going to be 
discussed. So, certainly in terms of better organizing the resources we do have Mission 
Review 2 gives us an opportunity to do it. But the larger point is well taken and we do 
have to get everyone to understand that we are not well funded. Especially in a state that 
spends an enormous amount of money per student in the K12 system. NO always to 
beneficial results either.

Joe: ok, and our last is from Qalid.

(Not audible)


Dr. Salins: We’re well aware that Fredonia, incidentally, your campus was the inspiration 
for the 500 dollar bonus, cause you apparently have an organized effort to make course 
availability work for your students. But one of the, in terms of metrics and how we use 
the, the 1rst and 2nd year retention rate is a major variable. That varies quite widely, and 
is a very good predictor of ultimate graduation, and most of that is not related to course 
availability. We have rates that go from 50 or 60 percent 1rst to 2nd year retention all the 
way up to 90-95 percent. That range of variation is not course availability; it may not 
even be resources that are a combination of advisement and the characteristics of student 
that are enrolled.  We do have to understand the issue better, my office is working very 
hard to do that, I do think we’ll be making progress on that.

(Applause)

Joe: Well, I’m trying to keep us on schedule, but I also know that one of the benefits of 
these meeting is to be able to have this direct interaction with the provost and the 
chancellor. So let me tell you what we’re going to try to do to catch up. We’re going to 
allow you to have an additional 15 minutes or so added on the schedule. If you really 
want to stretch it for your sector meetings for an hour, I think well probably be able to 
accommodate that, but we’re going to start lunch not at 12 o clock, but 12:15. Carol, do 
you want to give directions to the rooms
(Give directions)

<Sector meetings and Lunch>



UFS
Winter Plenary 2005			
Friday Afternoon Session

Joe: We will try to get on with the afternoons agenda. (Whispering)  You need to pick up 
your cookie and coffee, and come have a seat. (People sitting) Ok now, if everyone will 
just hurry and find your seat, or find your seat in a hurry.
Well I’d like to begin our afternoons agenda, and the first thing I’d like to do is to 
introduce our chancellor who’s going to be listening to the reports, and I’d like to use as 
my introduction a statement that I made this week at a board of trustee meeting. 
Everybody’s been hearing about this meeting, so at the end of the meeting I was able to 
make a comment, and this is what I had to say. “Recently I’ve read some newspaper 
articles which questioned chancellor kings leadership of the university. These articles use 
anonymous sources and unspecified charges to create this doubt. Today I want to make a 
statement in support of chancellor King’s leadership. As president of the University 
faculty senate I have directly worked with chancellor King for the past 4 years. Based on 
this experience I consider chancellor king an outstanding leader of SUNY. He has a 
vision of excellence for the system, and he has aligned the resources available to him to 
enable the university to move forward in the front ranks of higher education. There are 
many positive indications of this progress. Enrollment is up, Admission selectivity by 
sector is up, faculty research is up, and philanthropic giving is up and increased by 50%. 
My faculty colleagues and I consider King to be a strong effective leader, he is collegiate, 
he listens to faculty concerns, he addresses faculty concerns, through his actions 
chancellor king has earned my respect and support, and that of my colleagues, and with 
that I’d like to welcome chancellor King today. (Applause)
You’ll get your chance to say something in just a moment Chancellor. I hope you have 
your pad of paper with; anyway, we sincerely appreciate you coming to our meeting. And 
now we need to begin our sector reports. Lets begin with university centers:

U.C: Let me take this as a means of getting to the university centers had two major areas 
of concern. One of regards to student access and recruitment, and second the academic 
bill of rights. On student access and recruitment, a continuing concern about tuition and 
fees, and in particular if we’re supposed to recruit out of state, and internationally the 
continuing increases of tuition, particularly at graduate levels make this difficult. So, we 
need to attend to that we believe. Second issue of concern, the academic bill of rights 
which was submitted to the board of trustees a week or so ago by trustee DeRussy, with 
the request that the board consider it seriously. And with regard to this we have a number 
of observations, one of them is that in many respects this appears to be a satisfactory and 
reasonable approach. There are however dangers in its implementation, I can be easily 
misconstrued and miscarried, on the other hand it is clear and we know it is clear. But 
there are instances of behavior, or if you prefer miss behavior by our faculty that justify 
the claim that something like an academic bill of rights is required. These may be few, 
they may be far between, but they are just frequent enough that they are going to get 
noticed. And in consequence, we think that we need to make some steps forward, and this 
senate might wish to consider making some steps forward. One of them is that we think 
the adoption of an academic bill of rights as proposed would be a mistake. It goes to far, 
it says too much. Second is that give the right of faculty to approach their topics, 
particularly in the humanities and social sciences in the way the dean appropriates, some 
of which may be taken as coming from perspectives that have a political component, we 
think the approach is to require that every course have a clear course description. This is 
what we’re going to do, and that it includes perhaps the perspective from which we’re 
going to do it. And secondly, that no such course is the only course of section that the 
student takes or can take to meet the requirement either for the degree or for the major, so 
that we do not have the situation where someone approaching a topic, whether it be 
English lit, or political theory, or philosophic views on business ethics, and I use the last 
one because that happened to be one that I do, can be the gate guards in terms of degree 
program or major. And last we need to encourage our fellow faculty and students to 
recognize that the first goal of our educational activities is the acquisition and 
development of the capacity to think critically. Teaching any topic from a very narrow 
perspective does not do that, and if we fail to do that, we have indeed failed, much more 
seriously than we have failed if we don’t get a 42% instead of a 41% graduation rate.
I’ll be happy to answer any questions that anyone might have

Joe: Now it will be up to Chancellor king, you can address each sector’s concern 
immediately following the report. Or you can, we can have them all report and you can 
address them collectively, its up to you.
 
Chancellor King: I’m making notes, so why don’t we do everybody, and then any of the 
concerns that are duplicative 
 
Joe: we’ll be able to combine, ok. Now our comprehensive colleges, Achim Koedderman

Koedderman: Chancellor, on behalf of the comprehensive colleges I was charged as a 
convene nor to express our unanimous support and gratitude for your efforts in 
supporting excellence in SUNY, and I want to underline that this is something that comes 
from everyone of us. (Applause) IN this context, I have this whole bundle of concerns 
that I will try to add up, which of course is contrary to what I just said. We have 
overlapping circles of questions and concerns, which come from workload to resource 
allocation, what happened to the money, which we loaned to the doctored institutions to 
questions of ratio of fulltime and part time faculty. At the bottom of our concerns is that 
there has been a fundamental change in the context of education regarding banner, 
advisement, IM we are available 24 hours now. And there's an increase of demands on 
faculty among from technology and related demands on faculty time. The complexity of 
advisement has increased, and overflow from insufficient classroom size is often dealt 
with by dedicated by independent studies which are not recompensated, and it also leads 
to a decrease in efficient use of faculty. Which leads me to the second point; increasing 
numbers of graduate students are needed in order to handle those big class sizes. But the 
comprehensive colleges have no voice current on the committee which works on the 
allocation of graduate students and they fear that there might be a shift where graduate 
students would only be available for such tasks. As teaching large classes and assisting in 
that in the doctorate level institutions. Now, we come to the third major point, increasing 
class size has made demands on faculty and there is now real release structure for this. 
However, as a fallback, position, campuses have increasingly hired adjunct faculty, and 
adjunct faculty partially who are hired fulltime But full time adjunct faculty are not a 
replacement of tenure track faculty, because they will not take part in advisement, and 
they will not take part in the curricular development which is so essential to the faculty 
mission. Budget cuts have necessitated and we all understand that, resource allocations to 
other areas, and shifts, but often those shifts are invisible. We need more full time tenure 
track lines. And that is the consensus of the entire group. Now, we would like to know 
from system administration what are the concrete goals for the faculty adjunct ratio. And, 
what kind of vision do you have for the best possible balance given our current situation. 
Now, next and related point, second to last you can believe, the point of 50 million on 
loan to doctoral institutions, they were lent, and some of the money came back, and we 
would like to know much came back, and how much will still come back, before we get 
into the next budget crisis and the next loan. We feel that morale among faculty is low in 
work related issues, we loose some of our best faculty because of salary questions, and 
we are not able to attract the best give our salary levels. Even if we do get our best people 
hired, salary compression becomes a real problem. The size of classes also weighs 
heavily on morale. Recruitment of retention is not only an issue for students its also an 
issue for our faculty. Workloads and class size however, are issues of union concern, and 
therefore my committee has charged a subcommittee with writing a request to the union 
to address those issues directly. The last point goes back to something we all love, and we 
actually have a mission written into our books, written by the trustees which we fully 
endorse and it underlines the importance of mastery of subject matter, excellence in 
teaching, scholarship, service, and continuing growth. IN this context we feel that we 
need more support, and that the areas we have here, with out allocation of resources to 
them actually just become paper tigers. The first three, mastery of subject matter, 
excellence in teaching and scholarship, are directly related to faculty development, 
faculty development is very important to us. Over all the health of the institution depends 
on your support for those five areas in faculty development, which if supported in the 
right way enables us to graduate student in time, and to achieve those common goals, 
what we need is your guidance on how to do that best.  Last but not least...we need also 
guidance from our faculty colleagues in the senate, because we would like to get some 
criteria and rules on how to formula the answer from the faculty governance regarding 
the Mission Review 2 process. So that we could maybe say who should participate in this 
to get some uniform structure so every campus actually has roughly the same 
participants. Thank you very much for your lengthy attention span.

Joe: I think what we’ll try to do, we will have an executive committee meeting tomorrow 
morning at 8 o’clock, we’ve got some resolutions we’ll have to take a look at etc. And 
we’ll also try to have a discussion about the what the senate suggestion for an ideal 
faculty composition for the campus visits on mission 2 will be and we’ll try to share that 
with or, in some form another, in discussion, or offer some options and see what the body 
wants. Um, lets have peter Nickerson from our health science centers come forward.

Peter: The health science sector would like to commend the chancellor, for articulating 
the aspirations of our faculty, with the support that you have established, with the rapport 
you have established with the faculty, and for the initiatives that have strengthened our 
academic programs (applause). We talked about graduation rates, we’re kind of fortunate, 
health sciences, especially with professional and graduate programs, that we have a rather 
high graduation rate, probably related to and active and selective interview process, 
fulltime faculty advisors, and also active cultivation of the students. At the undergraduate 
level, the health science professionals also are doing pretty well. We were thinking about 
how high, um, it’s certainly in the vicinity of 90%. Related again to selectivity, 
advisement, and the ability to work with the students because the students are frequents 
already made the decision to pursue a career in the health sciences. We are aware also of 
a new proposal in the budget for medical school tuition related to community service.   
We understand that the governors budget, there is a proposal, that would encourage 
community service, after graduation. Um, those in state students that would agree to this 
would pay in state tuition, without this agreement, there would most likely be an out of 
state tuition. This…for health sciences we encourage community service, and this is part 
of the process generally. The problem would be if we required this, then we would have a 
very difficult time most likely recruiting the students, with this type of proposal. and 
finally, we’re also aware that the executive budget there is a proposal as summarize on 
the sheet that’s been handed out to you. ON the budget, proposal to prioritize the 
hospitals, this is not the first year that that’s been proposed. We feel that this has a 
number of negative issues associated with it. The hospitals really are laboratory for the 
students, and they certainly to indeed express our service mission to the state, and the 
faculty frequently are paid by the hospitals. Clinical research as well goes on in the 
hospitals. Also we feel that this is not a very wise proposal. Federal dollars more likely to 
flow to university rather that to privatized hospitals. That’s our report. 

Joe: and now we’d like to have our college of technology, Ann Donnelley

Ann: chancellor king we appreciate all the work you’ve done on behalf of SUNY. Most 
recently regarding the tuition plan. And I know that you’re trying to work out the details 
of a modest tuition increase in indexing in a fair and equitable manner, and support 
number one you and your efforts. To carol and Joe, the senators in our sector would like 
to be included in the daily new clips distribution list. Regarding the upcoming election 
for president of the senate, in view of the rapidity of breaking news, and very fluid 
politics in Albany in the upcoming year, we request that candidates address the issue of 
logistics ion their statements, Pay inequities that persist at the college of technologies are 
causing us to loose faulty to community colleges and to industry, and to fail to recruit 
young qualified faculty. And, incidentally, <inaudible> is the lowest of the lowest 
sectors. Our sector choose not to address the academic bill of rights hoping that ignoring 
it would make it a non issue, and it would stop at the board of trustees level. Also, 
discussed factors involving advisement in the complexities of graduation rates, and we 
were delighted to include trustee Stephanie Gross in our group. 

Joe: and our last sector report will be from our specialized colleges. Kathleen….

Kathleen: ok, we too would like to thank chancellor King for his help not only with all of 
the SUNY problems, but with the sectors in particular, because here are some of our 
basic problems we’d like to see solved. I only have two things to mention, that we 
mentioned in our group, the first one is we would like and update on the Alfred college of 
ceramics concern. We thank you again, thank you very much chancellor for helping us 
last…from our last faculty meeting, and now we’d just like to get an update on that. And 
our last, we also discussed budget, morale, all the issues we have in school, but the big 
one is SOS, save our ship. We understand that that beautiful ship in Maritime 
unfortunately had an accident, and now its in dry dock. And, we’d like to make sure 
that’s there's enough money in the budget to save a beautiful ship at maritime if possible, 
no, not if possible. Save our ship…all right, that was it, thank you.

Joe: and that concludes our sector reports. Chancellor King, would you like to come up? 
Forgive me forgive me forgive me….Ken, would you come up please (laughter)

Ken: Whoah…we’ll have the discussion later. Um, the CGL’s met, and I’m not sure if 
we’re a sector…well, I think we’re a trans-sector group, crossing all sectors, and speak to 
the concerns of the university. The first major concern was regarding Mission Review 2, 
and specifically the roll of faculty governance bodies in the visitation teams, and the 
visitation process. We would like to insure that faculty governance bodies are in fact 
engaged in and part of the mission 2 process. Secondly we address the academic bill of 
rights very quickly and it went as follows. We are concerned. For any one who looked  at 
the academic bill of rights or HAS looked at the academic bill rights there is very much 
there to commend it. There is much there with which we will individually and 
collectively agree. The problem seems to be that there are a number of respected 
organizations such as the AAUP that have raised much more detailed questions and issue, 
that come out of the academic bill of rights, and we would welcome a discussion about 
that issue, and I guess one of the questions we have for you chancellor king, is this going 
to be a piece that the board of trustees will take onto itself, and make some kind of 
decision this next meeting without engaging faculty governance and faculty 
representation, and the administration of the university ion a dialogue as to the wisdom of 
this particular document. Our third concern was a continuing concern about the use of 
assessment data. Provost Salins indicated this morning that we had done well in the 
November and December period, and we certainly would support that, but that’s only the 
beginning of a process, and we all recognize that we have not even yet begun to gather of 
report the data for the strengthened campus based assessment. It is obvious that the 
guarantees that we tried to write into the agreement last year no longer hold. But what 
does that mean, and I think that’s the issue that we would like in some venue to take up 
once again. Thank you very much.

Joe: Now Chancellor King, we’d like to welcome you to the podium

Chancellor: well first, Joe, to you and to everybody here, I cannot tell you how much 
your support means to me. This has been a rough couple of weeks, and your help and 
support and Joe’s comments at the board meeting the other day were nice tonic, and more 
importantly for me personally, the fact that you feel as supportive as you do, is very 
gratifying to me. This is relationship that is probably more important to me, and has been 
from the day I walked in here, and I’m warmed by your sentiments so thank you very 
much. Let me get to business. I’ll just go down, I made my notes, and I hope they’re 
complete. The issue of tuition and fees for out of state and international students, which 
I’ll segregate from the tuition plan, that will take center stage in which I will talk about at 
dinner tonight in greater detail. We have tried very hard to accommodate kind of two 
interests that on occasion are competing. The first is that there is a political notion…this 
is not democrat republican, but just a sentiment within the legislature and I think 
generally within the state and probably most states that the sons and daughters and adults 
that attend the public university in the state where they reside and where they pay taxes 
should receive preferential tuition over those who come from some other place. So there 
is always going to be a differential between tuition charge to instate tax paying residents 
and those who come here from other places whether its other parts of the country or other 
countries. At the same time, and there is by the way, a certain pressure that we get from 
the legislature to assure that if instate tuition, that out of state has to go up by a 
comparable percentage. And the problem with that is that you’re applying the same 
percentage to very much larger base, so that it on a occasion drives increases that in our 
judgment are unwarranted for the out of state students. What we’re finding though, in the 
other competing value, is trying to keep our tuition for out of state and international 
students sensitive to the marketplace, to the extent that we track our tuition by degree, 
and I trust you know that currently in statute we are obligated to charge the same amount 
for the same degree, and so even that applies as well to out of state students. We can 
charge them different than we charge instate, but whatever we charge at the university of 
buffalo for a business degree, and masters of business administration, we have to charge 
the same amount at Oswego, and Stony Brook, at wherever else. So, we’re trying to in 
terms of out of state, and international tuition, be sensitive to the political pressure of the 
in state versus everybody else, and at the same time, try and stay within how we view the 
marketplace. I think generally…I cant tell you in every instance, but generally out tuition 
remain, even for out of state, quite competitive, and the best example I can give you of 
that is the recent relationships we have developed with a number of universities in 
Turkey. We’re offering joint degrees, this is this program where students are spending 
two years at our campuses, and simultaneously earning a degree from the SUNY campus 
they attend and their home campus in Turkey. 

The reason I raise that is the students who are coming here are paying full freight, paying 
the full out of state tuition. They may get some subsidy from the government of Turkey, 
or from some philanthropist in Turkey, but what we’re receiving from their behalf is the 
full out of state tuition. What we have learned form this experience is that most 
international students who view coming to the united states often think in terms of the 
tuition that they expect to pay at private universities. SO, being able to have the kind of 
access that these students now enjoy at SUNY at a price that although its significantly 
higher than what our instate students pay, its still competitive compared to what they 
would pay were they to attend another university public or private. That said, I hope 
that’s responsive to the concern from the sector. In terms of in state tuition and fees, I 
think what I’ll do is just reserve my discussion of that until this evening because its part 
of this much larger plan. The academic bill of rights: there are a number of issues 
contained there. I am, first I have to tell you I shouldn’t say I was surprised because little 
surprises me these days, but this issue has been percolating for some time with trustee 
DeRussy and Chair Egan. 

It first appeared in the context of trying to influence speakers that come to our campuses, 
and I have taken the view, well I think it is vitally important that there is a diversity of 
views that are presented on our campuses on typically the most controversial issues of the 
day. They originally wanted me to essentially direct campuses to direct campuses to 
invite certain speakers to come and speak on campus, which I declined to do. I figure that 
there were enough organizations on each of our campuses of varying points of view that 
if they wanted to invite speakers they could do so on their own. So, the notion of getting 
some sort of balanced presentation first in the context of outside speakers that would 
come to campus, and perhaps more recently as a result of the number of articles that have 
appeared in the national press, the broader concern that is contained in this proposal is not 
a great surprise to me. I think that, while I can’t assure of this, but I think that the board 
in taking this up would not simply take it up without consultation with faculty, and give 
the comments that I’ve hear here this afternoon, I think that approaching this 
constructively, with constructive recommendations rather than simply throwing down the 
gauntlet and saying “don’t talk to us” is a much better way to approach this, and I think 
the portends for a much more positive outcome of whatever the discussion is going to be. 
I think that some of the comments that were made here, recognizing that on occasion on 
some campuses some problems are valuable. I think that it speaks highly of you as a 
body, that we’re not sticking our heads in the sand and saying that sometime something 
doesn’t happen that its probably inappropriate, and I think the board, at least the majority 
of the board would welcome recommendations form the faculty as to how to address 
these issue. 

The couple of recommendations that you offered certainly need to be described and 
understood by the board and how those could be helpful. And, obviously the concerns 
about trying to implement a policy, whether it’s exactly as proposed by trustee DeRussy, 
or some other version of it, the also need to understand some of the concerns. I have read 
the critique by AAUP and think that a lot of the objections to these types of expressions 
are well founded, and need to be understood. I actually sent an email yesterday to Betty 
Capaldi and described my theory of like-mindedness, which is a fairly human and natural 
tendency that I think we all have in forming business and professional relationships. That 
we tend to be drawn by people who are like-minded, and there's no magic in that, but I 
think that in the context of what our responsibilities are as an institution of high education 
that we do need to find a way to assure that our students are give the broadest and most 
diversified access to points of view as we are responsibly able to provide to them If we 
can come up with some other ways of doing this that are reasonable and supportable, I 
think that’s a string and positive way of addressing this issue. And I think that frankly it 
demonstrates a very high level of responsibility on the part of the faculty. SO, I would 
encourage that, and I certainly would encourage the board to not jump on this too 
quickly, but to do it thoughtfully and with full consultation of this body. I hope that’s 
responsive on that issue. 

In terms of the concerns from our comprehensive colleges. I’m just trying to see if I can 
consolidate some of my thinking here…let me do the easy one first, the 50 million 
dollars. First, I would not describe it as a loan (laughter). But, we have worked very hard 
over the last year and a half to try and get those dollars restored to the comprehensive and 
technology campuses, from who the money was removed. I will tell you that the 
president of Cornell has a different view of how that money should have gone even 
though he was the largest single beneficiary of the transfers. That aside, what did happen, 
precisely is the following. We requested last year that the budget be increased by the 50 
million dollars, so that we could return to the campuses in proportion that they 
contributed, the dollars that had been moved the previous year. The legislature at the end 
of the process appropriated 50 million dollars for that purpose, but the governor in his 
wisdom did not veto the appropriation, but he used the powers that the budget director 
has to impound two thirds of those fund. So, the amount of money then ended up getting 
distributed back to the campuses initially, was about 16 and half or 17 million dollars, 
and the money was distributed back in proportion to how the money was transferred 
away from those campuses. In the intervening months, since that occurred, we have been 
able to do two things that have helped significantly. First is the governor just recently 
agreed to release and additional nearly 10 million dollars. I think its 9.7, something like 
that. So that the amount being transferred out of the 50 is now, because the appropriation 
is still alive, is now 16.7+9.7…whatever that is, 27 million bucks I think. And in 
additional, Dave Richter has been working on a proposal that is not fully executed yet, 
but which we are hopeful may allow us to transfer some additional funds. Again all if the 
transfers will be done in proportion to the contribution of each of those campuses that 
were donors as opposed to recipients. There is a reasonable chance that we will be able to 
get back to those campuses on a recurring basis, and that’s really been the sticking 
point…having money that will recur, not just a one-time replacement. Probably 
somewhere in the magnitude of 35 and 40 million of the 50 million. So…we’re still 
working on that, I can’t guarantee you that this last chunk will be able to be moved, but 
we’re trying very hard to facilitate that. Now, the importance of this is not just to replace 
the money that was transferred out, but also to establish a base of operating aid for those 
campuses as we go forward with a new budget allocation model. 

As you know we’ve been working for over a year to develop a new BAP, I don’t…I think 
we’re going to call it something different, but whatever its going to be called, I think you 
understand what it is. What we have done is we have been meeting with a broad array of 
our campus presidents, business officers, administrations, I think, how have you been 
participating? Joe’s been involved, and we’ve attempted to do a couple of things in the 
new model that was not done in the first go round. Most importantly the original model 
presumed that we would see year over year growth indefinitely in state support, and that 
obviously has not occurred.  As a result, model was always setting an expectation Levi 
that we were only able on a few occasions able to fulfill, and on most occasions we could 
not. In addition the incentives that were in the model which seem to work by the 
way…we have now essentially fulfilled those objectives and don’t think that we need to 
provide the same kinds of incentives, so we’re going to shift where the financial 
incentives are directed. They will now in the new model principally focus on retention 
and graduation, and at the same time try to preserve the basic balance that is in the 
current formula. My objectives from the outside which are kind of the 50,000 foot 
objectives are to make sure that we have a system that is predictable, that is transparent, 
that  is fair, and that has appropriate financial incentives in it to achieve objectives that 
are widely shared across the university. And I think that the new model will do that. 

Part of the problem that caused the 50 million dollar transfer was the model itself, and 
what we confronted was kind of the perfect storm of circumstances that created this 
enormous, and unavoidable imbalance. But, on a go forward basis, I think that the new 
model will help dampen some of those crisis consequences in the event we confront years 
in the future, with similar circumstances, I hope that wont happen but its certainly 
possible, and we think the new model will reduce the potential for the incredible 
dislocation that we confronted years ago, IN terms of this notion of full-time versus part-
time faculty, or tenure track versus adjunct faculty…there is now question that because 
we have been so constrained  financially  over the last several years, in the face of 
growing enrollment. We have essentially met the challenge, by allowing certain 
attrition…while there were no layoff, as people that were retiring that were tenure track 
faculty we simply weren’t replacing them on any campuses, with new tenure track faculty 
and replacing them with adjuncts. Is there number one some fixed ratio that we have in 
mind, no, but obviously as each of campuses look to address their own individual 
aspirations, being in a position to reverse this trend and move on to hiring more full time 
faculty is something that is a very high priority, and one of the underlying objectives of 
the new tuition proposal which, as I said I’ll talk about tonight. So, as a fundamental 
notion, we think that is it vitally important to get our selves in a position to hire more 
fulltime tenure track faculty, and I think each of our campuses will be poised to do that as 
soon as we can make the financial resources available to them. 

Obviously issues of salary, class size, and the understandable resulting morale questions 
are all again obviously tied to our financial resources and I will more fully address that 
tonight. In terms of graduate students not being available for teaching large classes at our 
comprehensive colleges, this is the first time I’ve heard this issue, and very honestly I 
don’t know enough about it to talk very knowledgeable, so I will raise it with betty 
Capaldi and the provost, and see whether or not…. first try to understand the problem a 
little bit better, and see if there's something we can do to be helpful. Faculty 
development…we are about at long last I think not very far away from publishing this 
strategic plan that we’ve been working on for far too long. Included in that is a 
commitment to faculty development. We have an issue right now that is pending, and we 
need some help to solve it, which has to do with assisting our community college faculty 
in need of earning terminal degrees to see if there is a way to facilitate that within SUNY. 

There’s a variety of issue, some are financial, and some are individual with faculty who 
take on PHD student. But, we see that as obviously a critically important need at our 
community colleges, our community college presidents are interested in facilitating 
capability for their faculty who desire theses degrees to try and find a way to get them 
into PHD programs in SUNY affordable prices. IN terms of the larger question of faculty 
development No institution, whether you’re a university or a private business can 
continue o maintain the edge that it need in excellence without continuous efforts to make 
sure that our work force is as highly skilled and as current in their respective disciplines 
as we are able to support. Again, these issues tend to be financial, and typically when 
resources are tight, these are the kinds of things that go first. So, I’m hopeful, and I don’t 
want to tell you that our new tuition proposal is a panacea for all these problems, but the 
capacity that is there in terms of providing these new resources at each of campuses is 
substantial, and I’ll actually show you some numbers tonight so you’ll get a chance to see 
that. I would hope as assuming we get this plan that these resources can be used in a 
variety of ways, including faculty development. 

In terms of Mission Review 2 give Joe’s comments about the body, apparently publishing 
a resolution on that subject I would be very supportive of directing that as the provost 
staff goes out and makes the campus visits, that included in those visits are 
representatives of campus governance. I certainly would welcome your direct and 
recommendations in the regard, and unless the faculty is fully part of whatever the plans 
are at each campus, those aren’t going to go very far. You got to be part of the process 
and support it, or you know, its wasted effort. So I support that and will support you in 
that effort. In terms of our health science centers… most of your concerns pertain to some 
proposals in the budget. The new proposal, which is this…its actually a little bit different 
version of a program that the state had for a number of years, but discontinued late in the 
Como administration, which was essentially trading tuition for a certain number of years 
of service by graduate physicians in high needs areas. This is kind of modeled off that, 
although there are obviously some other wrinkles in it in terms of how it works. I don’t 
know whether the legislature is going to want to do this or not, very frankly. There was 
some energy early in the budget negotiations to simply take all of our medical school 
tuition and push them up the level of private medical schools, and we strongly resisted 
that and persuaded them not to do that. But this particular proposal, I don’t have much of 
a reading on that, it’s a little obscure, but we would be interested in the view of our 
campus presidents and faculty on this as we get into the budget process. In terms of the 
privatization of hospitals…this is a proposal that is now been offered by the governor 
once before, maybe twice before, it calls for a study. The legislature has not accepted it in 
the past the unions have been very much opposed to it, and I don’t think that the proposal 
will get much farther than it has this year. I will say this though…I’m not as concerned 
that if the structure of the hospitals from a business perspective would change, either to 
make the public benefit corporations of 501-C3 corporations that it would adversely 
effect either our teaching mission, our research mission, clinical trails or any of that. 
There are some reasons very honestly to consider doing this, although most of the 
concerns that would have caused me to take a much stronger position on this a couple 
years ago we were able to resolve with the deal we worked out in 2001…2002… and in 
this years budget as you notice, the governors executive budget adds some new dollars 
for a hospital as part of their operating subsidy consistent with that deal, so I am very 
pleased about that, and our hospitals are much stronger today financially than they were 
four years ago. 

With our technology sector this pay equity issue which has been haunting us for a long 
time, I hear this regularly when I get out to our campuses, and I’m a little bit perplexed 
because I view most of this as an issue that’s tied up with our labor contracts over which I 
have no control, but I’m happy to try and understand how we can elevate the pay status 
for all our faculty, but particularly our faculty at our technology campuses. We made the 
observation recently to people up the hill, and I may do this in my budget testimony 
before the legislature in a couple weeks, that we spend less money training a third year 
student in quantum mechanics at any one of our campuses then we spend on a fourth 
grader teaching them arithmetic and spelling. Certainly seems to be an imbalance there as 
I see it, but again all these issues are tied up with money, and some of it I can control, and 
some of it I can’t. 

The Alfred update. We have a team of financial people that if they have not yet been to 
the campus are on their way shortly, including our senior most finance people to start 
grappling the reality of whatever the financial concerns are the Alfred university has, and 
we have made it eminently clear to the president of Alfred university that by statute we 
are entitled to have appointed a single unit head. He has been persistently avoiding our 
demands, and we are working on what we can do to remedy that. Some of this has to do 
with what our powers are under the statute. I’m not particularly fond of getting into a big 
confrontation, but the president has not been terribly responsive to our requests. I’m 
hopeful that the financial review that will undertaken as I said, I just don’t as I’m 
standing here if the teams already been out there or not, but if they haven’t they’ll be in a 
week or so. We’ll be very interested to know what that demonstrates, and we’ll hopefully 
use that to resolve some of the tensions that have developed over the past couple years. 

In terms of the ship at maritime…I was not aware that there was an accident or that it 
needed repair. I will tell you, and I don’t know whether or not there are specific fund in 
the capital budget or in the operating budget to address whatever the costs of repair are, 
but I can an tell you one of the most important features of the executive budget was the 
restoration of a 30 million dollar lump some which had been removed a year ago. It was 
restored in the executive budget, the lump sum is that pot of emergency money that we 
need desperately for stuff like this. Now, I don’t know the extent of the damage to this 
ship, or what its going to cost to fix it, but certainly that pot, which we don’t have till the 
legislature give it to us, but its in the budget, might be a source of funds to fix. There's no 
question in my mind the ship is an integral part of our mission at maritime, and I have no 
intention of losing it from our training capabilities, and from my personal perspective its 
always fun to say I have a Navy (laughter) I think that covers everything, thank you very 
much
(Applause)

Joe: ok, well thank you very much
<meeting adjourns>




UFS
Winter Plenary 2005
Saturday Morning Session

Joe Hildreth: I’d like to bring to your attention that we are going to make a small change 
in the agenda. At around 10:00 just before the committee reports we are going to have an 
introduction of the candidates for the president of the senate by the nominating 
committee.  Following that we’re going to ask each of the candidates to make a short 2-3 
minute statement so that you can get to know them.  Now it’s my pleasure to introduce 
the president of the student assembly and trustee that we were able to honor last night, 
President Stephanie Gross.

Stephanie: To start, I want to thank you again for last night.  I had an amazing time and 
so did my parents.  I just wanted to thank you again for all your support – it was really 
touching. It’s been such a great experience getting to work with Joe and the rest of you.  
To start, before I just talk about some things that are going on, I really want to say how 
excited I was to see your positive response to the chancellor and your support for him.  I 
know I support him, even when we disagree I think it’s important to have that 
disagreement and I really enjoy working with him.  Whatever ways you can show that 
you support him, it’s really important.  The reason why I have to leave you guys early 
today is that our executive committee meeting, is meeting downstairs in S-137 if you 
want to stop by.  We will be talking about ways to show our support to the chancellor as 
well.  If you have any more suggestions for me to take back to them, I’d love to have 
more feedback on ways that we can show our support.  
	 On the tuition plan, and the tuition issue, the chancellor and I have been working 
on it for a very long time – working out some of the final details.  Some of the questions 
you asked are some of the things we have been talking about for a very long time now – 
trying to figure out the best way to handle some of the – I want to say more minute 
issues, but they are still extremely important.  We are supportive of the plan; we are not 
supportive of the tuition increase.  When I testify to the legislature I need to explain and 
encourage people to explain that when saying you do not support the tuition increase it’s 
not a debate over the need for the money, it’s a debate of whom you are asking to pay for 
it.  Therefore, if they don’t support the tuition increase they still need to give the dollar 
amount to us so that we get out of this hole and the tuition plan actually works and 
functions the way it was supposed to – where it is an index, it’s capped, and therefore 
students are paying a small fee but, it’s predictable for the next four years.  We like to 
joke, it’s like buying a car – your price doesn’t go up.  Also, with the budget this year, 
with the TAP and the EOP I really enjoyed the chancellor’s presentation yesterday 
because it obviously brought new light to the issue with TAP.  We are very concerned 
about it getting filled, but hearing that it actually is a lower amount than in past years was 
really something good to hear.  I hope his assessment is correct, that they will get filled, 
and that’s something that we will be pushing for, with a lot of energy to the EOP and 
TAP to the other programs.  To let you know about the academic bill of rights that trustee 
DeRussy brought up – I wanted to let you know yesterday, but I figured I could tell you 
today – I think I hesitated to assume that it was a joke when she gave it to me originally, 
so I apologize for not taking it seriously to Candice, but, she did talk to me about 
bringing it to the student life committee or academic standards.  So, through Joe, I can 
keep you abridged to those meeting and those dates, and what committee decides to put it 
on their agenda – there will be a lot of dialogue.  Just so you know, for the past two or 
three academic standards meetings since trustee DeRussy resigned as chair she has not 
attended, so what’s somewhat positive it her attending these meetings she’ll have to 
speak to the issue, if she doesn’t attend, like she hasn’t been attending, we will talk about 
it and it will probably die there.  I need to really look over the academic bill of rights in a 
little more detail.  It was something that I just kind of didn’t take that seriously.  We’ll 
look at it a little bit more, and if you guys have any more feedback please feel free to e-
mail me or communicate through Joe, whatever is easier.  Something that I was very 
happy that did take place, that we were very supportive of, was the board of regents 
bringing back teacher education from three years to get certification to five years.  
Unfortunately they did also pass an issue with faculty that I wanted to let you know.  
They have a percent that need to be full time for teacher education, I believe it’s 51, and 
the private schools were pushing to be lowered and they did lower it – I believe it’s 41, or 
40 percent, or under 51.  This isn’t really an issue for us because most of our teacher 
education programs are above, but I did want you to know that I think this is something 
that I think you should keep a bridge to simply because it does leave the opportunity for 
teacher education programs to have less full time faculty, which is definitely not a 
positive thing.  About the student assembly, just some things, our spring conference is 
going to be April 15-17, in Rochester. One thing that I have been constantly pushing is to 
have full attendance of our delegates; there are 112 delegates for the student assembly.  
At our last conference we had about 65 or 70 of them there – it’s extremely difficult to 
get all of the students there, with schedules, classes and just travel arrangements, but if 
you could all please go back to your student government leaders and encourage them to 
attend.   All of our meetings are, I think, extremely important since the student assembly 
meets only twice a year – in the fall and in the spring – as well as executive committee 
meetings.  It will also be my last meeting and it will be a very important election.  There 
are rumors of tens of twenties of people running for president, who knows what happens 
in the end.  I look forward to it, so I really hope you encourage your student government 
leaders to attend.  The last thing I wanted to talk to you about, I’ve been having 
individual conversations with a lot of you, I want to be as forthcoming as I can and if you 
have any questions I would love to answer them, but I wanted to let you know that while 
these past two weeks have been the hardest sitting on this board, they’ve still been the 
most gratifying.  Seeing the board member’s act like board members has been amazing.  I 
would go to meetings and we would not talk in the time span between occasionally a 
phone call, if anything just a “hi, hello,” whatever is going on, but mostly on my end 
calling them and keeping communication there.  These past three weeks I’ve talked to 
almost every single board member on the phone more than three or four times; one of 
them calling me at 12:00 at night – I didn’t think they were up that late.   So to see them 
respond the way I responded, and to see them take and realize that there are issues worth 
fighting for was extremely gratifying.  To see them communicate with other board 
members, to really questions things that were going on – it was really important and I 
wanted to let you know that to start this is from a board I was once heard classified as 
lemmings, so it’s good.  I didn’t say that, somebody else said it.  Also, for the graduation 
rates I wanted to let you know that, as the chancellor said, our chairman was mistaken 
and I think it’s fair to say that he was mistaken, unfortunately, I think you should know 
that most people realize that his intentions were not pure.  It’s a very nasty and political 
situation right now and I think anything that we can do to do the moral and right thing 
and support the people that we know are working hard for the institution is extremely 
important.  Does anyone have any questions? 

Q1: What actually did happen at that board meeting?

Stephanie: Which one, the last one in New York City?  Most of our board meetings when 
we go into executive session we usually do it because we have an interviewer or we have 
litigation issues, we always have litigation issues, so when the chairman had suggested 
that there was no need to go into executive session most of the board members just 
looked at each other and said, “Ok, why not?  We can wait.”  He had made a comment 
that at the end of the public session, after our blue-sheet was all voted on, if we wanted to 
go into executive session we could.  So we all said “fine.” The real mistake in that was 
the fact that our board meeting agenda shows people that we have executive session at 
11:00, most likely, in parenthesis that the board might call executive session, and that our 
public meeting starts at 1:00.  I really wish we hadn’t done that now in hindsight because 
so many people showed up at one thinking the board meeting was supposed to start and 
they didn’t realize we were done with our board meeting.  That’s something that we 
definitely need to talk about.  If it says we’re going into executive session, we need to 
wait for our board meeting at least.  It was really unfair to a lot of people that were 
expecting us to start at 1:00.  From a lot of the controversy that’s happened these past two 
weeks I think it’s fair to say that our chairman did not want the dialogue that was going to 
take place and therefore waiting on executive session, and waiting to have that dialogue 
at another point seemed more favorable to him.  I have made it clear to him that I have a 
lot of questions that I want answers to and I’m very happy to know that there are a lot of 
other board members that have a lot of questions they want answers to as well.  

Joe: I think you can understand why we value Stephanie being on the board as much as 
we do, because it’s great to have her there.  She mentioned a couple things and in terms 
of all the materials that we had, I failed to mention to you that on behalf of the full senate, 
on the teacher education issue that Stephanie mentioned, we were alerted to that and 
before the board of regents met we had a meeting of the executive committee and we 
passed a resolution and I will get to the resolution:  Therefore be it resolved that the 
SUNY university faculty senate executive committee opposes the amendment of the 
commissioners regulations which would relax the 50 percent minimum requirement for 
full time faculty in teacher education programs.  This we sent to each member of the 
board of regents electronically before they were to receive it.  So it was in their hands and 
in addition to that, one of our members of the operation committee, Kim Dawson, is 
actually in regents, so we had a little e-mail back and forth with him.  It did not stop that 
change which we did not want, but we did what we could to try to influence the outcome 
of it.  That’s why the executive committee is empowered to act on behalf of the senate 
because some of the times you just have to act in a timely fashion or you won’t have any 
influence at all.  So we did try to stop that change.  I have a copy of the American 
Association of University Professors statement on the academic bill of rights.  I sent this 
out, thanks to Greg who sent it to me, to each of you e-mail addresses Thursday morning, 
so it will be on your computer and I’d like to give this to Stephanie so you can have 
another perspective on that.  

Q2: I don’t understand, is the senate against the 50 percent rule or supportive?

Joe: We were supportive of the 50 percent rule and it was proposed that it was going to 
be changed and we opposed that change because we felt that it would open the doors to 
more adjunct faculty and fewer full-time faculty.  

Q2: It was going to be changed to what?

Joe: It was actually going to be changed, and I think it was changed to an unspecified 
percentage, a reasonable number with no minimum at all.  

Q3: Something about the teacher ed. thing to understand is NCATE, which we all have to 
be accredited to by NCATE to TAP, say that we need to have a sufficient number of full 
time faculty for regents – at least 50 percent.  Now they’re saying, “if you’re doing a 
really good job and your student teacher candidates are passing the New York State 
teacher exam we’ll let your powers hire fewer full time faculty because you’re doing such 
a good job,” instead of saying “now you need to do an even better job.”  If your students 
are passing the New York State certification exam with an 80 percent or better, which we 
all are, we can go lower and lower with full time faculty.  

Q4: Something that has been happening on my campus, we don’t have a department of 
education.  The programs of educations are attached to the academic departments.  How 
do we enforce such a rule?  If you have for example ten faculty members who are in the 
teacher education program and you are affiliated with the history department, now you 
can have ten lecturers and when you compute the numbers because we are part of the 
history department we have more than 50 percent.  Those who are involved in the teacher 
education program, they’re all non-tenure faculty members, so that’s how my campus is 
getting around that issue.  

Joe:  Well, see, that’s what we hoped to avoid and unfortunately the regents did not go 
along with our recommendation which is to keep the 50 percent rule and that’s no longer 
in effect now.  We did what we could and I hadn’t reported on that, and when Stephanie 
mentioned it I thought that I should.  I wish we could’ve been more affect I’ve, but we 
weren’t able to stop them from making that change.  

Q5: Joe, I just wanted to ask you, Stephanie said that she was going to be meeting with 
her delegates today to find out what other things could be done to be supportive of the 
chancellor if I understand correctly.  I know that we’re going to be talking about a 
resolution in support of the chancellor, but maybe we might want to briefly talk about if 
there are other things we might do to be supportive of him.  

Stephanie:  Two things: One, just going back to the faculty issue with teacher ed. – it was 
really a hard sell because there were a lot of private schools that were pushing for it, and 
their organization KIKU had a lot of people involved pushing for it, so it was pretty 
powerful.  I keep teasing the chancellor about how we need to have some sort of 
chancellor press conference, party thing and he keeps telling me I’ve lost my mind.  What 
I want to try and start, and something that I think Joe will keep you informed with is with 
the tuition plan and still working some minor details out with it Mike Trunzo is putting 
together a lot of really amazing initiatives, one which he is still waiting to get approved.  
I don’t know if I am jumping the gun by telling you about it, on the website having a link 
where it will set it up so that students, family members, faculty, parents, alumni, can click 
and send a direct e-mail to your congressmen, your legislatures, a bunch of different 
people, and it will automatically send it to them, letting them know, “I am a student at 
this campus and I support the tuition plan.”  It’s a really nice system; we were going over 
it yesterday, he’s still trying to get approval for the set up because it’s pretty complex 
website wise.  With that and the chancellor going to these campuses as he talked about 
yesterday, and traveling and visiting them, I think that as long as people are talking 
positively about the plan and coupling his name with that, I think it’s a really good start 
and I think it’s really great that he’s going to be visiting these campuses to really push the 
plan because there are a lot of people that have misconceptions about the plan and even 
myself as a student, supporting a lot of the concepts in it and that’s something that they 
really need to understand which is why I will be testifying to the legislature to let them 
know this is something we really do support, in the general sense that it’s planned out 
right now.  I hope that my group comes up with some other ideas and I will definitely 
relay them back to Joe and the rest of you on ways that we can really show support.  I 
know in a general sense we have a tendency to write editorials and I know that’s one 
thing that a lot of them are hoping to do – to talk about all the positive things that he’s 
done, and hopefully in time maybe some of the miscommunications that have come out 
will be seen in public.  

Q5: Two quick things for Stephanie while she’s still here:  I think you are very wise to 
point out the difference that the two ideas shouldn’t necessarily be formally linked, that 
we need money, but getting money from students is certainly not the only place we can 
get it from.  Just because we need money doesn’t mean we should be getting it all from 
the students.  I think you are wise to try to break those ideas apart.  The other thing is 
unrelated to that, but to the academic bill of rights.  Although we in this room, and our 
student body, all are researchers I find we can’t read everything and I find one thing we 
often do not read is literature of the far right, or conservative literature.  The bill of rights, 
and the idea behind the bill of rights is old news.  It’s been out there for a couple of years, 
but we don’t intend to read that.  The accusations that speakers funds on campus’s only 
go to liberals or to democrats, who knows the truth of that, that these are old charges and 
the academic bill of rights is not a new idea.  It’s pernicious in that it continues to be said 
loudly and in the present of a well organized fashion and she’s taking the facts that we all 
agree with, that there should be a broad diversity of thought and intellectual pursuit on a 
campus and using those facts that we agree with to propose something that not all of us 
would agree with, their academic bill of rights.  It’s a dangerous thing and I think that 
there should be some effort to report on that literature in this country which is ever 
growing, and which many of us are ignorant about because it’s not who we are.  

Stephanie: I think the chancellor said it best yesterday when he said that we have a 
tendency to just go with what is like-mindedness to us.  Obviously a lot of us do not 
agree with what the academic bill of rights is referring to. It’s hard for us to talk about it 
and digest it.  That’s why I really was sincere when I told trustee DeRussy to bring it to 
either of the committees, as a voting member to both of them so whichever one she 
prefers because it obviously is a student issue, but it does deal with obviously academics, 
so either both or either one.  We should talk about it, but her push for dialogue is not as 
sincere as mine, and her willingness to talk about it is a lot shorter than mine.  So if we 
have dialogue, we can talk about it for a year or two and she would want to see change in 
a week.  That’s one of my concerns.

Q5: You’re right, certain of us are more willing to talk than others and that is a problem, 
but it’s something that we have to acknowledge as a problem and mostly we just haven’t 
been looking at it.

Stephanie: If I could just make a comment about the tuition increase as you mentioned.  
The main reason why it’s so important to keep it different, to separate the two that we do 
support the tuition plan, but just remember these numbers: 950 was the last tuition 
increase, that was a 27 percent increase, and now another 500 brings it to about a 46 
percent tuition increase over the past three years.  That’s an obscene amount of money 
that you’re asking the students to cover in a very short amount of time.  These numbers 
need to be very clear to people.  

Joe: Thank you Stephanie.  Now I have an opportunity, an honor to introduce another 
important member of our community, the president of the faculty council of community 
colleges, Kimberly Riser.  She has been at all these meetings that you’ve been hearing 
about.  Kimberly has also been there representing faculty and she’s a familiar face that 
I’m always glad to see and I’m glad that she could be with us today and I’m pleased that 
she can speak to us.

Kimberly: Thank you Joe.  I bring greetings from the faculty of your community colleges 
and I also give great thanks for the invitation, the open invitation to attend your meetings.  
It’s very important for me to hear your issues so I can relate them to your faculty and we 
can join hands as we have so effectively over many years, but in particular with the 
assessment initiative last year.  I just wanted to give you a brief update, I know that we’re 
running behind in the schedule, so I thought what I would do is just tell you, highlight, 
the most prominent charges that are committees are working on.  Our academic affairs 
committee is dealing with a few issues this year, many of them involving maintaining 
academic standards in rigor.  The first one involves a careful examination of dual 
enrolment courses.  These are courses that students take in high schools and they receive 
college credit for them.  There is a SUNY policy, but we’re reexamining the policy, 
we’re looking at best practices and we do have concerns about credentials of faculty 
teaching them and consistency with what we offer.  There are some of your schools that 
do dual enrolment albeit very small.  Forestry has the highest percentage, but I’m not 
even sure if the percentages that I have here are accurate.  I believe that you don’t get 
money for your students that take these courses, but rather you’re allowed to charge fees.  
We get money at the community colleges for students who are enrolled in dual enrolment 
courses.  So you can imagine this is an issue for some of our presidents that do a lot of 
dual enrolment, but we really feel that we need to examine it.  As I tried to say before, 
dual enrolment is when a student takes a course in a high school and they get college 
credit for it, and then for example, my school is Nassau Community, we do very little 
dual enrolment, but a student might take a biology course in a local high school and it 
would be over the time frame of that public high school, but they would get college credit 
for it.  So that when they attend a school, many schools accept these courses, many 
schools do not.  I have personal experience with it in the private sector.  My children go 
to public school, but they have taken a business management course at their high school 
and they got college credit from a private school, C.W. Post.  This is an issue for us 
because of the standards.  We want to make sure the standards are maintained and the 
courses are comparable.   This is done throughout the country and we are looking at best 
practices.  You might want to just determine how many of your schools are involved in 
dual enrolment and I have the percentages, but as I said they were reported to me and it 
was said to me from system that they may be inaccurate numbers.  We also are trying to 
examine ways to maintain academic standards and credentials for adjuncts.  Believe it or 
not, we have a lot more adjuncts than you do, I know you find that hard to believe, but we 
do.  This is a major issue for us; in fact we had Bill Scheuerman be our keynote speaker 
at our fall plenary to discuss all of the multitude and complexity of issues involved with 
adjuncts.  You brought it up yesterday with regard to advisement and full timers and all 
of that.  We are also monitoring the status and strength of campus based assessment.  Our 
discipline panels, we had many people interested in being selected for the panels and we 
had a subcommittee that selected them their names were forwarded to the provost’s 
office. We have one campus, Geneseo Community College that has taken a formal stand 
regarding strength and campus based assessment since the foil request and their 
governance body has taken a stand and said that they will not do it.  Our other 
governance bodies have not deliberated on that and the impact of the foil request.  One 
other issue that Stephanie brought up and then Joe informed you of, your executive 
committee passing a resolution, we also took a very proactive approach regarding the 
teacher ed. 50 percent rule. I wrote a letter on behalf of the faculty council and I had the 
good fortune to sit next to commissioner Mills at the academic standards meeting and I 
could give it to him and encourage him to consider opposing the amendment and that 
meaning maintaining the 50 percent rule.  Unfortunately that did not fly.  Our governance 
committee has become more involved with lobbying.  Traditionally the faculty council 
has not done much with regard to lobbying and they are developing a legislative agenda 
with our presidents and we will be carrying the same message up the hill as our 
presidents next month.  Our governance committee is also researching the academic bill 
of rights.  We will be putting out a formal statement.  They may be preparing, we may be 
preparing talking points for my presentation to academic standards and student life.  As 
you know they have been directed by Candice DeRussy and Chairman Egan to examine 
the academic bill of rights.  I was thinking in light of Janet’s remarks, data would 
certainly be helpful here.  The argument being presented by the chancellor, or the 
statement being presented by the chancellor yesterday, that he had some pressure to 
encourage campuses to have speakers that presented a conservative or right wing point of 
view.  I think that it would be helpful for us to demonstrate to academic standards and 
student life that we indeed do that on our campuses.  So I am going to ask our campuses 
to respond with a list of these speakers that have presented those points of view and the 
very balanced presentations that I assume we all have on our campuses. We can talk 
about the dollars at least at Nassau Community College that we have to spend to have all 
the extra security guards and policemen when we do this, nonetheless.  Our community 
college relations committee is working with our new vice-chancellor, vice-chancellor 
Eaton, to promote community colleges and the faculty.  Our technologies committee has 
produced a very affect I’ve list serve for our governance leaders.  Unfortunately our 
governance leaders are not a cohesive group, we certainly could use your group as best 
practices, but our list serve is up and running and I’m so happy because it is such an 
important group of course.  Our technologies committee is also working with IR and John 
Porter’s office here to try and take a peek at how our students are performing in different 
programs upon transfer.  Lastly our student life committee is exploring ways in which we 
can educate our students to prevent hazing.  We are having more and more dorms on our 
campuses, but more importantly than that, or equally important, our students transfer to 
your campuses.  Of course education is the answer, education in high schools, education 
in community colleges, education on your campuses as well.  We have been proactive in 
regard to the permanent transcript notation.  I wrote a letter to the chancellor expressing 
our concern and dismay that the faculty and students were not consulted in that process.  
Your campuses have responded to student life office with your student codes of conduct, 
and how your have recorded the permanent transcript notation as you were directed.  We 
had issues for it in terms of the fact that we weren’t consulted, in terms of due process; 
we wanted to ensure that the students had due process before something as serious as a 
permanent transcript notation occurred.  We certainly support sanctions but we were 
disturbed that we were not consulted prior to that development of that policy.  If you have 
any questions I’d be happy to answer them. 

Luther: Kim, when you talked about dual enrollment, you’re talking about courses that 
they bring to campus as first year students, you’re not talking about something they’re 
doing while they’re in community college are you?

Kimberly: No, they’re in high school, perhaps a senior in high school.  They’re taking a 
course in high school and they get three credits.  It’s like A.P., except the granting 
institution is the college.  

Jim: Speaking just about Nassau, your students when they come into my program are 
some of the best prepared students I have, so whatever you’re doing at Nassau, keep it 
up.  

Kimberly: Thanks Jim.  I’ll have to relay that to the powers that be.

Jim: Now, for the hard part.  When I was at your FCC plenary as a representative there, 
and Bill Scheuerman actually used a percentage that said 80 percent of community 
college courses are taught by adjuncts.

Kimberly: It’s about 60.  FIT, Fashion Institute of Technology, as one would imagine.

Jim: We’ll write that off to Bill Sheuerman.  The other thing I wanted to ask was also at 
your plenary, the practice of something called pilot courses…

Kimberly: Yes.  I checked into that because Joe had actually mentioned that to me as a 
concern that you raised to him and there was I guess one abhorrent report. The question 
involved faculty giving pilot courses for a number of semesters before they went through 
a curriculum process of approval.  And of course in terms of academic standards that’s 
very frightening.  We don’t do them at Nassau.  I was actually surprised to hear that 
anyone did them, but I did check into it and I’m happy to report that those numbers are 
not accurate.  Any other questions?

Peter: Yeah, Kim, if you could, I haven’t heard anything about permanent rotation policy 
on transcripts, could you just explain that.

Kimberly: Sure.  I don’t have the language with me but, there was a committee or a 
council, and I don’t recall the name of it that the chancellor appointed and I believe it was 
an advisory council, and they were discussing the concept as per the chancellor about 
what are punitive measures to use with students that have committed hazing.  The 
chancellor thought that a permanent transcript notation would be a good idea, which were 
not opposed to, we were opposed to the process, that’s all.  Permanent transcript notation 
if a student is found guilty of hazing, and other serious violations, and this is where the 
campuses have some room because those other serious violations…I just spoke with Ed 
Englebride yesterday about that. Those other serious violations can be defined by the 
campus – I was really happy to hear that because of course at community colleges we 
have a lot of autonomy at each institution and that’s a wonderful thing for us and you 
don’t.  I was happy to hear that the state ops had some room now.  None the less, if a 
student is found guilty of hazing there will be a connotation on their transcript that will 
follow them throughout life that will say that they were found guilty of hazing or another 
serious violation.  Campuses were asked, the presidents and their student directors were 
asked to determine a way in which this could be incorporated into their student code of 
conduct and they responded and sent this to Ed Englebride.  Now, I’m concerned that 
your asking this question because what concerns me again…I know that you would know 
this if faculty were consulted at Binghamton.  That’s the fault of your particular 
administrators; it’s certainly not the fault of the chancellor.  It’s the fault that your 
administrators did not consult the faculty.  Originally I wished that there were faculty and 
students on that council, but you know, that can be addressed in the future.  

Achim: I would like to know what happened to gear in your body?  Campus strength, 
campus space, and whatever that assessment is.  We came up with a group of people to 
serve on the criteria for the three measured outcomes.  Is there any deliberation, what is 
the feeling?

Kimberly: Ok.  I believe that you just forwarded your names for the discipline panels to 
the provost’s office…we forwarded our names Jan. 3rd. Joe will be forwarding your 
names soon.  The next step will be appointment letters from the provost to those faculty 
and they are supposed to be convening next month to deliberate on standards and rubrics.  
At the same time the provost’s office has been put out a call, which I hope you all 
received to collect the standards and rubrics for critical thinking.  So, those are two issues 
that are happening.  Another issue that’s happening you may recall in the beginning of 
November, provost Salins sent out a request for campuses to respond to the gear 
guidelines.  Apparently executive provost Hewer could speak to this, but apparently there 
were many many suggestions for improvement of those gear guidelines, and the provosts 
office, in particular Patty Francis, is working through those guidelines, modifying them, 
and they will once again be presented to us.  I can say from the faculty council’s point of 
view, we ask that the assurances section be included in the final guidelines.  They were 
taken out and we were horrified to see that because everyone voted in favor of the gear 
guidelines because that assurances section was there and it was deleted.  That really 
concerned us.  I think that’s where we are at this point with strength and campus based 
assessment.  Now in meetings that Joe and I have been at we have been informed that the 
university, the legal department, is looking at how we might protect data in the future.  I 
know our IR departments are planning on meeting in May or June to discuss this as well, 
so that is where we are at this moment.  Any other questions?  Ok. Thank you.  

Joe: Have you had the resolution resolve that the university faculty senate expresses 
strong support for chancellor King’s leadership distributed to you?  Ed, could you see if 
we have some copies.  What I would like to do because we are running behind and since 
this is a resolution that I would say has high priority; I would like to read this to you.  I 
will read these, and then we can have a discussion and vote on this.  While their being 
distributed, I’ll just read it.   {Resolve…} This was passed with out dissent by the 
executive committee it is now on the floor for discussion… She had a question about 
what that meant and the fact is that in many of the newspaper articles there was no 
specific charge mentioned, just that there was an implication that there was unhappiness, 
but nothing specified.

Janet:  I’m proceeding somewhat carefully because I have already spoken to the 
executive board and told a point of view.  I was not able to be at the present at the 
executive board discussion so I don’t have all the information I should have.  I would like 
to personally thank Joe and the exec board for bringing up this expression of support for 
the chancellor.  I don’t want to stand in opposition in anyway to that expression.  I am 
uncomfortable with the mention of the newspaper and I think it endangers the otherwise 
dignified tone of this resolution.  Referring to the National Enquirer sort of charges 
which are unspecified and I’d also like to suggest that what I understood we wanted to do 
and what Joe Hildreth did so eloquently yesterday when the chancellor was here was to 
give a strong expression of support to the chancellor.  We don’t want to stand in 
opposition to the board – it might put the chancellor in an uncomfortable position, and we 
don’t want to stand in opposition or publicly criticize the chairman of the board either, 
who was the source perhaps of some of the allegations in the paper.  So I’d suggest not 
mentioning the newspapers and instead just firmly, clearly support our chancellor.  

Joe: We would need to have a second for that.

Pete: Second. That was an informal suggestion by Janet, so let me form it into an 
amendment that we strike the phrase that the senate in the last resolve clause, “the senate 
rejects…etc.” down to the word “and” after 2005.  

Joe: So your proposed amendment would be that the senate take out “rejects unspecified 
charges against Chancellor King from anonymous sources appearing in newspapers and 
other media in early 2005.”  So that it would then read “that the senate reasserts its 
support for Robert King a strong effective leader and advocate for the concerns of all 
members of our university community.” Is that correct?  Ok, that’s been amended, I 
assume Janet that you would second that.

Janet: Thank you, I am grateful for the omission. 

Joe: Achim?

Achim: Joe I would like to hear you about this because when you presented what you had 
done at meeting which in an altered form we have no other resolution you read this and 
when I remember at least your performance at the executive committee the crucial point 
of your presentation was just that passage.

Joe: Yes, I … if you all remember the articles that you’ve read, how many of them gave 
one specific charge indicating inappropriate leadership.  There was never a specific 
charge.  When sources were quoted in the governor’s office they were anonymous.  
When you hear unspecified charges and anonymous sources, doesn’t that raise all sorts of 
red flags?  So my intent was, and I had included this in the statement that I had read to 
the board, was to point to the fact that this is an unhealthy, unwise way to conduct 
university business.  

Marvin: I usually agree with Peter and Janet, but I don’t on this issue.  What is the 
negative on saying that the press has rushed into this with minimal, in fact very distorted 
information?  Either they got it distorted, or they distorted it after they got it and we’re 
victims forever of the press doing this.  We’re all victims of it.  I see no question that we 
should.  This is a stand not only for the chancellor but also against irresponsible press 
action, which we may all be victimized by when we start publishing our data on 
assessment.  

Tom: I agree with Marvin.  I mean otherwise, without the specific references to the 
problem, all we have is a show of support linked to nothing.  We support him because it’s 
Friday?  We have to link it, there is a problem and I think it’s the worst kind – 
anonymous sources.  So I think we need to link it.
Ken: I think this is a real issue on which we can honestly divide.  My own sense is to 
keep this as pure as possible, that we limit this particular resolution to the strongest 
possible support of Robert L. King.  I think it anyone who comes across the news item 
that may or may not be buried on page 43 of whichever paper that the faculty senate has 
endorsed Robert King, would also be aware of the larger context in which this occurred.  
We don’t need to specify that.  I share with Marvin, and certainly with you Joe, a sense of 
outrage at the way in which the press allowed itself to be played by certain people within 
the political realm, but folks, lets just keep this one on Chancellor King, I think that 
would be more effective at this point, without talking about anonymous sources and 
unspecified charges.

Bill: [inaudible] 

Joe: Ed explain all that.

Ed: Simply a motion to close debate on all matters before the house.  If you get a 2/3s 
vote debate will end.  You will then vote on the amendment, which is to delete that 
language, and then after that you’ll vote on the main motion with or without that 
language in it.  This vote is 2/3s and non-debatable.  

Joe: We need to vote on this.  Do you understand what you’re debating on?  This is to 
close debate.  All those in favor signify by saying “I”, this is to close debate…opposed 
“nay.”  Show of hands please.  All those in favor of closing debate please raise your 
hand.  Opposed please raise your hand.  It’s not 2/3s, so the debate continues.

Rose: We have been victimized by unspecified negativity directed at us and what we do 
in our universities for several years now since the board of trustees had changed to the 
character that it has now.  The unspecified anonymous sources charging us with having 
lowered our standards, the unspecified anonymous sources that charged us with having a 
weak general education program.  These same sources are now attacking the chancellor 
and we have an opportunity to start to expose their M.O. To start to expose the fact that 
one of the things that happens and has happened to us is that they tear down the 
reputation first and then they come in to attack with their agenda.  I think that this is a 
typical way of doing things for a certain group of people.  To expose that… I think we 
need to be continuously exposing it and the fact that you’re bringing out that now I think 
is important.  I would suggest that we bring it out now and to be perceptive and perceive 
when this is occurring and directed at us and then expose it to.  It’s the only way that I 
think we going to be able to stop it.

Achim: I believe that your presentation and your presentation on our behalf at the board 
of trustee meeting was something that we should endorse.  I also believe that it left a 
good impression and it leaves and much better one if we stand behind you in the senate 
actually retroactively ratifying what you did by saying with the common voice what you 
said with the longing voice before.  I think that by altering substantially what you said we 
take the support away.  So I wouldn’t like to alter.

Jeff: I tend to support the amendment because I don’t like to be part of disseminating 
these unspecified charges, I don’t know what they are.  The resolution doesn’t say what 
they are and it’s as unspecified at the charges themselves.  I support the amendment.    

Marge: I support the amendment because sometimes I think what happens, although 
those of us, perhaps in this room may be intimately familiar with the articles with the 
particular statements that were made in the media are very few comparatively speaking 
because downstate we are not very clued in.  I certainly had not heard of it personally and 
I don’t think it’s been a subject of discussion outside of a certain area and when you put 
in this kind of language, what do you mean unspecified sources?  I think you’re actually 
shooting yourself in the foot by bringing it up again. On the other hand saying that we 
very much support this chancellor and talk about the terrific things we like about him... I 
think someone used the word pure, I think it is pure.  This leader is well respected by the 
people who seek to follow him and have been satisfied going to these ways.  By raising 
the piece of this…the unspecified is unspecified.  You’re reinforcing something that 
should be dying off.

Joe: Just for the record it specifically refers to an article from the New York Times that 
was then picked up by other newspapers and repeated.  Personally, I want to go on the 
record that I am not ever going to be on a part of anything that uses anonymous sources 
and unspecified charges.  It’s character assassination in a horrible manner.  

Dick: I tend to oppose the amendment I guess because I sided with Joe on the disgusting 
things I’ve read day after day in the Times Union. A slight concern I have is about the 
unspecified charges verse the unsubstantiated because while I am willing to believe much 
of the crap that has been in the paper may have been leaked by the head of the board or 
by a certain acting or interim president or others for their own venial motives.  Some of 
the stuff that was in the paper seems to be reporters speculating, and I recall specifically 
something in the Times Union speculating something about not only Bob, but his wife 
Karin having some financial irregularity that was being investigated, that sort of thing.  
There’s an awful lot of nasty stuff in the paper that wasn’t leaked out of the so called 
Egan Ryan connection, but came about through various reporters who were stunned by 
what the hell was happening and drew their own conclusions and indeed some people if 
we pass this… although I am for it, possibly some people will be going back in the papers 
looking at these nasty things all over again and some of those charges are not unspecified, 
they are unsubstantiated.  

George: I want to support the resolution the way it was written because we are 
addressing, responding to specific individuals out there.  We may know who they are, but 
they didn’t identify themselves and I don’t think the rumors will die by themselves.  We 
don’t really mention in the resolution whom we are addressing and what kind of issues 
we are talking about.  We can’t have a resolution out of the blue that we are supporting 
the chancellor; that doesn’t make any sense.  We need a strong resolution to say why we 
are supporting him and those are the reasons that we are supporting him. I don’t see any 
reason why the last 5 words should be taken out from the resolution and I think they 
should be there.  

Andrea: I’m going to be very brief because I am very passionate about this and I know a 
lot about the inside baseball on this.  I understand and I am very grateful for the fact that 
the senate as a whole to support the chancellor.  He is a terrific man, I have worked for 
him for 14 years, and in those years I have never known him to do anything that would 
cause him to have this kind of stuff played out in the paper.  All this was is character 
assassination.  It has put his family through hell and I hope none of you ever have to go 
through it because what I have found out in my 14 years being in the political scene, and 
the Albany scene here, which is such a far cry from politics it amazes me, that no matter 
what you do if someone is out to get you, they will get you.  Perception is reality here.  
The chancellor was mentioned in the canal situation along with his wide.  The Attorney 
General stood up and said that they had found that the Kings had done nothing wrong, 
but every time it’s in the paper they make reference to this.  This is just out and out 
character assassination of the chancellor which will hurt him if the chairman succeeds in 
what he’s trying to do in getting rid of the chancellor and trying to find another job.  I just 
hope none of you have to go through this and whatever you do to support the chancellor I 
am eternally grateful, as I know the chancellor is.  

Pete: Janet’s first comments along this line had to do with keeping the resolution pure.  
That’s why I suggested an amendment that would do that.  I would urge my colleagues to 
see it that way. The kinds of issues we’re talking about, particularly referencing events, 
charges or lack of charges, not referencing them explicitly, properly belong in whereas 
clauses.  Once we are done with this amendment I am prepared to offer a second 
amendment, but it’s out of order at this time, that would specify the whereas clauses that 
would cover these issues.  I agree they need to be covered in here.  I don’t like the idea of 
having a resolution say that we are going to point attention to the charges.  I would rather 
say lets keep the resolution to say we support the chancellor.   Let’s make sure we cover 
that, but do it in the proper way through some explanatory part – which is was whereas 
clauses are about.  

Pare: I would just like to say I support the original resolution and I think there are 
moments when keeping it pure makes sense and in this case I think we need to think 
about what affect a resolution might have and to be affect I’ve and to be pure in fact, I 
don’t think does it.  I think the information is out of context at that point.  I understand 
the kind of discomfort with the reference to newspapers and the language of unspecified 
etc… We understand that there’s a messy situation that is taking place and the subtext in 
the conversations that are not the official ones that we’re having now, but that we had for 
the last day, have addressed that there are some very serious problems and a person who 
we feel very strongly as serving in the university system with some great excellence and 
somebody we can work with is being threatened.  I think it’s a real mistake to be pure 
with it and I’m willing to deal with some messiness because it’s important to call out 
even if one doesn’t get it all right, some of the dynamics of the situation that’s taking 
place.  Character assassination, etc, can happen, it continues to happen, unless you call it 
out.  It’s an invitation for that to take place.  I hope even with some concern that I have 
about it, a cleaner purer resolution really doesn’t have the effect that we want.  

Speaker: Let me move the conversation from purity, or lack thereof, to the strength of 
this resolution, which is what I was getting at.  I want to support President Hildreth 
because this resolution is important to make publicly in order to support the chancellor, 
which I’d also like to do.  However if you want to pillory irresponsible press, you should 
do so in a better way and not in this resolution.  You can’t use the resolution for both 
things.  The way the resolution is worded now, I have no idea what you’re talking about 
it suggests something like sexual misconduct perhaps.  Who knows what was in those 
newspapers according to the wording of this resolution.  If I remember the public who 
was not as involved in this as we are, that’s what I would think – oh, they caught the 
chancellor in a compromising position.  This wording is too vague.  It is in a way as 
vague as the newspaper articles that we feel so strongly about.  So, let’s have the 
strongest possible support for our chancellor, but say what we mean.  If you want to say 
that newspapers at the time participated in character assassination I believe you should 
make that direct statement. I however think it will weaken the resolution, which simply 
says, we are the faculty senate; we support our chancellor. 

Marvin:  I think that the argument about unspecified is beside the point.  The word in 
here that’s critical to us I believe is the word reject.  That’s the word that we should be 
voting on.  We reject all of the allegations that were made against the chancellor because 
we think they were irresponsible.  I think we aught to make that stand now and in this 
absolute place.  The man was pilloried by the press and we’re going to pass it by and say 
we support him because it’s Saturday.  I think the key word in here is reject and this is the 
thing we should put our foot down on.

Joe: We’re going to try to bring this to a close…try to move through and have a vote on 
this amendment. 

Ken: Thank you colleagues.  Listening to you I have come to a somewhat different 
understanding of what this might do.  However, I don’t think it works where it is.  What I 
am going to suggest is that if this amendment is defeated, we take out the clause that the 
senate abhors, and make a single whereas clause, which would read something to the 
effect that whereas a raft of news stories are reporting unsubstantiated charges against 
chancellor King based upon anonymous sources received wide circulation in newspapers 
across the state in early 2005, therefore be it resolved, we support the chancellor.  It is a 
way… if in fact that’s the key, then that’s what should come up front.  And I understand 
Joe, that’s what you led with when you were before the board.  I would just suggest to 
you that there is a way in which it could be clarified and still have the support for the 
chancellor itself be contextualized.

Speaker:  I had a problem again with the last resolve here.  It was a little confusing and 
uncomfortable. I like the fact that with Ken and Pete talking about separating that out 
there so you remove the bit about the unspecified and put that information, which I think 
is really important and key to a lot of folks voting on this.  I think you put that, as Pete 
said, into a whereas, or put it just at the end here as Ken says.  Something that says we 
just reject the practice of a publicizing unspecified charges from anonymous sources.  
Certainly we can pass resolution after resolution here, but if you separate the last to parts 
it makes it a little easier for people.

Osman: I don’t a pure resolution will give the message, so we need to somehow refer to 
what is going on.  You could say the senate rejects the charges – if you want to take out 
unspecified.  Or rejects charges against the chancellor doing his leadership at the 
university, but I strongly believe that we should refer to what’s going on.  A pure 
resolution is not going to give the message.  

Runi: I agree with this we can’t be pure moment.  I think putting it in a whereas clause 
removes it and sort of says, we’re responding just to this one thing that has happened – 
the newspaper stuff.  There’s a whole raft of things that have been brought to bear.  The 
newspaper stuff is the worst part of it, it’s the most obvious and public part of it.  Shifting 
it to a whereas clause sort of makes it almost inconsequential.  I wish that we could find 
Janet a way to state…and I think Marvin came close to it when he said we reject any 
attempt to pillory the chancellor.  We need to put it into the resolution itself.  We need to 
keep it in the body of the resolution, but I do agree that this saying sort of unspecified 
charges, anonymous sources elevates the sources themselves to a point where they 
become something that people will speculate about.  If you could find a way to re-phrase 
this, we should keep it in there, in the body of the resolution. Otherwise, putting it there 
as a whereas makes it seem as though that one little thing doesn’t have to be thought 
about. It moves it away from the focus.  

Joe: We’ve got 4 more comments… its 10:31, we need to get a decision on this 
amendment.  Does anyone have anything new to add to the debate?

Melissa: Perhaps it’s not that new, I want to speak in support of Runi, but for a different 
reason.  If we say whereas this, then this, it means that we support him because this thing 
is going on and that’s just untrue. Our support is unconditional.  It’s not because of this; 
it’s because of the wonderful things that he’s done.  I don’t think it should be in a 
whereas.  It needs to be resolved that we reject this, but not as a whereas.  

Ann: I would speak to exactly the reverse.  I think that we should define as Peter’s 
solution was.  That we reject the serious allegations as whereas’s and then come down 
firm on our resolve in our support.

Rose: This is new because it’s more in depth.  This is an old technique.  I have been 
foiled.  Many of my faculty were foiled by people who were obviously working for 
people who had inside information or something.  I hate to make unsubstantiated 
allegations, but this stuff comes from our own board.  New Paltz was a place where we 
had liberal speakers and our campus president lost his job and was pilloried and was 
assassinated in the press.  My every piece of paper during the time that I was the 
presiding officer of the faculty at New Paltz that had anything to do with my name was 
foiled by somebody.  That kind of stuff is happening now to the chancellor.  The 
chancellor is being assassinated because he’s been responsive to the faculty and we have 
to come out in favor of him and expose this technique that’s been used.  This is not a new 
situation.  There’s fighting dirty, this is not a dirty fighting resolution; it’s simply 
exposing them.  I think that some re-wording is a good idea.  By the way, in the third 
paragraph of the resolve, with the ‘philanthropic’, needs and of’ in there. 

Maureen: I’ve been listening very carefully because initially when the discussion began I 
was very ambivalent, I could fully understand both points of view and wasn’t sure what 
was in the best interest of how the senate could be most effective in expressing its support 
of the chancellor and I think that we do need to provide some context for the resolution.  
If we support the amendment I do believe that then it has no context.  Because it’s very 
clear that what’s going on is very ugly, very insidious, it will not stop and that I think we 
do need to respond to it with very strong language, and I think that the problem in the last 
resolve is that the language is not strong enough.  I think that even though initially I 
thought that the suggestion to move some of the wording to a whereas, that that might be 
appropriate, but now thinking more about it, I agree with Runi’s point that diminishes it.  
Also what Melissa said, it seems like were just responding… that that would be an ‘if 
then’.  That we are supporting to the chancellor because we are reacting to this and I 
think that would not be appropriate, but I do think we need to deal with this face on.  We 
don’t like that it exists, we don’t want to dignify anything, but we can’t ignore it.  So I 
think the wording in the last clause needs to be even stronger. 

Paul: Couldn’t we just change unspecified to unsubstantiated?

Joe: Not now, we have to vote on this first.  Can we vote on this? Is there something 
absolutely new?

Speaker: It is absolutely new.  One of the issues that we’ve been discussing here is if this 
were to be removed a couple of us have suggested that it be replaced in whereas clauses, 
so I thought it was appropriate to amend the amendment since I proposed the amendment 
in the first place.  I would like to amend the amendment by adding two whereas clauses 
as follow: Whereas chancellor Robert King has distinguished himself as a champion of 
excellence for the SUNY, and whereas unspecified and unsubstantiated charges have 
been leveled against chancellor King from anonymous sources and speculations 
appearing in newspaper and other media in early 2005.  Therefore be it resolved – go 
through all those resolved clauses in the original amendment and strike the statement that 
the senate rejects from the last resolve clause.  

Joe: If there’s a second for that…I’ve been informed that under Roberts you can not deal 
with whereas clauses until we resolve the proposed amendment it’s out of order.  So 
we’re going to need to vote on the proposed amendment first.  Can we vote on the 
amendment? … Alright, now what you’re voting on is to remove this section: “rejects 
unspecified charges against chancellor King from anonymous sources appearing in 
newspaper and other media in early 2005 and that the senate…”  So if that’s removed it 
would read: “Further resolve that the senate reasserts its support for our colleague Robert 
King as strong affect I’ve leader and advocate for the concerns of all members of our 
university community.”  Are you clear? … Ok.  All those in favor of the amendment 
which would remove that phrase which I just read, please signify by saying “I.” … 
Opposed, “nay.” … I think it’s clear that the amendment is defeated.  Lets just move our 
way down the other round here.  

Ken:  … I in fact will  introduce an amendment and that is that we move the, create a 
whereas clause and specifically (I like your language better than my own).  Two whereas 
clauses:  Whereas chancellor Robert King has distinguished himself as a champion of 
excellence for the SUNY and whereas unspecified and unsubstantiated charges have been 
leveled against chancellor King from anonymous sources and speculations appearing in 
newspapers and other media in early 2005.  Therefore…and the resolve clauses continue 
until the last clause resolved in which we strike that one piece.  Now the reason why this 
is in fact, I think a better piece is that it does contextualize exactly why this is coming; it 
allows the faculty senate to note that the charges are in fact unsubstantiated and then to 
reaffirm in the strongest possible terms our support for the chancellor.  I think this brings 
clarity and it also expresses the will of the body as I thought I was understanding it 
during the course of the debate.

Joe: Now this will need a second… Now we can discuss this further.  Now I need to have 
that up here so that I can refer to it.  [Re-reads proposed amendment.]  Now I assume 
you’re going to want that phrase that we have debated for a while removed… Discussions 
on the proposal.

Maureen: I support the inclusion of the whereas’s.  I think that provides context, but I 
think that providing that context that even makes more sense than to keep this phrase at 
the end because you’re referring back to the fact that we are rejecting these insidious 
tactics.  And I think that maybe it’s not just the charges, but the tactics that we’re 
condemning.  

Marvin: I want to speak against this amendment because the way that we have it now 
we’re saying this has been a very successful chancellor, he’s worked very well with us 
and we reject these unspecified charges against him.  To put that up at the top in a 
whereas looks like all of our commendation of him has to do with those charges.  It 
makes the charges too important now because we’re saying here’s a whereas but now all 
these resolutions have to do with those whereas’s and I think it’s in the wrong place.  I 
think where it was originally is the place that it should be.  

Tim: I want to speak against this also because it’s impossible for 30 academics to write a 
resolution around the table.  It’s going to take forever if we keep trying to change.  The 
sun will still rise tomorrow whether the phrase is in a whereas or in a resolve.  

Pete: I think there is one thing we do need to keep in mind though, the audience for this.  
There are several audiences for this resolution, regardless of how it’s written and I don’t 
actually agree with Marvin that putting these whereas clauses will indicate that this is the 
only reason for doing this - although this is in fact what has triggered this body to do this.  
The audience includes several groups: One is our colleagues in the faculty; one is the 
chancellor; presumably one would be the press, but I doubt it; but, the other one is the 
board. Regardless of how you want to look at this we all know where we suspect many of 
the allegations originated and we certainly have at least a passing understanding – 
although I don’t think any of us either do know or want to know all of the details 
involved her – but I think we know what this is targeting.  The individual, or individuals, 
being targeted here who are on the board of trustees are individuals who treat their 
positions as ones of extreme authority and tend not to broker opposition very easily.  To 
be perfectly honest, if we want to be affectI’ve advocates for the chancellor and his 
position I do think we need to tread somewhat carefully here in reality of the politics and 
not be exactly in your face with certain individuals.  I think the question that you want to 
address for yourselves is: are we advocating for the chancellor or not?  And if we want to 
be in your face with certain individuals, maybe we’re doing him more harm than good.  
The amendments are still going to keep that language in there, and they put it in a slightly 
different way, but I do think we need to keep that in mind.

Joe:  Let me bring up an important point here.  We have a guest speaker that we have had 
wait for an hour and I was wondering if we might be able to table the discussion, have 
our guest speaker give her presentation and then continue this.  Now what we would do is 
that this would close debate on the question on the amendment and then it would also call 
the question.  You understand what your voting on?  This would need 2/3s.  All in favor, 
“Aye”.  Opposed, “Nay.”  Now we can vote on the amendment.  The amendment is that 
we would insert “whereas…” Opposed, “nay.”…  It’s defeated…  Show of hands please.  
It’s clearly defeated.  Now we’re on the main motion…”I”, … “Nay”.  It’s passed 
without dissent.  

Joe: Now we have a speaker that has been most patient with us and I want to bring him 
up here now – Christopher Brennan is a library part of the operations committee and he’s 
going to be speaking on the long term consequences of under funding for SUNY research 
libraries.  

Christopher: Good Morning.  I think we’ll finally get started her.  For those of you who 
don’t know me my name is Christopher Brennan, I’m the associate director at Drake 
Library and a member of the operations committee.  As you know the theme for this 
year’s university faculty senate program is enhancing support for academic programs.  
Upon joining the operations committee this year, the committee decided they wanted the 
issues that we wanted to take a look at.  What are the implications of this theme for 
university libraries?  Libraries as you know have traditionally been called the core of the 
heart of the institution, for outside of the classroom it’s where a lion share of the learning 
process takes place.  The committee wanted to take a look at the health of the libraries in 
recent years and open up discussions within the senate in terms of what the current health 
of the university libraries are and could be and what the senate as a body could do about 
it.  So what I am going to do this morning is take a look at some of the inflation issues 
that affect our academic libraries in general.  My colleague Meredith Butler from the 
University at Albany are going to take a look at some of these implications for the 
university and research sectors of our collective institutions and talk about what the 
implications are for SUNY and the various funding levels for portions of SUNY.  Lets 
take a look first of all at what inflation looks like nationally.  As you know inflation as 
measured by the CPI is nationally running between 2.5-3% a year.  That would be 
wonderful if that were true for libraries.  The inflation rate for research journals alone, is 
running 8-10% a year.  The cost for all library materials, books, AV, and so forth, is 
running 5-6% per year.  These are conservative figures, as Meredith will point out.  
Depending on discipline some of these figures are substantially much more extreme than 
that, but just to take it as a conservative figure that’s the ball park we’re going to be 
looking at.  What this means for SUNY is that for a 4 year period, from 1998-2002, I 
don’t have 2004 figures yet, library spending must increase between 20-24%, just to keep 
in place with inflation.  Anything above that of course is gravy.  What has been the 
impact on SUNY during this period, 1998-2002?  University centers library funding 
increase has gone up 20.5%.  For the comprehensive colleges within SUNY they’ve 
increase 6.3%.  The health science centers and specialized colleges have decreased by 
2.4% and 24.5%.  Statutory colleges have increased a little over 7%.  The colleges of 
technology have gone up about 6% and community colleges as you can see there are 
basically flat.  What does this mean? It means that university centers as a group are 
barely keeping up with inflation.  Everyone else is losing purchasing power against 
inflation.  If you want to see your individual institution there is a document in your 
packet that says university library expenditures that are broken down by the 32 campuses 
– we don’t provide the breakdown for the community colleges, but everybody else is 
represented.  Everyone else is losing purchasing power against inflation.  Some, such as 
the specialized colleges, in my estimation, are truly hurting and are in a crisis mode.  If 
the library is still the heart of our campuses, the heart is weakened.  If we expect SUNY 
libraries to contribute to student’s academic success we need to examine how library 
support is formulated and distributed.  Some of the discussions that we’ve had this 
weekend in terms of the Chancellors tuition plan have implications for this, but some of 
the other elements…part of it has to do with the current budget allocation process and 
how that is determined.  My colleague Meredith is going to talk about the implications of 
this for the research sector, but then I would like to have a broader discussion for a few 
minutes.  Neither Meredith or I have a lot of time scheduled for this and I know there are 
other reports, so we probably can have as full a discussion as I would like, but I think this 
is something that we need to start talking about and we will probably want to continue 
discussion at the April plenary if no other format than introduction of some resolutions 
that we may want to discuss and debate at that point.  Let me turn it over to Marilyn and 
then we can have a broader discussion of these issues.  Thanks.


Meredith: The last time we talked was back in January of last year. You invited me to 
talk about faculty rights in the digital age, I tried to encourage people to maintain their 
ownership of content that they create. We talked about institution repositories, systems 
that we can create where the things that you create on your campuses can be stored and 
leveraged across the university, and some of our plans about that. We talked about 
learning objects, all the traditionally we talked about publications, but as we move 
forward with digital content we’re creating different things, images, data sets. All of 
those things can be stored, shared, retrieved and preserved, in electronic formant, and 
that’s something we really need to be able to address. I also mentioned to talk to you 
about science direct, a significant and very expensive initiative that we have within the 
university that provides tremendous research capability to the university. I’m going to be 
updating you on most of these items and a couple of others, and things have changed, 
things have taken some different directions, and I want to point that out. What I am going 
to be doing is just going over my slides, I’m going to do them real quick, then I’m going 
to jump into the ArtStore presentation, and also a presentation of what we got in our 
institutional repository. Things really popped up with the art faculty this year, primarily 
because as Joe said, people began to realize as Kodak made its declaration that they will 
not be making slide projectors, that kind of sent a shiver of fear through our art 
department, because they’ve traditionally relied on that technology to deliver instruction. 
Now as soon as you start to walk away from that physical format, and you start to begin 
to look at  a digital format, barriers we’ve traditional held in our institutions really start to 
break down. We  actually had a meeting of visual resource curators, the people that 
manage slide collections in the campuses, librarians, and art faculty people to talk about 
what we can do as a university to being to move into this new environment. That took 
place around March. Out of that was a conversation of discipline that took place in 
October at FIT. Did anybody go to that? Oh, unfortunate there were about 210 people 
that went to that from allover the country. We had people there from the university of 
Wisconsin, Oregon, Dartmouth, Cornell, Princeton, Yale, NYU, technicians, librarians, 
faculty members, vendors, it was very exciting, and we all were sitting there talking 
about how we can begin to move more aggressively into a more digital environment. 
What was really interesting is that all of the people there that were from outside of SUNY 
were somewhat jealous of the kind of conversations that we could have within SUNY, 
because can actually talk about raising things, sharing our resources, sharing our efforts 
to produce something for the university. Where as most of the other institution are out 
there struggling with these things on there own. Part of that outcome is the SLN SUNY 
learning network, has produced an online environment, where we can continue the 
discussion with every person that was there at that particular meeting. That environment 
actually went up live earlier this week, so we’ve got about 200 or so people that are 
actively in there, that’s what it looks like, if anybody is interested in participating let me 
know. But there we’re going to have conversations about basically continuing the 
dialogue, how we can add our resources collectively, what we need to do about meta-
data, or ways to describe the objects we are putting into our systems standards and tings 
like that. We also began to have discussions at that co sit basically with art store, I don’t 
know how many of you are familiar with art store or what it is, very similar to J store, if 
you’re familiar with J store. Art store was established from Mellon money, Mellon 
foundation put a lot of money into art store, and what they’ve done is they’ve acquired 
the rights to about 500,000 digital images, and they’re making those available 
electronically to subscribers. That means that we have particular license to use images 
that if we went out on our own, just getting the rights from the copyright holders would 
be an incredible task. So art store has done a significant amount of effort to go and gather 
our rights and give us an umbrella to use them under. While we had conversation within 
the community about creating our own environment of our own images because of the 
cost associated with j store, we really looked at the cost associated with doing it by our 
self with that particular group of images was very prohibitive, and organizationally we’re 
just not there, and we wont be there for a long time. So art store made a lot of sense., I 
went to the provost, we did have some money in our library account at system 
administration. We agreed basically to put that money down for the one time payment for 
art store. That means that campuses didn’t have to come up with a big chunk of money to 
begin with, but we did have to leverage the ongoing operating cost off to the campuses 
we have 34 campuses that art participating in this, and 4 university centers, 12 of the 
comprehensive colleges, 3 colleges of technology, 1 specialized college, and 14 
community colleges, so its quite well received. What’s really interesting about the 
funding for it was that again that began to break down barriers, cause you’d go to the 
library community and the library community would say “That’s not traditionally 
something I pay for.”  Departments didn’t have the money to do it. Combination of 
departmental money, library funding, and in some cases student technology fees these 
campuses were able to pull it off. But again it kind of goes to show that even our own 
budget lines don’t hold, so that was interesting to watch. Even communication channel, 
we’re establishing new communication channels with people we never talked to before. 
Right now we got training that’s being coordinated with the SUNY training center, if 
you’re not familiar with the SUNY training center, it located in Syracuse, another 
university like program that sponsors professional development for SUNY faculty and 
technical staff. So we’ve got on campus training at the University of Buffalo, University 
at Stony Brook. That’s regional training, any body can go to it. We’ve also have a series 
of :::that will be established to train our art store. Our next step with images, we’re not 
anywhere near done with images just because we now have access to art store. We’re 
looking at additional contracts with discount, and to me its kind of mind blowing that 
didn’t have this before. These are standard things that we’ve always purchased for the 
university from a standard set of vendors out there. Every campus has gone off and done 
it onesies and twosies. If we pool our resources and get university wide contracts it’s 
going to provide deeper discounts and going to be able to afford more. So we’re going to 
be working on that. We’re working on establishing perimeters for the legal sharing of 
campus-produced images. So if you produce an image on your campus, there are ways 
that we can share it with other campuses because we are a system and because we do 
have rights with some of those images, we’ve been working with counsel’s office to 
determine what our real rights are. They have given us an opinion regarding two-
dimensional images of things that are in the public domain, based on a case called 
Bridgeman v Corel. Which does tell us that we can begin to digitize and share images 
across the university if they’re of a particular age and format. We’re establishing teams to 
coordinate the university wide meta data and image standards so that we know we've got 
certain standards that we’re going to be adhering to that will be used across the 
university. We’re looking at applications that we can put into place, either open source 
applications or commercial applications to help us with that sharing. Right now open 
source looks very attractive cause its zero dollars, and that what our budget is…its kind 
of a no-brainer right now. But the open source applications look pretty god, they’re 
generally funded by places like the Packard foundation and Mellon, so there’s a lot of 
money going into them, and they’re driven by places like MIT and James Madison, and 
Princeton, so they’re coming out with some good quality stuff. Were investigating 
hosting an infrastructure. Right now we’ve got a pretty significant infrastructure we’ve 
established out of buffalo state. With the I tech organization out there.  It’s supporting 
both the SUNY learning network, and the SUNY connect library services. We’ve got 
good horsepower with processors out there and we’ve got storage. And that’s what you 
need to drive this. And one of the things we’ve found when we’ve talked to virtually 
every institution is that part of what they’re struggling with is technology infrastructure 
and the storage cost of doing this kind of activity. So again doing it at a system level will 
give us more bang for the buck. We re also looking at training programs if we establish 
technology standards we can certainly work with the training center to establish training 
programs associated with those. Institutional repositories these are technology that allow 
you basically to store any digital asset and retrieve it and preserve it. We’re using one, we 
just installed one recently called d space, again an open source application out of MIT. 
Right now that’s what we’re using to house our 300 SUNY press titles. The SUNY 
Odeon is testing their open access journal and we’re looking at using that as a way to 
feed images, so were doing quite a bit of testing with that. Our next steps on the 
institutional repository is to customize it so the look and feel is SUNY specific. Right 
now its bare bones, very much what we got from MIT. We’re going to take and modify it, 
make it look like it’s in the SUNY.edu web space. We’re going to create an advisory 
structure to establish best practices, and we’re going to be testing additional objects, 
video, audio, and things like that, so if anybody has any particular kind of content that 
they’d like to begin to look at, to see if it would fit in this environment, I’d love to talk to 
you. There’s very interesting content out there on the campuses, I know some of it, one it 
particular I’d like to look at is the writer forum series at SUNY Brockport, 30 year 
archive video of poets and writers, that would be a beautiful thing to digitize and make 
available across the university. We need to promote the service to interested campuses. 
We’re getting to the point now where we feel we can take it into production. And just a 
quick update on our ELSEVIER science direct contract. We do now have a five-year 
contract, that’s till 2009. We wanted it off our plate as long as possible. This is probably 
the hardest thing I’ve ever done in the university. There was quite a bit of anguish over it, 
its very expensive, its very heavily used, faculty love it, it drives research, it drives 
research revenue into the campuses, but its very hard for the libraries to sustain it because 
of the high cost. In order to make it work we had to basically put it all one the table, and 
its hurting us. We dropped all the paper subscriptions, its all electronic. We got a 10% 
discount by doing that. And trying to take paper journals out of librarians’ hands is not an 
easy task. And nor is it an easy task to take the paper journals out of faculty’s hands, but 
we needed it, we need access to the content, and this was the only way we could afford it.  
By doing that we also saved enough money where we now have access to 1835 titles. We 
walked into last year with about 1300 titles, basically Elsevier
 through another 500 on the table for virtually no additional money. We increased 
additional archival access an additional two years back, going back to 1995. But when 
you look at the overall cost it’s going to be over 30 million dollars for the five-year 
period…it’s a lot of money. And in all honestly, we look out on that, and we’ve drawn 
down, all of our reserves were…like I said, we’re putting everything on the table. Five 
years form now, we’re going to be looking at a significant pull, I’m not sure how we’re 
going to be able to renew after that, But five years is a long time. You know, things can 
be different, new revenue streams can pick up. We don’t really know where were going 
tube, were also hoping that some other models begin to kick in and Elsevier isn’t such a 
market presence as it is now. Ok, so that’s it for the boring power point stuff. Let me 
show you the art store stuff, cause this is really interesting. This is the beginning of the 
art store service. It’s actually a java client you initiate through a web browser. I’m just 
going to show you some of the highlights, and trust me, everything I’m going show you 
is not available on every image…I’m showing you the really good stuff. I learned that 
from the sales people. Art store is composed of a series of collections that art store has 
gone out and negotiated for. So right now there’s a series of collections, and just the other 
day they announced 13 more institutions they’ve established relationships with who will 
be contributing images to art store…. so it’s a growing resource. This is the Duran 
archive, again just a little bit of background on here, you probably cant see it, but it gives 
you a little bit about the collection on the left hand side. And basically this is another 
Mellon funded project. Mellon gave a bunch of money to northwestern university to go 
out to the Gobi desert in china and photographed some of the caves that were there that 
hold the incredible artwork.  You’ve got to search the screen, down at the bottom, I’m 
going to type in QTVR, which stands for quick time virtual reality, again this is a high-
end function of the application. Let me get that piece started first. What this will allow 
you to do with these selected images is picture yourself in the middle of the room where 
this art is, and you can do a 360-degree pan around the room. That one takes a while to 
load up, so while tats loading up, I’m going to show the standard image on some of the 
features associated with that. You’ve got a series of controls down at the bottom, they 
allow you to basically enlarge the image, shrink the image down. Print the image. The 
application also comes with features so if you’re a faculty member you can create course 
folders and you can store your images in the course folders and allow your students to 
access it. It’s got zoom tools. I got to put my microphone down for a second.  (Inaudible 
speech) Kodak’s revenues are going down…we’re going down they made the decision to 
get rid of this live projector, picked up on the digital, and their revenues are going up 
again. It’s amazing, and everybody has got access to it now. So when you think about 
what your students are going to be expecting, what they’re going to be used to dealing 
with…i8ts going to be digital, and high quality. So these are the kind of tool that are there 
and available. Ok, let me put down my microphone on this one.  Those are the kind of 
things you can do with this particular group of images, so it’s a very impressive tool. But 
again not every slide is like this. Let me show you a couple others. Ok, you got a search 
bar up at the top. You can search across various collection or you can search across…oh, 
I have a typo in there, oh actually this…I have a typo, and its asking if I’d like to search 
for something it knows it has. SO it is giving me an option. This is a poster from world 
war two. What’s really interesting is the more you zoom in on it…well, that's a little bit 
too far…you can actually read the print. SO member of the torpedoes…its really quite 
interesting. There’s architecture in here…there’s a collection of native American images 
from the Smithsonian. So what we’re really hoping is, this kind of tool traditionally slides 
have been a province of the art departments, and maybe geology, and some others. This is 
really going to open it up. It’s going to open it up to anybody who wants to use it. Its 
available across the campus, its available for students use, it has some very interesting 
tool. It also comes with an offline viewer so you can take it in the classroom. What you 
do is create your class folder, store images you want there. You can use the offline viewer 
to download them into laptop or PC, and use it as a presentation tool in the classroom. 
Some of the restrictions on art store…you cant just download images and plug them into 
power point easily, because of the rights restrictions. The content owners are afraid of 
people running off with it. You can take smaller reduced images, download them into 
power point, but the high quality stuff, you have to use their particular tools…that is a 
drawback. So this is the viewer, you got some controls up here to proceed through your 
slides. Again, the zoom capability, and this one always amazes me cause it looks just like 
my next-door neighbor (laughter). You can do a couple of different presentation tools her 
as you can break it up into side-to-side, top and bottom. The other interesting thing, one 
of the interesting pieces that I didn’t really get to should you, probably should have, and 
let me see if I can still get to it. Ok, this is…threes a button down here where you can 
click to get the meta data associated with the images, and on some these images, the meta 
data itself is an excellent teaching tool. This Meta data is so elaborate from what 
northwestern did, it actually talks about how the site was excavated. It has a ton of 
information on this artifact. Again, not all images have great Meta data associated with 
them, but it is quite relevant and a great teaching tool. One of the other things I wanted to 
show you is the d-space…our institutional archive we’ve established. What we’ve go, the 
way d=space works is you create communities within the environment, and within 
communities you create sub-communities, and then within that you create collections. So 
what we’re playing with at this point in time are communities based on campuses, and 
now we have two, one for SUNY Oneonta, where they have a sub-community for 
educational change. And then a collection of their electronic journals, and we’ve got 
essentially the journals stored here in PDF format. They’ve available through a single 
URL, so that that can be passed around. We have this information being backed up ion a 
nightly basis so its being well preserved, and Oneonta is quite happy with how its going 
so far.  Some of the other things we have here at this point. Within the SUNY 
administration we’ve got collection for ourselves. Within there we’ve got digital images 
our SUNY press e-book collection. And presentations. So if anybody wants to go see any 
presentations we’ve give in the past they’re in there. Again with the digital images we’ve 
got something very small right now, we’re working with Binghamton to do some testing 
But you can see actually you also get a thumbnail of the image. More meta data, and 
ways to view and save the content if you choose. So, a lot do, there’s a lot out there, but 
there’s some real promise here. What’s really interesting, especially working with the 
images is how excited people are in the community. There really is a lot of excitement 
about it, and its new, and its one of those things where if we get in front  of it before 
campuses start to go off and do their own thing, I think we can really leverage the 
university quite well, and we’ll do it…the unfortunate thing is we’re doing it in addition 
to all the things we currently do as you know…you know how this all works here but 
we’ll get it done. What I would hope is that you can take it back to…being to talk about 
some of these things on your campus. This art store application…we’re not quite sure 
how this is going to travel through campus to get the word out. I can talk very well to the 
library community. I can talk very well with the technology community. You don’t 
always have good in-roads into the faculty community, so hopefully you can assist us 
with that. Over the course of time we’re going to be adding things to this system 
repository. We’re going to be adding new content, new content providers…its going to be 
a very dynamic environment. And if you don’t take advantage of it in the classroom, 
we’re doing it for nothing. Because we've got a real advantage with digital concepts you 
can bring it right in to what you’re doing on a regular basis you can incorporate any of 
this into your course management systems, you can use it in the classroom, whatever you 
want, it really gives quite a bit of flexibility.

Question: how would you access these sites?

Right now if you’re on a campus, we’ve got these set up so if you’re on a campus and 
you know where to go, what the URL is, you’re there. You go to www.artstore.org when 
you get back to you’re campus, you’ll be in./. Without the “E”…www. A R T, STOR . 
org…O R G

(Inaudible)

Please, talk to you local library.

(inaudible)

CHRIS:
Artstor should be there, but again it didn’t necessarily fall to just the library either on 
every campus, its interesting to watch how its evolved on the different campuses. But it is 
there, and it is available, and almost all the state operated campuses have access to it, so 
the odds are good that if you’re in this room, you have access to it.

Marilyn: Good Morning.  I am very pleased to be here – not for quite as long as I have 
been here, but I’ve been away from Albany for the last 3 weeks so all of this is news to 
me and quite interesting. I am relying on old technology, my voice, but I do have a 
couple of charts in your packet that I will be referring to if you want to pull them out 
now.  I want to talk about the long term consequences of under funding for SUNY 
libraries and I really do mean all SUNY libraries, but I’m going to illustrate my point by 
referring to the research libraries – partly because that’s of my experience, but also partly 
because it’s the research libraries that indeed form the base of the foundation of all 
SUNY libraries.  SUNY libraries and especially the university center libraries have 
responsibilities for serving the teaching, learning, and research needs of today’s students 
and faculty, but equally important they have responsibilities for building and preserving 
collections for future generations of students and scholars.  I think we are all aware by 
now that new methods of creating, sharing, and using information have had enormous 
impact on the ways libraries acquire collections, provide services.  Many of these 
changes have had positive impact on our universities and libraries and have vastly 
improved our capacity to serve users needs and provide information quickly and 
conveniently any time and anywhere.  However, some of these changes, such as the 
growing commercialization of scholarly publishing have had a devastating impact on the 
economic health and well being of our universities and our libraries and it is that issue 
that I want to talk a little bit more about today.  The journal-pricing crisis is seriously 
affecting our ability to provide the information students and faculty needs to conduct 
research and stay current in their fields of interest.  This crisis has been worsening for the 
past two decades but it becomes especially acute in periods of economic decline. I think it 
would be fair to say that SUNY is a system and certainly SUNY libraries have been in 
economic decline for quite sometime in spite of what you read in the papers in Albany.  
On reason for the journal pricing crisis and the continuing price increases is the growing 
commercialization of scholarly publishing.  A second reason is the trend toward large 
publishing monopolies and conglomerates – particularly in the science and technical 
fields.  These monopolies wield a great deal of power in setting prices and eliminating 
competition.  As Chris demonstrated, the journal-pricing crisis is the result of many years 
in which the annual increases in the price of library materials and especially journals have 
greatly exceeded the overall rate of inflation and have been considerably larger than the 
increases in our acquisitions budget.  Commercial publishers charge more for their 
materials than do scholarly societies and university presses.  For example, the Dutch 
company Elsevier, which publishes mainly science journals, is the best example of a 
commercial publisher charging far more than can be justified by standard economic 
measures.  Over the past decade Elsevier prices have increased over 10% annually and 
depending on the discipline sometimes 20% annually.  The chart that I put in your 
packets shows the avg. prices that SUNY Albany paid for journals in 2003-04.  If you 
take a look you’ll be astounded at some of the avg. costs.  This always comes as a 
surprise to faculty and students because they think it’s free and it is to them, and of 
course we want to fight to continue that illusion, but indeed, it’s not free.  For example 
the avg. price of a chemistry journal is now $2695 and that’s a 35% increase in price 
from 200-04.  Although science and tech are the most expensive journals I think you also 
need to look at what’s happening in the field of education.  The avg. price is not great - 
$371, however look at the dramatic increase in price – 49% in 4 years.  What that tells 
you is that these dramatic increases started in the sci./tech. area but once the publishers 
realized they could get away with it everything has become more and more expensive.  
As you can see we’ve had to absorb these price increases for journals from a low of 26% 
to a high of 59% just in the past 4 years.  Furthermore, publishers like Elsevier not only 
gouge on pricing, they also have the power to dictate the terms to their customers – terms 
of their licensing agreements –as they did to SUNY.  That forces us to enter into legal 
agreements that require us to pay more every year for the length of the contract and also 
prevents us from canceling anything from that vendor in years when we get budget cuts.  
I can’t stress enough how devastating the impact of these 2 conditions – rising prices and 
limited ability to affect the spiraling costs are on the economic viability of our libraries.  
It really prevents us from fulfilling our mission to strengthen and enhance teaching, 
research and service.  Let me give you an example from my own institution – and that 
really is the data on the 2nd chart.  If you look you will see that in that same period 
Albany had an 8% increase in grad. Programs, no real change in undergrad., but look at 
the increase in funded research – 231% increase in the amount of funded research done 
by the faculty.  At the same time our acquisitions budget increased by 15%, but what we 
purchase with that money – monographs that largely support Humanities, Social 
Sciences, went down by 18% and our journal subscriptions went down 2%.  Now you 
might say look at the full text electronic serials dramatic increase, however that’s not a 
very accurate picture – it doesn’t tell you the health of the organization.  Yes, there’s 
been a dramatic increase in electronic resources and yes, that’s a wonderful thing, but it 
all is additive cost.  Much of the content in electronic resources duplicates rather than 
adds something new, and more significantly we don’t own any of that content.  So, if a 
publisher buys another publisher and they decide to eliminate content, even though we 
might have a licensing agreement for that content, it goes away.  If we can’t pay the bill 
that content disappears in the blink of an eye.  I think that has significant implications for 
faculty and their ability to do research.  Christopher illustrated the degree of journal price 
inflation and that it’s taken place during the past five years and I have tried to show you 
how these prices look to individual academic disciplines.  I’ve also shown you the 
unprecedented growth in research and the expansion of academic programs at 1 SUNY 
university center in the same period.  Now let’s look at the economic impact of how 
SUNY has financed its campuses and their libraries over the same period through the lens 
of Albany’s libraries and their acquisitions budget. Even though our university 
administration has made every effort to support the university libraries and help us pay 
for these additional costs, the past 5 years have been increasingly grim.  Our libraries 
have needed an increase of between $350,000 and $400,000 just to cover price inflation.  
That’s really a hard message for me to carry to our provost every year.  However in only 
2 of the last 6 years was our university able to provide funding for that budget.  In 2 of 
the 6 years we took significant cuts to base and in the remaining 2 years we received only 
¼ of the money we actually needed to cover costs.  As a result we’ve had to reduce 
acquisitions expenditures, cancel journals, serial subscriptions, cancel publishers from 
our approval plans and stop buying books.  In fact, we’ve had to cut by nearly ¾ of 
$1,000,000.  What does the outlook for the future look like? We’re planning further 
significant reductions in our acquisitions budget for the 2006 and 2007 fiscal years 
because Albany is running a deficit and may not be able to add any new money to our 
acquisitions budget in either of these years.  Even though you’ve heard they’re holding 
their own it’s simply not true.  I don’t think that Albany’s problem is either unique or 
representative of all 4-university centers, but I do think it’s pretty typical.  In fact we’re 
planning to cut about 24% of our current acquisitions and that means journals in science 
and technology – the very areas we should be investing in – over the next 2 years to 
absorb the price inflation.   Moreover the additional constraints imposed by the SUNY 
wide science direct license with Elsevier requires that Albany’s libraries not only pay 
more over the next 5 years to cover the cost of journal price inflation, but we’re not 
allowed to cancel any journals in that period.  So that means while we’re absorbing this 
dramatic decrease in funding we can’t touch Elsevier journals – some good, some not.  
So we’re supporting the very kind of journal publisher that we don’t want to support. 
We’ll have to cut the less expensive society and association publications.  So it’s a pretty 
grim picture.  My personal view is that these kinds of reductions that I’m talking about, 
24% over two years, are simply unsupportable for a research library in a research 
expanding university and that the negative consequences of such action will be long 
lasting.  A research library and indeed all SUNY libraries can only be as strong as the 
faculty who support them.  SUNY libraries need a strong and engaged faculty advocating 
for sufficient and predictable budgetary support.  I thank you for the opportunity to 
present this information to you this morning – in the hope and the knowledge in fact that 
you are and you will be a strong advocate for the SUNY libraries.  Thank you very much.  

Joe: We have questions.

KEN.  Rather than a question, I just want to say a personal thank you for the time that 
you took to prepare the remarks this morning and the time that you took to stay with us so 
that they could be delivered.  They have been heard. Meredith,  could you comment on 
open access publication?

MEREDITH.  I have been an advocate of open access publication and have sponsored 
programs for the last seven years to get faculty more informed and students more aware 
(graduate students particularly) of alternatives to commercial publication.  My personal 
view is that this system is terribly broken and we simply have to stop the cycle of faculty 
producing research which they give to commercial publishers for free or sometimes pay 
to have it published—then the commercial publishers come back and are really 
bankrupting our institutions.  I was more optimistic about open access as a more viable 
alternative to the current system for early January when I got a preliminary report from a 
study that Cornell faculty have done that shows that it’s likely to be more expensive, at 
least in the short run.  And I think—I haven’t looked at their full report yet—but I think 
what they’re really saying is that in this perhaps long drawn-out period of transition, 
we’ll have to do it all.  We’ll have to support open access, you know subsidize open 
access publishing, and continue to buy print and electronic resources.  With that caveat, I 
would say that I do think I would encourage faculty (particularly tenured faculty) to look 
for alternatives when they are publishing research.

JANET.  I’ll be as brief as possible.  The report was interesting—what would you like us 
to do?  Here are some things I see—you’re talking about commercial sources becoming 
too expensive for our libraries to support, you’re talking about the fact that when we are 
no longer a party to licenses, our libraries become empty—you’re talking about the fact 
that faculty publish (which is surely just a small part of the problem that faculty publish 
with journals which make their publication unavailable perhaps even to their home 
institution.  Would you suggest for example that we push our admin to have new juried 
journals so that faculty who need to publish can do so in a new publication that’s free?  
Obviously, you’d like more money—there’s a limit to how much we can get for you.  
What are your suggestions, how can we help?

MEREDITH.  I know in the interest of time, I’m not going to go into all the various 
things that I think a faculty can do, but there are wonderful—this is already pretty well-
developed on websites and I can certainly call it to Christopher’s attention and share it—
the Spark—the scholarly publication—academic resources commission—has a lot of 
information about specific things that faculty can do and their wonderful resolutions—it’s 
a goldmine and we can get you that info.  In addition to specific actions that faculty both 
individually and as a group can take—I think the SUNY faculty senate should be strong 
advocates for predictable increases that actually go to the library—not disappear into the 
general unspecified budget of the university or college.

JANET.  We’re all familiar with that budget.

KEN?  I want to concur with what Meredith just said about regular concurrent 
inflationary increases that go to libraries.  If you take a look at the chart that was included 
in your packet, you’ll notice that each of our institutions had varying approaches to these 
various inflationary increases over the years—some in fact did have their library budget 
go up, some go down.  Part of the reason for that is the way the current budget allocation 
process is set up in that there is an amount given to each campus each year but how our 
individual campus allocate that across their operations vary from campus to campus.  If 
the institution is supportive of their library, then more money will go to the individual 
library, and if the institution is not supportive of their library, then their budget will be 
cut.  When the current budget allocation process was set up, there was no provision for 
inflationary increases, and one of the things that I would like to see (as Meredith 
mentioned) is that there should be some sort of mechanism to take inflation into account.  
Whether that’s realistic or not give the current environment I’ll leave you to judge.  But I 
think it’s something that the university as a whole needs to take a look at.

LUTHER.  Luther Peterson, Oswego.  I heartily endorse everything that’s been said here.  
However, as a singular university proof, dealing with a local university library, I find 
another ingredient in the problem, and that ingredient is very difficult to state to you two, 
and to Marilyn, and to others around here that are connected with libraries.  My 
experience is that librarians are fashioning themselves now no longer as lovers of books, 
but as information specialists, and therefore what I find happening is that they’re going 
through the shelves in our library and taking out and moving or destroying books that 
haven’t been used—say—in the last ten years…under the excuse that nobody’s using 
them or that our budget is set up so that we should have a smaller library…then we can 
get a bigger budget for a our books or some controverted logic such as that.  I’m getting 
towards the end of my academic career, and I have a number of books in early modern 
European studies that I think are valuable and important, and I was told by the associate 
director of our library that we don’t want your books.  Now, it seems to me that that 
should go to a research library.  Now a school of 8,500 student—if it doesn’t have a 
research library—if it doesn’t conceive of itself as having a research library—What’s 
going on!

MEREDITH.  I can’t comment on your specific situation, but I can assure you that I love 
books. Sometimes I do despair when I go to professional meetings that at no time in three 
or four days do we actually talk about books any longer.  But I think it is more the sign of 
the times that we have to be all things to all types / ages of faculty and students and that is 
we, good librarians will be focused on preserving the rich investment in the print world 
and at the same I think we do realize that most students certainly and a good many 
faculty want the convenience of electronic resources delivered to the desktop.  So we 
need to be both good librarians and conservators of the print world and we also need to 
be info specialists at the same time.

KEN?  To piggyback or compliment on what Meredith said:  I don’t want to disparage 
my colleagues at your library because I don’t know them and I don’t know what their 
thinking is, but a couple of things need to be pointed out:  one is, removing of library 
materials is a standard part of library operations, that’s called weeding.  Because you 
want material is of most use to your community, but in our library and in most libraries 
that I am familiar with, that process is done in conjunction with faculty.  If there is 
material that the faculty think is useful to the student either currently or potentially, that 
material stays on the shelf.  It does not get removed unilaterally without consent without 
cooperation without input.  So as I say I can’t speak to your individual institution, but that 
would be very unusual in my library and most libraries with which I’m familiar.

ROSE.  I just have a YES NO question.  Yesterday we saw a presentation from someone 
from system administration about the Elsevier. Deal, this 30 million dollar deals.  Before 
that deal was made, were you consulted, were deans and directors of libraries consulted at 
all as to whether or not they agreed with that deal?

MEREDITH.  Yes, absolutely.  In fact were engaged in endless negotiations with 
Elsevier? Over about 2.5 years that probably was a total waste of our time.  I’ll go on 
record  to say that I was one of the lone voices that opposed that deal and asked the 
Albany faculty to support NOT entering this contract for some of the reasons I said 
earlier.  I’ll also say that it would have been very hard—the faculty actually supported a 
resolution saying for affordable journal prices.  It would have been impossible to provide 
access to all of that content for the same amount of money.  So we were truly caught 
between a rock and hard place, but I think—you asked what faculty could do—in a way, 
there are several things you could in your own professional associations, and that is don’t 
allow your professional associations to sell their journals to commercial publishers like 
Elsevier.  But I guess what I want to stress is the reason that I opposed the Elsevier deal is 
that I do think it’s ruinous in the long run.  I think we really have to look at the 
implication of whether there will be any access to scholarly research at the rate the world 
is changing into the commercialization of info.

DICK COLLIER?  The way against ignorance didn’t used to be that expensive.  Now we 
have the war against Cancer.  All of this is very expensive requiring these journals—a lot 
the other scientific journals of course are concerned with various applications that might 
relate to homeland security, that sort of thing, and if you look at certain other countries in 
the world are doing, we certainly have a need nationwide to keep up on current research.  
Instead of each campus and each system of campuses being beaten up and robbed 
nationwide, is there any possibility that politicians in Washington could be convinced 
that this is a threat to the U.S. and amounts to war profiteering?

MEREDITH.  Given the familiarity that our current president demonstrates with 
information and knowledge, I think it’s a long shot, Dick.  I’m sorry, in the interest of 
being fair and balanced, should I retract that statement?

MARILYN.  I’d like to address what Luther brought up.  When your library is full, when 
the shelves are full, where do you put it?  So sometimes—this is in a sense another aspect 
of the whole funding question, because the funds for capital growth and so forth of 
library space are not particularly available.  So that it’s a zero sum gain—you cannot 
have more than the library will hold, so you make informed decisions.  The other 
comment that I’d like to make is addressing this issue of government support for more 
open access has to do with an initiative that would have required research funded by the 
National Research Foundation to be published under the condition that the material 
become freely accessible after 6 months (only NIH).  That proposal received a lot of 
interest.  The proposal is being severely decreased in scope and perhaps even withdrawn 
because of pressures by commercial publishers and so forth that they are not in support of 
having material that they publish available in open access.  There’s a counter move, 
basically.

JOE.  What I will do is I will ask our operations committee to take a look at some of the 
issues raised today and discuss it and bring recommendations to the body.  I have been 
looking at my watch and the agenda, so we’re going to move as quickly as possible…

GEORGE TORTORA:  The nominating committee would like to submit the following 
names for running for presidency.  Carl Wiezalis, Peter Knuepfer, and Jim McElwaine.  
What we would like to do is to have each candidate to give a short statement so that we 
can get a sense of a candidate for those of you who are perhaps who are perhaps new and 
don’t know these people have a sense of who they would be.  Let’s do it in alphabetical 
order.  Pete Knuepfer:

PETE.  I’m Pete Knuepfer, I’m from Binghamton, and I’m in the geology dept there.  
I’ve been at Binghamton for gosh I think 19 years.  I teach both in geology and 
environmental studies.  I’m the director of the environmental studies undergrad program 
at Binghamton.  I have a healthy and reasonably productI’ve research and graduate 
program.  I have 4 graduate students and with any luck a few more coming in the fall.  
I’ve been on this senate four years…a couple of years of that I was on the exec 
committee at Joe’s behest, I served on a number of task forces over that time.  Most 
notably or time consumably the work on assessment and the efforts that we made to 
convince system that they shouldn’t go the route they wanted to on assessment.  I’ve been 
heavily involved on my own campus for a number of years as a CGL, as chair of a 
number of committees, as a member of other committees, as a member of search 
committees at the campus level and a number of other things like that.  I think there are a 
number of significant issues we’re going to be seeing over the next few years.  I think we 
all know what some of them are and they’re pretty obvious.  Some of them obviously 
have to do with the politics of SUNY and the politics of the board.  I’m not sure how we 
deal with some of those but hopefully we can identify some friends and use the kind of 
relationships that Joe has been developing over the last few years and pursue those and 
continue to work in that direction.  I see that the kinds of the nature of threats and 
changes that might be happening to academic freedom—not only with something like 
what our friendly trustee has suggested recently, but rather in the broader sense in the 
post 9/11 is something that we as a senate need to look at and I think that’s going to be an 
important issue.  That we look at what’s happening and what could be happening to us.  
And we need to be very aware of that.  Finally I think that there are a lot of things that 
we’re going to see probably come our way, surprises that are pulled out of the hat, etc, 
that we’re going to be reacting to, and I hope that we can be pro-active on some things as 
well.  Finally on the role of the president.  The pres is your representative.  We had a nice 
healthy debate a little while ago.  I was on one side of some issues and many of you were 
on some others.  I made a few comments that I think probably some of you didn’t agree 
with.  As a pres, however, one sets that aside, and Joe has really admirably demonstrated 
how one does that.  You set aside your own views because you’re representing the group.  
Whether you’re representing the group in discussions one on one with a chancellor or a 
board member or whatever or in leading this group here, we are your representatives and 
whichever one of us you elect hopefully will be able to do that in a positive way.  I think 
communication in both directions is extremely important.  I would hope although 
realistically I don’t know how well one can do this, I would hope as president I would 
somehow be able to figure out a way to be able to get around to the campuses at one 
point or another to talk with individual governance leadership and senates.  Whether that 
can really work, I don’t know.  I do anticipate spending several days a week in Albany if 
I’m president and enjoying the delightful drive between Binghamton and Albany up the 
freeway that is the gift of our former state senator who was the senate leader and decided 
that he didn’t like driving through small towns to get up here—and do what is necessary 
to make sure that this is done the right way to represent the faculty.

JIM MCELWAINE.  This is going to sound bad.  There we go.  .  That will work.  My 
name is Jim McElwaine, I’m your VP.  My home campus is Purchase College in 
Westchester County.  I teach music.  At that college I’ve had the pleasure over the 12 
years that I’ve been full time there to build 5 brand new curricula.  That’s been a real 
privilege and a gift from someone—I don’t know, but whoever it is, I thank them.  It’s 
probably the taxpayers of NY.  What that should tell you is I’m a builder.  I have 
managed to build curricula in subject matter not conventionally covered by the 
university, and everyone of them was an uphill battle, and they’re all thriving and 
prospering.  Right now we have the largest school of musical composition in the world 
here in the state university.  As a matter of fact, the state university is the largest 
employer of artisans period ever in the history of the world.  And I think that’s one way 
to look at this.  It may well be the largest employer of medical specialists—it may not.  It 
might be that for lawyers.  But these are ways to help us increase the visibility of the 
program.  6 and a half when I become senator for Purchase College, I began a very quick 
and thorough education in how this senate works, and I believe it works, and I believe it 
can work better.  Or better than it did in the previous resolution we were discussing.  I 
think the discussion from that was important but I think the wordsmithing from the floor 
has to change, and I have plans to change that.  So for the last 7 years, I’ve been able to 
study with one of the very best presidents this senate has ever had—that’s Joe Hildreth.  
Joe has moved this senate to a more and more effective place—we are closer with the 
trustees—for better or for worse—and we are closer with system admin.  He’s had the 
benefit of inheriting an excellent chancellor.  I feel like I’ve had a really good schooling.  
If you’re interested in continuity in this senate, then I urge that you consider voting for 
me for president.  What I would stand for are four things, and I will conclude with those:  
1 is of course continuity.  I think that’s critical to the ultimate deliberative body of the 
faculty of one of the largest universities of the world.  Another is empowerment and 
visibility.  We need to empower every individual senator.  I urge you to read a message I 
sent called A Message of Support—I think it had 42 answers to it—Please read the 
original at least, if not all the answers to the plans, because there are plans to empower 
each individual senator through increased campus visibility.  The last two things.  Agility.  
We need a quick response team.  The state university is glacial.  The faculty is more 
glacial if that’s possible.  We need to be able to respond On A Dime.  This is why we’re 
outmaneuvered time and time again.  We need to learn to play our relatively weak hand 
against very strong pre-dealt hands to the board of trustees, the governor, and the 
chancellor.  And finally, diversity.  We must change diversity.  Look around you.  We do 
not represent our university correctly.  We simply do not.  And we can change this.  Only 
you and I can change this.  No else can.  Thank you.

CARL.  My name is Carl and I’m an addict.  I’m addicted to two things…collegiality and 
all other aspects of governance.  And sometimes I wonder if this is an illness, being 
addicted to governance…but it’s also an issue where sometimes our colleagues aren’t as 
interested as we are in doing some of these jobs, and you kind of step up to do them.  I 
may be the senior person when it comes to the nominees when it comes to this particular 
office.  I got a start in the senate in 1988 under the Karen Marco admin, and I worked for 
Jim Chen, Joe Flynn, and now Joe Hildreth.  They’ve all had their strengths, and I’ve 
learned something from every single one of them.  As far as my governance activity is 
concerned, I was the VP of this body under the Chen and Aceto  administrations.  Some 
of you remember that.  Some of you that are new probably don’t know my face as well as 
some of the seniors.  One of the issues was I was president of my national org, the 
American Association for Respiratory Care, and that took me really substantially away 
from campus activities for about three years, and I’ve recently been re-elected as senator.  
Other positions that I’ve had with this body have been chair of the Governance 
Committee for about 3 years.  I was chair when we converted it from an ad hoc to a 
standing committee.  I was convener of the LGLs for about 3 years as well in the 90s, 
again alternate senator / full time turns as senator from my campus.  Most currently, I was 
asked to serve on Governance and Student Life committees.  Also with Achim, we are 
trying our best to represent Faculty Senate at the new Levin Institute soon to be the 65th 
campus, I think.  It’s been a pleasure working with Kareem and getting to know him.  I 
have a special perspective on this university, and I don’t know if anyone shares it with 
me, and that is that all 5 of my children graduated from SUNY schools right across the 
strip.  I was always looking for that tuition waiver, but I never got that tuition waiver.  
Anyway, Cornell, UV, Cobleskill, and Buffalo, and Potsdam.  My children got a 
wonderful education and I was very proud that they attended SUNY schools and are all 
doing very well in their careers.  I feel I’ve got an inside view of the university from the 
parent view as well as from the senior faculty view.  Again I’ve been teaching for 37 
years.  Somebody thought I was a manager for some reason—I’ve been teaching since 
1966, and I’m a full professor and have been a full professor since ’90.  I do a lot of 
international work with my professional society, and I’m currently working with several 
agencies involved with international chronic lung disease, because that’s my area of 
special interest and that’s what I do.  I’ve served all the offices on the campus.  You 
know we’re a medical university with an undergraduate program.  I’m in the 
undergraduate program.  I was the department chairman for 27 years and then I moved 
over to general governance for the institution, which includes the medical school, the 
colleges of graduate studies, nursing, and health professions.  I have a lot of experience in 
this governance business.  I’m really concerned about the politicization of the university, 
and I really believe that we can do more, if not as a formal body, as individuals, to 
advocate for SUNY.  I know that “lobby” word has to be used selectively and a lot of 
people are afraid of it.  Last week I was UUP delegate assembly meeting because I’m 
also on UUP exec committee for our campus.  We talked a lot about these issues that we 
can do together, and I really believe that there are projects that we can work on together 
with UUP.  I’ve always invested split time in both these areas, so I’d like to examine that.  
The university, we’re interested in access for all people, affordability for all people, and 
we have to be sure that the quality is always preserved.  And this has never changed since 
the first class I taught in 1966 when I first got out of college.  It’s no different now, and 
apparently the trustees need to be informed of that paradigm.  But in any event, I’ve had a 
great time with all my relationships with the senate, and I’ll do the best I can if you’ll 
elect me as your president.

JOE.  I think you can see that the nominating committee did an excellent job and we’ve 
got three excellent candidates, so…now they will be preparing a one-page statement that 
will be sent out to you, and they will also have a one-page resume that will be going out 
to you, so I think that we—the hard choice is going to determining which of these 
excellent candidates you’re going to vote for.  We’ve got action items from the awards 
committee, governance, and we have an action item from operations, is this correct?  In 
the interest of time, could we have those committees come up and introduce their action 
items and then have the committee report submitted.  Would that be a reasonable way to 
deal with our time issue?

SPEAKER: I have a problem with that.  The problem—we heard a speech of the 
chancellor yesterday, which addressed some of the issues that are at least close to my 
heart—campus strengths and system assessment, and I suspect that some of the 
committees will actually address that.  If we only have that in writing, we will have no 
way to address it.

KEN.  Joe, can I make a quick comment?  Since the CGLs were the ones who raised the 
concerns about where we were with system assessment, what I have asked because I’ve 
learned some things at this meeting from Kimberly that I wasn’t quite aware of in terms 
of what is proceeding on the system level, I think it would be perfectly appropriate for us 
to have an update from either Patty Francis and/or Anne at the spring plenary, and I’ve 
asked that that be added to your hopper for consideration.  We can just leave it at that.

JOE.  That would be help, or we’re going to have to go very much over time because of 
the time we have now.  Let’s go ahead and start with the action items.  If I don’t have an 
objection, we can go ahead and do that.  Just have the committees with the action items 
present, and then they’ll submit their reports, and that will enable us to somewhat get 
back on time.  You understand this is just to be able to accommodate the time that we 
have left.  Okay, awards committee, Marvin LaHood

MARVIN.  Okay, I’ll be as quick as I can.  I want to say one more time, which I’ve said 
for over a decade.  This is the best deliberative body that I have ever been a part of, and 
you prove it every plenary and you’ve certainly proved it this morning.  The civility of 
that discourse is just spectacular, I think.  The first thing I need to tell is that the executive 
committee and the awards committee and then back to the exec committee—these are the 
people that we are apparently going to be appointing to these three distinguished panels 
with a small d.  In writing, mathematics, and critical thinking.  This is just informational.  
Writing:  Millie Clark, UB.  Malcolm Nelson, Fredonia.  Patricia Bellanoff, Stonybrook.  
And Robert Moore, Oswego.   Mathematics, Bob Rogers, Fredonia.  Malcom Sherman, 
Albany, Jack Narrian, Oswego.  Maureen Dolan, Old Westbury.  Critical thinking:  Clyde 
Herod, UB.  Gwenn Crane, Oneonta.  Norman Goodman, Stony brook.  and <inaudible> 
Westbury.  These are three new resolutions now, to kind of clean up the last kinds of 
things that I think needed to be cleaned up on the awards committee.  And this is the third 
year that we tried to do this.  The first one—let’s do the first one—resolution restricting 
multiple designations for distinguished faculty rank.  This has taken a long time and a lot 
of thought, and I hope that it’s agreeable to you.  Be it resolved that…once appointment 
to distinguished faculty rank is conferred, it is a rank… regardless of designation, and no 
further appt to other designations of distinguished faculty will be permitted, thereby 
constricting the conferral of multiple designations of this rank.

JOE.  Since it’s a committee item and the exec committee has supported it, we don’t need 
a second so it’s on the floor for discussion.  Pete?

PETE.  I have mixed feelings about this one.  There are different ways of being 
distinguished, and there are diff titles to the ways of being distinguished.  Yeah, Marvin, I 
understand it is a rank.  We have at least one of our colleagues whose name you just 
mentioned in the context of the small d distinguished who happens to hold two 
distinguished professorships, and they recognize two diff ways in which that that 
individual has gained distinction or been recognized for distinction.  On the one hand I 
see that if one is holding a rank, you can only have one title.  On the other hand I’m not 
sure whether it’s appropriate to limit how one might achieve that title, so as I say I’m 
somewhat ambivalent about it—on one hand I see the point of it in terms of rank, I don’t 
necessarily see the point in terms of limiting a person to only being recognized in one 
fashion at that rank.

KEN.  Pete, the way I resolved this in my own mind is that in fact since it is rank, it 
makes sense that it only be done once.  On the other hand, there are chancellor’s awards 
for excellence in other areas, which will allow people in a certain amount of time to also 
receive distinction and recognition for that kind of work.  So it seems to me perfectly 
appropriate and I certainly support the work of the committee.

MARVIN.  In a system of what do we have 12, 000? Faculty members, there are 200 
people who are distinguished, and if I could have read the whereas, we’d like to hold that 
open so that other people might be able to apply for that.  Any further discussion?

SPEAKER: Do the people who have the degrees have to give them back?  I believe one’s 
in London.

JOE.  No, they would not stripped of their second—Are you ready to vote on this?

MARVIN.  Thank you Peter, we did think about that problem.  Resolution on Revising 
Eligibility for Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence.  We have a problem.  People with 
distinguished ranks are applying for chancellor’s awards.  The committee thinks that that 
is keeping other people who don’t have a chancellor’s award—perhaps—obviously they 
would be masked out by somebody who is already distinguished.  So we would like..be it 
resolved that the eligibility criteria for each of the chancellor’s awards for excellence be 
revised to preclude the nomination for a chancellor’s award for excellence of any faculty 
member already holding distinguished faculty rank.  Okay, Pete…

PETE.  So you heard my worries about the first one… I think this one sort of doubly 
dumps on the people.  So you’ve got a colleague who has achieved distinguished rank for 
their teaching, and they’ve also been spending 25 years on doing service, and they can’t 
get a chancellor’s award for service the way this is written.  I thought this was going to be 
for distinguished faculty if they held distinguished faculty rank in the same area.  So I 
would like to actually propose an amendment to this resolution, and add at the end of it:  
‘any faculty member already holding distinguished faculty rank within that area of 
excellence.

(Second.)

MARVIN. Wow, I gotta take you two guys on again?

PETE.  You won the first time.

JOE.  Pete, I have a little instruction for the group from our parliamentarian that you’re 
not supposed to make a motion after a speech.  You have to make your motion, get a 
second, then make your speech.  Did we get a second for this?

(second)

JOE.  Now we can discuss this.

MARVIN.  So if you were a distinguished teaching professor, you could apply for 
chancellor’s award for excellence in faculty service which you also just passed last year.

?  Either apply or as is the case at my campus, it would be a nomination from another 
group, and I think this would be—appropriate.

MARVIN.  It took me 3 years to get these resolutions up here.  Whatever the body 
wants…if you want to vote…

JOE.  There’s a second, now…we’re going to vote on the amendment.

Amendment passed.

JOE.  Now we’re voting on the amended resolution.  All those in favor…

(Passed.)

MARVIN.  I would beg on you all on your local campuses…if you have greedy people 
who are going for multiple awards who are masking out other people who don’t have 
much a chance against…you come up for a chancellor’s award against somebody who’s a 
distinguished professor, you’re going to have a hard time…and that’s why we wanted this 
legislation.  But I’m perfectly willing to go along with that choice.  Okay now, just on 
your campuses…we put these three through because we thought there were some very 
greedy people out there getting multiple awards, masking people out.  The third one:  Be 
it resolved that a faculty member seeking a second chancellor’s award must wait at least 
10 years before doing so.  Same philosophy.  Yes, Kareem.

ACHIM.  I’d like to speak in support of this, and the reason I would like to do that is that 
we have indeed people as you described.

PETE.  Why ten years instead of some shorter…

MARVIN.  I wanted it forever.  10 years was a compromise with my committee.  I 
wanted one chancellor’s award.  You know what, you get 1.  How many medals do you 
wanna wear?

JANET.  I’d like to speak against this motion.  When I read about it, I went for guidance 
to the officer on our campus who’s in charge of running the chancellor’s award business.  
And he told me it was a very bad idea because a faculty member hasn’t even 
accomplished enough to even apply for one of these until he’s 40 or 50 or so, and he’s 
just beginning to build his service, his scholarship, his teaching to the level when he 
might receI’ve a chancellor’s award.  So you hope that once he’s received a chancellor’s 
award, he will go right on working perhaps in another category as has been pointed out 
by Peter, that you might be eligible for teaching—you might also be eligible for 
scholarship or for service.  10 years is too long a time.  In fact I don’t think there should 
be a limit at all…just in order to get rid of abuses that may have happened on one or two 
campuses or some campuses, you don’t want to preclude the possibility of someone 
continuing to work and distinguish herself by tenure.  And so I think that these are clearly 
different categories, they have clearly different criteria, and it’s entirely possible that 
someone who has worked hard enough to establish herself in one of these areas might 
also continue to work and establish herself to be eligible for others.  I ask that you vote 
this down.

MARVIN.  I’m going to give an answer now that’s very frank, because I’ve spent 14 
years on the senate.  And this is the same—yeah, I have to do this, because this happens 
all the time.  A committee does very very intricate kinds of work, and that is presented 
here in a kind of simplistic way.  We have a nominee—we have a faculty member right 
now who’s been nominated simultaneously for three chancellor’s awards and that 
happens often.  

JANET.  Is the person eligible to receive them?

KEN.  Although I might prefer another time sequence, these sense of what the committee 
has presented it seems to me is what’s appropriate.  If you’re picking a specific amount of 
time, there might be a better number of years.  But it seems to me that the multiplicity of 
awards...it’s something that we need to think about.  Just so you know, at a fairly young 
age, I received a chancellor’s award for excellence in teaching and I’ve been nominated 
for excellence in service this year.  So it’s taken me a while to build a service record that 
would be appropriate for such a nomination, and I share the sense of what the 
committee’s trying to do here.  I think we ought to support them.

RUNI?  I’m not speaking against the motion per se, but I do think that individual abuses 
on individual campuses need to be dealt with by the campus committees, legislating away 
morality isn’t the way to go about it.  Your distinguished award committee, chancellor’s 
award committee should be sensible about what it considers…and if the person has 
acquired the merit to get 2 chancellor’s awards as judged by that committee, more power 
to them.  But you can’t legislate that people shouldn’t be give it.  Why?

JOE.  Are we ready to vote?  All those in favor…

(Passed)

JOE: GOVERNANCE / RON?  

RON: Morning.  On behalf of the governance committee—it is on the evaluation of 
administrators.  You need to read it before the next meeting.  It will come up again, both 
in substance and we’ll hopefully have some more to present upon it.  We do have a 
resolution for you to consider this morning.  It is entitled Resolution on Academic 
Misconduct.   The chancellor came before this body a couple of years ago concerned in 
reaction to an incident on one of the campuses where there was a faculty member who 
engaged in some act of academic misconduct and nowhere was it reported but it 
eventually wound up in the press and things did not look particularly good.  He presented 
the body with a proposal, the salient feature of which is that upon the end of the final 
determination of guilt, presumably the end of a disciplinary process, where an arbitrator 
has ruled and there is no further possibility of appeal in any way shape or form, that the 
campus pres be directed to report that finding to the governance body.  And that becomes 
the means of public disclosure.  That was his proposal to the body.  My understanding is 
that initially there were concerns that this was a collective bargaining issue…it was 
referred to UUP…they’ve effectively taken a pass on it.  The chancellor has come back to 
us and asked us for an endorsement of that proposal.  He did so a year ago.  Our 
committee has looked at it and the operative part of our resolution…I’ll make one change 
or two change in the whereases in a moment (they’re not substantive).  Now therefore be 
it resolved, the university faculty senate endorses attached proposal by the chancellor to 
require that a final determination of academic misconduct after all appeals have been 
exhausted be reported by the campus president to the faculty governance body during a 
scheduled meeting and permitting further disclosure at the discretion of the campus 
president and the president of the senate is directed to convey such endorsement to the 
chancellor.  The two word changes that we’d like to make… to investigate allegations to 
to ADDRESS allegations … and in the 4th paragraph…  change the word insures to 
ENSURES.  With that, the proposal is before you.

KATHLEEN.  I think when Ron began, he said in reaction to one incident that occurred, 
we are now doing what Runi’s been saying, that we’re specializing a situation, which is 
okay.  But my main concern is the idea that you know a faculty in essence being give a 
big A to wear for academic misconduct and being reported to the campus president to the 
faculty governance in a scheduled meeting.  I fear that this is something that really can be 
misused.  And secondly, maybe I feel sorry for whoever did this…but I don’t think this is 
appropriate.  I mean to stand up at a faculty governance meeting and say so and so has 
been accused of academic misconduct—I mean I certainly think that the information can 
get out in another way—not to publicly ridicule the person at a meeting.

JANET.  I’d like to support what has just been said.  We’re turning ourselves into the 
body which makes anybody even accused of something Hester Prynne.  If you take a look 
at the second paragraph—

RON?  That paragraph refers to communications between the campus president and the 
chancellor.

JANET.  I understand, so when any allegation has been made…that allegation, that 
accusation is forwarded to the chancellor before having been proved that misconduct has 
occurred.

RON?  I know that every campus that receives research funds in any way shape or form 
from fed sources is required to have a process to investigate research misconduct.  The 
finding of misconduct has a potentially profound effect to a campus because if there were 
fed dollars give and there was misconduct there is the prospect that those fed dollars 
would have to be repaid…penalties of a variety of odds and ends.  One would expect—
I’ve been involved in one of these investigations—one would expect that the chancellor’s 
office would want to know if there is a fed complaint—in this case by a fed agency—that 
has the potential impact of requiring of funds that were give to the state university.  That 
part is in fact—at that point the entire process is not public.  It is not public at all.  The 
second paragraph speaks only to internal communication between a campus pres and the 
chancellor.  It’s part of his proposal, but it has nothing to do with this body in any way 
shape or form.  It just happens to be part of the process that he’s outlining there.  The first 
paragraph speaks to what is effect public disclosure at the end of the process after a 
finding of guilt and after the possibility all appeals are exhausted.

JANET.  May I ask several more questions?  Actually the proposal doesn’t say after the 
possibility of all possible appeals has been exhausted.  This proposal says all appeals on 
campus…which precludes all sorts of legal appeals.  #2.  I don’t see what this proposal is 
doing except pillorying someone, setting him up in public and saying You have sinned 
Hester Prynne.  I don’t think it worked for Hester Prynne, it wasn’t right—and I don’t 
think that the senate should be involved in that.  #3.  I see no definition of academic 
misconduct.  I’m not sure what we’re talking about.  Are you talking about plagiarism or 
other misconduct?  Okay, the only purpose that I see here is public humiliation in a 
purposeful fashion of one of our own colleagues who may indeed have done a terrible 
thing, or it may it may be the kind of mistake that Harvard’s president was just found 
guilty of, and that two of Harvard’s most prestigious law professors were also found 
guilty of, which was not purposeful…they had no need to do that.  So I don’t understand, 
I am opposed to a motion whose only purpose is public humiliation.

RON?  I’m going to respond in kind of a parallelism where there is a finding of medical 
misconduct against a physician.  That is a matter of public record.  It is published by the 
NY State Health Dept on a website where one and all can look at it.  This provides for 
public disclosure in a much more limited way, I think, preventing the institution from 
being held up as not accountable for misconduct when it occurs.  Personally and 
professionally, I deplore misconduct.  Where it occurs, I want it stopped; I want it 
exposed.  As I said, I’ve been on one panel to investigate.  That case has will go through 
the disciplinary process I believe.  The conduct is inexcusable.  And in the end, once an 
arbitrator has ruled and the judgment is final, I honestly believe that we do not do 
ourselves as a profession any justice by having the appearance of covering it up as a 
private matter.  It is not a private matter.

MARILYN.  I serve on the governance committee as well, and I was strongly in support 
of this.  You characterize the purpose of the procedure to humiliate someone.  I would 
characterize it instead as an affirmation of the concern for academic honesty that all of us 
share.  It is an affirmation of a shared set of values, not a humiliation of an individual.

PETE.  I would add to that.  I appreciate the concerns of the humiliation of an individual 
if it’s done in that kind of a context and perhaps there is a better way to do that, but I’m 
not sure we can figure it out…

<Tape change>

PETE.  …In the timeframe that we have available to us.  But to be perfectly honest, I 
think the alternative that has happened on at least of one campus—I’ve been involved in 
some of these cases as well, and some of the hearings, etc.—on my campus.  They 
haven’t been exactly swept under the rug all the time, but there have been instances 
where it’s pretty darn close to it.  Usually at the behest of senior admin on the campus, 
who either don’t want it to go to the fed level of scrutiny or don’t want it to go out to the 
public that anything like this could possibly be done by one of our faculty members.  
That’s what the chancellor argued to us in the first place, and I still buy his argument.  
…that the purpose of this is not in fact to vilify a faculty member who has been found 
guilty of academic or research misconduct, but rather to make sure that people know that 
that happened.

?  I’m split on this.  I have no problem if the academic misconduct is in fact of 
extraordinarily serious nature:  plagiarism…there are issues…I think this is not an 
inappropriate public info…way if releasing public info about that.  The concern I have 
right now Ron is do we have a definition of academic misconduct?  And the only reason I 
raise that at this point is that plagiarism for example—and those of us who are dealing 
with plagiarism on the part of our students—know that there’s both willful plagiarism 
and there is inadvertent plagiarism, and in fact give the level of at least some of the at 
least social science instruction in NY state, some of our students have been taught to 
plagiarize and that that’s called writing a paper.  We have to have some understanding 
and make some judgment as to the intention and the severity of the particular offense 
before we go to a public piece.  So my question is do we have a definition or a series of 
definitions that operate from what we call here academic misconduct?

RON.  I can tell you that again the case that I sat on involved a complaint by a fed agency 
and one of the documents they sent was what their standards were, and one of these 
standards was very specific:  that the transgression had to be deliberate.

DICK COLLIER.  Having some personal investment as you may recall, every time the 
chancellor brought this up over the past couple of years, he tended to preface it with, this 
is in response to the Albany embarrassment…I strongly support this.  I have a campus 
filled with people that would like to know that a president cannot be allowed to willfully 
cover up a case and interfere with a process and that when someone is found guilty, we 
will find out about it, and it will not be buried.  The case in Albany involved somebody 
probably not accidentally plagiarizing 70something pages out of a book that was written 
in the early 1900s…it’s not like they found it on their word processor in other words.  As 
you may know, those charges were brought—nobody heard anything—because the 
charges were brought by someone off campus, a scholar in another country.  On that 
scholar trying to find out what happened, he contacted some of our faculty saying he had 
heard nothing.  Since none of them had heard anything and since the individual charge 
even the 2 VPs and the president knew all about that charge had subsequently been 
promoted to yet an additional administrative position…all hell broke loose.  So I would 
strongly advocate this be approved…I think this is a safeguard campuses need in case 
you someday have a rogue president.

ANNE.  Could we accomplish what we wanted in the 1 2 3 4 5 6 now therefore be it 
resolved…if we had after all appeals had been exhausted, the OFFENSE be reported by 
the campus president to all the faculty governance body during a scheduled meeting 
permitting further disclosure which may be name or not—at least the offense has gotten 
the publicity and the awareness that we wanted.

RON.  I don’t have a problem with your suggestion, but understand that the chancellor’s 
request to us was an endorsement of the proposal, and I don’t think the body can rewrite 
the proposal.  If we can’t endorse it the way it is, then I think we go back and you 
know…informally let him change the proposal and then come back with something.

JOE.  I believe Ron is correct on that.  The proposal that was give to us was written by 
the legal staff here and I’m certain that we’re either going to have to endorse it or not.  I 
don’t think we can change the wording of it.

CAROLYN MCDONALD.  I’m also from Albany.  I was also on the committee that has 
been writing the procedures for determining guilt or innocence in these cases.  And I find 
that I’m a little bit uncomfortable that’s here, partly because of disciplinary arbiter—it 
would be done by a committee on my campus.  It’s not clear exactly what that would 
mean, so there’s some technical difficulty there.  The other problem which is much more 
significant is the question of seriousness.  There can be deliberate but not terribly serious 
and technical violations, which a committee could necessarily if there’s a complaint find 
that in fact the complaint was valid, but recommend rather minimal response to this.  And 
perhaps this response this response should not include that the brouhaha of an 
announcement at a senate meeting of this.  So that one would like to see that the 
arbitrating committee could recommend or not as part of its findings such a public 
disclosure instead of necessarily have a finding a positive force that it disclose.

RON.  Let me respond procedurally.  The campus can do what it wishes in terms of how 
it investigates and whatever its preliminary determinations are.  Assuming that there is a 
belief on the part of a committee, the admin, whoever, that this misconduct has occurred, 
that now get to sanction.  What do we do about it?  And there the contract becomes 
operative.  Cannot—a sanction, a counseling letter, a demotion, a fine, firing—all 
disciplinary actions are covered by the contract.  And the accused there has the right to a 
disciplinary arbitration.  Before an arbitrator in an adversary proceeding where the 
plaintiff, the campus, presents its case, the defendant presents his/her case.  The arbitrator 
must be satisfied at whatever the threshold is that in fact the person was guilty.  So 
everything preliminary to that, unless the person agrees (yes, I did it and I’m willing to 
accept this sanction)—absent that, it will go into the disciplinary procedure.  There’s no 
way to short-circuit it unless there’s an agreement.

JANET.  I hope it’s obvious that I stand with all of you in abhorring any kind of 
plagiarism or dishonesty.  Nonetheless, we are talking about behavior—academic 
misconduct—which we don’t even have a definition of yet.  Plagiarism may be part of 
it—what about a sociology teacher who visits a website that somebody else thinks is 
obscene?  I don’t have a definition, I don’t know what we’re talking about here.  As a 
teacher of music business, let me tell you that there are plenty of things that I and my 
staff deal with on the web for example which someone else might find to be misconduct.  
And if an allegation is made of misconduct on my part, then that will have been have 
been forwarded to the chancellor so just he can be aware that there might be a problem on 
one of his campuses.  I also would like to point out that we evidently already have tried 
and true campus procedures in place.  So what the senate is going to be doing is adding to 
procedures in which each campus in its own sense of honor has already put in place.  And 
then the third thing I point out to you is that these allegations or even public 
announcement of guilt at some level of some sort of some thing which may be academic 
misconduct—this sort of thing being made public bears an uncomfortable resemblance to 
the sort of character assassination we were unhappy about this morning.  Let me end 
simply by saying that we already have campus policies, we already have directives from 
all sorts of organizations such as AAUP.  I don’t see that our senate should be part of 
negative statements about colleagues.

KEN.  This is not character assassination.  This is a documented, demonstrated reach of 
professional ethics.  Now the question for me still remains, Ron.  Do we have somewhere 
a definition of what constitutes academic misconduct?  That’s a phrase that can cover 
such a multiplicity of offenses that I’m uncomfortable simply supporting it at this point.  I 
would be much more comfortable if you could tell me that Well we have it but not before 
us…and then we could defer this to the spring plenary when we can have it before us and 
we can see exactly what kinds of offenses would in fact be involved.  I would be much 
more comfortable with that.  

MORRISFELT?  Why do we have to take a stand on this issue?  Can’t we sidestep it?  I 
feel uncomfortable with it.  Is this our role…he’s asking us to endorse his resolution.  Are 
we forced to do it?  I feel uncomfortable with the situation.  It seems like it steps out of 
our role to add an __?__ to a disciplinary hearing.

JOE.  No, we don’t have to support.  In the back…

BILL LANFORD?  From Albany.  I certainly support this resolution.  I don’t think it’s a 
major consequence one way or another.  But I think it needs to be supported from a 
management POV.  I think you should recognize that individual campuses have a conflict 
of interest.  They don’t want to disclose these situations and so they tend to want to cover 
them up.  Presumably when you talk about federal misconduct, you’re talking about the 
federal definition.  The defendant has all the rights and opportunities in the process…it’s 
just when it comes to the end, you still want to cover it up.  And the answer is the campus 
has all the reason in the world to bury it.  And I think the chancellor is one step removed 
and he says let it go out…once the process goes its way, it should become public.  I 
certainly support the resolution.

JOE?  If I can just add a little bit…the chancellor said the problem is not that we don’t 
already have procedures in place for the process of determining guilt, the problem is we 
don’t have procedures in place once a determination of guilt has been made.  And the 
Albany situation is what provoked this.

ACHIM.  (No mic, inaudible)

(second)

JOE.  This is a motion that will require majority.  It’s non-debatable, but it does mean 
that the body will be serious about taking it up again.  Okay?  So you understand, we’re 
voting to table the discussion…it will be brought up again.  All those in favor…

(passes, discussion is tabled)

Runi?  

RUNI: Good afternoon everybody, I won’t keep you long.  I just wanted to reiterate again 
how happy I was at the 2 presentations that were made about the library and the 
presentation that Maureen gave you around the energy project.  Both of those issues 
generated a lot of discussion and we are going to be deliberating on some of the issues 
raised around library expenditure and the issues associated with it and we will be coming 
up with some recommendations and maybe a resolution for the spring plenary.  There 
was a resolution that was drafted around the energy issue, but it has been tabled.  We are 
going to await a presentation by Dan Shepard of System along with the full report from 
Maureen Dolan and we will give you that resolution at that time.  A 3rd resolution is 
coming around to you.  This resolution has to do with the burgeoning number of non-
tenured track, full-time or even part-time faculty and adjuncts and the ratios of such 
people to the tenured-track, full-time faculty lines on a give campus.  This is an issue that 
we have been studying in the Operations committee.  There is a report that will be made 
at the spring plenary and a follow-up report looking at some recommendations for 
working conditions for adjunct faculty will be made to you at the fall plenary of this year.  
I will read the motion to you, and it has already been accepted by the exec committee and 
therefore does not need a second…

(reading motion)

PETE.  This is actually a question…I would hope that maybe some of the CGLs have 
been closely enough involved on their campuses to know.  I know that there was an 
extensive ridiculously long list of questions that System asked the campuses to prepare in 
their statements on mission review, too.  Was this in there?

ANNE.  It’s in there.

PETE.  If that’s the case, this would seem to be moot.

RUNI?  Are you asking about the guidance document?  The actual specification of ratios 
or simply the reporting of numbers?

PETE.  Reporting of numbers, not a target by which any agreed upon predetermined ratio 
would be met.

??  It may be of interest to you to know that Cobleskill was criticized because we had too 
many full-time.

?  So there.  All the more reason for ratios.

???  A word of clarification.  The ratio full time tenured-track and non tenured-track 
faculty…inaudible…. If they don’t have the resources to hire the full-time faculty, what 
are they going to do?  I did ask that question of my dean last year as a matter of fact, and 
he said We just don’t have the money!  We’d love to hire them, but we just don’t have 
the money.  We are in deficit.  My unit had a deficit of 5 million dollars.  We just don’t 
have the money to hire…inaudible

RUNI?  At some level, the purpose of this resolution…this is not news to anybody.  As 
you all you know, there are burgeoning numbers of temp…and in some programs, the 
presence of temp faculty may actually be an indication of quality, where you’re getting 
consultants to come in.  So that’s not the point.  The point is not to lock in to any give 
campus or for any give group what the numbers should be, but rather that there be some 
planning around how those numbers will change.  They may need to change for 
budgetary or other reasons.  Sometimes these decisions are made on a much more ad hoc 
basis and it is the at the detriment of quality when it’s done that way.

??  That’s the reason for the timetable, and different campuses can establish different 
timetables.  What we want, as Runi says is for there for there to be some planning.  And 
the reason we’re bringing this resolution forward now is now is the time to do the 
planning.

KEN.  Let me just tell my colleagues now that Brockport/Rockport? is part of our last 
strategic plan.  We noted that there was a steady inexorable growth in the number of 
adjunct faculty and it wasn’t until we began to address that directly by trying to establish 
a ratio target of the percentage of courses that could be offered by non-tenured adjunct 
faculty that we began to look seriously at what had happened and what direction we 
could take and what realistic targets might be.  The way this is framed I really applaud 
because it does not set a university standard that would be arbitrary…rather it invites 
each campus to look most seriously at the issue on that campus and to then create a plan 
for that campus.  That I think is appropriate.  So I support this.

JOE.  Motion to close debate.  2/3 required, non-debatable.  Okay.  All those in favor of 
closing debate…

passes, debate closes.

motion passes without dissent.

RUNI?  Just very quickly to wrap up, there are two other studies ongoing which we will 
present to you at the spring plenary.  One is a study on __?__ profile, ___?___ study that 
Ron has done.  And the other is the administrative costs.  Thank you very much!

JOE.  Give the hour and the fact that people have left, we have a resolution from the exec 
committee on the composition of faculty and the mission review 2 teams.  If the group is 
comfortable, we can just pass that as an exec committee and then send that on…it’s a 
suggestion that the campus invite campus governance leader and the senator to be a 
member of the campus team for mission review.  It’s a very simple resolve that the 
campus visitation team for mission review 2 include the campus’s university faculty 
senator(s) and the campus’s governance chair or designees among the campus group 
officially consulted for mission review 2.  All those in favor…

passes.

JOE.  Before you leave, we have one senate tradition that I’d like to continue, and that’s 
our poem.  Collier…

<poem is read>
<meeting adjourned>