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 c