University Faculty Senate
Proceedings of the Spring 2003 Plenary 
Cornell University

________________________________________
Friday Plenary Session
President Hildreth:  I would like to call this meeting to order. I managed to 
walk off this morning and leave my gavel in the car; so, we’ll have to use 
knuckles, I guess.  Marvin’s volunteered to whistle, but I said, “That’s okay, 
Marvin.” Anyway, it’s my pleasure this morning to introduce our host senator 
from Cornell, William Sonnenstuhl, who’s going to give us our welcome.

William Sonnenstuhl: Good morning. It’s a pleasure to have all of you here, and 
I want to extend a very warm welcome on behalf of not only the SUNY senators 
here on the Cornell campus, but for all of our colleagues across the campus. We 
had hoped that we would have some nicer weather for you so that you could really 
see our beautiful campus. Nonetheless we are giving you the full treatment 
because this is the sort of weather you can very often expect in Ithaca this 
time of year. In April, it’s often mud season. We do hope that even though you 
have a short visit here, that you have a very pleasurable one. 
       We have a wonderful faculty, many wonderful students, and I know that 
many of you have colleagues here on the Cornell campus, both in the contract 
colleges and also in the endowed colleges. I hope that you’ll find some 
opportunities to visit with them and speak with them. 
       I also hope that you may find some opportunities to visit Ithaca itself. 
There’s some information in your packets about our wonderful city -- we’re very 
proud of it -- and the reality is that when we have gorgeous weather here, it is 
one of the most beautiful campuses and places to live, I think, in New York 
State. In fact, when I used to live downtown I used to walk down the hill every 
day and say what a wonderful place it was and how lucky I was to live here. So, 
I hope you have a chance at least to sample some of them. 
       Let me say also that we are the land grant college for the state of New 
York and we are very, very proud of that status. That does mean that we all 
follow those three missions that are very sacred to us in terms of research, 
education, and outreach, whether we’re on the endowed side of the University or 
the contract side of the University. And, I think that we’ve been very, very 
fortunate in terms of the leadership we’ve had where we’ve had a president who’s 
exemplified all of those things. Hunter Rawlings, the president of the 
University, continues to teach undergraduate students, which I think is 
something wonderful. He has really developed a research scholars program for the 
undergraduates, so that many of us on the faculty are privileged to have 
wonderful undergraduate students working with us doing research. He has pushed 
all of us to think about our research and how it extends to the citizens in New 
York State and all around the world, increasingly. So, we’re very fortunate to 
have that.
       Finally, let me say that, just in terms of logistics, that a number of 
you have asked me about getting the Statler this evening. Hopefully the weather 
will clear, but I’m not confident of that. I know that Claudia Strednick has 
arranged for a walking tour for those of you who would like to walk over there, 
take a leisurely gait and see some of our beautiful campus. I would encourage 
you, if you have some time, to visit our arts quad, which is the oldest part of 
Cornell. It’s a beautiful place. Also visit the Mann library, which is a new 
wonderful state-of-the-art library. It’s a beautiful campus and I do hope that 
you have a chance to do that. That said, if you don’t want to go on the walking 
tour, you could walk to the Statler Hotel from here in about ten minutes. Also, 
we’re encouraging people to carpool to go over there. There will also be some 
bus transportation over there. So, you should have plenty of opportunities to 
get there.
       Finally -- I don’t know whether she’s here -- I would like to extend a 
very warm “thank you” to Claudia Strednick. She’s worked very diligently to make 
sure that this function happened, and I think it’s going to be a wonderful 
couple of days. So I wanted to say, “Thank you,” to Claudia and thank you for 
coming; and if there’s anything we can do, let us know. And now it is my 
pleasure to introduce the President of Cornell, Hunter Rawlings. 

President Rawlings: Thank you very much, Joe, and welcome to everyone. We’re 
delighted to have you here for this weekend, and I hope that your discussions 
are provocative and productive. I’m sure they will be. We’re delighted to have 
you on our campus, as Bill said, because Cornell is the land grant university 
for New York State, and we take that responsibility with the utmost seriousness. 
We also very much enjoy our relationship with your institutions, and we look 
forward to even more articulation with you in the future because that’s an 
important part of our responsibility. I know that the relationships we have 
already built are very strong, and we’re intent on building stronger ones into 
the future, as well. So, I think it’s a very good time for that level of 
coordination, cooperation and colleagueship. We at Cornell are committed to 
that, and we hope that we will have even richer relationships in the future.
       It’s a pleasure especially to welcome you here during what I know is a 
difficult time worldwide, as well as for the United States of America; but I’m 
pleased that all of you could make it at this time. I’m delighted to see the 
attendance. I think that while all of us have been keeping an eye on the 
television screens, things seem to be going better now, and I’m glad that you’ll 
be able to conduct your conference at a time when things are clearly getting 
more positive. On this campus, we have a large number of international students, 
many of them from the Middle East, and we spent a good deal of time in the last 
couple of years, but especially in the last few weeks, working closely with them 
to ensure that they feel comfortable and safe on the campus. I’m sure you all do 
the same thing on your campuses. At the same time, we’re also making sure that 
all of those who serve in the armed services or in the reserves feel that this 
is a good time for them, as well, and that they have support on this campus. 
       Also, I’m happy to say and happy to report that thus far, at any rate, 
the Cornell campus has been extremely mature in the way it has gone about its 
work over these last few weeks. I’m especially pleased with how much the faculty 
is reaching out to our students in terms of teach-ins and other means of 
bringing their expertise to students at a time like this, when they most need 
it. A number of our students have, in fact, sought out the help of the faculty 
during this time. We, like you, certainly do have experts on the faculty who can 
assist a great deal because they have special forms of knowledge that are 
helpful to students at this time.
       I’d also like to say how much I respect the work that is done by a number 
of faculty members in our contract colleges because they do indeed carry out, as 
Bill said, three responsibilities at Cornell: the responsibilities of research, 
education, and outreach, and all of its dimensions, including the highly 
organized extension programs that Cornell’s been operating for a long period of 
time. As some of you may be aware, in the past two years, we have done an all-
university-wide study of our land grant mission at Cornell to re-affirm that 
mission and also to see if there aren’t some ways we can update it. We can find 
new ways of doing old business and also seek out new businesses, so to speak, 
for our land grant colleges.
       While I’m saying that, I also want to emphasize that Cornell itself is a 
land grant university, as Bill pointed out, so it’s not simply a matter of the 
faculty in those four contract colleges carrying out the land grant mission, but 
there are also faculty members in our endowed colleges who take that as part of 
their responsibility. I might underline the fact that in recent months the 
College of Engineering has begun to focus a great deal more on the kinds of 
outreach it does because it has a lot to offer, especially at a time when the 
relationships between research universities and industry are especially 
important. I’m happy to say that technology transfer is going forward very, very 
well now on this campus. One of the very nice indicators of that is when you 
arrive at the Tompkins airport, which I know some of you have, you will see 
spread out in front of you the Cornell business and research park, which is 
where we have a number of spin-off companies -- over eighty -- that have 
developed in the last few years and are now driving employment in this county. 
That’s a very nice result of first-rate research being done in Cornell 
laboratories, and we expect to see a lot more of that in the future. Our three 
representatives to the State University of New York Faculty Senate, Jennifer 
Wilkins, David Brown and Bill Sonnenstuhl, whom you just heard from, carry out 
key parts of that mission.
       Dr. Wilkins is a senior extension associate and one of the developers of 
the northeast regional food guide, an educational tool to help consumers in our 
region improve their diets while eating more locally grown and processed foods. 
We’re very bullish on New York products, whether they happen to be wines from 
the Finger Lakes in our vicinity or on other foods grown here. Increasingly, 
I’ve noticed at Cornell receptions much more emphasis on New York State 
products; and I think that’s a very, very happy outcome.
       Professor Brown is a professor of rural sociology, as I think many of you 
know, whose research and teaching include investigations of migration and 
urbanization in the U.S. and in post-socialist central Europe. Those migratory 
patterns, you might say, are of great interest to social scientists, and that’s 
an important part of the work being done here at Cornell.
       Professor Sonnenstuhl is an associate professor of organizational 
behavior and extension in our School of Industrial and Labor Relations with a 
focus on substance abuse in the workplace. We have a great deal of expertise on 
the workplace, and whether it’s our labor economists or our human resources 
experts or professors like Dr. Sonnenstuhl, you will see a whole lot of emphasis 
now at Cornell on the nature of the workplace and how to improve it. I’m very 
pleased about that because I think it’s an increasingly important aspect, not 
only of the work that we do, but of the work all of us do in order to ensure 
that the workplace is better understood and better researched. The outcomes then 
will be better in the longer term. So, the ILR School has, I think, acquired a 
very strong reputation in this dimension.  I’m proud of that because it’s an 
important aspect of our land grant mission.
       As you all know, I think, Cornell is a private university, but it does 
have contracts with the State of New York, and those contracts have been in 
place for a very long period of time. They’re important to us, and our 
relationship with the State University is important to us. I think it gives us 
the kind of integration and synergy that’s really needed at a time of tight 
budgets. We all know that this is a difficult time in this state; it’s a 
difficult time in almost all of the fifty U.S. states. None of us, I think, 
should feel “down at the mouth” about that. That’s something we go through 
cyclically. We’re certainly in the middle of a difficult downturn now, but I 
think if we can develop better means of developing this sort of synergy that 
we’re seeing in the State University and with Cornell, we’re going to be better 
off for that.
       So, at Cornell, at any rate, we want to offer as much assistance and 
colleagueship and partnership as we possibly can to make the best of the 
resources that New York State has and to ensure that in the future we really are 
getting the best possible return on our educational investment. While we are 
extremely strong partners with the State University in all of its dimensions, we 
hope that this will be an increasingly important aspect of our relationship into 
the future. I wish you a very, very successful conference. I know that the work 
that you do is extremely important, and I thank you for coming to Cornell this 
weekend. I was looking at our CGLs over on the right side…
       I’d like to welcome you to Cornell. It’s good to see you again and I want 
to remind you that this is our spring plenary. Maybe if we say spring plenary 
often enough, something will change outside. In fact, it’s our 134th spring 
plenary. And it is the 50th anniversary of the faculty senate. The first meeting 
occurred in 1953 at the Dewitt Clinton Hotel in Albany. According to the minutes 
of the first meeting, the first order of business was to read the resolution 
that was approved by the Board of Trustees in April of ‘53 that created the 
Senate. I made a trip to the warehouse, which was an interesting experience, and 
I have the minutes from that first meeting. We’ll be reading some more excerpts 
from those later on tonight. We’re going to have a little bit of a celebration 
tonight following our dinner, so I think that we’ll be able to enjoy that. And, 
as part of that celebration, I’ve invited former Presidents: Aceto, Flynn, 
Markoe and Chen, and they’re each going to be saying a few words about some of 
the issues and activities that occurred during their tenure.
       This is Carol Colby’s last Senate Plenary meeting. And we’re going to 
honor her tonight as well. One of the things we’re working on is this little 
book that we have that we started last night in the Executive Committee. If you 
want to pass it around, I thought it might be nice if you could maybe express 
your good wishes for Carol and her retirement. I think it would be something 
that she would enjoy.
       Thanks are in order because this is a time of tight budgets, and you 
can’t always assume that when a person retires that you have the opportunity to 
fill that position. But we have our Senator, Dick Miller, who has supported us 
and we’re going to be able to fill that position one hundred percent. I just 
wanted to publicly thank him for that.
       I want to give a special welcome to our Senator, Norm Goodman, who’s 
back. Some of you may remember that he was unable to make our last meeting. He 
gave the excuse that it was for medical reasons. I did check into it and he 
really did have a legitimate reason; so he’s back.
       
(Male voice in background: ”Norman wanted you to stay away so he could have the 
floor to himself. We tried that; it didn’t work.”) 
       
        But in case you think he might have mellowed, I can assure you, he 
hasn’t. He was in perfect form for six hours last night, and I think you can see 
that he’s in that same form today. I spoke with Jim Varner, who is our co-chair 
of our Graduate Committee, and you know he’s had some medical problems as well. 
I spoke with him two days ago and he’s doing fine. He said he couldn’t be here 
today, but that he did actually teach a class last week. So, he’s coming along 
well and expects to be fully back very shortly.
       Well, we do have a full agenda so I want to move on. Just kind of 
indicate that during each Senate Plenary meeting, one of the things that I try 
to do is present you with the major news and issues that are going on in the 
Faculty Senate and in the system as a whole. The idea is that you can take notes 
on these and report back to your campuses. The campuses react and you report 
back to us and complete this whole circle of communication, which I think that 
the Senate is about and should be about. 
       I just wanted to call your attention to several handouts. I noticed that 
Carol put some of them on your table, but if you didn’t happen to get those, you 
probably should. We have some copies of the Governance’s handbook that was done 
a few years ago. Some parts are not valid now, but most of it is. I’ve had 
several calls for that over the years, and that’s one of the happy by-products 
of the trip to the warehouse. I’ve found another carton of those, so we brought 
them for you. Also, the same thing is true in terms of the publications on 
assessment. Assessment is going to be a topic that we’re going to be talking 
about later on today, and I thought you would enjoy seeing some past Senate 
publications on that issue. 
       So let me talk to you about some of the current Senate initiatives. The 
first is the art exhibitions. As you remember, in the fall we had a SUNY student 
art exhibition at State University Plaza. We had nineteen campuses participate 
and eighty-five works, and we were able to produce a catalog. We’ve done the 
same thing for the spring with eighty works from across the system. We’re going 
to be having a reception for that April 11th.
We also have a series of art faculty exhibits. The first one was by Geneseo; the 
second one is scheduled for Oswego. They’re running for two months apiece and 
they’re being held in the gallery section of the first floor hallway. And then 
this summer, we’re going to be having a “Best of SUNY” student exhibition that 
is going to take the best work from both the fall and the spring exhibitions and 
present that. And from that “Best Of” show we’re going to be awarding three one 
thousand dollar ($1,000) scholarships. I should say Chancellor King is going to 
be awarding that. Of course, this couldn’t happen without Chancellor King’s 
support, and I very much appreciate of that support. 
       I’m also very appreciative of all the campuses that have spent the time 
and energy to support the exhibition in the way that they have. They basically 
were able to transport the work and pick it up, and there was no charge to the 
system or to the Senate for doing that. It’s been an experience that has really 
been meaningful to me and I hope that you have had a chance to see some of 
those. 
       We had a report last night on the Senate’s student transfer initiative. 
We have a task force that’s done research, and we’ve researched transfer plans 
from the states of Florida, Maryland, Arizona, California, Georgia, and North 
Carolina. The research did yield some ideas that we put into a draft which was 
presented to the executive committee last night. But, I think it’s fair to say 
that the executive committee didn’t give it a green light. So we’re going to go 
back to the task force with the suggestions that they gave us, and we will 
report on that in the future. 
        One thing is that we’re not going to go forward with anything like this 
until we have the support of this group; but we’re working and we’ll continue to 
work, and we’ll continue to report. 
       There’s been mention made of the budget. I just wanted to make a couple 
of points, and then I’m not going to go into any detail. We’re going to have 
Brian Stenson here later on today, and he will be the person to give you the 
detail of it. 
       But let me give you some points that I think ought to go into your notes 
to report to your campuses. First of all, the current budget deficit for New 
York State is approximately 11.5 billion dollars. I’ve had that described as the 
worst budget deficit or fiscal crisis in the history of New York State. So it’s 
pretty serious stuff.
       In response to this, Governor Pataki has forced a cut to SUNY’s budget by 
$184 million. And then the Board of Trustees proposed a tuition increase of 
twelve hundred dollars to offset that 184 million dollar cut. However, I’ve been 
talking with the legislature, and the word I’m getting back from those people is 
that the increase is probably going to be reduced to something around $900.
       In my lobbying trips to the chair of the assembly’s Higher Education 
Committee, that’s Ron Canastrari, and to the chair of the Senate’s Higher 
Education Committee, Ken Lavalle, I lobbied that however you want to restore 
that $184 million, that the reserves have been spent and every additional cut is 
going to show up in some form of action that is going to reduce the quality of 
the University. They were both supportive, although I got the verbal exchange 
from Laval’s office that they would try to make up the loss in revenue that a 
$900 dollar tuition increase would produce. I didn’t get the same assurance from 
the assembly. In terms of people that I’ve talked to, they’ve said that the 
Legislature doesn’t have the money to put anything back. So, it’s a troublesome 
situation.
       I’ve also asked for TAP to be restored, and there is a bill that is 
active that was written by Eddie Sullivan when he was in office to have the 
President of the Faculty Senate be a regular member of the Board of Trustees. 
And, of course, I did lobby in favor of that. My reasoning was that we need to 
have another voice of diversity on that Board, and that seemed to be well 
received by them. We’ve been asked to come back to talk more with the Chief of 
Staff for Senator Laval. I presented our Rational Fiscal Policy to each of the 
chairs during my visit, and Laval’s is interested in that; so we’re going back 
and talking about that policy. My message was not to take a part of it, but to 
look at the whole package. All of those recommendations are interdependent, and 
I’m going to do what I can to see that that, in fact, happens. 
       Let me move on and talk to you about some of the system activities. The 
first I want to mention is the Provost Advisory Council on general education. 
Norm Goodman gave a report on that last night. The first meeting was held March 
26th. Procedures were developed to process campus guidelines as they’re 
received, as well as to process course additions for general education. I think 
that they’re going to be done electronically, which I think is good. The acronym 
for this is [T1]Ac G. Ac G is going to start to review the assisting learning 
outcomes for each content area, and that review will involve campus faculty in 
the process.
       There’s a SUNY general education conference planned for April 24th and 
25th in Syracuse, and as of March 26th there are seventy pre-registrants from 
thirty-five campuses. There’s a nursing initiative, and there’s going to be a 
meeting on April 9th of nursing deans and directors to discuss the nursing 
shortage and what SUNY’s strategy or role should be in that initiative. There’s 
a faculty development initiative. Provost has created an advisory task force on 
faculty development. The third meeting was held on March 26th at Duchess 
Community College. There was a questionnaire that the group developed earlier 
that was sent to campuses. I hope that you are familiar with that. The responses 
were reviewed by the committee during this meeting, and we were able to start to 
get some major ideas from the responses. We’re going to eventually be making a 
report that’s going to basically focus on best practices in faculty development 
and teaching research service, as well as promotion and tenure, as well as 
awards and recognition. It’s my sense from working in the group that it’s an 
area that needs this kind of research and effort. I have hopes that what we’ll 
produce will be useful to everyone 
       One thing that’s been made perfectly clear is that there are not going to 
be any directives that come out of this. It’s simply going to be to kind of 
share what for this group seems to be a good way to go about doing these things. 
Hopefully, it will have some positive effects. Let me talk a little bit about 
the SUNY Assessment Initiative. There is a general education review group, GEAR, 
which is just about one hundred perfect teaching faculty. It has received and 
reviewed the assessment plans of virtually all of the campuses, which will be 
fifty-seven. Not all of the sixty-four campuses, for one reason or another, have 
the undergraduate general education program. At the present time, forty plans 
out of fifty-seven have been approved. The GEAR group is planning a Best 
Practices and Assessment conference for next fall. The date has been set: it’s 
November 13th and 14th at the Crown Plaza in Albany. Each campus is going to be 
invited to send members of the faculty, professional staff and administration 
who play a key role in the campus-based assessment process. Call for 
presentations have been sent to each campus. If you haven’t seen it and you need 
to see one, just send me an email and we’ll make sure that you get it. 
       Let me talk to you a little bit about the new vision and teacher 
education. You’ll recall that that is a program which increases the content for 
both elementary and secondary education students. The key features are that it 
now requires eighteen upper division hours for elementary ed majors, and it 
requires that secondary ed teachers have a major in the discipline that they are 
going to teach. So, a campus implementation report is going to be due in the 
Provost office on June 1st. From what I’ve been hearing, that’s been coming 
along rather well. There have been problems in terms of various aspects of it, 
but I haven’t heard a great deal about problems. As part of that initiative, 
there is a teacher education transfer template. There has been a problem getting 
agreement on all of the courses in that template. There was a meeting last 
Friday, and that still didn’t resolve it, so that’s a continuing issue, but 
they’re continuing to work on it.
       The enrollment planning process has been approved for 2003-2004. Overall, 
the plan calls for 2% funded enrollment growth. It breaks out to 1.6% growth for 
the doctoral institutions, 1.2% for the comprehensive colleges, and 7% for the 
technology colleges.
       I don’t fully understand that process, and I thought, “Well, it might be 
useful to have an explanation of it,” so I’ve asked Joe De Filippo to come and 
give us a presentation on that so that maybe we could have a better 
understanding of it.
       Now let me move on to some issues of concern. We talked about these last 
night in the executive committee. The first is the Global Education Networks 
American History course. You will recall the discussion we had during the Alfred 
Plenary meeting in which we basically said that we don’t want SUNY to 
participate in this. I mean, that was the sense of it. So, last week, surprise, 
surprise, there were full-page ads advertising a GEN American History course in 
most of our newspapers. I brought Potsdam’s and several people of the Executive 
Committee brought theirs. Basically what it’s advertising is saying that through 
Hudson Valley Community College, students can take this course. And then they 
talked about the quality of the course, and they talked about the fact that it 
would be three credits and that it would satisfy the general education 
requirement for history, and that it would transfer into the college in which 
the ad appeared. So, if you haven’t seen it on your campus, I urge you to go 
back and look a couple of weeks back. I think that you’ll probably find this 
full-page ad. This was alarming to a large number of us, so we looked into it. 
       First of all, we went and spoke with the Provost about this. He didn’t 
have any knowledge of it. It’s not going through the SUNY learning network. He 
found out about it just recently. Ben started to do some more research in terms 
of Hudson Valley. He made a call to Hudson Valley and asked about the course. He 
found out that there are going to be two six-week sections and one twelve-week 
section starting in May. It’s a Hudson Valley course taught with a Hudson Valley 
instructor, and the GEN Involvement was described as a course ‘cartridge’. I 
went on to ask what that was and it was explained, “Well, it’s like an 
electronic textbook.” The class size was twenty-five per section. I then had 
another faculty friend call and ask some more questions so that we had the name 
of the instructor and so forth. We had a long discussion about it in the 
Executive Committee trying to find out what type of action we should take, and 
one of the things that we discovered is that this new technology doesn’t make it 
so easy to work with the older ways that we would approach a curricular issue 
like this. So, it was decided that we needed to go through the faculty council 
and have some more discussions with Hudson Valley because this thing is being 
offered on Hudson Valley’s server. And, we need to talk about this with the 
Union, and then we will report back. 
       I think it’s fair to summarize the Executive Committee’s reaction as 
being unhappy with this and that we’re going to be looking into it. We’re unable 
to arrive at a course of action that seemed to be appropriate, so we need to do 
some more work. If you have some ideas please share them.
       University-wide assessment is an issue that everyone is concerned with, 
and the Executive Committee discussed it at some length last night. We have that 
on the agenda today, so I’ll save my remarks until that time and then we’ll get 
into that discussion fully.
       Another issue that I’m very concerned about is rethinking SUNY. Back in 
early meeting this spring, the Board of Trustees Chair, Tom Egan, announced that 
the Board would begin work on rethinking SUNY, too. He appointed Trustees Randy 
Daniels and Ed Cox, and also he went to John Crane and to Cortland President 
Judd Taylor to work on this group that’s going to be charged with looking at 
ways that SUNY and system can increase efficiency. One outcome of this has been 
like a survey, referred to as the Crane-Taylor survey, that’s been sent to 
various offices in system administration. Most people are uncomfortable with it. 
I haven’t seen the entire survey, but I have seen a question or two, and one 
question that stuck in my mind went something like this, “What are you doing to 
improve faculty efficiency on the campuses?” And then there was a forced choice 
with contact hours, credit hours…that’s what I remember of it. I’ve also heard 
that the thing goes into some very detailed questions, as detailed as asking 
them to put down the mileage on the campus cars from each campus. That type of 
thing. So as I continue to learn more about it, I’ll report back to you; but I’m 
very concerned.
       Let me end there and simply conclude by saying how much I appreciate the 
opportunity to serve you as President. I try to show that appreciation in terms 
of the way I conduct myself every day. As I’ve mentioned at every plenary 
meeting, I use four guiding principles: communication, consultation, respect, 
and quality. I just wanted to thank you once again for the opportunity. That 
concludes my report. If you have some questions, I would be pleased to answer 
them.

Jim McElwaine: ‘Morning, colleagues. It’s time for roll call.

Interval

The Executive Committee met last night. You’ve already received an extremely 
detailed report from Joe Hildreth, who makes my job very easy. Thank you, Joe. 
We would re-announce there is a general education conference coming up the 24th 
and the 25th followed by a general education assessment conference, which will 
be November 13th and 14th, and there will be an assessment conference on the 
general education assessment con…no, I’m just kidding!
	The Executive Committee did consider a motion last night that these 
conferences that involve curricula be sponsored entirely or in part by the 
University Faculty Senate. That motion was moved, seconded, passed without 
dissent. Standing committees’ reports were received from the Awards Committee, 
the Governance Committee, Operations, Student Life, the Undergraduate Committee 
and the CGL Representative Liaison. No reports from the remaining two 
committees: Graduate and Public Information. There was a suggestion that 
Rethinking SUNY II should be called Re-Rethinking SUNY. That was also not 
addressed. There was a report from Norman Goodman on ACGE, surfacing once again. 
And, other than that, Joe has pretty much nailed all the details for you.	
	Comments, no? Back to the boss.

Joe Hildreth: Thank you, Jim. In my opening remarks, I failed to recognize our 
Parliamentarian for this meeting, Ed Alfonsin, could not make it, and Danny 
Malone was nice enough to offer his services, and I’d like to welcome you, 
Danny. Thank you for being here.
	I just wanted to make the remark that I’m happy to be here, and I also 
want to take the time to request that Anne Donnelly explain to her husband that 
my raincoat is outside and she can explain why I say that. Okay, I think we need 
to move on to the next order of business here, and that would be the elections 
and Peter Nickerson, I’ll turn the floor over to you.

Peter:  …bylaws at the last meeting. We have two candidates. The nominations 
were closed and the statements were sent out, and you had them in your packet. 
So, we’re ready to do the election. At the election, only the Senators or their 
alternates can vote. Gail Hagenah has agreed to help me and if any of the 
Senators do not have ballots, could you please raise your hand - senators or 
their alternates? So, if you please fill those in, we’ll collect them. 

Do we have everybody’s ballot now? The election has now concluded, and we will 
do the tally.

We are very pleased to have the answer. We’d like to congratulate Joe Hildreth 
on his reelection as President.

Joe Hildreth: Well I want to thank you and I also want to thank Carl Wiezalis. 
When I heard that Carl Wiezalis was running against me, my initial thought was, 
“Oh no,” because he’s such a good guy. I’ve known Carl since my initial 
involvement with the Senate and we both came as campus governance leaders. He’s 
a very good guy so I just want to tell you that I feel especially pleased that I 
was able to win this election with someone like Carl running against me. 
	Now I guess we need to move on. Our next order of business is to go to our 
sharing of concerns by sector. We have some breakout rooms for you. It’s on this 
pink sheet that’s in your folder, and let me just go over these. The University 
Centers will be meeting in Multipurpose Room C. The SUNY Colleges, that would be 
the Comprehensive Colleges are Multipurpose Room C. I wonder if that room is 
divided. The Health Science Center is 306C, Agriculture and Technology is 306 A, 
and the Specialized Colleges are 306 B. The Campus Governance Leaders are in 
Multipurpose Room A and B.
	We’ve got a discussion on the convener situation for the campus governance 
leaders, and I’m going to say a couple of words to you. Then I will go to 
Multipurpose Room C, and I will make sure that that is accommodating your needs. 
We will have until 11:15 for this. Remember that we’re going to be having an 
election for the 2003-2004 Executive Committee when you come back. Normally, you 
decide during these discussions as to who your representative will be. And while 
there can be an election between two people, correct me if I’m wrong, it’s 
tradition that people come in and have one nomination and that will be the 
person who will represent your sector in the Executive Committee for the coming 
year. So, these will be important decisions.
	See you back here at 11:15, and I hope that this Multipurpose Room C has 
enough Multipurposes to work!

INTERVAL __________________________________________________

Today we’re going to have the reports by sector, and following those reports 
we’re going to have the election for the 2003-2004 Executive Committee. Now 
basically the way that’s going to work in most cases is that we will call for a 
nomination during the election section of our agenda. If there’s only one 
nomination, I’ll ask if there are any objections. Then, if we have none, we’ll 
ask the secretary to cast one unanimous ballot. We won’t be required to vote, 
but that will put it on the record. So, that’s the way we’ll do it.  We’ll go 
through and we’ll have the election, which means that you’ll come up and give me 
the nomination. We’ll have the secretary cast one unanimous ballot in most 
cases, and that will certify the election, and we’ll have it on the official 
record. And then it’s lunch. 

So, if we could have the representative for the University Centers, I believe 
that would be Pete Knuepfer.  
       
Pete: The University Centers agreed some time ago that they would ask a 
particular member to be on the Executive Committee for two years running. I am 
completing my first year on the Executive Committee, and so keeping with that, 
the Centers have re-nominated me for another year to torment Joe. 
       
President Hildreth: Are there any additional nominations from the floor? 
Alright, Mr. Secretary, I believe that it is now appropriate for me to now ask 
you to cast one unanimous vote for Pete Knuepfer to be the representative on the 
Executive Committee for the 2003-2004 year.

Comprehensive colleges?
       
Tim Phillips: As I was the only nomination amongst the Comprehensive Colleges, I 
am the nominee: Tim Phillips, Cortland. 
       
President Hildreth: Health Science Centers? Peter.
       
Peter Nickerson: We do have a nominee. It’s George Tortora from Stony Brook.
       
President Hildreth: Additional nominations from the floor? Mr. Secretary, you’ll 
cast that ballot?
The Technology Colleges? Jeff?
       
Jeff: Against my better judgment, I’ve decided to accept the nomination of the 
Colleges of Technology, and I’ll continue on into a second year if they’ll let 
me. 
       
President Hildreth: This is your last chance to do something about Jeff before 
he’s confirmed. Are there any more nominations? Alright, seeing none I’m going 
to instruct the secretary to cast that ballot. Let’s see, we need to have the 
Specialized Colleges. Kathleen?
       
Kathleen: I’ve been nominated for a second term, so I accept the nomination.
       
President Hildreth: Nominations from the floor? Alright. Campus governance 
leaders. Now, this is not in our bylaws, but do we have someone to speak for the 
campus governance leaders?
       
Ken O: The campus governance leaders have adopted a process that will yield a 
new convener shortly. 

President Hildreth: But, it hasn’t occurred yet.

KO: It has not occurred yet, and so until it occurs, I will be acting as the 
convener.

President Hildreth: But it will occur this plenary, won’t it? Or not?

KO: No.

President Hildreth: It won’t.

KO: No. It will be similar to the last process, which will involve email 
nominations and ballots, and it will be done within four weeks. We do have two 
nominations. 

???: …recommendation of the committee to set that up. So that we can make sure 
that all the CGL, if they weren’t here, could be there.

President Hildreth: All right, that’s fine, and then Ken, you’ll be making the 
report later on this afternoon?

Ken: Yes, I will.

President Hildreth: Okay. I believe that takes us through the election of the 
Executive Committee, and we got through that quickly. 
       I have some announcements here. We are scheduled for a walking tour of 
the campus from 5:30 to 6:15 this afternoon, and there was a question to see how 
many people would be interested, given the weather. Could I see a show of hands 
of the people who would like to go on a walking tour? We do have the people here 
to conduct that. Okay, good. That will take place at 5:30 and we’ll give you 
instructions when the meeting breaks up as to where you should meet. I see a 
note that you’ll meet on the first level. 
       I have an announcement about carpooling to the Statler Hotel from the 
meeting location. We have drivers: Bill Coles, Judith Adams-Volpe, and Marilyn 
Kramer will be riding with Bill Coles. If you need to make some additional 
arrangements, go ahead and do that, but I did want…

Man: Is there a parking place at the Statler where we can park?
       
President Hildreth: Jim, would you get Claudia to come in here so that I could 
ask her a question about that? And then Sue Bastable, Anne Donnelly, and Angela 
Hower will be your riders. Claudia, what about parking at the Statler tonight?

(Claudia speaks away from the microphone.)

President Hildreth: And actually Carol has identified for me those six 
people…this is what Carol’s like. Every time I walk into the office I’ve got 
this three-page list of things that she wants me to do, and this is a perfect 
example of it. So those people to go with Claudia are: Melissa Brown, John 
Cross, Ellen Fitzpatrick, Martin Haybower Burlmont, Ken O’Brien. Dan Murphy is 
also going to be a driver, and his passengers will be Ed O’Shea, John Taylor, 
and Karen Spellacy. If you don’t find your name there and you need a ride, let 
Carol know and we’ll work that out. 

(talking in background)

And then I wanted to mention on Saturday that the parking is not going to be the 
same as Friday, but see the Driving to Ithaca sheet for directions on that. And 
with that, I believe that we can break for lunch. I believe that lunch is going 
to be served in the same room that we had breakfast in this morning. I will 
point out to you that we will begin our afternoon plenary session at one 
o’clock. So, have a good lunch. 


President Hildreth: Now we have, due to the weather, a change and then we have 
another change that we want to announce. We are not going to be able to have the 
presentation on using the website due to weather and the Operations Committee 
felt that it would be better to just go ahead and summarize what they were going 
to do during their report on Saturday. So we have that time. So what I think 
will be useful then would be to move up our discussion on University Wide 
Assessment. So we will have that discussion and it will be begin at 
approximately 3:30 and we can let that go for an hour or so. That will give us a 
little bit of time if we need it. Then we will try to break immediately 
following that discussion, let’s say that might be around 4:45 and have our 
group picture then. So that might mean that there might need to be some changes 
made in terms of going back to the hotel and transportation, etc., etc. So I 
have a sheet here and if you would like to go back earlier to the Statler, if 
you’d sign up we’ll try to see that you have transportation and then we will 
still have our reception at 6:15 which will be back on campus. So let me pass 
this around so that those of you who need transportation can sign it.

???: Joe, what’s happening with the walking tour?

President Hildreth: The walking tour is on. Let’s see. Is Brian here? So, now 
it’s my pleasure to introduce the vice-chancellor for Finance and Business, 
Brian Stenson. He’s going to give us a budget report, and he’s the one who can 
give you the insights and the detail and the perspective that I was unable to 
give this morning. Brian?

Brian Stenson: I think I might be able to give you some perspective; I don’t 
know if I can give you any detail. Good afternoon. Thanks for inviting me here 
today. I genuinely mean it, it’s a great pleasure to be out of Albany for a day, 
even on a gloomy day. I think they call this “Ithicating” here at Cornell. I’m 
not making that up. I think it’s part of the local lore. I think I’ve mentioned 
this before to you folks, but there’s rarely any good time to talk about fiscal 
matters in New York State. I don’t mean in terms of the substance; it’s the 
timing. Even if you can get past the usually downbeat subject matter, the timing 
just never seems to be right. It’s either well before any real developments or 
well after them. So, we are either rehashing old news of sitting around 
speculating on events that are yet to happen. So everything really is 
conjecture. But I’ll try to give you some of my perspective after following this 
process for too many decades. We can have a conversation about where we go from 
here.
	The Executive budget details are well known, so I’m not going to hash over 
that in much detail, although I do want to talk a little bit about the major 
issue facing our budget and that’s the impact and the prospects for the 
Executive budget recommendation that would reduce state support by a significant 
amount and increase tuition revenue by a like amount. I’ll get into that in a 
second. But first I’m going to give you an update on where things stand today on 
the state budget. I did not get a chance to look at the Times Union this 
morning, so who knows, everything could be settled, for all I know. Unlikely, 
but it’s possible. Especially now that we’re nineteen years in a row late. The 
interesting thing is that this year, especially this year, you can see the 
relationship between the budget of a given state fiscal year and the next fiscal 
year. If you follow it a little bit, and with any luck I can help illuminate 
that a bit today. You see how one year really affects the outcome of the 
following year, and you’ll see what that means for the content of the state 
budget; but it’s interesting to look at. It’s probably a consuming interest only 
for budget geeks like myself and Pete Pillegi, who’s down here, but it should be 
of at least mild interest to everybody here who relies to some extent on state 
funding. 
       As you know, the post state budget was released by the governor in 
January, and it was constructed in the context of a huge gap facing New York 
State for the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2003, which is the ‘02-‘03 fiscal 
year in the one that started. The year we’re in now is ‘03-‘04. In that gap is 
the result of mainly revenue losses reflecting the real slowdown in the economy 
nationwide, and particularly in New York and our state that, as you know, was 
especially hard-hit by the events of September 11th. That really devastated the 
economic base of the city and the financial services industry and a lot of the 
allied industries down there. It just shook consumer confidence right to the 
core. So we’re really facing a double whammy in New York State and in many of 
the local governments in New York State.
       There are also sharp spending increases in the state budget for pension 
contributions, again relating back to the economic slowdown in the stock market. 
Health insurance costs are rising. Health care costs, like in Medicaid, are 
skyrocketing. School aid, all those kinds of programs, are rising in spending 
next year, many of them following commitments that were made last year during an 
election year budget negotiation. So the chickens are coming home to roost in 
the 2003-2004 fiscal year.
	When the state budget was released by the governor, receipts were 
projected to decline in the prior year from earlier projections and again in the 
year we’re in now, from ‘02-’03, and the loss of non-recurring revenues that 
were available to fund spending in ’02-03 are gone. Those revenues are gone so 
that the State has this baseline budget imbalance. Last year, for the year that 
just ended, the governor had predicted a 2.2 billion dollar budget deficit, and 
he predicted a 9.3 billion dollar deficit for the year we’re just starting. 
That’s really a baseline gap and that’s the difference between what their 
receipts would normally achieve without any change to tax structures, given the 
economic forecast and what the spending commitments would require. So, it’s a 
baseline gap. In this case, the spending line is going up sharply, and the 
revenue line is actually declining. So, you have this 9.3 billion dollar budget 
gap. There was a projection of about eleven and a half billion dollars of 
deficit over the two years. The governor proposed a combination of actions that 
were mainly spending reductions and more one-time revenues to close this budget 
gap.
	Funding is being reduced for virtually every state agency and state 
program with the exception of public safety kinds of programs. But it includes 
cuts in school aid and Medicaid and most state agencies. State support for SUNY 
operating colleges and state operating and statutory college and the community 
colleges is being reduced year over year.
	There’s also a heavy reliance on one-time actions in the executive budget. 
These were proposed as a bridge, really, until the economics strengthened, in 
that the normal state tax structure would start to generate more state revenues 
as a bridge to get to better economic times, while they achieved technical 
budget balance in ’03-’04. The largest element really is the securitization of 
tobacco settlement monies that the state, as other states, are getting a stream 
of revenues from the tobacco companies that the governor proposed borrowing be 
done in anticipation of those revenues. So you discount that and get upfront 
money in exchange for a dedicated stream of these payments over twenty or thirty 
years. I’d call this the mother of all one-shots. It would have generated about 
3.8 billion dollars of receipts in ’02-’03 and ’03-’04 in exchange for giving up 
multiples of that over the next twenty or thirty years. The State Controller 
estimates that there’s a significant number of one-shots over and above the 3.8 
billion dollars, but it’s anybody’s guess what’s a one-shot and what’s not 
really. It’s sort of a technical doublespeak kind of language.
	So that’s the general architecture of the Executive Budget. I want to give 
you a sense now of where we are in the process. The year ended Monday night, as 
I indicated, at midnight. I did that too many years when I was in the Division 
of the Budget. Sometimes it didn’t end until 4 o’clock in the morning. But I 
want to tell you a little bit about what happened here.
       There was no agreement on an overall plan to achieve a balanced budget in 
the year just ended. As I indicated, the Governor wanted to use some of the 
Tobacco bond money in ’02-’03, but that did not happen. There was no agreement 
on how to do that. Assembly speaker Silver opposed the Governor’s plan because a 
lot of those tobacco monies have been promised or dedicated to other programs, 
particularly public health programs. He was concerned that using them now for 
balancing the budget would jeopardize the level of funding for those programs 
that are near and dear to the speaker’s heart. So, that money was not made 
available. Senator Bruno has proposed a highbred of the two plans. Compared to 
what the governor has recommended that the securitization of tobacco and the 
assembly speaker has recommended more of a conventional borrowing program. 
Senator Bruno suggested a highbred of those two ideas.
	You have to remember that New York State operates on a strictly cash basis 
of accounting. They report on an accrual basis, but they operate and manage and 
budget on a cash basis. So without that tobacco money, the Division of the 
Budget had to turn to good old-fashioned cash gimmicks to balance last year’s 
budget. They did that by slowing down the actual disbursement of money. The 
reports are not quite in yet, but sketchy information that’s been leaked showed 
that school aid payments totaling 1.3 billion dollars were delayed from March 
into either the April, May, or June months. The thinking there is that as long 
as the money came to school districts in the current school year, which ends the 
same time as our fiscal year, June 30th, it didn’t matter. So they delayed 1.3 
billion of school aid payments to help close last year’s budget gap. Clearly 
there will be implications for certain school districts. Some of them may have 
to borrow money to make up from that lost revenue from the State.
       One of the traditional techniques that the State has used in the past 
years -- I’m not sure if they used it this year -- was to delay the payment of 
tax refunds. So, if anybody had plans to use their tax refund to buy a new car, 
you may have been disappointed. They’re being held somewhere in a filing 
cabinet, waiting for better times.
       The culmination of these actions, obviously, is not to save money but 
just to delay the spending. So the school aid has to be paid in April, May, and 
June. That’s not part of the Governor’s recommendation, to cut those payments, 
but it has to be paid in April, May, and June and those tax refunds would have 
to be paid some time or another. Probably in April, May, and June. 
       So the State’s cash situation in April and May is really in difficult 
shape right now. They will probably run out of cash in May, unless some 
extraordinary event happens, whether they issue the Tobacco bonds or do some 
good old-fashioned cash flow borrowing that they’ve tried not to do in the past 
eight or ten years. 
       In normal times, April, May, and June is when the State would generate a 
lot of tax revenues from your tax payments, but these are not normal times and 
they won’t get nearly as much money as they would normally or even what they had 
planned on when they put the budget together this year. So there’s a real cash 
crunch coming for the State of New York. We were concerned that this would 
affect our payment of aid to community colleges. It has had no effect at all on 
the State operated colleges, but there was a delay in payments for the community 
colleges in the State SUNY system. But those payments were delayed only a few 
weeks. The payments were actually made in late March, compared to a late 
February or early March. So it was just a small blip, and we were lucky there.
       Back to the overall State budget, on a strictly cash basis the State 
closed last year’s budget in balance. The actual cash receipts equaled actual 
cash disbursements. But if you look at this over a two-year basis, all of that 
11.5 billion dollar budget gap sits squarely in the ’03-’04 fiscal year. How are 
they going to close it? We don’t know yet, but there is some good news and there 
is some bad news. First, the good news is that the Legislature and the Governor 
have agreed on a revenue estimate for next year. This is sort of a monumental 
event this early in the year. Obviously, at some point when they negotiate a 
budget, they have to agree on a revenue estimate; but they did it in early 
March, probably the earliest such agreement in recorded history. It’s part of a 
process that was called Consensus Revenue Forecasting. It was statutorily 
mandated, I think, back in 1996, to have sort of a forced conference or conclave 
where the Governor and the Houses of the Legislature get together, share revenue 
estimates, and agree on a consensus forecast with economics and revenue for the 
state. And this is the first year that that’s happened before April 1st.  But 
this agreement covers only tax revenues. That’s what can be collected by the 
state from income tax, sales tax, corporate income tax and so on, the broad 
based taxes. Unfortunately, the number was not much different than what the 
Governor had projected. So there’s not a lot of new money being found as part of 
that process. But they have the agreement on that and that’s the bulk of the 
State’s recurring revenue base. 
       The main part of it that is always used in terms of negotiating in an 
active budget is what they call avails. The tobacco securitization money is an 
avail, but there are others. There’s always talk about selling state assets, 
relieving agencies of surplus funds and balances, taking that off their hands so 
they don’t have to worry about it, spinning up or accelerating the receipt of 
monies. Actually, businesses for a long time had to make estimated prepayments 
of their quarterly sales tax, so they’d have to estimate how much sales tax 
they’d collect in a two or three week period at the end of the month and 
estimate that and pay it early to the State before they collected it. That went 
over big, too.
       I just want to talk a little bit about the tobacco money. On paper that 
transaction is still possible, but there’s no agreement on how to do it, how 
much to do, how to structure the money and the bonds that would be issued. And, 
there’s also some further complication. I don’t know if anyone saw the paper 
this week, but the actual stream of revenue that the State is going to collect 
is in some jeopardy. Phillip Morris has been hit with, I think, a ten billion 
dollar settlement that might imperil the company’s ability to make these 
payments. So, the very revenue stream on which the State budget is predicated 
now for this next year is at some risk. If that doesn’t happen, they’ll become 
extremely creative in finding alternative revenues. So, we have to watch that 
closely. I would encourage everybody to keep an eye on that one. That’s going to 
be a very significant idea.
       The other major revenue source that people will have to talk about, I 
think, is involving changes to the State’s tax structure and revenue structure. 
Not just taking some balances here and there but to look at some of the broader 
based taxes, closing loopholes, and so on. The Business Council has issued a 
series of alerts to their members warning them about secret behind-closed-doors 
discussions to close corporate loopholes, imposing a temporary personal income 
tax surcharge and so on as a way to generate the monies that people think they 
need for this state. You can imagine how receptive the Business Council is to 
that idea. They weren’t all that hot on it. But, that’s going to be an 
interesting area to watch. You really should watch that debate carefully. How 
that’s resolved will determine whether the State closes this next year’s budget 
gap in a way that is structurally sound or really just pushes off the problem 
for many years or just one year. That’ll have a direct impact on the budgets 
that the State will have to enact in ’04-’05 and ’05-’06 and therefore another 
impact on our budget in that year.
       So there are all these other ideas being floated in Albany, but all of 
the discussion has really been speculation by affected lobbyists. Very little in 
the way of incremental or sequential decision-making. It’s not at all like the 
federal system where they do one budget bill and then move on to the next budget 
bill. There’s no precise agreement yet on how the money will be spent that they 
haven’t quite figured out how to raise yet. We know from public statements that 
the legislature’s priorities are school aid, and the Governor recommended about 
$1.3 billion of actual reductions next year in school aid. They want to restore 
that. There’s a lot of interest in restoring that because that has a direct 
impact on local property taxes, and there is all sorts of anxiety at the local 
level about that. I’m sure you’ve seen that. There’s a lot of interest in 
restoring the proposed healthcare cuts, Medicaid cuts, and TAP. TAP is high on 
everyone’s list to restore. There seems to be some interest in restoring at 
least some of the community college cut. But again, we don’t know yet.
       There’s been a budget bulletin release by the State Budget Division. That 
has actually made the papers, and you can see some of the aftermath of that. To 
keep the pressure on lawmakers and to help generate budget savings in the year, 
DOB (Division of the Budget) released a bulletin asking all agencies to stop 
capital projects, to slow down spending, and eliminate anything that’s 
unnecessary. These emergency measures were designed to generate savings, but 
also really to pressure the Legislature to act now on the State Budget. The way 
they expect to do that is by stopping the capital projects. It’s not exactly 
clear what that will mean, specifically for us, but there’s an intent there to 
really cut back. 
       We enjoy as a University a pretty significant degree of budget and fiscal 
autonomy from the State, so the Budget bulletin doesn’t technically apply to us. 
But we were asked to do what we can to comply with the spirit of the bulletin, 
and I think that we are. From my perspective, it’s a good idea. We need to do as 
much as we can here for a couple of reasons. First, we don’t know the ultimate 
outcome of this year’s budget. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but it 
would be prudent to identify and generate savings to the extent that we possibly 
can. Regardless of how this year’s budget for SUNY comes out, we do still have a 
structural imbalance in our operating budget. There are built-in salary 
increases that would raise the level of spending and certain other things, 
inflation and so on, over the level of funding that was recommended in terms of 
aggregate amounts by the Governor. So even if we get exactly what the Governor 
recommended to us in aggregate terms, forget about the nips of tuition and state 
support for a minute; our spending needs will exceed that amount. We don’t have 
a significant salary increase or collective bargaining budget issue next year. 
That’s probably fortunate for the University, but unfortunate for everybody in 
this room. In addition, the year that we’re in now, campuses balanced their 
budget, again we did not get funding for collective bargaining and certain other 
things but the campuses in many areas balance this year’s budget by using campus 
reserves, and not a lot of that remains. 
       And finally, the Consensus Forecast indicates that the State is going to 
be in this soup for at least another year and probably two years or three years. 
So the long-range budget projections for this state are not very rosy, and ours 
are just as bleak to the extent we rely on State support.
       Let me talk a little bit about this bulletin and what our general 
position is on it. On personnel issues we’re going to continue the guidance that 
we’ve already given campuses regarding the retirement incentive. In that 
exercise, we did not place extraordinary controls on campus hiring for faculty 
who vacated their positions; and we’re not doing that now, either. We’re just 
urging campuses to be cautious and make sure that decisions on refilling any 
position, even the faculty, is well thought out and is part of the overall 
strategic thinking. For non-faculty positions, we really urge campuses to be 
extremely restrained in rehiring and try to keep non-faculty hiring to the areas 
that are truly critical, whether it’s health and safety positions that might 
generate revenue, such as development or help identify cost savings. The 
bulletin also called on us to control our non-personal service spending. So we 
asked campuses to review and limit as many of these areas as they could, 
including travel, the use of consultants, conferences, publications, purchases 
and so on. We have not established targets for the campuses. We’re actually more 
interested in the budget control processes that the campuses are using, so we’re 
going to ask campuses to let us know how they are doing on a monthly basis, but 
again, not shooting for a budget target and certainly did not impose staffing 
targets at all. We’re interested more in how campuses are managing this, what 
kind of changes they’re making, and how they go about things as opposed to 
achieving a dollar amount.
       We turn now to the budget outlook for State University for the year 
ahead. We will start with just the context of the Executive budget. I indicated 
before that the budget really reduces the level of support for many, many state 
programs and agencies. In that context, I think that SUNY faired pretty well. We 
worked closely with the administration over the past year or so to explain our 
needs and drive home the fact that in our opinion SUNY was not treated as well 
as others were when the State had a lot of money to spend. We looked at the 
amount of avails, the additional amount of money that was available to the 
Legislature each year when they enacted the Budget, and found that we didn’t 
participate as equal partners in that. We didn’t participate as junior partners 
in that, either. I don’t have to tell you…
       So the Governor, I think, and the Budget Division recognized that we were 
not well positioned to take another hit on our budget because of the built-in 
cost increases that we’re facing and the fact that we were pretty thin already. 
Our level of funding was reduced in real terms over what it had been before. So 
he recommended the reduction of State support that he was forced to recommend, 
but he recommended that we be authorized to raise tuition and generate an equal 
amount of campus revenue. To fill that hole up, we believe that a $1200 increase 
is necessary. That’s a $1200 increase on resident undergraduate tuitions. We’ve 
been working with the Presidents under Dick Miller’s leadership to work our 
other tuition increases for all the other categories in the tuition schedule. By 
that I mean all of the non-resident tuition rates, and the graduate and 
professional school tuition increases.
       Our strong advocacy message is that we need the full $1200 to balance our 
budget. First we want to make sure that how we allocate the money next year in 
our budget process does not severely disadvantage campuses or any particular 
campus. As you probably know, I think from some of our past discussions on 
budget allocation, the degree to which campuses depend on State support versus 
tuition is all over the lot. Some campuses rely very, very heavily on State 
support and other campuses do not. It’s much more of an even split. These are 
the high-cost programs and high-cost campuses. Second, I go back to the built-in 
structural budget gap I was talking about before. The level of spending that we 
would have next year will exceed the level of spending recommended in total or 
aggregate terms by the Governor. So we already have this thing and if we have to 
live with a lower level of tuition support that’s not made up with State 
support, then we’ll have an even bigger imbalance between our receipts and our 
spending requirements in the following year. These are the same old issues. It’s 
collective bargaining, it’s inflation, and it’s new spending for the enrollment 
growth that we have, even though that pretty modest this year. Other mandates 
that are not funded, whether it’s teacher education and even HIPPA. All along 
the line there are pressures on the campus budgets and if we get an absolute 
reduction in the overall level of support or the level of funding in the 
operating budget, then that makes those problems magnified. AS I mentioned 
before, many campuses used up their campus reserves in balancing this year’s 
budget. So our real point is that if the overall size of the budget is reduced, 
our situation in terms of budget outlook next year would be disadvantaged.
       We’re looking at ways to manage this challenge in the year ahead. I can 
report that there is no plan now to make wholesale changes to the so-called BAP 
(Budget Allocation Process). We’re not going to completely rewrite the thing. 
First, it’s too late and second we’re arguing that this is not the year to do it 
because of the significant disruption in the components of the funding. But we 
are looking at ways to ameliorate the impact of the State support reduction on 
the campus. Planning to consider more substantive actions for discussion in 
future years. Not starting in ’03-’04, but in future years. I would hope that we 
could replicate the spirit of cooperation we have with the campuses.
       We have regular, modest tuition increases that would be available for 
everyone to use in terms of planning and decisions, including campuses and 
students and families. There’s no clear indication on what the Legislature is 
going to do on that. I think we’re making some progress. Some of the legislators 
that we’ve been talking to are getting increasingly comfortable with the idea of 
modest regular increases. When you show them the numbers, our peer or competitor 
states, especially those in the northeast, had raised tuition modestly every 
year for seven years in a row, and we haven’t. So as a result, we have this huge 
upside room that makes the budget folks say, “Well, let’s raise it by twelve 
hundred bucks.” It just makes a significant reduction of state support all the 
easier to swallow.
       As you probably know, the state education law currently prohibits us from 
changing the tuition schedule until the state budget is enacted. That really has 
caused some difficulties. We haven’t faced this situation in about eight or nine 
years, but we have increased professional school tuition rates and we have to do 
that on a contingent basis. So we have this very inelegant process where the 
Board might make a contingent or conditional tuition increase that’s effective 
only when the state budget passes. Those tuition increases were really not 
designed to achieve budget balance at any particular campus; but they were used 
to help provide additional revenues to invest in the programs that benefited. So 
the University of Buffalo raised the tuition rate for the pharmacy (the Pharm. 
D.) program, the law program, and physical therapy. We think there are some good 
results as a consequence of that. 
       I think that the real obstacle to an effective tuition policy is the 
requirement that the monies be appropriated. We could raise all the tuition 
rates we want and not be able to spend the money unless the legislature in the 
enacted budget included some provision for us to spend that money. They’d have 
to provide an increased appropriation for us. Short of some radical shift in 
State policy here, which I don’t think will happen in our lifetimes, we will 
have to rely on a mutual trust with the legislature. As I said, I think we’re 
moving to develop that level of trust. 
       Let me talk a bit about timing. Timing is always dicey when we talk about 
tuition increases. Students right now, as we sit here, are making their college 
decisions for next year and we really don’t know what the tuition rate is going 
to be next year. We’ve developed some different scenarios for decision-making 
that cover the various possibilities. I think that the most sobering possibility 
is that there will not be a State budget with a provision for tuition until 
after the close of the fall semester. As I said before, the State of New York 
operates as a cash basis, and they can just go on with the emergency bills, what 
the Feds call Continuing Resolutions. As we sit here now I don’t think that’s 
likely. 
       There was some talk early on that no budget would be the outcome. You 
should understand that that no budget scenario was probably the dream scenario 
for the State Budget division. That allows them to fund things that are low 
level, cut back on all the discretionary kinds of things that agencies would do. 
They can structure the level of emergency appropriations to be barely at 
subsistence level, and it just holds down spending in the year. So, from the 
Division of the Budget standpoint, they just rub their hands and smile at the 
thought of that. But I don’t think that that is going to happen this year. 
       The latest we’ve ever gone in terms of waiting for a final resolution was 
October a couple years ago. That was the year of the so-called bare bones 
budget. We’ve been taking every opportunity to make the Legislature aware of the 
awful implications of the very late budget for us. If the tuition rate were not 
able to be increased, for example until January 2nd, that would preclude us from 
going back in charging the rates back to the fall. When we had the late budget 
that was finally deemed official in October, the Board of Trustees then enacted 
a resolution raising the tuition rates of those programs that I mentioned; the 
professional program of Buffalo and Stony Brook. But we were able to increase 
them mid-semester. We didn’t collect the money until the spring bill, but we 
increased them officially in mid-semester and we had been out and did a very 
public outreach program to the affected students. So they knew even back in May 
that we were raising tuition rates, and we told them again in August and 
September when classes started that those rates were going to be increased. So 
we got a little bit of pushback on that, but not much because we’re dealing with 
graduate students, not a hundred thousand or so undergraduates. So it might be a 
bit of a different scale. But we believe if it happened in mid-semester, we 
could go back and increase the tuition rate retroactively. 
       But I’m personally optimistic that the state budget will be done by June 
this year. A couple of things that are going on this year is that they enact the 
legislation that expires in the end of June. The rent control laws expire at the 
end of June, and that’s a huge issue for Speaker Silver’s district. So that’s a 
way to force serious negotiations. There are a couple of other things that are 
going on this year that end in June that will force everybody to the bargaining 
table and look at these thinks altogether, finish off that package of 
legislation, and finish off the State budget. So I’m optimistic that the State 
budget will be done by June, if only because the longer you go in the year, the 
more likely it is that you won’t have any more money; and there’s no percentage 
in sitting around dividing the same amount of money. If there’s any sort of 
additional revenue weakness in the State budget, then that’s even more incentive 
to get it done and get out of town.
       Let me wrap up at the risk of completely ruining your weekend. Before I 
take your questions…that’s pretty close, probably. But it’s not bad. I think if 
we can get the $1200, and I think there are increasing signs that the 
Legislature is understanding, at least, of the notion that we need $1200, and I 
think increasingly likely to support that. There have been other numbers tossed 
around as a potential outcome, and I think that those numbers are three digits 
in total. $800 or $900 is the number that you might have heard as another likely 
scenario. Those of us who sit there and watch this day-to-day knowing  the 
demands on the State and knowing  the limited resources are not optimistic that 
if the tuition rate were rolled back that the State would replace that with 
State support. We don’t think that’s going to happen. So we’ve been pushing for 
the $1200, and we think that it’s more likely now to happen. 
       But on a brighter note, I want to let you know that from the vantage 
point of system administration, I think it’s clear that we’re in a far stronger 
position than we were a few years ago, if you look at almost everything but 
budgets. Our general financial condition is stronger. We don’t have as many 
campuses that have severe long-term financial problems as we did just four years 
ago. Our academic programs are stronger, we have a more selective admissions 
process. Incoming students are getting stronger and stronger and more selective 
each year. The fundraising is up. We have a renewed attention on fundraising and 
you can see the results on that. The Governor’s proposed the second five-year 
capital plan that will help make needed investments in our infrastructure, and 
the demographics are strong, which was not the case the last time we had the 
major tuition increase back in 1995. 
       We’re still on an upswing here in terms of the high school graduating 
class. All of those arrows are pointing in the right direction, I think. Even if 
we have a significant tuition increase, $900 or even $1200, I think that we’ll 
be in a much better position to absorb that and move on. Even with a $1200 
increase, SUNY will remain a great value in most cases compared to our public 
competitors and I think that it will remain very attractive to thousands of 
great students and thousands of dedicated faculty like you. So at that point 
I’ll stop and see if I can answer any questions you may have. 
       	
Jim McElwaine: I’m Jim McElwaine from Purchase College. You mentioned something 
about stopping capital projects. Does that mean SUCF projects or how do you see 
that impacting of SUCF?
       
Brian Stenson: We’re not sure how…in theory, technically it doesn’t apply to us. 
That’s our position. But we’re working with DOB to try to find out exactly what 
they mean. The way it was originally explained to me is that projects that were 
in a particular stage of construction, not the design stage but the construction 
stage, you could have a contract within that stage. So if you were already in 
the construction stage and you’ve already issued a plumbing contract and a HVAC 
contract, you could do masonry and heating and so on. But you could not advance 
a project from design to construction. That’s their opening position, and we’re 
continuing to dance with them on that. So there isn’t any real specific guidance 
yet but that’s the general intent of what they want.

Marvin LaHood (Buffalo College): Brian, I’m going to ask the question that I 
asked before because I think that it would be interesting for the Senate. In 
this “Rethinking SUNY II,” there is this talk about efficiencies and so forth; 
and invariably in the last decade that efficiency has always been aimed at us. 
So we’ve had this diminution of full-time faculty lines and all that sort of 
thing. Is there going to be also some look at the efficiency of the 
administrative structure?  I don’t mean system, but I mean the administrations 
of the various units.
       
Brian Stenson: We’ve received several data requests from the folks doing the 
study. We actually added them all up and there are approximately 208 specific 
data requests. A large number of them speak directly to efficiency, and I’m not 
even sure if any of them speak to traditional faculty productivity, you’d be 
glad to know. But a lot of the questions look directly at staffing patterns, 
percentage of the budget end in this, and the work force that are in so-called 
administrative or overhead kinds of functions. There will be many of these 
questions that we will be trying to answer with them, comparing a lot of our 
benchmarks to CUNY and other state schools. There is a whole range of questions 
that speak to that issue. 

Tim Phillips (Cortland): Brian, you mentioned future year budget scenarios. I’m 
sure that you guys have developed multi-year budgets. What if we have a really 
bad situation? Could you just elaborate on what really might happen in an  11.5 
billion dollar deficit scenario?

Brian Stenson: If you’re talking about the following years, once a year DOB does 
a multi-year budget projection, and that’s done only to accompany the executive 
budget. That rapidly becomes out-of-date. If you look back at the past years, 
you cannot find a set of updated out-year projections following the enactment of 
the State budget. DOB has put out a set of out-year budget projections. They go 
two years out from the budget year so they’ll cover ’04-’05 and ’05-‘06. It’s in 
a very obscure place in one of the three budget documents, so I’m probably the 
only one on this campus who could find it. I’m typically the only one in my 
office who looks at this stuff. But the budget outlook for those years all 
assume enactment of the proposals recommended by the Governor. 
       The numbers for the out-years are not nearly as bad as they were for the 
’03-’04 year with a nine billion dollar budget gap. I think that the rough 
amount of the budget gap projected for 2004-2005, for example, was in the three 
billion dollar range. Again that is assuming enactment of the Governor’s 
proposed cuts of about $1.2 or $1.3 billion in school aid, so that just ripples 
through. So it’s not terrible every year. Every year in almost everybody’s 
collective recollection, the enacted State budget would produce out-year budget 
projections that are worse than what was assumed by the Governor. And that’s 
just because of the nature of Albany and how they do a budget. They’ll add 
spending commitments. It was a tried and true technique done years ago, and I’m 
afraid that we might be tempted to slip back into this, of enacting a program in 
the year you’re in, particularly in budget year, and paying for it in the 
following year. 
       Let me give you an example… particularly school aid. As I said before, 
it’s the same fiscal year as SUNY, which is July 1st to June 30th. What they 
would do was enact a school year increase, we’ll say $1 billion, and fund about 
two or three hundred million of that in the current state fiscal year and pay 
the remainder in the April, May, June period of the next state fiscal year, 
which came in this same school year. So in the year that you’re doing this 
budget, the school districts would have this billion dollar number coming in and 
they could use that in their local budget planning and it would be reflected in 
the budget that we all vote on as taxpayers. But it doesn’t come until the next 
state fiscal year. Well the next state fiscal year comes and then they have to 
somehow finance this. There are rolling problems like that. 
       They also do the same thing with tax refunds. They would delay tax 
refunds historically from March to April. As I said, they operate on a cash 
basis, so they have this tremendous cash flow imbalance in April, May and June. 
So the amount of receipts that they are normally collecting doesn’t nearly cover 
the amount of spending. As a result the State used to do seasonal borrowing, or 
cash borrowing. So they would borrow money --  it got as high as 4.3 billion 
dollars every spring --  and paid it off every March. And then to pay that off, 
they accelerate the sales tax payments as I mentioned. It got to be a terrible, 
complicated kind of a thing that had an incredible cash flow imbalance. If you 
looked at a graph you’d see this huge bulge of receipts in January, February and 
March, and nothing in April, May, and June and vice versa. The spending was very 
top-heavy in April, May and June. It got to be very, very difficult. 
       So there will be temptations, I’m afraid, this year to just delay and 
keep delaying the spending that was delayed from this past March to this April 
and do it next year as well. We should all watch to see how that happens. And 
that will make next year’s outlook worse. You can’t speculate on it now; who 
knows what’s going to happen, but that’s the general State outlook. Most of us 
believe that if the State is faced with another difficult budget year next year, 
it could be because of these things; or if they balance this year’s budget by 
really using a tremendous amount of one-shots, then the State will have a really 
significant problem. Maybe six or seven billion dollars in ’04-’05. Most of us 
believe that the State will be very reluctant to propose another tuition 
increase to the magnitude that we are talking about this year. So I would not 
suspect that in two years another $1200 tuition increase is in the cards. You 
don’t know. Never say never.  
       I think that a lot of it will depend on what’s going on in other states. 
If other states, and they typically act before us, if they bite the bullet and 
do big tuition increases, maybe mid-year and one for next year maybe then we’ll 
do another tuition increase. But if that happens…we’ve got the election year 
coming up next year. It’s just another complication we have to think about and 
that makes it inevitable that every time we try to do long-term budget scenario 
plans, we throw up our hands. You can identify some extremes and at some point 
we would want to identify what if Scenario A happens versus Scenario C. But 
Scenario C you don’t like to think about.

Vince Aceto (Albany): I’d like to go back to the Rethinking SUNY questions, 
Brian. Back in 1995, you may recall that the original Rethinking SUNY took place 
within a four-month period and there was a tremendous amount of involvement and 
engagement of administrators, presidents, the University Faculty Senate. We 
shadowed all of the committees of the Board of Trustees, and we solicited 
comments from faculty across the system. We had over a thousand responses which 
we organized and then presented to the Board. We had, I think, a rather 
significant role in helping to shape and define what the Rethinking document 
would look like. Is that going to happen this time? This sounds like it’s kind 
of tightly operated within a small group of people, and we’re going to all feel 
the impact of that. It just seems to me that in the spirit of active involvement 
of the Faculty Senate in the affairs of the University that we should have a 
voice there.

Brian Stenson: There are a couple of things that are different about this 
exercise. First, Rethinking SUNY was mandated by the legislature, and the 
Trustees were directed to report to Rethinking SUNY and identify specific topics 
and recommendations. This is an administrative…at their own discretion that the 
Trustees have launched this effort. So far it’s been focused on collecting data 
to enable the Trustees to have a body of information that they could then use to 
go forward. At that point, you probably would want broader involvement following 
your question, but I don’t know the direction that that second step will take or 
when it will happen. Maybe Dick could elaborate on that a little bit.

Dick Miller: I just would elaborate that while there may be a question or two 
out of the 204 that are directed at issues like faculty productivity, the 
overwhelming focus of the survey or of this project by direction, if you go back 
to the language of the Board when it was adopted, if you will, and into the way 
it’s being conducted, it’s being aimed at the administration, mostly in Albany, 
but also at the campuses and aimed at campus level best practice benchmarking of 
cost activities in the administrative and what I would call overhead areas. 
There was no intention by design that it get into faculty things, but part of 
the process is that they are going back to Rethinking SUNY I, looking at all of 
the recommendations that were made in Rethinking SUNY I, whether they were 
enacted or not, if not, why not, type thinking. So you have nothing to fear from 
us on that. And the “us” does not include Brian and me.
       
Vince Aceto: We’d be in real trouble if it did. No, my comment goes beyond 
simply academic matters. I can recall when the RAM (Resource Allocation Model) 
was being developed. It took us a year and a half to finally get a faculty 
member on that group. Now admittedly you can say that that didn’t deal with 
specific academic issues, but it deals with the affairs of the University and if 
you look collectively at our faculty, we have expertise and skills in areas of 
finance and budgeting which I think probably exceed those of the Board of 
Trustees. 
       
Miller: That may be, and I think that you ought to point that out to the Board 
of Trustees. The Board of Trustees, not the administration of the University, 
has designed Rethinking SUNY II.
       
Brian Stenson: The other thing that I would just mention on Dick’s comment is 
that the people who are doing this are looking not just at Rethinking SUNY I, 
but all of the other various studies both internal and external that have 
occurred. Most of those, as you know, have been focused on system 
administration.
       
David Carson (Buffalo State): I just have a very basic question. Does the money 
from a tuition increase go directly into the SUNY operational budget, does it go 
to the individual campus where it was raised? Does it go into the State’s 
general fund? Where does the money go?
       
Brian Stenson: Mechanically it’s raised at the campus, collected at the campus, 
and it’s swept regularly and comes into the State of New York, but it’s in the 
SUNY account. And then we keep track of it all so that we know how much tuition 
comes in from all the different buckets, not just tuition but fees and dorms and 
everything else. Then we send it back to the campus on their account. The 
revenue that is generated is part of the core operating budget allocation that’s 
given by the Trustees as part of the BAP. It goes right back to the campus.
       
David: But it stays SUNY money, it’s not made available to other…
       
Brian Stenson: Correct.
       
David: Okay, thank you.

Richard Eckerd (alternate, Binghamton): Actually that was my first question, 
whether the money is coming back to the campuses and whether it’s coming back in 
a proportionate way. The second question is probably very naïve, is whether 
anyone at the levels of the legislature is considering any kind of a tax 
increase. 
       
Brian Stenson: I think, yes, that is on the table and I don’t know how serious 
it is. There’s a lot of talk about loophole closures which are really tax 
increases, and there is the idea that’s been floated pretty aggressively by 
certain interest groups, and I think that the Fiscal Policy Institute is one of 
them, that would have a temporary income tax surcharge. From their standpoint, a 
temporary surcharge, say three years. That provides a much better bridge to the 
economic rebound that people are looking for, and it doesn’t use the one-time 
money up. So, yes, there is a lot of talk about it; but, typical in Albany, all 
that talk is either out in the public domain by the interest groups, or it’s 
behind closed doors by staff. The phrase is “no fingerprints.” If they could 
figure out a way to do a tax increase like that that had some sense of fairness 
in it in a way that doesn’t disadvantage particular members or particular 
houses, I think they would do it. 
       That same principle applies to prior years when we were talking about 
even small tuition increases. If they could figure out a way, you’d think they 
could, intelligent people, to let us raise tuition but without having Speaker 
Silver’s face plastered on tuition increase posters, they would do it. I make up 
Speaker Silver as one example. It could be Senator Bruno or Sonnenstuhl, it 
doesn’t matter. They don’t want to be associated with it, but they recognize 
that it needed to be done, at least in terms of tuition, but it was impossible. 
No one would go first. 
       
Norman Goodman (Stony Brook): Brian, I had just an informational question to 
clarify something you said, but I want to pick up on the discussion with Vince 
and you and Dick Miller. In addition to the point that Vince was making about 
the expertise that we have among the faculty, there is something else to 
consider, Dick and Brian, and that is that the administration changes that you 
are talking about is possible for efficiency have an effect on the faculty and 
in some respects, is the faculty and staff who are in a better position to tell 
you what those effects are likely to be than the administrators thinking about 
those. That’s something that I think you need to consider, both at the campus 
level and certainly at the system level.
       
Dick Miller: I just want to make it real clear, if I hadn’t before, that we’re 
not driving the string, and I think that if the faculty has an interest that it 
might ask Tim to speak with Judd Taylor, who has been drafted to represent the 
presidents in this process which I find to be a comforting thing because I think 
he’s one of our most effective presidents. I think that expressing the Faculty 
Senate’s interest in the project to the Chancellor and through Judd through Tim 
would be a good idea. 
       
Norman Goodman: I think that’s fine, but I do, Dick, give you and Brian some 
credit for having some influence in this, too, so your good offices would be 
helpful as well.
       
Brian Stenson: What we’re doing in sort of a quiet way is that we work through 
all of the data requests that we’re preparing and we’re finding things that 
don’t make sense or something else that they may want to look at.
       
Norman Goodman: But again, what I’m suggesting and what I think that Vince is 
suggesting, is that in addition to your members from system administration and 
your presidents that there is valuable input that faculty could provide to this 
whole process it ought to be considered.
       The simple factual question was when you talk about the rational tuition 
policy, something this body has considered quite consistently and actually 
recommended an indexing mechanism. But if I understood you correctly that can’t 
be done automatically since the legislature would have to prove it year by year?
       
Brian Stenson: Not the tuition increase. We could raise tuition every year by, 
let’s say, $200. We can’t spend the money unless the legislature makes an 
accommodation in the budget for it.
       
Norman Goodman: That’s one and the same thing is that you can do what you want 
but…

Brian Stenson: Yes, I know. There are ways around that, and one is that you 
would need a radical change in the State Budget policy and framework to allow us 
to do this independent of the Legislature and that’s not going to happen. That’s 
the way it is in other states, but in our state we need that appropriation 
level. What we would need to do is just work on them and try to come up with 
some accommodation or an agreement with the Legislature that we would do these 
modest tuition increases regularly; and in exchange for that, they would give us 
the appropriation, and this would not be seen as a substitute for State support.
       
Norman Goodman: Do you have any hope that that will work? Because it speaks 
directly to your point a minute ago that under that condition, nobody could 
finger anybody else for that tuition increase.
       
Brian Stenson: I think that helps a little bit. I think that if there is this 
small increase…the problem is that in the past years, we’ve always had giant 
tuition increases. It turns into a political battle, but if you had a tuition 
increase of the kind that our other peers do, then it’s more sellable and people 
can point to other states, and this is just normal stuff. It helps SUNY pay for 
initiatives and enhancements, and it’s not just substituting for State support. 
I think in that context, it helps Legislature get comfortable with it.
       
Dan Murphy (Utica-Rome): Brian, are you aware that in 7-9 months from now, an 
initiative for the largest academic fundraising development in U.S. history run 
by SUNY?

Brian Stenson: There are finishing touches being put on a new fundraising 
campaign.

Dan: …massive campaign. My question is what is the prospect list for such an 
initiative? If they’re going to start vacuuming the change out of the couches of 
all the donors on the local campuses statewide, and they do succeed in raising 
$3 billion, or whatever it is, then how is it going to get allocated back? And I 
don’t know where these conversations are taking place.

Brian Stenson: The whole intent of the fundraising campaign will be to build any 
efforts of the fundraising campaigns of the campuses now. There is no intent to 
raise this money centrally and then dole this out. I think that it’s still a 
matter of campus responsibility. We’ve hired Michael Luck and the research 
foundation with SUNY, and he’s really serving in his terms as a coach, 
cheerleader, and a technical expert because of his broad experience in that. But 
it really will be a campus responsibility. There might be some situation 
where…let’s use an example of companies that do business across the SUNY system 
that might be interested in doing something SUNY-wide that then would benefit 
the campuses. For example, IBM might say, “Let’s give a million dollars, and 
let’s have that dedicated to financial aid for students in the IT field.” We 
don’t educate students. The areas that I believe they’ll focus on and try to 
structure the fundraising goals around would be financial aid, faculty 
development and something else…I can’t remember what it is.
       Joe, could I suggest that we shoot the messenger? I was glad to see that 
the podium was near the door. 

Male Voice: (too faint to hear) …There was a reference made earlier about  some 
sort of adjustment this year. If we ended up having winners and losers because 
of the bad formula and because of the fact that different campuses are not as 
reliant on tuition in the same way. If we get that $1200, what’s going to be the 
impact across the system? Is it going to be the equivalent of having a flat 
budget or would it be the equivalent of having a 1% deficit, or will some 
campuses actually be winners?

Brian Stenson: Well, there are two levels of the answer. Some of the outcome 
will depend on what we do with the other tuition rates in the schedule, such as 
the non-residents and the professional programs. But having said that, there are 
two levels. One is that we believe that if we do the tuition increase, starting 
with kicking off the $1200 and then have higher rates in other parts of the 
schedule, on an aggregate system-wide basis we would be flat. Individual 
campuses, obviously, would differ and that relative flatness is a composite of 
some ups and some downs. That’s what I meant in terms of looking at that to make 
adjustments and to really mitigate the worst impacts of both positive and 
negative.
        Being a budget person and a little bit tuned in to some of the politics 
there, in this environment where we are closing mental health institutions and 
stopping capital projects, it’s hard for me to believe that we will have an 
allocation that will have, for example, an 18% budget increase to Potsdam. It 
would be hard for me to envision that, as much as Potsdam may deserve it. There 
are big winners and big losers in a situation like that and if you think about 
it, that means that the framework on which the BAP was initiated five years ago 
has changed. We have a change in the mix of State support and tuition. Ideally 
we would have had small tuition increases each year and State support  
increases, and we’d still be in a relative state of harmony between the two. 
That didn’t happen. Occasionally we got some State support increases, mainly 
just to pay for salary increases, and no tuition increases, so we are in some 
ways a little out of kilter. So we’ll be looking to make those kinds of 
adjustments. I can’t tell you if they will be one-time adjustments or permanent 
adjustments. 
       Maybe you will remember that when we implemented the new BAP, we 
recognized that there would be a dislocation between the distributions under the 
old formula and the new formula. We had a three-year phase-in to avoid the same 
kind of dislocation. A severe disruption in this environment is not in anybody’s 
interest.

(male voice too faint to hear)

Marvin LaHood: I just wanted to say that Brian has come to us year after year, 
plenary after plenary, and given us about as straight talk as I have ever heard. 
I think that we owe him a great debt of gratitude. (applause)

Brian Stenson: Thank you. I’ll keep doing it until you disinvite me. We’ll have 
heart medicine when that is the case. 

Runi Mukherji (Oid Westbury): You may have already given us this number, but I 
just wanted to ask again. With the $1200 increase, the budget will be flat you 
just said. What would that mean in real-term decrease in terms of need?

Brian Stenson: Last year we estimated that it was approximately $100 million of 
unfunded cost last year, mainly collective bargaining, which was about sixty-
five last year. I think that the numbers for the year ahead are much, much 
lower, maybe in the range from $40-50 million.

Runi: So it was about 5% last year and will be about 2-3% this year?

Brian Stenson: Yes. In that range. I didn’t bring that number with me and I’m 
getting too old to keep that number in my head. But it’s in the range, so it’s 
better than last year. The problem is that we used a lot of reserves up last 
year to balance that budget.

President Hildreth: Thank you very much, Brian. We appreciate it.

Brian Stenson: You’re welcome.

President Hildreth: You know, a lot of times when I am talking to Brian, you may 
have the same experience or it may just be me,  a lot of times he is going so 
quickly over these concepts and terms that are flowing off his tongue without 
any effort whatsoever that I feel like I am trying to listen to a foreign 
speaker and I am trying to remember college German, and it’s like I know the 
word but I can’t quite get it. It isn’t until some time afterwards that the 
meaning starts to sink in. 

Brian Stenson: Next time say, “Go over that again and switch to English.”

President Hildreth: Anyway, I think it was great. Thank you very much. Now our 
next speaker is Joe DeFillipo. Joe is Assistant Provost  in the Provost‘s office 
and he is in charge of program review and planning. He’s going to be speaking to 
us about the program planning process, and I think that that is something that 
would be useful for us all to know a little bit more about. Joe?

Joe D.: I thought I was going at three. 

President Hildreth: Did I do something again?

(discussion and laughter among audience)

President Hildreth: No, you can go sit down. Let’s see, I’m going to come up 
with an excuse here. It’s like I need these glasses for distance vision but I 
don’t need them for close up reading. So I guess that that is going to have to 
be the best excuse that I can come up with. I’m sorry. 
       Our next agenda item is the sector reports. So we’ll try to have the 
leaders of the sector meetings come up and give your reports. For that, we 
normally would have Chancellor King here, but we don’t have him here today. So 
we have Senator Miller here. However Senator Miller is not necessarily convinced 
that he wants to pretend to be Chancellor King, but he might on occasion feel 
the need to respond. So I guess that will be the way that we will try to work 
this. So why don’t we start with the University Center’s sector report? 

University Centers Chair: All right, I’m sure that everybody will have something 
to say about budgets, so I just want to emphasize a few points that we discussed 
related to budgets and then a few other things that we talked about around the 
table.
        First of all, we discussed budget consultation on campuses and by going 
around the table we realized that each of our campuses has a mechanism in place 
for faculty to be involved in discussions about budgets. At each of our 
campuses, those mechanisms basically aren’t being used this year for a variety 
of reasons. Realistically, it’s probably mostly due to the uncertainties that 
administrations are facing. But we sort of bring that to everyone’s attention in 
part as a matter of curiosity as to how much any of the other sectors and 
individual campuses are having an opportunity to have influence on the budgetary 
decisions on the discussion of responses to the budget uncertainties that the 
campuses face. In part, as the usual sort of thing that one always does at these 
sessions, which is to bitch about what you think is not going right on your 
campuses. So there’s that one. 
       We, of course, have a good deal of concern that we expressed last time 
and continue to have a great deal of concern about whether there is going to be 
any recovery of increased tuition costs in the graduate students’ scholarship 
program. We don’t have a lot of optimism there, but we certainly want to be on 
record to say that it is absolutely essential to graduate programs that any 
increases in tuition costs be matched by increasing funds in those graduate 
scholarships to offset those costs, or else campuses are basically getting taxed 
almost doubly for the opportunity to increase tuition, because we don’t get 
those tuition dollars in the first place for those people. While we recognize 
that professional schools probably both need and ought to have differential 
tuition, we also just want to make a point that we think that if one were to 
even consider differential tuition by program within sort of the traditional 
areas of graduate education that is outside of professional schools, that that 
would be a bad idea. For example, any thought that there might be about 
differentiating tuition for an engineer versus a humanist or between a Masters 
and a Ph.D. student, we think that that would be a dangerous road to go down at 
all. 
       On a somewhat different note, but still in a sense financial, we have a 
lot of concerns and worries about the issues that are coming up with respect to 
international students. This is obviously true not only at the graduate level, 
but at the undergraduate level, and it’s true for every campus in the system 
that has any international students. There is obviously a major increase in 
reporting requirements. There are a lot of other issues associated with the 
changes in the international student environment that have come down from the 
federal level. On a very practical level, there are changes in reporting 
requirement that are significant in terms of time and effort by the generally 
very small and outstanding staffs that we have at our campuses to work with 
international students and international student services; and we have a great 
deal of concern about how those groups are going to have the financial backing 
to basically do what is now instead of being a State level unfunded mandate, is 
a federal level unfunded mandate; and we have some concerns in those areas. 
       Let’s see. I’m trying to decide which of the other items I actually want 
to bring up to everyone. Our understanding is that when honorary degrees are 
presented at the Universities, they are presented on behalf of the faculty and 
the Board of Trustees. They are, of course, approved by the Board of Trustees 
and we were having a discussion about to what extent do the faculty actually get 
involved in choosing, selecting, naming, vetting potential honorary degree 
recipients. Our sense around our table was “very little”. But these degrees are, 
in fact, being done on behalf of the faculty; and it’s against something else 
that we would encourage everyone to think about on their own campuses and maybe 
discuss within their governance structures.
       Just to put it on the record, rather than something that is necessarily 
of significance to everyone else around the table here, the four centers have 
Division I sports programs. There are, of course, issues that Division I sports 
programs have that fortunately, the rest of the folks who are still at Division 
III can safely ignore and we just sort of wanted to be on record to suggest that 
perhaps the directors of the Intercollegiate Athletics Boards at the various 
centers get together to talk about programs in common that they have and issues 
that they are facing. This might be very helpful to all of them.
       Finally, we were also discussing around the table the nature of our 
research offices at the centers and this would also certainly go beyond us. The 
question of how do these research offices work in terms of are they working by 
function, are they working by sort of a group or discipline within the campus, 
and how well are these research offices supporting the system-wide increased 
emphasis and pressure to develop external funds through external supported 
research; and is the organizational assistance helping or hindering faculty in 
their efforts to do this. So these are just some concerns, some of which are for 
ourselves, some of which are for all of us to think about. 

???:	Let me make a couple comments. We’re very aware of the graduate students’ 
scholarship funding stipend issue. Suffice to say, it is unlikely that there 
will be additional funds for stipends. We also are very involved with the 
discussions with your deans about differential tuition for programs such as 
engineering…

(end of tape, tape change)

, , , business administration, and we understand the dynamics there, but I think 
that we are getting different messages, perhaps from the faculty, than we’re 
getting from the deans on that. The process for honorary degrees, just so you 
know, is that the presidents recommend honorary degrees. The Provost has a 
committee that reviews them and passes them to the Trustees for their ultimate 
approval. There’s no reason why on the campus level there couldn’t be an 
agreement between the faculty and the President that they’re vetted locally 
first.
	Finally on Division I sports, the athletic directors do get together 
periodically. We facilitate their work with counsel on matters related to 
compliance. Each of them have just submitted a report in the last week on 
compliance activities because of concerns from the University of Georgia and 
otherwise. 

President Hildreth: Thank you. The Comprehensive Colleges? Tim?

Tim Phillips: We also had budget issues and discussions related to that. I’m 
specifically talking about restructuring at the campus level. The hope that the 
governed structure and the faculty would be communicated with and consulted 
about campus spaced reorganization. A related issue was the sector 
reorganization that is proposed and whether or not this is consistent with the 
mission review that occurred. The idea behind mission review at least in part 
was to promote the regional diversity and we’re wondering if this new sector 
reorganization is consistent with that.
       There has been an example of a lack of consultation that was brought up 
by one of my colleagues that led to the closing of the grad program at Brockport 
in nursing, and not much consultation occurred there with the faculty or the 
governance structure. Also related to that, kind of an international issue, too, 
was the termination of an adjunct Iraqi professor at Oswego. No consultation and 
further problems with some of our colleagues there.
       Another big issue was system-wide assessment. Our group took a firm stand 
on that. We understand that there are going to be further discussions. We wanted 
to remind the Senate that there is a history here that the Faculty Senate has 
said, “No,” to system-wide assessment again and again. Our compromise was 
campus-spaced assessment that we’re engaged in now. We’ll see how that proceeds. 
We don’t want to be recalcitrant or anything, but we did want to make that 
point. And, we wonder why the Board of Trustees wants to push this now, during a 
fiscal crisis. It would be another unfunded mandate, and it borders on the 
irresponsible nature of those kinds of mandates.
	Another issue: Turnover and evaluation of administrators. Everyone at the 
table mentioned a great number of interim and acting deans and vice-presidents 
and people that only have six months or a year of experience. The lack of 
opportunity to evaluate these people, the fact that they turn over so fast and 
the regular evaluation procedure that would occur never gets the chance to occur 
because they are gone so fast. We understand that the governance’s committee is 
going to come out with a report, and we look forward to the results of that and, 
hopefully, some best practice. Best practices guidelines can be shared from 
that.
	Another issue is the great use of adjuncts at campuses. Fredonia, for 
example, has over forty percent of their classes taught by adjuncts now, which 
leaves a small number of full-time faculty to advise 100% of the students and 
handle all of the committee assignments. Of course, it is probably only going to 
get worse during this budget crisis. We know it’s a resource issue, but it also 
undermines the quality of the entire institution when we rely too heavily on 
adjuncts. Not to degrade adjuncts, we understand that many of them do a great 
job and are great faculty members, but they usually don’t carry the same kind of 
full-time commitment because they have other things to do. They teach at two 
colleges or some of the adjuncts I know teach at three campuses. So they really 
can’t make that same kind of commitment.
       A big issue for us, and it’s a difficult issue, is technology and the 
increased use of technology. Certainly the faculty at the comprehensive colleges 
embrace the use of technology in education and the proper use of it. But we are 
a little bit apprehensive about things like the global education network. One 
example is that if we have more and more of our students taking courses from 
different online delivery services, and the preparation, content, and rigor of 
the course is not controlled by SUNY faculty and then they have to graduate from 
our programs and take proficiency exams, and teacher’s ed, and things like that 
and they don’t score well, it will make our programs look like we are not doing 
a good job. Things also related to technology are electronic textbooks and the 
support from the different publishers there where students can go online and get 
assistance with say, a physics problem, from who knows who, whether or not they 
have the kind of training in physics to assist students. So there are a lot of 
related issues in the technology area. It’s a very difficult one and we know 
that it’s evolving and it’s going to happen, but it’s something that our group 
wanted to at least take note of.
	A last general area is articulation agreements, transfer credits, PACGE, 
ACGE, things like that. We’re wondering if we shouldn’t be more careful about 
exactly what courses should be accepted, in the General Ed area, for example, 
that are delivered by someone else besides SUNY, and whether or not they have 
been reviewed, whether or not the content and rigor of these courses and the 
learning outcomes are exactly what we defined in this whole Gen Ed process. We 
want to be cooperative in the whole articulation area. We appreciate the efforts 
by system and others to facilitate the transfer between SUNY schools and other 
schools to four-year and University Centers, etc.,  but we’re also worried that 
there may some other online delivery systems that may not be consistent with the 
kind of demands that the SUNY faculty have in that area. 

Dick Miller: I’ll just comment that the Chancellors at the Faculty Senate 
Committees report that Maureen chaired on local practices and budget-making sent 
it to the Presidents recommending it to them as a best practice, encouraging 
them to read it and follow it. We have not inspected them to find out if they 
are concurring. 

President Hildreth: For any of you that may not have a copy of that report, send 
me an email and I’ll be sure to send that out to you. You can give me your name 
and address here, and I think that will work; but it will be even better if you 
send it to the system office there. If you want to take it down, it’s 
hildrejo@sysadm.edu. I’m gun-shy after messing up the agenda as much as I have 
today, let me tell you that. Health Science Centers? Peter.

Peter N: There’s been some reorganization of sectors at SUNY and Health Science 
is now reporting to the Doctoral Campuses area. We’re very fortunate, though, to 
have an expert from System Administration on the Health Sciences with us today. 
That was Peter Pilegi. Peter, thank you for coming all that long way from 
Albany. Your discussions with us were very, very helpful. Among other things we 
talked about budget, and especially the support in the budget for hospitals. 
This is a continuing issue and the legislature has addressed this in the past 
and, apparently, if the budget is passed as suggested, we’ll also have 
continuing support for the hospitals.
	Also, there is access to capital. This is absolutely essential for the 
operation of Health Science units, and that is still, we hope, in the budget. 
The flexibility for hospitals, for example the ability to contract our for 
services and then to have post-audit review. Right now that doesn’t happen. You 
have to contract out, and six months later maybe get the contract completed. We 
are certainly hoping that that was going to pass. You’ve heard mentioned today 
HIPPA regulations. This certainly is a very important issue for the Health 
Sciences. This is an unfunded mandate. What we’re talking about here is privacy 
and how the various private information about a patient or about anything else 
is used in education and yet not revealed. For example, suppose you go into an 
emergency room and see that a colleague’s wife is being admitted. Are you able 
to call the colleague and say, “Gee, you need to get down to the emergency room 
quickly, because your wife is here”? The answer is no, you can’t. These are 
regulations that have a spectrum, and it depends on how you apply them. They are 
either too much or too little. Certainly the ability to train students and 
faculty in regulations is absolutely essential, and we have talked about some of 
the ways that that is being done.
	Records. Now suppose that this had happened on our campus. In the school 
of Dental Medicine there was a flood that didn’t smell very good. What happened 
was that the patient records from the school of Dental Medicine didn’t smell 
very good either. So what do you do? Can you discard those? So before they could 
make a decision, they put them all in the freezer. In the meantime they 
contacted the campus and the campus contacted Central Administration and it 
looks as if it’s about seven years you need to do it, so they are going to 
remain in the freezer for a few more years. The issue being that if you have to 
restore those records it’s going to be an interesting event. There’s certainly 
going to have to be some radiation to get rid of the bacteria. The issue is: How 
long do you keep records? This includes students who, from the registrar’s point 
of view, are rejected from some type of application. You actually have to keep 
those, and we have to know how long to actually keep these things. Otherwise, 
we’re under some kind of liability if you throw them away too soon. Peter 
Pilegi, we are very pleased to say, is making some progress on identifying 
someone from the Brooklyn Health Sciences who will eventually join us in this 
millennium.
	We talked about a nursing conference on nursing education that is being 
held by the Deans, I think that will be the 9th of April.

Miller: I’ll just comment that I don’t think that Brian didn’t spend any time at 
all on the capital plan that is in the Governor’s budget. If you define it the 
same way in the context of what was called the $2 billion plan the last time, 
define it as the $3 billion plan. It does have $350 million for hospitals in it 
which is an order of magnitude five times of what they were getting in the 
previous plan. The first $1.2. billion of it is earmarked to campuses 
specifically for capital renewal projects, which we call “deferred maintenance” 
without offending anybody. With that the campuses would have broad discretion as 
to its use of their portion of that. There is a limited amount of money for plan 
adaptation, and a large portion of that is going to be tied to campus matching 
from a fundraising  point of view. What we’re trying to do is keep the 
Legislature and the Governor from lining all that money out. We’re trying to 
leave as much discretion for the campuses as we can, but we’re quite optimistic 
about that.
       There is a guy in System Administration who has an interest in records 
retention, Don Brida, and anytime you find somebody who’s interested in records 
retention you should keep him. We’re going through to true-up with the state 
archives what the requirements are, and then we’re going through functionally to 
make sure that our functional areas system administration are not over-
retaining. We’re also making an investment in scanning technology, and we are 
consolidating our two warehouses into one. If any of you are interested, I think 
that we have all of the books ever printed by the SUNY press (I didn’t say 
published, I said printed) in the warehouse and we would certainly like to make 
those available to the Faculty Senate. 

President Hildreth: Just for the record, we did contact Brooklyn Health Science 
center and we’re told that they were going to have an election for a senator. We 
haven’t heard anything more because other things came up, and we didn’t follow 
up on that; but we’ll follow up after the meeting. 

Male voice: Dick, did you mean that? Could we have a list of titles? The SUNY 
press put out some pretty interesting books. Do you really mean that those 
titles are available to us?

Dick Miller: Absolutely, and I’ll make it an action item to send those out over 
the listserv. We have a lot of other things in there. We have the largest order 
of No. 1 pencils ever placed in the United States. I’ll bring the entire 
inventory to the October meeting.

President Hildreth: I had two reasons to go the warehouse. I really did want to 
get the minutes for the first meeting, and I also was instructed by someone to 
take a look at the sixteen square feet that have been allocated for the SUNY 
Senate and see if we could get rid of some of that. It was worthwhile, actually, 
because I thought that we were totally out of the Governance Handbook, and I 
have found that to be a very useful document. We were totally out of copies of 
that in the office.

Male Voice: We’ve also been looking for a better place to have receptions. 
People are kind of tired of the Gallery, and we’re going to start having 
receptions at the warehouse.

President Hildreth: Well there’s a lot of room in there and it certainly would 
be different. Technology Colleges. Jeff?

Jeff: Although the bad weather today seems to have downsized our group a little, 
we still managed to pull together four of the five Schools of Technology for a 
really good discussion. I’d sort of convinced myself a day or two ago that, for 
once, I’m going to break with character and try to be positive about what’s 
going on with the Colleges of Technology. So I asked my colleagues from the two-
year colleges to use the idea of being positive as sort of a theme for our 
discussions. There were no discussions and we adjourned immediately. No, I’m 
kidding. We actually did find a few positive things to talk about which I think 
are worth noting.
	First of all, in assessment, the notion of campus-wide assessment was a 
real struggle at the two-year colleges, and I’m sure at all of the colleges at 
first. But what my colleagues and I are finding is that it’s really produced a 
very positive result in the close inspection of our programs and assessment 
right up-close of what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and how well we’re doing 
it. I really think that it’s added a great deal to the colleges and having a 
sense of ownership of that assessment process.
	The next positive item that we should mention is the basic change in the 
character of our institutions that’s coming about because of the shift from two-
year to four-year programs. There are some real growing pains to deal with in 
that process, most notably the tendency to bring a lot of attraction and 
attention to the four-year programs at the expense of two-year programs. All of 
the colleges are grappling with that problem very nicely, I think. On the 
positive side, it really has infused the campuses with a new sense of purpose. 
I, myself, am in a traditionally two-year program that has gone four-year, and 
it’s really changed my attitude about what I do every day. It’s really made it a 
more exciting place to be; and I think that all of the colleges will gain that 
same advantage of having the breadth of the four-year culture on campus.
       We are cautiously optimistic about enrollment signs. All of the Schools 
of Technology are either holding even this year or showing slight increases, and 
I think that’s a good sign at any time. We’re thinking that the dual whammy 
that’s been thrown at us of economic downturn and a really uncertain national 
and international state of affairs may actually play into our hand and lead some 
students to stay a little closer to home and spend a little less for an 
education. Possibly that’s some of the explanation for our enrollment success 
this year.
	We’re thinking very positively about the treatment that we’re getting from 
System Administration, 7% growth rate as opposed to the other areas of SUNY that 
are pegged slightly lower than that in terms of potential growth. That’s simply, 
I think, an acknowledgement of what has happened to the two-year schools over 
the years and having negative growth in enrollment. I think that we’ve finally 
turned the corner on that.
	We’re also, as a group, very positive that we still have some problems to 
deal with. The Colleges of Technology are, by a rule, located in rural areas and 
are very small. That presents two problems for us. (1) It makes it difficult to 
attract new faculty, particularly for the upper-level courses, and it also has 
made it a little difficult to attract a diverse faculty and student body. The 
small size creates problems in many very subtle ways; for example, in a large 
institution where there might be twenty people teaching economics. At Alfred 
State College or any of the other two-year Colleges of Technology, there are 
only one or two. Any change in that formula has a very large effect on both the 
students and the curriculum. We constantly have to struggle with trying to keep 
a good balance of teaching faculty and course loads and course sizes.
       The problems that we’ve experienced with respect to attracting new 
faculty and keeping faculty has inevitably led to a rather heavy reliance on 
adjuncts at our campus, and I’m sure at the other Colleges of Technology. And 
those adjuncts, through no fault of their own, are hired on short notice with 
little prep time and, I think, don’t do as much service to SUNY as we could have 
them do if they were given a little bit more prep time. This also at times opens 
the door wide-open for outsourcing options like GEN which concern us a great 
deal, as they do all the sectors. We’ve learned over the years to deal with 
this, but it is a constant struggle, and that is to deal with the high cost of 
our technology programs, most of which are higher than average in cost. What I 
was hearing today was that at some of the Colleges of Technology, there seems to 
be a little bit of a shift in emphasis towards the less lab-oriented, higher-
enrolled, less expensive courses.
	Finally, a few years ago, there was an entity called the UCT. I think that 
that group, the gathering of our Colleges of Technology, produced a lot of good 
dialogue among the campuses, and we’ve lost that sense of unity among the 
Colleges. One of the results of that is the developing atmosphere of 
competitiveness between the Colleges of Technology, and we ask SUNY to be 
mindful of that in the oversight of the development of new courses, that the 
Colleges of Technology don’t wind up directly competing curriculum for 
curriculum and major for major as we go about this evolution into a new academic 
format.
	I’ve noticed as I was jotting these down, that I’m beginning to sound a 
bit like some of the comments that Tim Phillips made from the Comprehensive 
Colleges. Perhaps that is a sign that we are going through the change that I 
think everybody is expecting us to make towards a more four-year baccalaureate-
based campus.
	I guess that I’ve covered all of the points. I hope that Senator Miller 
will inform the Chancellor that the Colleges of Technology were optimistic and 
positive this time. Thank you very much.

Dick Miller: The first thing I’ll tell him is how much you appreciate the 
support from System Appreciation. On assessment, if you have campus-level 
anecdotal of positive outcomes from campus-level assessment, I hope that you’ll 
share them with the system in very specific terms and either get them into the 
Provost shop or my shop so that we can make the case that campus-level 
assessment is working and having a benefit, because there are those that do not 
feel that.
       I guess that the only other thing I would say on the UCT is that you 
align the sector groups of this body the way we have them aligned centrally now. 
There were the five original UCTs. We have added to that Farmingdale, Maritime, 
and Utica-Rome, and we treat that as a sector. As the original UCTs have emerged 
out of their financial malaise, we think that sector makes sense as a sector and 
are treating them that way. I think that your group may be enhanced by bringing 
the schools I mentioned into it. 	Suffice to say, on a percentage base not 
just this year but in the last several years, applications to the Technology 
Colleges have grown at a much greater pace than any other sector of the 
University. Applications from out-of-state are double digit, and applications 
internationally are double-digit increases. So I think that there are some 
indications that that sector is doing well enrollment-wise. We are concerned 
because there has been a flattening at the Comprehensive Colleges of application 
activity and we’re not sure what that means, whether that has something to do 
with “small liberal arts” colleges, whether it has to do with raising standards 
and people aren’t applying. That reflects and ties into transferability. It also 
reflects transfer activity at the Comprehensive Colleges, which is not as robust 
as either of the University Centers or the Technology Colleges. It’s a matter of 
concern for us. 

Marvin LaHood: Joe?

President Hildreth: Yes, Marv?

Marvin LaHood: May I?...

President Hildreth: Dick, that question of sectors is an extremely important 
question for us. We talked about it in the Executive Committee yesterday, but 
because we don’t know what their rationale was for your going to three from our 
five that everybody from this room has always been with, we curtailed this 
discussion…

Male: It was done at the system level simply as a means of organizing ourselves 
administratively both on the finance side and the academic side to support and 
coordinate what we considered to be like institutions. We wanted groups that 
were large enough to deal with and so we set up a technology sector of eight 
campuses. The comprehensive colleges have always been pretty straight forward; 
and then it gets a little mushy around the University Centers and the 
“specialized colleges.” Since the specialized colleges, other than Maritime and 
Utica-Rome, all offer doctoral degrees, we lumped them in with the University 
Centers.

President Hildreth: So those are the three categories: Doctoral degree granting 
institutions, which is quite a hodge-podge actually…

Male: You’ve got optometry in there, you have ESF in there…

Dick: I would suggest that if the Senate was going to seriously consider 
anything I said, that you might have a sub-committee of the doctoral 
institutions that would deal with Health Sciences and optometry. The fourth 
sector for us is, of course, community colleges, but that’s not of concern to 
you.

President Hildreth: What I think we’ll probably do is invite Dick to our May 
executive committee meeting so that we can talk about it in a little more 
detail, but I’m glad he got a chance to give the rationale.

Dick Miller: I hesitate to think that the Senate is over-deliberating on a 
subject, but this would seem to be it.

Male voice: What subject have we not over-deliberated? May 19th. 

President Hildreth: There was one meeting that Senator Miller attended at which 
we had a long discussion about some parliamentary point. I forget what it was 
but it made a big impression on him. Let’s go on. Specialized Colleges? 
Kathleen?

Kathleen: One of our concerns was just answered, and that was the concern about 
the sector reorganization proposal. In essence, we were wondering how a sector 
realignment would influence the money allocations and growth situation.

(Male voice in background)

Kathleen: It doesn’t?

Male voice: It does not.

Kathleen: If the doctoral degree programs are said to grow 2%, and the 
technologies can grow 7%, will that be affected by putting us into the different 
sectors?

Dick Miller: No. Each institution, from an enrollment planning point of view and 
Joe DeFillipo will speak to this, is looked at in the context of its memorandum 
of understanding, previous levels of enrollment, etc. It’s not a sector-wide 
decision. It happens that because the technology sector is recovering from 
previous highs in enrollment that they all have, with the exception of Maritime, 
the same circumstances.

Kathleen: Okay. Well that was one of our questions. We did talk about the 
budget, and we talked about the increasing reliance on adjuncts, of course, a 
system-wide situation.
	Two other items came up in the specialized colleges, and one of the 
members mentioned the fact that system administration sometimes doesn’t give the 
colleges enough time to complete their mandates. In one case, the campus was 
given only three weeks to send in a report, and this rigid short timetable and 
deadline would have forced the campus to violate its own procedures. So the 
question was if system could give the colleges a little bit more notice when 
things are happening.
	And now the other question came up about specialized colleges and that is 
that the relationship and structure of the contract colleges to the private 
colleges that they’re close to: Cornell, Alfred and USF… (male voices) …ESF…oh, 
I’m so sorry. Originally I believed that the group felt in the past that this 
wasn’t a big issue, but it seems to be a bigger issue right now, especially in 
the budget climate and a situation like that. So the reps from each school seem 
to share their experiences with their particular situation, and they want to 
know if there are any general guidelines for contract relationships, if they are 
developed individually for each college, or if they are internal contracts? Our 
group recommends further discussion of the following: What does it actually mean 
to have a contract with SUNY and what the objectives are on each side.
       Another question that came up: Is the funding affected by some of these 
schools that have additional responsibilities beyond teaching, or if teaching is 
emphasized so much at SUNY, do schools who have other applications also have a 
problem? Those are the things that we mentioned.

Dick Miller: On mandates, there are some mandates that we pass on to you that 
come to us from other agents, in which case we don’t have much in the way of 
flexibility. Those that we impose ourselves, I think are always subject to 
pushback as to reasonableness. I don’t know of any college president in the SUNY 
system who ever lost his job because he missed a mandate deadline.
	On the contract colleges, and this maybe ought to be a longer conversation 
and I do think that this is a subject that may be of interest to the full 
Senate, none of the above is basically the answer. The relationship between ESF 
and Syracuse is strictly between ESK and Syracuse as to agreements on shared 
services, courses, police, use of dormitories, dining places, etc. With Cornell, 
we have no written agreement. We have a formula that we send them the money by. 
They are under our “general supervision”. Beyond the term “general supervision”, 
there’s no explanation for what “general supervision” means. So that’s that one.
	At the Alfred University, with Ceramics we have a rather detailed contract 
that we are in the process of renegotiating with them, and I would say that it’s 
interesting to note that the place where we have the most detail in writing, we 
have the greatest problems. So there is something to be said for not being too 
specific so that people don’t have any flexibility.
	Finally, on the funding, as most of you know, the BAP takes into account 
various issues related to enrollment. It also takes into account research with a 
20% research match; and then it has a thing called special mission adjustments, 
that make adjustments for the public service mission of Cornell, the six-hundred 
foot ship at Maritime, etc. The extent that the Senate hasn’t had one of those 
briefings in a while. That will put you to sleep, too. But it is an interesting 
and very important subject.

President Hildreth: What is the term for that subject? Yes, I think that it 
would be an interesting discussion. Now we need to have our report from the 
campus governance leaders. Ken?

Ken O’Brien: First, we’re glad to be here. We had six issues; the first three 
are housekeeping.
       The first one dealt with the university-wide assessment discussion group, 
or the discussion group that is proceeding on the possibility of university-wide 
assessment. Under the rubric that we would never let him leave without at least 
one more job, we asked a former CGL, Carl Wiezalis, if he would please serve as 
our representative and he agreed to do that. So we now have a representative to 
that discussion group, Joe.
	The second was the issue of convener and alternate convener. We had two 
nominations from people who were here, but the process we’re following is an 
email process and we will first ask anyone on the CGL email list if they would 
like to serve, like to be nominated? If so, they will be put on the ballot. 
Within two weeks, we will have the ballots out; and then we will have them 
tabulated so that by the end of the month, we will have a convener and alternate 
convener for next year.
	The third issue was a meeting time. We have decided that we’re going to be 
meeting after the Executive Committee meeting on the Thursday before the plenary 
session at approximately 8:15. If we have an alternate convener and the convener 
happens to be at the Executive Committee meeting that runs late, that’s cool, 
and we will begin to have our meeting regularly then. For that purpose, we would 
need a room other than a hotel room, and hopefully a place on the meeting 
schedule. That would make the most sense to us.
	Now three substantive issues.
       The first dealt with the global education network. We had very serious 
concerns about the courses in American History and Calculus. We were 
particularly troubled by the lack of information about an approval process and 
about what that meant and also about exactly how the money works. Just minor 
questions.
	The second issue was system-wide assessment. This is in a more substantive 
sense and it led to a heated discussion, one which was overheard by Dick Miller 
who was, I think, cast back to his youth in the 1960s when he saw many in the 
academic underclass begin to use the radical rhetoric of revolutionary change. 
The point is that we are unanimously opposed to system-wide assessment. That 
should come as no surprise to people in this room. For your edification we found 
that there was a unanimously approved resolution at Potsdam that has some 
interesting language. I’m going to read two where-ases and a be-it resolved.

	“Whereas system administration mandated that each campus create and 
implement a campus-based assessment plan for general education, and whereas SUNY 
Potsdam created a general education assessment plan, which was approved by the 
Potsdam Faculty Senate and SUNY Gear and is currently in the first year of a 
three-year cycle of implementation, therefore be it resolved the faculty of SUNY 
Potsdam will continue to follow the general education assessment plan it 
approved and will not support, embrace or participate in any SUNY mandated 
standardized general education assessment plan.”

       We’re going to distribute the language to the e-list, and just to begin 
our own conversation as to where exactly the CGLs stand and where different 
campus units stand and different campus Senates stand on this issue. We welcome 
the participation that has been extended to us for this conversation.
       The last substantive is budget. Our discussion did not focus on the 
budget issues on the State level. We presumed that was sort of beyond our 
control, but really the implications of how that gets visited upon individual 
campuses and particularly those campuses that have some sort of shared 
governance responsibility. It’s a very different matter to work in a shared 
governance responsibility on budgeting in a relatively good time because that 
meant, at least on our campus, that we were a part of a process that actually 
produced priorities for additional campus spending and new initiatives. And it 
was meaningful. At a time of potential cuts, however, it seems that senior 
administrators naturally begin to produce, not detailed budgets, but very broad 
budgets, that keep any such questions to themselves. But the real problem is 
that most of us don’t really want to participate in that. We don’t want to get 
down onto a line item piece on budgeting. It’s not our job. So there’s a sense 
of a problem that we want to at least discuss amongst ourselves on the e-list to 
try to figure out where we might be standing as a group and where we might be 
standing as individual campuses on that issue. The first place we want to start 
is that I asked Carol to send the report that you folks had adopted to all the 
CGLs, because we think that that would be very valuable. Thank you.

President Hildreth: I had a note passed to me indicating that it  might be 
useful to have a five minute break, that there have been cookies brought in and 
that people might want that before we go on. So is that a reasonable thought? 
No, we’re not going directly to cocktails after that. Would you please try to 
get back in five minutes and then we will resume with the agenda?

President Hildreth: Okay, now, this time I am certain that we are to the SUNY 
enrollment planning report section. I don’t want to start into this introduction 
and have those looks directed my way. It’s either glasses or the fact that I 
didn’t have a cookie or something.
I’m pleased to have with us this afternoon Joe. He’s the assistant provost for 
Program Review and Planning in the University Provost Office. He’s going to be 
making a report today on the enrollment planning process which is something that 
affects all of us and which I bet that most of us know very little about. Joe?

Joe DeFillipo: This morning I went to College Town Bagel to write my 
presentation. I had planned to blame various things on Dick Miller, and I was a 
little disappointed to see that he’s here today. He’s not in the room now, but 
I’m afraid that he might hear me while he’s out making his calls. So I’m going 
to skip over blaming him. If the talk has a disjointed quality as a result, 
you’ll know why.
	My work is in the Program Review and Planning office within the Provost 
office at System Administration. I’m functioning as the head of the office in 
Don Steven’s absence, as he functions as the head of Academic Affairs as a 
whole. Our office has two primary functional activities. One is the review of 
academic program proposals, and the other is the running of the enrollment 
planning process in System Administration. We also perform a number of other 
functions related to specific initiatives. We also get assigned to other 
initiatives, and you may be familiar with some of our work in respect to those. 
But academic programs and enrollment planning are the two main functional 
activities.
       In regard to enrollment planning, our offices function within System 
Administration as largely a coordinating function. The process works 
approximately like this: Campuses in the fall submit a plan to System 
Administration. This is a plan for their level of funded enrollment for the 
subsequent academic year. The plan includes detailed components of enrollment: 
first-time full-time students, part-time students, transfers, continuing, 
returning, undergraduate, and graduate. If the campus has special professional 
components such as a medical school, law school, etc., those are included as 
well. And then there is an aggregate overall annual average FTE that that totals 
to according to conversion factors that are established historically. The System 
Administration Office of Institutional Research then aggregates that data. They 
have various spreadsheets that calculate how those components fit together into 
the FTE. Institutional Research also gathers selectivity data from the campus’s 
student data file that is submitted at approximately the same time as the 
enrollment plan. They produce that data in a form in which it can actually be 
reviewed, and campus enrollment plans are subjected to scrutiny so that one can 
know whether they’re approvable in their current form or if a discussion may 
have to take place.
	The means for conducting that review is an internal System Administration 
body entitled appropriately enough the Enrollment Planning Group. This has 
membership from various System Administration offices within the Provost’s 
office, Program Review and Planning, the Central Academic Affairs office, the 
Campus Liaison office. Some of you may be aware that within the Provost’s office 
there is a liaison coordinate with each of the now three sectors of the 
University. Each one of those liaisons functions as a quasi-advocate for his or 
her campuses and institutional research. From outside the Provost’s office, 
there are representatives from Brian Stenson’s office, Finance and Budget, the 
controller’s office, and Enrollment Management, which is Wayne Locust’s office 
in System Administration. The group comes together, inspects campus requests. If 
questions come up about a particular campus’s requested enrollment plan for the 
subsequent year, we get back to them, conduct discussions, and negotiate an 
agreement by engaging in an iterative back and forth process.
	After the Enrollment Planning Group conducts a review of the system as a 
whole, it makes a recommendation to Dick Miller and Peter Salins. The 
recommendation is for an approximate aggregate funded enrollment for that year 
and a level of funded enrollment for each campus. That recommendation may also 
include strategies for addressing the effects of systematic external 
circumstances such as the likely budget that the University is going to 
encounter in the given year in question. That latter factor, as you know, is 
likely to be much more salient nowadays than it has been in the past because the 
University does not have State support to fund enrollment growth.
	We don’t go back to the campuses with a penultimate number until the 
recommendation we make to the vice-chancellors has been vetted and okayed by 
them. At that point, we’ll go back to the campuses with either, “Yes, your 
enrollment plan has been approved and submitted,” or “No, for one reason or 
another we think that the number should be not the one that you submitted but 
something else, and here are the reasons why.”
	The review criteria. There are two main policy vectors that we operate 
within. One is mission review and the other is the University’s budget. Within 
mission review, the two sub-vectors are a campus’s selectivity goals and then 
it’s actual enrollment targets. Generally speaking, we don’t take the mission 
review numbers and dictate to the campus that you absolutely cannot have 
anything different from them, and we don’t interpret a campus’s selectivity in 
any given year rigidly relative to the mission review memorandum of 
understanding. But we do use those as a framework and in fact the enrollment 
management personnel on campuses have now grown quite accustomed to utilizing 
the mission review parameters as the framework within which they conduct their 
businesses.
       The theory is that if the campus’s submitted plan is within its mission 
review’s selectivity and enrollment goals are internally consistent and 
externally realistic, and if it is consonant with the likely realities of the 
budget, then we approve it as submitted. We do approve many of them as 
submitted. If a submitted plan falls shorts of one of those things, if a campus 
hasn’t been making its selectivity goals, if it seems implausible that it will 
actually make the enrollment target that it’s requesting for the next year, then 
we engage in discussion with the campus to see if our interpretation is 
incorrect; or, if we believe that our interpretation is not correct, then we 
communicate that to them as well.
       A snapshot of particularities across the system this year and in the 
recent past. With regard to selectivity, SUNY campuses almost completely across 
the board have met or exceeded their mission review selectivity goals  In the 
two years that I’ve been responsible for this, selectivity been a determinative 
factor in our decisions relative to particular campuses only in a very small 
number of cases. In this year’s process, the one that was concluded in ’02-’03 
for ’03-’04, is the case that every campus made its selectivity goals or came 
close enough to be considered to have met them. Some campuses seem to be 
reaching a plateau with their selectivity. There is some sectoral aspect to 
this. It seems that the Comprehensive colleges as a group seem to be coming 
close to their limits for attracting Category I students. If not all four, then 
probably three or four of the University Centers seem to be continuing to 
attract more Category I students. I think that if some of the sectors are, in 
fact, reaching a plateau, that will play a role in the second round of mission 
review.
       Another particularity that one can observe is that in System 
Administration we utilize the category campuses in transition which mean the 
campuses that are undergoing a significant mission transition and that are 
presumed to need to grow robustly in order to satisfy that mission transition. 
The predominant locus of that category of campus is the text sector. As Dick 
pointed out before, we don’t say that one sector gets treated differently from 
another in the enrollment planning process, but it does happen because of 
historical reasons and because of the mission transition that the tech campuses 
in particular are undergoing that they are treated under the category of 
campuses in transition. Our presumption is that they will grow robustly and that 
we will support that growth. That is considered to be an overall good for the 
system, as these campuses attempt to reach a financial equilibrium that was 
undermined during a few years of enrollment decline in the recent past.
       Another particularity that we are noting is the phenomenon of what I am 
going to call over-enrollment. I don’t use this in a derogatory sense 
necessarily, but particular campuses regularly enroll significantly more 
students than their enrollment plans call for. This is something that wasn’t an 
overriding phenomenon a few years ago. It was more likely that there would be 
concern about whether the campus was going to be able to meet its enrollment 
goals. That was true around 1998 when I first came to work in System 
Administration. Nowadays it seems that a SUNY education is in much greater 
demand and campuses have not historically been in the habit of attempting to 
manage their enrollment strictly. One result is that we still have the 
phenomenon of campuses taking in many more students than they are actually 
funded for in a given year. Other things equal, this would not necessarily be a 
problem. A campus would simply enroll according to the criteria that they 
establish and then seek to make up that enrollment in the next year. But we do 
have a proviso in our process that, depending on the budgetary impact, we don’t 
necessarily cover excess enrollment beyond a certain small window over the plan 
in subsequent years, if the University doesn’t have the resources to do so. One 
of the things that we’re doing now is asking campuses to manage their enrollment 
more strictly than has been the case in the past. If a campus does not do that 
we do not necessarily have a commitment to cover the excess enrollment or all of 
it in future years. That is a proviso that is explicitly written into the 
advisement that we send to campuses each year at the initiation of the process. 
It’s an issue that is something that we feel somewhat strongly about when we 
deliberate these things in System Administration because we are acutely aware 
that we don’t have extra funds to support large enrollment growth.
       This year. State operated and funded campuses (all of the campuses except 
for the community colleges) together submitted enrollment plans that, had they 
been approved as submitted in total, would have entailed approximately a 4% 
growth in funded enrollment from 2002-2003 to 2003-2004. The thing that I want 
to emphasize is that this would be plan-to-plan growth that is what drives the 
budgetary shifts from one year to the next. When we got this set of plans and 
saw the aggregate effect, we knew at that time that it was unlikely that there 
would be State support to fund any growth. Now we know that the State support to 
the University is not going to be sufficient to fund a 4% growth or really any 
level of growth. This then posed a de facto dilemma for us. Horn one of the 
dilemma is that fully funding all of the campus requests would have entailed a 
degree of diminution in per FTE support that we felt was undesirable, if not 
patently irresponsible. In fact, the problem is somewhat more complicated 
because the totality of the original campus submissions didn’t have a 4% growth 
evenly distributed across all of the campuses. The distribution was lumpy. We 
have big campuses growing a lot, some other big ones growing only a little, and 
some small campuses not growing at all, some small ones growing a lot…very, very 
lumpy distribution. That was deemed to be a problem because what happens if you 
take a flat or declining pot of State support and divvy it up among a larger 
amount of FTE, and the distribution on top of that is a very lumpy distribution, 
what you have is resources going from the small lumps to the big lumps. We 
didn’t feel that we were going to ultimately eliminate that phenomenon entirely, 
but we did want to keep it to a minimum.
       Horn number two of the dilemma has to do with the other side of the 
problem. One might have, under these circumstances, decided to freeze growth. 
That was deemed to be a very difficult choice and would have pulled up campuses 
very short with not much notification for planning, and it was also felt that it 
wouldn’t be sufficiently respectful to the University’s long term planning 
context, which is the mission review process. There are mission review goals 
going through 2003-2004 for each campus and simply freezing enrollment would 
have been more violative of the mission review planning than we wanted to be. 
One might also add into that that there are political difficulties with doing 
something as simplistic as freezing growth. Many of you may be aware that in 
Wisconsin that they tried doing that, and they did not get a good reaction from 
the State. They were essentially told that they were going to receive even less 
money than they would have otherwise, and the Wisconsin system reversed that 
decision.
       How do we resolve this dilemma? The resolution was to aim for a more 
modest aggregate growth of 2% or less. That was about the level that the finance 
felt comfortable that the shifting of resources would not be too extreme. The 
approach that was taken for doing that was to keep as much as possible to the 
mission review enrollment target for 2003-2004. That would then have the 
advantage of being within the planning parameters of the campuses. Circumstances 
that would constitute exceptions to doing that are if the campus was already 
above its 2003-2004 MOU goal, and there were a few instances of that for 
particular reasons, those campuses were not reduced. If the campus was one of 
the transitional campuses undergoing a significant mission change, those 
campuses were not held to their MOU target as a limit. There was then a further 
category of technical adjustments to enrollment plans or specific prior 
commitments to meet a State need or to match a particular plan that had been 
developed for a campus in the context of the State as a whole.
       An example of this was the scholarship program at Maritime. We had a 
commitment to provide them with support and to match the scholarships that they 
were giving. We agreed to do that above the level of the particular MOU goal. So 
that was the general initial approach to the problem of aiming for 2% or less 
growth within the context of mission review. The result of that was that the 
distribution was still quite lumpy; so what we did was to develop an addition 
epicycle on top of that which was to establish a 1.8% funded enrollment cap for 
the non-transition campuses. There was nothing magical about that number; that 
number was developed as a way of being maximally respectful of the MOUs but not 
taking the MOUs simplistically because in truth the MOUs were developed so 
individualistically so as to allow a 4% growth for one campus and a 1% growth 
for another. We didn’t want to have the enrollment resources distributed that 
unevenly.
       By taking the 1.8% number the result for the system was a 2% plan-to-plan 
growth in 2003-2004. Sectorally that amounts to a 1.6% plan-to-plan growth for 
the doctoral sector, a 1.2% plan-to-plan growth for the comprehensive colleges, 
and a 7% plan-to-plan growth for the technology colleges.
       Policy issues into the future. For the foreseeable future, we are not 
going to get more State money. I don’t know exactly what approach the University 
is going to be taking over the next few years to accommodate the lack of 
resources for enrollment growth. We believe that it would be prudent for 
campuses to attempt to manage their enrollment as strictly as they can. They 
need to realize that if they do exceed their enrollment targets, we’re not going 
to necessarily fund the overage. They need to plan carefully so that those 
overages are within the margin that they think they can cover with the tuition 
dollars. This doesn’t mean no growth or that you can only grow if you can cover 
it with the tuition dollars. It means that we’re going to try to be prudent 
about how much growth there is; and within that context, campuses will need to 
manage well.
       Another factor is that growth versus the budget reality is not going to 
go away in the near term. There are opportunities here. Campuses can concentrate 
on academic quality, increased selectivity, and retention related issues. But I 
think that the challenge is going to be to the University’s access mission. The 
University is probably not going to say that they are going to freeze enrollment 
or that we don’t want more students, but there is going to have to be a balance 
in the near future between the resources that are actually available and the 
University’s need to serve its public.

Pete Knuepfer (Binghamton): If I could see myself in the position of a college 
president, faced with the idea of how I might grow my campus, I could say, 
“Well, geez, State funding is really reducing, so I’m not going to depend on 
that at all; but tuition is going up, so I can grow on the basis of tuition and, 
if I’m really careful, I can probably manage that.” At some point, if every 
college president in SUNY were to decide to do that, would we run up against a 
brick wall of State Legislature saying that you can only spend so many dollars 
of tuition?

Joe P.: That general problem is something that I know my immediate boss, Provost 
Salins, sees as a real pitfall for the University. An increase in tuition is 
going to make it more feasible, not less, that campuses can grow on the margin. 
On one hand, they would be foolish not to calculate that margin and plan within 
it. I think that we all understand that it would be foolish not to plan within 
that margin. But there is a real pitfall there. There is also a converse 
pitfall, which is if you manage too strictly and don’t take more students when 
there is a demand, you might anger the legislature. So I think that what you’re 
left with is that the presidents in the system all need to strike a sort of a 
compromise among these competing factors. Plan well within the margin and don’t 
be excessive with the growth because we are not getting additional State 
support. Also don’t manage so strictly or arbitrarily that it looks like you’re 
cutting access off.

Jim McElwaine (Purchase College): You’ve given us a mechanism for growth. I’d 
like you to give us an idea of a mechanism for shrinkage. What I mean by that is 
that there are many professional schools in the state that feel the recent 
period of expansion has worked to our great disadvantage. Specifically, 
sometimes in the Health Sciences field, particular parts of the Health Sciences 
field, the professional arts training field, sometimes in the engineering 
programs, and the professional fields in Applied Science. In other words, I 
sense a need for some programs to diminish. Maybe not entire campuses, but 
programs within that campus. Can you give us some strategies for productive 
diminutions?

Dick Miller: We believe in the devolution. When it comes to the pruning part of 
prune-and-fertilize, that is a campus level responsibility, and we look to the 
faculty to lead that effort. And I’m not kidding, okay?

Joe: One thing about that non-facetiously, though, is that the questions of 
growing or shrinking particular parts of a campus seem to me that the way the 
University currently operates for its planning, the appropriate context for that 
is mission review. If you have had involvement with mission review, you know 
that System Administration did not take the leadership in that process in 
telling the campus where its programmatic focus should be. I think that as we go 
into the next round of mission review, it will be up to the campuses to locate 
that and to do that kind of planning.

Dick Collier (University of Albany): Want me to ask my question about epicycles 
instead? When you talk about selectivity goals, you have a population that 
applies. Part of that population is accepted, and then a smaller part of that 
population actually enrolls. How do you measure selectivity goals and which 
group? It seems that the most accurate group would be those who enroll.

Joe P.: I gather that you are asking a more technological question and if it’s a 
more philosophical one… Institutional Research gathers that information from the 
student data file that is submitted by each campus in the fall, and the student 
data file has SAT scores and the high school average for each student. 
Institutional research collates that, cleans it up a little bit because the data 
isn’t always completely uniform, and that is plotted against the mission review 
selectivity goals for the campus. Physically what we look at is a little grid 
that tells percentages of an entering class that fall within the categories 1-5 
of the SUNY selectivity matrix. When we get those printouts from Institutional 
Research, we provide it back to the campus so that they can see that it is 
actually accurate according to their lines.

Norman Goodman (Stony Brook): I want to pick up on the question started by Pete 
Knuepfer, responded to by Joe. It’s not a question, really, but a comment. One 
of the things that is often excluded from the discussion about the enrollment 
increases and the money that they bring in through tuition is the actual cost of 
enrolling a student. When I raised this on my campus nobody could give me an 
answer as to whether they have actually figured out how much it costs to 
increase enrollment. When I spoke to your boss, Peter Salins, he said, “That’s 
an interesting idea. If you find anything out, tell me about it.” So I set up a 
committee on my campus through one of the groups that I am involved in to do 
that. But that is a serious consideration because once you increase the number 
of students, there are all kinds of ancillary quantitatively measured costs and 
unquantitatively measured costs attached to it.
	Clearly, if you increase by one hundred students, what does it mean in 
terms of student support services? What does it mean in terms of administrative 
services? What does it mean in terms of residence halls? You need that. On a 
non-quantitative side, what does it mean in terms of the number of faculty that 
you need to increase? What is the quality of education when you don’t increase 
the faculty (which we’re not doing)? So whenever we talk about enrollment 
growth, the System Administration has to consider the cost as well as the 
tuition increases.

Joe P.: You’ve established a committee on campus at Stony Brook, Norm?

Norman Goodman: Absolutely, and I promised Peter that I’d give him the results.

Joe P.: I would be interested in that. I think that maybe we could facilitate a 
little bit more participation than the Provost gave you in that comment. It may 
actually be that you could develop some metrics that could actually be used by 
the campuses in doing their planning. A lot of the planning that you are 
describing is campus-level planning. Frankly, we in System Administration are 
not even competent to do that. We don’t have the right staff to do it, and we’re 
not competent. We engage in sort of more macro resource allocation planning. But 
I think that that would be very useful system-wide for campuses to get at those 
questions. 

(Norm speaking in background.)

Joe P.: Producing the data for that kind of inquiry may actually be something 
that the Provost office could be helpful with because our IR office has access 
to an enormous amount of data both within and outside of SUNY. If you want 
someone to facilitate that, I’d be happy to.

Marvin LaHood (Buffalo College): Joe, I’m going to ask you a question, and then 
I am going to make a statement. The doctoral degree granters…what’s the 
percentage that…?

Joe P.: Plan growth for the doctoral sector 1.6%.

Marvin LaHood: Comprehensive colleges?

Joe P.: 1.2 %.

Marvin LaHood: Techs?

Joe DeF.: 7.0%.

Marvin LaHood: All right. I wonder if I’m not drooling, Dick. I asked a question 
about the new sector definitions and you said not to make a big long discussion 
of it. The next thing I hear is one of your colleagues using them to determine 
the extent of growth. Fantastic, really fantastic.

Dick: You know, you are drooling, Marvin. There is nothing determinate about 
that, okay? We didn’t determine the growth based on the sectors.

Joe D.: Actually, Marv, maybe this is a distinction of Talmudic refinement, but 
what I said was that one of our directives is to support enrollment growth at 
the campuses that are designated as in transition. These are the campuses that 
are undergoing significant mission transition for the most part to correct very 
significant enrollment declines that put them in financial jeopardy from about 
the mid to late ‘90s. Really what is happening with that 7% growth is that most 
of it is going to putting these campuses not even barely back to where they were 
before.

Marvin LaHood: I have a problem with that 7%. I have a problem with you using it 
to designate enrollment growth at 1.61270 -- three sectors which this Senate has 
never discussed as sectors -- of making distinctions by those three sectors. We 
have never discussed it. 

Dick: You’ve been discussing it for three meetings in the Executive Committee. 
That’s what I referred to earlier about over-deliberating.

Norman Goodman: I think that we under-deliberated. 

???: Well, then, you do it, Norm. Will you and Setal please talk? I was alone at 
Geneseo; I’m not alone today. Talk.

Norman Goodman: Dick…what Marvin is saying, to put words in Marvin’s mouth 
(which is not too difficult to do)…it is one thing for you…

Dick: I’d rather not have any of my words in Marvin’s mouth.

Norman Goodman: What Marvin is saying is that the fact that you have mentioned 
this issue, or that somebody has mentioned this issue, doesn’t mean that you 
have discussed it and gotten some input from us as to what we think of the 
wisdom of that kind of change. Is that correct, Marvin?

Marvin LaHood: Yes. Thank you!

President Hildreth: Are there any more questions that come back to the 
presentation that Joe was making? Well, thank you, Joe. Okay, so we talked about 
the fact that we are not going to be doing the presentation on using the Senate 
website, because our Web manager could not make it due to the weather. 
Operations committee has decided that they can make their report that we were 
scheduled to have during their report on Saturday which brings us to a 
discussion of University-wide assessment.
	Let me see if we can try to frame this discussion so that we can have it 
be as useful as possible. Now, we’re going to try to allow an hour for this. We 
have a little over an hour, so I think that that is a reasonable amount of time. 
Let me try to talk about what is coming up here and answer some questions that 
people have asked of me. 
	Is the meeting that we talked about on University-wide assessment going to 
happen? Yes, it is going to happen, it has not happened yet. There were problems 
being able to schedule it. It will be scheduled in the near future. We have 
selected Anne Donnelly, Pete Knuepfer, Carl Wiezalis, Marvin LaHood and myself 
to represent the Senate with this group. The Faculty Council of community 
colleges is also going to be selecting a group to meet with members of the 
Provost Office to discuss this issue. When the Chancellor asked for this meeting 
to occur, this request came during this ninety-minute meeting that Bob Axelrod 
and I had with him back in December. During that, we presented some reasons why 
the Senate has passed resolutions against University-wide assessment. He said 
that he was concerned with public accountability and that he would try to meet 
the Faculty’s objections, as long as they were clearly stated and asked if we 
could have a meeting and present these objections.
	So what I wanted to do today is since we have our representatives here, 
and they have pencil and paper handy, is to have a discussion on University-wide 
assessment. We had that discussion in the Executive Committee which went on for 
over an hour, I think, and I want to try to summarize that for you. Before we do 
that, I thought that it might be useful to give you a little bit of background. 
I’ve asked some people, since I saw that we were going to have a little bit of 
time due to the cancellation of a couple of agenda items, to provide you with 
some background on some things that occurred in the past. Jim Chen, the past 
President of the Senate, was present when the Senate produced some publications 
on assessment, which you were given when you registered. I will ask Jim if you 
will come up and speak a little bit about those, the intent of those, and what 
you feel the overall message was from those publications. (?)

Jim Chen: Thank you, Joe. All friends and colleagues, it’s good to be back if 
only for a meeting or two. I should start by congratulating Joe on his 
reelection. It is a well-deserved honor, Joe, and a recognition of your 
leadership these last two years. I won’t say anything about hard work. You won 
over a good man, Carl Wiezalis. Carl, I hope that you keep your hat in the ring 
because I know that you are dedicated to the work of the Senate, and you know 
the complexities of the issues.
	There are two documents that Joe mentioned that he has passed out, and he 
asked me to talk about how these documents came to be and what is the rationale 
for their publication: what is in the document, what is their content. So in the 
short time that he had me prepare these notes, I’d like to point to the 
operation rationale of the entire idea on assessment. That is the foundation of 
these documents, and I think that, basically, just as the Faculty has purview 
over the design of the curriculum, you also have responsibility for your 
teaching as a matter of professional obligation. When I teach, I like to know 
how my students are doing. I like to know if they are getting a quality 
education and if I am being effective. For that reason, I find that assessing 
what I do to be very important. It’s also an iterative process. What I learn 
from assessment I hope to make use in my future work.
	The crux of the matter comes when the impetus for assessment originates 
from the top. When it becomes an administrative edict, I think that assessment 
is less likely to succeed. My sense is that assessment after these two 
conferences that we’ve held, assessment will not work as well unless the Faculty 
claims owner ship for the direction, the design and the use of the processes 
that assessment reveal.
	I was very glad to hear, when Jeff Johnston gave a sector report from 
Technology a few minutes ago that he said that there was great resistance to 
assessment on the campus. But after they did it and found the uses and the 
benefits of it, the faculty now claim ownership of the assessment process at 
Alfred. So I thought that that was very beneficial.
       What is in these two documents? There are two. One is dated 1992. 
Essentially that document came to be in 1991 when we invited Joe Burke, then 
Provost at SUNY Central, to share his ideas on energizing the assessment process 
at SUNY. I think that it is a document well worth reading. If the current 
Provost, Provost Salins, would like to energize the current process from a 
system-wide perspective, it may make some sense for the Faculty Senate to invite 
him or his representative to indicate where his convictions are. The rest of the 
documents have basically three perspectives: One from the University Center, the 
perspective of the Arts and Science Colleges, and thirdly the Community Colleges 
on assessment. I think that one thing we learned from that document is that 
assessment need not lead to comparisons between Faculty and between campuses. I 
think that some of these comparisons are problematic in the first place. One is 
trying to get to an individual assessment.
	The second document that is dated in 1994 was really a system-wide 
conference on assessment. There were fifty-one SUNY campuses that participated. 
There were 200+  representatives. I think what this document and what this 
conference demonstrated was that there is a depth of commitment to assessment on 
the individual campuses; a commitment of faculty, a commitment of the 
institution. However, I think that there is great resistance, too.

…One-size-fits all. If you take that approach, I think that there is going to be 
tremendous resistance. This 1994 document has basically five sections. The first 
section deals with the perspectives on assessment from a national context. We 
invited Ted Markazie, the vice-president for the AAHE, to give us his sense of 
how our assessment processes were fitting in on the national level. I thought 
that it was very useful. 
       The second section has to do with assessment in English, and there you 
can read assessment in Humanities and the Social Sciences. The same procedures 
work well. The examples that are given from the different campuses in assessing 
English works well for the other Social Sciences and Humanities.
       The next section has to do with assessment in Mathematics, and there you 
can read assessment in the technical fields and in the Sciences. I think that 
some of the procedures there are very useful. If you have not done assessment on 
your campus, you can get an initial idea of how the SUNY campuses have gone 
about the process. The third section has to do with the assessment processes and 
the logistics. It’s not that easy. There are a lot of procedural matters: how to 
gather the data, assess it, and summarize it. We had Fred ? give us some idea of 
how that process works. He was from the Institutional Research office in Albany 
at the time.
       Finally, section five has what I think is a brilliant summary by Dick 
Collier and Bob Seidel. Again, this conference respected different perspectives. 
The University Center perspective, Arts and Sciences, Community Colleges… There 
are different reasons for doing assessment, depending on the campus mission and 
depending on the sectors. Again that speaks for the importance of individual 
campuses claiming ownership of this process.
       So let me summarize by indicating that I feel that assessment is a 
professional responsibility. I think that we need to do assessment, we need to 
be proactive and not reactive to individual administrative perspectives. So I 
think that the University Senate may well take a lead in this system-wide 
assessment that is being talked about because I do feel that by claiming 
ownership, you claim the direction in which the discussion moves. I hope that 
summarizes what we did.

President Hildreth: I think that that was a very nice summary given on very 
short notice. Thank you, Jim. And now moving closer to date, I’d like to bring 
Norm Goodman up here who has been actively involved with this and with various 
discussions at an earlier date.

Norman Goodman: Let me start off by reaffirming something that Jim Chen said and 
that has to be driven home time and time again. Faculty are not afraid of 
assessment; we do it as part of our normal job. We are not afraid of 
accountability; we read it as essential. We started with this process of 
accountability and assessment well before this became an issue, apparently, for 
the trustees and System Administration. That’s what Joe asked me to talk about. 
In 1996 we had a conference in Albany on general education. Out of that 
conference, the University Faculty Senate had a conference. It developed a task 
force that Anne Donnelly and I co-chaired on general education. As part of that, 
the first point to make is that general education in contrast to, at that time, 
Provost Salin’s view of a rising junior test, we made a point in that document 
to point out that general education is a process that consists of the student’s 
entire undergraduate career, not just the first two years. So the assessment 
must take that into account.
	That document, which pulled together the experiences of SUNY including the 
documents that Jim Chen referred to, set up a framework for general education, 
but included in it a recommendation that since general education was seen to be 
a campus-based program of necessity, any assessment of it must also be campus-
based. I think it was recommendation three, you’d have to check the document, 
that was precisely that. That assessment of general education was an essential 
part of the whole process, but just as general education is campus-based, 
assessment must be campus-based.
       But to take into account the fact that we’re a system, it also argued 
that each campus should develop a plan for assessment that should be filed in 
the Provost office of SUNY and distributed to the other campuses almost as an 
example of best practices or different practices. That was our thought in 
developing the notion of campus-based assessment.
       In February of 1998, we had a plenary session of this Senate at Stony 
Brook. At that session, the focus was on assessment, and we had Dr. Barbara 
Cambridge, who was then and may still be, the director of the assessment forum 
of the American Association of Higher Education . We had forwarded to her, 
before she got here, the general education report and Provost Salin’s argument 
for a rising junior, system-wide assessment test and asked her to comment on 
those. It was very clear in her comments, which were re-printed in the 
University Faculty Senate bulletin that came out after that, that she thought 
that such a program of system-wide assessment was academically unwise, 
pragmatically infeasible, and fiscally foolish for a variety of reasons, which 
she spelled out.
       In addition, at that session we had four different campuses, including 
Fred V at Albany, who is one of the national leaders in assessment, present to 
the University Faculty Senate examples of how their campuses are handling 
assessment and, therefore, the value of campuses doing assessment on their own. 
Those were very useful examples to show that we can do things on a campus-wide 
basis.
	After that set of presentations, the Provost was asked to comment. Those 
of you who were there will remember his comments were essentially that we had 
not changed his mind one bit. So this is an issue that has, first of all, 
preceded the Provost’s interest in it. It came from the Senate itself. We have 
always been interested in assessment. Secondly, it involved both making rational 
arguments of why it is academically indefensible and pragmatically infeasible to 
try to find out who is going to administer, how to motivate to do it, and then 
fiscally responsible as an unfounded mandate, because the cost of that would be 
quite high. At that time, Peter Yule, who as some of you know is a national 
expert in higher education assessment, wrote an article in Assessment Update. He 
had reviewed many of the assessment attempts throughout all of the states in the 
union, including assessment of K-12 and higher education. He found them to be 
not possible, pragmatically and academically unwise and, at that time when we 
had less of a fiscal burden on us, fiscally irresponsible as well. 
	So, the notion of system-wide assessment has not received any support from 
the campuses, from the faculty or from national experts in higher education 
assessment. That’s the kind of background we bring to this discussion today.

President Hildreth: I’d like to now ask Vince Aceto to come up and to share some 
additional background information that he has from the time when he was Senate 
president.

Vince Aceto: After careful and thoughtful examination of Marvin’s comment about 
acido and not making any comments, I want to ask if in light of the fact that we 
are now going to have three sectors, if that will mean that we now can reduce 
the number of associate Provosts in the Provost office to three sectors? I want 
to say a few things about assessment.
	First of all, I think that we have corrupted the use of this word to such 
an extent that it’s lost its meaning. The purpose of assessment is very simple: 
improved learning. That’s it. In order to improve learning, there must be a team 
effort on the campus. You don’t do that alone, you do that with people in your 
department, your division and your campus. The two key elements are that you 
need extensive feedback from students and you need reflection on the part of the 
faculty to decide what needs to be changed, what isn’t right, what we should do 
differently. So it’s iterative; that’s already been said. That’s really what 
assessment is in a nutshell, reduced to its simplest terms. What we have 
presented to us now is something that’s far different. I don’t know if it’s 
accountability or if it’s an achievement test. I have to say that in all honesty 
it reminds me of something that we do a lot in K-12 which is getting very strong 
play now in terms of Regents exams and such, and I can see the day where we may 
have a SUNY high school in terms of the way we’re approaching learning and 
higher education, as opposed to the high school.
       Those are just general comments, but what I really want to comment on is 
that when I was President, I actively engaged in talking to people wherever I 
could find them. I carried on a lot of corridor conversations; and one day 
someone from the Provost office approached me and said, “Have you seen the RFP 
yet?” I said, “What?” “The RFP.” “What RFP?” Well, there is a request for 
proposals to develop a student achievement test, rising junior exam, presented 
from the Provost’s office. He presented me with a copy of this, and I was 
absolutely shocked to see it because it was the first notice that I had had of 
it. There had been no discussion on any of the campuses, with none of the 
presidents and none of the academic vice-presidents. It was all a big dark 
secret. I immediately made sure that all of the campuses got fast copies of 
this, and as a result there was a great deal of concern expressed to the Provost 
about this proposal for a number of reasons.
	I want to read a paragraph directly from the proposal itself because I 
think that in terms of History 101, here it is in terms of how we got to where 
we are in terms of assessment. This was in 1998.

	“The System Administration’s Office of the Provost wishes to assess 
student achievement in the first two years of undergraduate work. The project 
seeks to administer a nationally utilized test to students which would measure 
their achievement during those first two years at a sufficient level of detail 
to support institutional feedback such as linking results to specific curricula, 
advising and assisting students, etc. It will produce a database that can then 
sustain valid comparisons across institutions, valid comparisons within an 
institution across time, and comparisons to non-SUNY institutions. It is 
intended to offer the individual SUNY campuses valuable information on the 
effectiveness of their general education component, specific curricula, and to 
assess the campus-learning environment. The test would measure the skills and 
knowledge acquired during the first two years of undergraduate work and the 
value added to the student by the general education program.”

	So you can see that the whole intent here is not to improve learning, but 
to provide comparative data in terms of a database so that we can compare one 
campus against another campus. To what end, I don’t know, but certainly not to 
make learning more effective.
	The Senate passed a resolution at the next meeting expressing their 
concerns about this student achievement test, and we recommended that a 
consultative process be set up that would address the larger issue of student 
outcomes assessment.	Norm has already mentioned the fact that our task force 
on general ed placed assessment clearly on the campus, and we wanted to support 
that concept.
       That summer I met with the senior associate Provost several times to 
discuss a resolution and to work out a satisfactory revised document that we 
could both endorse. It was clear by the end of the summer that this was not 
possible, so we prepared our own report in terms of this proposal to set up a 
test for measuring student achievement. We said in our final report that we 
wanted a committee to be set up to examine the educational value, the 
feasibility, the utility, the cost, the relevant literature and expected 
outcomes of system-wide tests of student achievement. This will entail reviewing 
responses to the University’s RFP for a system-wide test of materials on the 
experiences of other state university systems and institutions with such tests. 
Then we expected a final report to be made available no later than March 1, 
1999. This was not done, but we ended our report by saying that we believed an 
implementation plan for a voluntary experimental testing program should occur 
after a careful examination of the factors cited above reveals it is technically 
feasible, it is cost effective, and most of all it is educationally valuable for 
the campuses and not being used for invidious distinctions. We would be begging 
the question to investigate the educational value, feasibility, utility costs 
and expected outcomes of system-wide tests of student achievement and at the 
same time have an advisory panel developing an implementation plan.
       Finally, it’s important to stress that while we will always welcome the 
opportunity to participate in system-wide governance and we would be delighted 
to have representatives of the Faculty Senate serve on the proposed advisory 
panel, we will neither support nor participate in the student achievement 
testing program unless these criteria are first met.
       There’s more here which I don’t want to go into, but I think that you get 
the point that this is not something which is suddenly emerging at the present 
time. It’s something that has a long history, and consistently the Faculty 
Senate has expressed a strong disapproval of any kind of system-wide assessment. 
If you want to talk about accountability or some other measure that you wish to 
use to demonstrate to the public that we’re doing a job and doing it 
effectively, let’s talk about that collectively. But I don’t think that we 
should continue to use the word “assessment” when that’s not really what we are 
talking about. That has to be campus-based. Learning doesn’t take place in some 
uniform cookie-cutter way across the whole system; it takes place campus by 
campus.
       It’s interesting that with mission review, the heart of it is recognizing 
the distinctiveness, the fact that we aren’t all the same, and that there are a 
lot of different ways of approaching the same goal in terms of student learning. 
We’ve accepted that, we’ve bought into that concept. We went through an 
elaborate process so that each campus has its own unique distinctive mission 
review document which was signed off by every president. That’s where you should 
build an assessment. That is the logical place to do it because it grows out of 
that particular institution’s curriculum. To do otherwise is to use it for 
comparisons that had nothing to do with assessment but, I fear, might have uses 
in terms of invidious comparisons of campus by campus.
       Lastly, I just want to mention very briefly that the Stony Brook meeting 
that Norm mentioned…we videotaped that whole conference. I think that we still 
have videotapes of that conference around somewhere. So if you want to take 
another look at it, you can. That was a very revealing conference in terms of 
the different points of view that were expressed and the consistent point of 
view in the faculty that it be campus-based.
       Finally, at a meeting of the Academic Standards Committee, which I 
regularly attended when I was president, I made a rather detailed presentation 
of about ten pages which talked about assessment as a concept in higher 
education. I really think that it is very important that we do our homework 
here. We all know that if you are going to do a piece of research, the first 
thing you do is that you review the literature. I want to see a very careful 
review of the literature that shows the positive benefits gain that will come 
about as a result of the system-wide effort that is currently being discussed. 
It isn’t there. At least I could never find it because in that testimony I 
showed that in every state where this has been tried -- Tennessee, Ohio, 
California -- it’s failed. It’s failed because you cannot impose this at a 
system-wide level. It has to be campus-based.
       So I really think that at some point we are just going to have to face up 
to the reality of the fact that this just has never worked. If we think that we 
in SUNY are somehow going to be different and this time it’s going to work, I 
think that we are sending a lot of good money after a bad end.

President Hildreth: Thank you, Vince. Now what I’d like to do is to try to 
summarize a long discussion that we had in the Executive Committee meeting and 
provide you with some statements that have been shared with me in that meeting. 
Then I would like to have people support or not support those statements so that 
we can have some sort of clear discussion on this issue.
	Last night we asked the question, “Do you want to have this meeting?” If 
the answer is no way, why should we have a meeting? People said that they felt 
that we need to have this meeting. So I think that we need to try to be as open 
as we can as we go into this meeting, but on the other hand we need to be as 
straightforward about the feelings of the group as we can. We’ve got the 
representatives here, and you have the background in front of you.
	Let me mention something that has been shared that I think people need to 
know because it’s part of the situation. I don’t believe that the Provost’s 
office is going to just force this on us. I think that if we say, “No,” to the 
Provost that he is going to respect that. But I have been told by anyone who 
knows anything that that is not what is expected from the trustees; that there 
is not just one trustee, but that there are multiple trustees that are eager to 
do this type of thing and that we may have a resolution from the Trustees which 
will impose this. That may be a reality of the time in which we live. I think 
that it would be inappropriate in terms of trying to frame up this discussion if 
we don’t share that information with you. So keep that in mind. I think that the 
Chancellor is aware of that, and I think that if there is something that we come 
up with where we could find some sort of common ground with the Chancellor, that 
he would tend to support us if he possibly could. That is why I think he wants 
to have this meeting.
       So I think that it is very important that we have some discussion about 
accountability because I know that that is important to the Chancellor. I also 
wanted to share with you some of the things that were mentioned last night and 
that have been mentioned that you can either support or not. We don’t need to 
have everybody repeating themselves going over the same issue and then leaving 
out others.
       One of the things that people are concerned about is that university-wide 
assessment would result is inappropriate public disclosure of the results. We’ve 
heard that again and again, and if that’s true then we need to speak to that. If 
it’s not true, please say so.
       There is a concern about the test that it would lead to an unhealthy form 
of conformity and that whoever teaches the test is going to design our 
curriculum. Whoever designs the test is going to design our curriculum because 
faculty will teach to the test and people feel that that would tend to work 
against the diversity that’s one of SUNY’s strengths.
       There is a concern about the money that is would take to produce this 
kind of university-wide assessment. Right now money is not something that we 
have an excess of, and this is seen by many as another unfunded mandate.
       A last concern is that we just completed the design and are just 
beginning the implementation of campus-based plans for assessment. There is a 
feeling that it would be premature to engage in university-wide assessment at 
this point in time without giving those campus-based plans a chance and a chance 
to evaluate that.
       I think that that is a fair discussion of the issues, but once again let 
me bring you back to the reality here which is that on many different occasions 
it has been expressed to me that while the Provost is not going to force this on 
us,  as soon as the Chancellor reports total impasse and that the Faculty cannot 
find any common ground, there will be a Trustee resolution that we won’t have 
any part of. That’s the other side and I think that someone needs to mention 
that to you.
       With that, I would welcome your comments, and we’ll have our 
representatives taking notes. Yes, Ken?

Ken: I don’t see how there can be common ground between campus-based and system-
based systems. One, that’s not a compromisable piece. It’s not a piece where you 
come to the table and try to find a way, which I almost always do, so that 
everybody walks away thinking that somehow they ended up getting part of what 
they needed.
	Let me go on for just a minute. First of all, it seems to me that what is 
being done here is step two on Gen Ed. If assessment, which has come out of 
certain disciplines, means anything, it goes to specific kinds of skills and 
content that are required for fields. It is much easier in some areas than in 
others because those skills and that content have been a product of the 
discussion within that discipline for ten or twenty years, and they have emerged 
from that as a core understanding from the practitioners that this is what 
people need to practice.
	What we are trying to assess is something different. A system-wide 
assessment here is for Gen Ed. Take any one of the Gen Ed categories you wish. 
Math, for example. Where is the common ground between Tech Math, which is 
approved at more than one SUNY institution, and Calc I? Where is the common 
ground in American History when it can range either from the first half to the 
second in content terms or it can be African-American History or it can be 
Social Problems? The content ground isn’t there. Western Civilization: which 
century are we going to choose? We have a broad range of courses that can fit 
under Western Civ. World Civilizations: which civilization? If we are going to 
contend that there is only a minor difference between those who studied African 
History and those who studied Latin-American history sitting down and taking a 
common test on something called Other Civilizations… Natural Sciences: which 
sciences? Which science becomes the particular focus of the test?
	So if content is not the issue, than what is? If you cannot do content and 
you can’t assess common content, then what are we going to assess? The only way 
that we can come up with a reasonable answer will evolve from a series of 
discussions on campuses that we have with one another. The campus is the only 
place where that can occur. It cannot occur across a system until we have the 
campus discussions to begin with. That’s where we are now.
	I will admit, for everyone except Senator Miller, that assessment was not 
one of the pieces that I welcomed into my academic life. I am an American 
historian. I assess students and student learning; I’ve done it for a lifetime. 
I assess the quality of the scholarship which is given in my field; I’ve done 
that for a lifetime. But the idea that there was going to be a test out there 
did not sit right.
	Once we began the process on my campus, we found some value in having to 
sit down and talk to one another about what we were trying to accomplish in 
various courses, what we were trying to accomplish in various levels, what we 
meant by certain kinds of skills in the first half of American history versus 
the second. But that is not easily replicable across an entire system of sixty-
four campuses. It doesn’t make sense to me.
	So this what we can honestly do on the campus level; we cannot simply 
replicate on the system level. If we can’t do that, all we are left with is the 
big test. I, for one, believe my campus will not participate. We won’t do it. 
Sorry to take your time.

President Hildreth: Thank you, Ken. I see Joe and then I see Dick Collier.

Joe Flynn (Alfred): We’ve been at this issue hammer and tongs for years. I think 
that there is another question that is fundamental: what is the nature of the 
system and what is the role of System Administration to the campus? When it 
comes to assessment, this body passed a unanimous resolution at its Utica-Rome 
meeting about two years ago in April. When it came to the issue of system-wide 
assessment, it said that the function of the system is to provide resources for 
campus-based assessment, to establish an office for system-wide assessment and 
to ensure that there were funded positions on each campus for campus-based 
assessment. It also noted that assessment is not just the assessment of general 
education; that is not what assessment is nationwide.
       We know that all kinds of system-wide assessments already take place in 
terms of student satisfaction, information of all sorts that is collected by 
System Administration, which constitutes assessment. We also know that the 
campuses have been working very, very hard to accommodate the impact of the 
Board resolution of 1998. I am quite sure that any talk about a big test or 
system-wide testing or voluntary piloting thereof would have a significant 
disastrous effect on the amount of time, energy and will that the faculty have 
put into this at the campus level and, as a member of the GEAR group, at the 
system level.
	Finally, let me say that I think that this is a conversation that should 
not simply occur among the Faculty Senate, but large numbers of faculty should 
engage in conversation directly with the Trustees and with the Chancellor’s 
office in an open-air forum. If there is one thing that the Senate has never 
been opposed to, it is free and open discussion. Personally, I think that there 
has been no justification other than rumors for the existence of a test. The way 
that the argument is being subtly insinuated into this body at this point speaks 
to me only of power.

President Hildreth: Dick?

Dick Collier (Albany): I come here to praise the SUNY Provost of 1992. If you 
read pages 5-15 of this handout, you will find that Joe Burke was amazingly 
prescient. It addresses accountability, it puts assessment into the context of 
accountability, it explains the importance of the uniqueness of each of our 
campuses and programs, it explains why Boards of Trustees, legislatures, and 
presidents have abandoned things like system-wide assessment. They don’t work; 
and if they could have worked, they probably caused more harm than good. There 
are many fine ways of doing it, and it looks to the future. It is a blueprint 
followed two years later by the booklet that Jim Chen talked about, and then by 
the succession of programs that Norm and Vince talked about. It’s pretty clear 
that that is the way to go and that that is the way that we are going. I’m 
certainly never unhappy about talking to anyone about anything, but if there is 
any sense at all that there is room for compromise on this, I have to agree with 
Ken that there is no room for compromise on this issue. This is not negotiable. 
If you have a test, let them do the test. Let’s make it clear that we have 
nothing to do with that test. I believe that if a result can be given, it will 
be readily observable by us without a lot of explanation to the press as truly 
foolish and not usable.

President Hildreth: John? 

John DeNisco (Buffalo State): I want to reiterate what Dick had said. I have 
taken a look at this and if you read those, I want to quote what the Provost at 
that time said:

“I believe that the best way, not just to avoid assessment mandate but to 
improve institutional performance and raise the level of knowledge and skills in 
graduates, was to design an assessment program that ensures accountability while 
preserving campus autonomy.”

If you look at the previous page, page seven, it says where Dick referred:

“The stick-and-carrot approach does not work. As many governors and legislators 
had hoped, colleges, Universities, and especially faculties resented these 
mandates.”

My sense is, since we have a lot of these in storage, to ask the Board of 
Trustees to look at these and then come up to us and tell us what they feel is 
our accountability in terms of this.

President Hildreth: It would be helpful today if we could have someone that will 
speak to accountability because I know that representatives would like to take 
some notes on that. Now we have Steve, then Norm, and then Dick.

Steve Walsh (Oneonta): I sense that in the near future there may be a motion 
forthcoming dealing with this matter out of this body. If there is, I would urge 
for such a motion be very simple and very blunt.
	Over the approximately dozen years that I have been associated with the 
University Faculty Senate, we have had a number of disagreements with the Board 
of Trustees, over which we have passed measures. There has been a spin that has 
almost always emerged concerning these: point of issues is one that has been 
mentioned today, and discussions on General Education. When the process was 
created for the system-wide courses that were required, the University Faculty 
Senate was complimented and praised for having contributed to the process rather 
than having characterized the opposite. When we had the “No-Confidence Vote,” we 
saw all kinds of different spins being put on this. Whatever statement, if there 
is one, emerges from this body needs to be so crystal clear that it is evident 
that there is an attempt to put a spin on it, and that it doesn’t characterize 
it the way that it is intended to be characterized would be a lie.

President Hildreth: Norm?

Norman Goodman (Stony Brook): There is a compromise which was attempted, and it 
worked. It is called GEAR. GEAR was a compromise. We didn’t want any kind of 
system involvement in the assessment of General Education, but we accepted GEAR 
because it was primarily faculty and the assessment programs were based on the 
campus. What GEAR was to do was to look at the plans for assessment, while the 
campus was still responsible for assessment. So a compromise was possible. We 
did what we could to accommodate the interests, and at this point Ken is 
absolutely right in that there is no other place that we could go. GEAR was a 
compromise.
	Your comment about accountability, Joe, was absolutely correct. There are 
two things about accountability that I can say. One is GEAR. GEAR insured some 
campus accountability for their assessment of General Education. The second is 
MOU. Every campus has a Memorandum Of Understanding which spells out what they 
have to do. To some extent, some of the campuses have built the assessment 
program into that, and the rest of them can be built in as well. The MOUs 
provide the mechanism of accountability,
	On both counts we have made the compromise necessary. We are accountable, 
and as John DeNisco mentioned with the Executive Committee last night, that to 
some extent we should ask the Trustees whom they define as a stakeholders to 
whom we’re responsible for accountability. We think that they are the students, 
the faculty, the parents and the taxpayers.

President Hildreth: Dick?

Dick Miller: I’m going to excuse myself because I’m in Operations, and I feel as 
though I am inhibiting this conversation with my presence. Having said that, I’d 
like to comment that the Board of Trustees are a group of relatively intelligent 
individuals. They are individuals. They do not speak with one voice, and they 
are reasonable people by and large. I would encourage you to develop a 
communication plan of some sort. Start communicating with them rationally, 
thoughtfully, with Joe Burke’s article…that kind of stuff. There are only a 
couple of them that are paying any attention to this and their minds are made 
up. The rest are not paying much attention; their minds are not made up, and 
they are capable of being reasoned with. If they are properly prepared, they 
won’t have something sprung on them. If the minutes of this meeting reflect my 
comments, I will deny them. I urge you that in addition to whatever you want to 
do about resolutions, etc., which I have no position on, to think about that 
communication strategy with those people. Sit down with them individually; 
there’s no reason why you can’t. Write them, reason with them, and explain to 
them so that when the moment comes they will say, “Time out.”

President Hildreth: Norm and Judith. Why don’t we have Judith first and then 
Norm.

Judith Adams-Volpe (Buffalo): As I am also a member of GEAR, I would like to 
make a couple of comments on this. One thing that is evident from reviewing all 
of the assessment plans that have been developed by the campuses is their 
complexity and the diversity of the plans. Just one very brief “for instance”: 
many campuses are developing a plan to assess the classes during the time of the 
particular course. Other campuses are going to assess achievements, results, and 
learning outcomes later in the students career, so we are going to gather an 
excellent amount of information from these plans.
       In comparison, if we look at a simple test, its shallowness and 
simplicity becomes stunning. We have to think about what the Board of Trustees, 
or whoever is advocating for a single test, wants that we cannot give them 
through the present General Education assessment process. The only thing I can 
see, without being obnoxious about this, is that what it cannot easily provide 
is media sound bytes and a very simplistic…

(end of tape) (beginning of tape)

…the GEAR assessment process, perhaps maybe we can provide a sort of a document 
which could provide those interested with some concise results of our assessment 
process. That might be very compelling to some people. I dread the thought of a 
test that is given to every SUNY student, because I don’t see how it can result 
in anything but sacrificing the first two years of the diversity, the 
complexity, and the richness of a SUNY degree.

President Hildreth: Norm?

Norman Goodman (Stony Brook): I have an answer, I think, to Judith’s questions 
which was: What do the Trustees want? I don’t think that that is quite correct. 
It’s not the Trustees; it’s several Trustees. What they want is uniformity. If 
you look at the beginning, on the very first twenty-four-page memo that Candace 
DeRussy sent out, it was clear that what she wanted was uniformity. For those of 
us who labored in the task force on General Education, her original ideas came 
down with a uniform course structure that every student had to take. So I think 
that the answer to your question is uniformity, because if you can’t get it 
through the General Education structure that we did, we’ve changed our courses 
and learning objectives. You can get it by forcing a single test to which 
teachers will have to teach in order to get the resources. What Vince mentioned 
to you is that when he was President of the Senate, he had a conversation in an 
elevator with somebody who said that there was going to be system-wide 
assessment because it was going to be used for resource allocation. We need to 
be careful about that.
	Let me pick up Dick Miller’s comments, which I think were absolutely on 
the mark. We need to engage the Board of Trustees, at least those sensible 
members, but we also need to engage the Chancellor because up until now, the 
Chancellor has said that it won’t happen if the Faculty doesn’t want it. He is 
now changing his tune because he is being put under pressure. We have to put 
some reverse pressure on him. I will offer a resolution tomorrow on this issue 
to do that. It will be in your packet of stuff tomorrow. But I think that we 
have to approach the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor, as Joe Hildreth has 
wisely said, with a set of reasoned arguments and explanations. We have the 
beginnings of that. We have Vince Aceto’s memo, we have the documents from 
Barbara Cambridge, the article by Peter Yule, Joe Burke…we have a whole series 
of things which lay out in subsequent terms why it is foolish to do what they 
are attempting to do. We should put that together in a single document, provide 
that to the Trustees and the Chancellor, and set up a meeting to go over these 
kinds of issues.

President Hildreth: If I could inject a remark here, I think that is exactly the 
way that I interpreted Dick Miller’s advice, and I think that is was very wise, 
politically savvy, and it comes from a knowledge that no one here in this room 
has. I think that that is the type of thing that we can do most effectively. 
What we’ll need to talk about is the form that it should take, and we need to be 
thinking about that.

Norman Goodman (Stony Brook): One thing that we ought to consider is the form. 
One way of doing it is to have a kind of open meeting. I’m a little leery about 
that because it tends to get very diffuse. We have, both on the Senate and in 
the faculty at large, colleagues who have close relationships with the members 
of the Board of Trustees. We ought to identify those people and put them in the 
forefront of this kind of discussion because they already have a kind of 
relationship that can be used, if we can provide them with the background.

President Hildreth: On that background, it’s not a bad idea to have a position 
paper. I think that we are talking about the same thing. I believe I had Ken, 
and then I see Karen?

Ken O’Brien (Brockport): I would just remind everyone that I did say at the last 
meeting that there is something that we could assess in terms of Gen Ed and 
assess it on a system-wide basis. But it’s not the outputs, it’s the inputs. 
What kind of resources has it taken to get us to where we are now? What kind of 
dislocation has that created on the campuses? And what kind of changes has it 
made in the structure of the first two years? It would be nice to know that. It 
would be nice to know how many campuses moved from Introductory History classes 
of forty to Introductory History classes of two hundred.

President Hildreth: Karen?

Karen Markoe (Maritime): It used to be the practice of the University Faculty 
Senate to invite Board members from a particular area to come to our meetings. I 
think that it may be time to bring that practice back. Wouldn’t it be good 
today, for example, if there were a couple of Board members from this area who 
simply heard our discussion?
	Secondly, because I tend to be pragmatic about these things, has there 
been any discussion about the mechanics of this? Quite frankly, I don’t think 
that people would do it in the classrooms. So how is the test going to be 
administered?

President Hildreth: There hasn’t been anything other than a suggestion here and 
there.

Norman Goodman: That was taken up at the plenary session at Stony Brook in the 
questions from the floor to Peter Salins. The answer was that they had not given 
any thought to that. The faculty from the floor has raised issues about student 
motivation, faculty time, and the cost. There were no answers to any of that.

Karen Markoe: At the spring meeting a year ago, I remember getting up and 
lamenting that I didn’t have enough teachers to cover my classes for the fall 
semester. I did have enough, but I’m right back where I was a year ago. These 
tests are not cheap, and I find the idea that money would be diverted from 
teaching to give this big universal test to be very disconcerting. I suspect 
that if we do get the entire faculty involved with this, they simply would not 
take part.

President Hildreth: I should let you know that individually and as a group, I 
always invite the Trustees. They were invited to this meeting both individually 
and as a group. Joe?

Joe Flynn: On another practical level, has anyone proposed any form of a test? 
Has there been any secret RFP like there was when Vince was president? Is anyone 
seriously considering this test that we’re objecting to? I can certainly tell 
you as a member of both the assessment task force and GEAR, everyone in both of 
those groups over the past years has been opposed to any sort of big test. You 
don’t have to go too far to take that poll.

President Hildreth: Vince?

Vince Aceto (Albany): To introduce some strategy here…Joe, I would like to 
suggest that you set up some sort of a task force that would bring together a 
lot of the documents, thinking, and maybe some additional research from national 
organizations that would provide us with a position paper both on assessment and 
accountability and kind of use that as a talking paper as we meet with Trustees 
so that we are all speaking from the same point of view, with the same 
information, and so that we are consistent. We could talk about this for the 
next two hours, but it kind of seems to me that we have exhausted the thinking 
here for the moment. Maybe the next step is to get a formal document that we all 
can take a look at and then use in our discussions with others.

President Hildreth: Let me respond and then I want to recognize Runi. I think 
that that is a perfect strategy in terms of what has been suggested here, and I 
am most inclined to do that. The one thing that would make it possible is that 
that type of document could be easily distributed electronically for people to 
comment on. Runi?

Runi Mukherji (Old Westbury): I’m not disagreeing with anything that has been 
said here, but the direction that we should be taking. As a member of the 
assessment task force and now as a member of GEAR, I have to tell you that this 
issue of accountability and assessment is something that I personally have been 
living and breathing for the last four years. Every week we have scores of these 
plans that we review in the GEAR group. The issues of accountability and 
assessment, what gets assessed for what reasons, what outcomes you’re looking 
for and how you gear assessment to that is something that all of these documents 
already have. I think that giving the Trustees material to read is theoretically 
a good idea, but not practically a good idea. I’m not sure that they are going 
to read this whole white paper because the documents already exist. I think that 
we need to find a way to give them a sort of a framework of understanding the 
complexity of assessment, maybe not in the form of a paper. In the couple of 
meetings I went to of the Standards committee, one of our own faculty members 
made a presentation which was completely heinous about how faculty are not 
accountable or responsible for what they teach. But it was enormously persuasive 
because it was a live person standing up there and talking about it.
	It might be worthwhile to think about using a format like that. Make a 
presentation that is not just an unfocused presentation but really using all of 
the materials that are already out there. We are good at this; we do this every 
day. Make a presentation to a group of people live and be open to questions and 
answers about it. Maybe we could invite them to a smaller, more informal, 
meeting.

President Hildreth: I have two things in mind. One thing that we need to do is 
keep in mind that we are going to need to come to some sort of resolution. 
Generally speaking, when you are dealing with a complex issue of this nature, 
it’s best to let a small group try to present that to the group via our 
listserv. I think that we don’t have to try to compress what we could talk about 
all afternoon and into the evening  into the amount of time we have left. We do 
need to get some sort of general sense of the direction that we want to go in. 
With that said, I have seen Carl, then Norm, Jim Chen, Vince, and then Peer. 

Carl Wiezalis (Upstate Medical University in Syracuse): For those of us who have 
been around for a long time, it’s rather strange that we look back upon the Joe 
Burke days as something that we long to return to. This current round of 
assessment looks remarkably like the early ‘90s when many of us did establish 
campus-based assessment systems that really worked quite well. It was strange 
that we were revisiting that when we had a perfectly well lubricated system.
	There is another group in SUNY that I am concerned about, relative to 
their silence. That is the academic VPs and the presidents. I’ve talked to a lot 
of these gentlemen and women over the years, and they uniformly support us in 
campus-based assessment, yet they are remarkably silent in public about this. 
They seem to push us out in front of this issue with limited weapons. Within the 
last two weeks, I got a call from one of those offices asking what we were doing 
to stave this off.
	So I would like to see part of our strategic plan including our academic 
VP partners, who meet as a separate group with the Provost, and our campus 
presidents, who meet as a distinct group with the Chancellor, and see what they 
can do to bring some effective pressure on the Chancellor and the Trustees so 
that we can stop wasting our time on this issue.

President Hildreth: Jim?

Jim Chen: I’m glad that you mentioned Joe Burke. This is a complex issue, and 
it’s very clear from the comments where this body stands. That is not an issue 
here.
	What I want to point out is that there is a political dimension to getting 
this resolution and what we have in mind move forward. I suspect that Joe Burke 
was probably not always in tune with what we has written, but he has in writing 
that he is convinced that this is the way to go. Originally though, I think that 
Joe Burke might have been in another space. Similarly, I think that you could 
get someone like Joe Burke, and maybe even King and Salins, but you have to be 
wise in getting them on your side.
	I would recommend that for whatever resolutions you draft, that you 
contact them and speak to them beforehand to get them on your side and convince 
them. It’s doable. Joe Burke is a perfect example of a person to bring to our 
side.

President Hildreth: Norm?

Norman Goodman: Jim, Peter Salins is a lost cause. What I did mention in my 
presentation is that when he initially took office and raised the issue of a 
rising junior test, almost all of his staff left because of him. He said that 
this was a crazy idea, and they convinced him to allow them to call together a 
group of five experts. I was the least of the experts there, but the other four 
people were national experts in assessment.
	We had a five hour meeting with Peter explaining why this is not a wise 
idea, why it should not be done, and why it can’t be done. At the end of five 
hours I turned to Peter and said, “Well, Peter, what do you think?” He said, 
“You haven’t convinced me.” We went through this at Stony Brook where Barbara 
Cambridge made a presentation. Peter got up again to say, “You haven’t convinced 
me.” He’s a lost cause.
	Bob King is different. He has said up until recently that if the faculty 
doesn’t want it to happen, it won’t happen. Now, he is obviously under 
tremendous pressure from at least some of the Trustees, and I think that you are 
absolutely correct. We need to engage him in this process. Ed Collier’s idea of 
engaging the AVPs and the presidents is also a very good idea. I think that I 
see Runi’s suggestion not as an alternative but as an addition, too. I see 
nothing wrong with giving them a white paper to read, but you then need to 
engage them on a personal level, I agree, and we talked about having a meeting 
there, too. I think that Dick is quite correct in saying that they are 
thoughtful and intelligent people. They may not have the same idea as we have in 
some cases, but many of them are thoughtful and intelligent enough to ask 
intelligent questions that we can answer. So I think that if we provide them 
with a white paper and then set up these meetings to meet with them, and with 
the AVPs and the presidents too, then I think that we can mount a substantial 
campaign. But I think that we should not wait because there is a momentum 
building up now. If we allow that to develop, those Trustees who are in favor of 
this will begin to pick up more support from the Trustees that already are 
there. So I think that we need to move as rapidly as possible.

President Hildreth: One of the things that I like to try to do is to summarize 
what it is that I’ve been hearing, so let me do that and then we have a few more 
people. We do have to be mindful of the time.
	One is that I am seeing people call for a strategic plan that needs to be 
developed immediately. There are going to multiple parts to this: one part 
having a white paper, another part that would call for the engagement of key 
players in this process, and there may be other parts that may need to be 
determined. That’s one thing I hear.
	I believe personally that this would best be done through the selection of 
a group to work on that who was experienced and who also would be willing to 
invest a lot of time in a very short time. So I’m hearing that and I also sense 
that this group is unanimous in its opposition to this. If that’s not the case, 
then someone needs to speak out because that is exactly the way that I am 
interpreting it.
	Now we have Vince and then Peer.

Vince Aceto (Albany): I think that you should add the academic VPs and the 
presidents to the groups that you are going to contact. I thought that Carl’s 
idea was a very good one.

President Hildreth: I agree with that. I meant to mention those when I was 
talking about key players.

Vince Aceto: The mischief always happens in the summer, and we’re approaching 
the summer. I think that your point about something soon is very, very 
important. It’s going to be too late in September. So I just wanted to reinforce 
that comment.

Peer Bode (Alfred Ceramics): I’m really impressed by the conversation, exchange 
and problem solving that has happened on the fly, although obviously not just on 
the fly because there’s a lot behind it. I think that I agree with almost 
everything that has been said. I just have a lot of respect for the process and 
this group trying to communicate with another group that isn’t necessarily 
processing in the same way or coming from the same place.
	In a sense, I just want to make the observation that I can’t help but 
think that we have gone through ten years of being defunded and lowering the 
funding within SUNY. We’re being challenged in terms of accountability. Think 
about it. It makes me wonder when we get through this what actually are the 
better issues? I don’t know how the issues from the Board of Trustees get 
created, but obviously when you create something like that, you go with it and 
you dig in and it becomes something tougher and tougher and a battle happens 
around it.
	So much of our conversation earlier in the day with the information that 
we were getting about budgets, etc. This University system has such an 
incredible challenge. It’s historic, and in a sense this is not the issue. This 
is a side issue and we have to deal with it, and I totally respect that. I think 
that all of the right things are happening in terms of what we’ll get to.
       Also, about what Karen said about having Trustees here…the process has to 
change because otherwise they are going to come up with another one and it will 
be another one, and then we’ll have to respond. It’s just an amazing waste of 
this group’s time and energy, and I’d like to come up with a process where there 
are some issues that we think are really the issues where we could work with the 
Trustees or they select themselves out in some way that we’re not just in an 
adversarial place. I just wanted to throw that out of ten years of defunding, 
and we’re being threatened with issues around accountability.

President Hildreth: Runi and then Norm.

Runi Mukherji: I know that we’re sort of winding down on this conversation, but 
I just wanted to throw this out for consideration. What would happen if we all 
resorted to civil disobedience? No, really, I mean this in a serious way. This 
issue of accountability works both ways. In a time of budget crisis, like this, 
I can’t understand how they can consider themselves accountable for engaging in 
an endeavor that’s enormously costly, for a completely unexplained outcome. Why 
would you want to compare the colleges and universities to one another? For what 
purpose? In what way is it connected to making education better? What is the 
next step?
	But the point is, what could they do? If we all as campus-by-campus took 
resolutions to not engage in this process, what would they do? I’m just curious 
as to what people think they would do.

President Hildreth: I think that that is an excellent question. We can try to 
address it. I have to recognize the last group of people. I think that I’ve seen 
Norm, Karen, and Ken, and those will be the last ones. And Dick. Those will be 
the last four and we have some time pressure, so try to be as succinct as you 
can.

Norman Goodman: I can’t answer your question directly, Runi. I don’t think that 
it is yet the time to engage in civil disobedience. I want to get back to Peer’s 
point, which is an extremely important point.
	There are many things in which we would be in concert with the Board of 
Trustees. We need to feel them out for those purposes. There are literally only 
a few people who have ideas which are so diametrically opposed to us that we 
cannot work with them. But they are a small number, and they will keep coming up 
with things like this all of the time. They’re not the concern; the concern is 
all of the other people who can rein them in. We can’t reign them in; their 
fellow Trustees can reign them in.
	Some of the people who have been here long enough will remember that there 
was a proposal that we have pushed for a long time for the Board to provide a 
plan for multi-year funding. The Trustees actually agreed to that. They put 
forth a four- or five-year plan. At the last minute it was pulled off the table 
when Tom Egan got a call from the Bureau of the Budget. So again, they were 
quite willing to work with us, and I think that we should explore that with 
those people. What are the things that we have in common?
	During Joe’s tenure as President, his major mandate to us is enhancing the 
quality of the academic agenda. That is something that we can engage them on. 
The problem is that the relative committee is the Academic Status Committee, and 
that is controlled by the people that we don’t agree with. But we have other 
people that we can and should work with.

Karen Markoe (Maritime): A small suggestion. One or two Trustees will be on each 
of our campuses at graduation. Why don’t we each try to engage those people on 
the subject when they come to our campuses?

President Hildreth: We’ll try to have the information ready to do that. Ken?

Ken: Several comments, very quickly. I don’t think that it is the time for civil 
disobedience, despite my opening remark. I think that this is the time to work 
every possible way that we can work to convince the majority of Trustees that 
this is not a good idea, this is not a doable idea, this is a very expensive 
idea, and this is an idea that would threaten to destroy a good part of the 
University. I think that it is that important.
	As I heard it, there are several different fronts. One is that Bob King is 
someone I have found can be worked with. At least, that was long before he got 
to Albany and into SUNY. So that’s one way that you need to go, and I think that 
the road there is through the discussion group. That is working with the 
representatives from System Administration. The other is working with Trustees. 
I am absolutely clueless, but I think that that is absolutely essential. You 
have to identify those who may become your potential allies in this kind of 
issue. A third group of academic VPs and presidents on campuses, and I think 
that the CGLs can be particularly important here. We meet with them regularly, 
and I would be more than happy to make sure that our president and our Provost 
understand where we are as a system. I think that that might work.

President Hildreth: Dick?

Dick Collier (Albany): I think, partly in answer to Runi’s question, what would 
happen is that wrath would be directed to the presidents and AVPs which might be 
motivating factors for them to start acting in concerted fashion on this. As for 
King’s prior comments, the Chancellor’s explanation of why it wouldn’t go ahead 
without our involvement and agreement was his understanding that it couldn’t be 
made to work without our involvement or agreement. Therefore, defined as a civil 
disobedience, it was “let these people do it themselves and come up with a test 
without any input or validation from us and deliver it to the presidents and 
AVPs who would then find someone on campus to deliver it and return dated to 
SUNY who would find someone to put it into tables and try to find something 
meaningful from it.” My feeling is that ninety-five percent would flunk because 
there is no motivation for students to do anything other than screw around with 
it, particularly if they read our pieces ahead of time.

President Hildreth: Okay, thank you. Now here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going 
to create a task force with the developing of a white paper that will include 
thinking, pulling in relevant background documents, and make a statement about 
accountability. This will be what we will all use when we engage in the next 
part of the strategy which will be this involvement with Trustees and other key 
stakeholders. 

Jim has some announcements about transportation.

Jim McElwaine: Everybody who is walking, we will assess the walking. Those that 
took the shuttle bus from the Best Western to here…(end of tape)



_________________________________________


Saturday Plenary Session
President Hildreth: We have a guest with us that is an old friend of the Senate. 
We’ve been honored with his presence many times before. I also enjoy his company 
at the Board of Trustees meetings, and I’ve found him to be an excellent 
representative of SUNY. I would like to introduce David Kidd to come up. David 
is president of the SUNY Alumni Association.

David Kidd: I have some good feeling being on the Cornell campus. My daughter 
graduated from the College of Veterinary Medicine here. My unpleasant feelings 
in 1972, I became president of Cornell High School. That was a nice job, I 
didn’t mind that at all, but that was the time that the civil rights movement 
was going full-blast. Late that spring it was Parents Weekend at the campus and 
Willard Street Hall, one of the student living quarters was taken over by I’m 
not sure it was the Black Panthers. I don’t want to say anything that may not be 
true. But for all the parents that filled that residence hall during that 
weekend, there was quite a contingent of black males (probably Panthers), 
students that just took over the hall and held them captive. They could not get 
out, and it was for almost a week that they were locked up in that hall. They 
had plenty of guns and ammunition and, because of the safety of the parents, the 
college had to keep bringing in food to feed them; and I can recall the pictures 
in the newspapers. They all wore the cartridge belts that were just loaded with 
the fifty caliber machine gun bullets. That is the picture that I have etched in 
my mind. But that was occurring in many places so there was nothing too unusual 
about it in a way at that particular time.
	I do thank Joe for these few minutes. I’m very sorry to have missed your 
first two meetings this year in October and January. I was hit with prostate 
cancer, and I had to spend a couple of months with radiation treatments five 
days a week. It’s one hundred percent over now and, as the oncologist said, “We 
all have to be going with something someday, but you will not be going with 
prostate cancer.” So that’s one way of describing a successful time.
	I’m primarily here to tell you that I’m resigning from my position in the 
Confederation of Alumni Associations. There are a number of reasons and most of 
them are quite obvious. For example, sometime before December 30th of this year, 
there may not even be a Confederation of Alumni Associations. One cannot be a 
member of an organization that doesn’t exist. Michael Luck, who has been our 
liaison person between SUNY Administration and the Alumni Confederation, has 
kind of been charged by the Chancellor to reconfigure what is happening and what 
he wants for the future of all of the alumni in the State University system. 
There have been some meetings going on, which I have not been privy to, with 
SUNY Quad, the Confederation, and perhaps others. These meetings are to see what 
kind of a reorganization structure they might come up with and to make that 
recommendation to the Chancellor before the end of the year.
       Now we have an annual conference, as most associations do in education, 
and it’s always in September. At our last conference the nominating committee 
was in place to recommend that next slate of officers, and the conference 
planning committee was in place to begin immediately. But Michael told us that 
it might be a waste of time, so he didn’t seem to complain when we suggested to 
tear up the slate of new officers and forget it and to also disband the 
conference planning committee. There is no sense in planning a conference for an 
organization that may not be in existence. That is kind of the main reason that 
I will be retiring from any activities with the Confederation of Alumni 
Associations.
	I talked with Michael this past week, and he said to be careful and not 
say too much to the senators or anyone else because everything is still in a 
state of flux. I think that what he also meant was that anything said about it 
in advance is preferred to be said by the Central Office rather than anyone like 
me. So again, I can’t very well continue to be the observer for the monthly 
meeting of the Board of Trustees if there is no organization for me to be 
representing.
	On the other hand, all is not lost from a personal basis because for the 
last twelve years I have been very active at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady. I’ve 
been a volunteer there for twelve years in the Cardiac Rehabilitation Program. I 
have enjoyed that role because it is next to home, and since January, I have 
been President of the volunteer AIDS Association Board of Directors; and I’m 
also on the Ellis Hospital Foundation Board of Trustees, so I do have plenty to 
do close to home.
	I do want to thank all of you for the privilege of attending your plenary 
sessions for the last of five of six years. I owe a debt of gratitude to Vince 
Aceto who was the first one to ask me if I’d like to come. I’m also indebted to 
Joe Flynn and Joe Hildreth, who were kind enough to continue that invitation. I 
really do appreciate the hospitality and the friendship, and I wish each and 
every one of you continuing success and, above all, very good health. I thank 
you again and want to sincerely say that I will miss you.

President Hildreth: Thank you, David. Our next agenda item is our standing 
committee reports, and we’ll start with the Executive Committee and the roll 
call. Jim?

Interval________________________________ 

Jim McElwaine: The Executive Committee met at eight-thirty this morning and 
collected points of information, access, and planning for a presentation to the 
Board of Trustees. As we continue to collect information to support campus-based 
assessment, we also look forward to the synchronization of the Senate’s 
initiative with the collection of opinions from the local CGLs and LGLs, as all 
of us express our support of campus-based assessment. There was extensive 
discussion about the language in certain talking points that we gathered. We met 
for about twenty-five minutes and felt that we made great progress toward 
bringing documentation, proof, and good presentation to our points supporting 
campus-based information. That concludes my report. 

President Hildreth: Thank you, Jim. We’re going to be putting together a group, 
and we had a resolution, but we decided that we would rather that just be given 
as a point of information that Ken will take and distribute. We’re going to have 
Ken involved with this working group, and we’re going to try to meet the 
Chancellors and request to provide a clear statement of our position. We’ll be 
distributing that, and we’ll be doing this before the month of May is out. We 
won’t be taking a long time to do it. If you have an interest in working with 
this group, I would very much appreciate it if you would contact me. I’m sure 
that we could use all of the help that people will volunteer.
	With that, let’s move onto the standing committee reports. Let’s start 
with the Awards Committee. Marvin?

Marvin LaHood: Justin and I are blessed with a superb committee. The names are 
on the report. This is a fairly simple and straightforward report. Let me say 
one more time that after all these years, I love the debate. As vituperative as 
I get, I want you to know that I love you all. At any rate, we’re waiting to 
hear the response to the things that we passed at Geneseo; I’ve been told that 
they are in the pipeline. The proposal to require five years of ? for both the 
DTP and the DSP has just been standardized. Also, three years on the nominated 
campus for DSP and DTP.
	We have a Chancellor award for excellence and faculty service which 
includes, for the first time, the idea that faculty governance is of extreme 
importance. We are hoping for that language to get into the DSP guidelines May 
16th when Justin and I meet with our committee in Albany. So the Faculty 
Governance will finally be seen as a very important piece of what happens 
campus-by-campus.
	The proposals for the conference disciplines are due on Monday. Justin and 
I both tried to get in touch with Janette this week. We don’t know how many 
applications there are, but we are going to meet in Albany on May 16th and make 
the selection and recommendation to the Provost.
	The question is, how many people think that the criteria for Distinguished 
Teaching Professorship would be the previously given Chancellor’s Award in 
Teaching and for the Distinguished Service Professorship the Chancellor’s Award 
for Excellence and Faculty Service? How many think that in the criteria those 
ought to be included?

(Vince Aceto speaks in background)

Joe H: See, Vince, I don’t know if we should have in the information that we 
send to campuses that you really ought to consider a possibility that, before 
you give a Distinguished Teaching Professorship, the candidate ought to have 
received a Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, Norm?

Norman Goodman: (speaks in background)…the Chancellor’s Award is for the quality 
of teaching on your campus. The Distinguished Teaching Professorship is about 
you having gone beyond the campus to the region, state, nation, or the world. It 
seems that you need to achieve the quality on campus before you move beyond 
that. That seems to be the logic. With the VSP, I think that you would have to 
phase that in because there hasn’t been enough time for this new award to be a 
criterion. But we have all kinds of criteria for each of these awards. What I’m 
suggesting is that this be one of them as an essential step in the process of 
moving from the Chancellor’s Award to the Distinguished Professorship Award.

President Hildreth: What we’re going to do, not as a binding vote, is take a 
poll just to be used as a point of discussion in the committee. Do we have some 
additional discussion here? (talking in background) Let’s stop this discussion 
then. What about a straw vote. Is that possible?

Marvin LaHood: Straw vote only exists in the minds of people who have never read 
(unintelligible) anyway. If you want a sense of the house…(laughing)

Unknown: It seems that Chairman LaHood is trying to abrogate his responsibility 
for the performance of his committee. I suggest that the Senate charge him to go 
back to the committee and then come back to this body with a specific resolution 
that we can debate and then take action.

Joe: Let me just add that I think that Marvin was just trying to get some 
feedback from the Senate and that…how about if you all email us so there’s a 
straw vote, but you can then voice your opinion.

(voices in background)

Joe Hildreth: Marv?

Marvin LaHood: So has this report been accepted so that we can move on? I don’t 
know why, but I still think that it’s nice to have person-to-person contact. 
That’s the way I live, and that’s the way that I’m going to die. I don’t want 
email from everybody. I’m going to override the email idea from the guy who runs 
the webpage. Could I have a sense of the house so that I can go back to my 
committee and say that the full Senate feels this way or that and use that as a 
basis for my discussion? Why can’t I have a sense of the house?

Vince Marvin, we’re giving reports, okay? Let’s just give our reports. 

President Hildreth: Judith?

Judith Adams-Volpe: I have a totally different question for Marvin. I would like 
to ask the Awards Committee that when they are discussing the SUNY distinguished 
ranks, that they include the distinguished librarian rank. It’s always left out. 
I know that the SUNY Librarians Association contacted Marvin about regularizing 
that award with the five-year so that the requirements are the same. But I’m 
concerned that when this is put forward through SUNY, that the librarian rank is 
just not going to be put into the paperwork. So if you would please do that, I 
would appreciate it.

Dennis M: Let me also add a point of parliamentary pettiness. When you accept a 
report, which was the motion that was made, what you literally mean is that you 
accept every word and phrase in it. That’s not really the proper motion. What 
you really want is to receive and file for the record. So why don’t you just do 
that? Also, it pains me to point out that I agree with Norm Goodman.

President Hildreth: Shall we move on then? The next standing committee report is 
the Governance Committee. Dan?

Dan Murphy: Good morning, everybody. My co-chair, Ray Guydosh, is in Washington 
D.C. and he sends his regrets that he cannot join us this weekend. You have the 
report in front of you, so I’ll just make some highlights.
	The Governance Committee had its meeting on March 21st, and Joe informed 
the committee of a proposed draft of what is called a cyber-security policy. It 
apparently originates in the Governor’s office of Cyber-Security and 
infrastructure, and the policy might impact SUNY faculty and their rights on the 
internet. You can see some of the things that we’re concerned about: privacy 
issues, access to data, computer access trails and so forth.
	At the time of the meeting on March 21st, we did not have a copy of the 
report. We do have one now, and Joe Hildreth and I are going to work to get that 
up onto the Faculty Senate website so that you will be able to see that. So at 
this point, I think that the Governance Committee is charged to review the 
cyber-policy and to submit the main points to Joe.
	The next item: There is a survey of local campuses concerning academic 
honesty for faculty. We’ve learned in our surveys that very few campuses have 
such policies. Skipping to the bottom of the paragraph, the suggestion was made 
that the Senate might first consider urging campus policies and then at some 
later date consider whether or not to urge processes to deal with any 
violations.
       The committee is continuing to review the status of the bylaws project. 
You can see the link there if you want to take a look at the status of it. It is 
clear to us that the governance principles are going to carry over to next 
year’s committee, but that is certainly moving forward and making progress.
       The committee discussed the results of a survey on evaluation of campus 
administrators. Denny was a member of that committee.

Denny: The main point is that we sent out a survey to the campus governance 
leaders with relatively sparse response. There are a couple of reasons for that. 
One is that the CGLs change and we don’t always know about it. But the primary 
result of this survey indicated that, to a very strong degree, the campus 
governance leaders and campus governance units said that there was really no 
effect on their campuses of evaluations of administrators at all. The majority 
indicated that the voice of the faculty is not visible in the final review or 
that the final review was not seen by the faculty. There were a few exceptions 
to this. A number of campuses reported that had guidelines included, guidelines 
for faculty input which were routinely ignored. I think that this is a rather 
important point.
       The key factor in determining whether the faculty at an institution has a 
meaningful role seems to be the sense that the faculty has of itself. In 
particular, at some campuses, the way in which a significant faculty role and 
review is established, was by the faculty taking it upon themselves to perform 
these reviews. When the role has been prescribed by the administration, it tends 
to be a less significant role than when it was established by the faculty.
	There is an interesting side note relevant to the evaluations of campus 
presidents. During the past few years, as part of the periodic review organized 
by the Chancellor’s office involving a visit by an outside individual, an effort 
as been made to contact and get input from the faculty governance at each 
campus. This contrasts with previous years when the review often took place 
without the faculty even being aware of it. Our subcommittee was unable to 
determine who initiated the change. Since the faculty does not see the final 
product of this review, the visibility of the faculty voice in the final product 
is not known.
	So I think that the best way to summarize this is that there are 
procedures on some campuses. I’ve seen the ones at Binghamton and Stony Brook 
and Albany, but I think that by and large, the results were insignificant in 
terms of the review of the senior level administrators.
	I know that on our campus there is a strong feeling that the dean is 
evaluated by the Provost and the president unless there are grounds of 
disenchantment based of factual problems. So, by and large, SUNY campuses do not 
have an effective way of evaluating senior administrators at all.

Dan Murphy: The bottom part of that paragraph concludes by saying that the 
subcommittee on administrative evaluation will develop, as part of next year’s 
committee agenda, a model example process. So this is sort of still in the 
works. Joe Flynn?

Joe Flynn (Alfred): Certainly there is adequate precedent and principle, both in 
he SUNY Board of Trustees and other places, for this where, as part of the 
reappointment process for both department chairs and academic deans, there is a 
consultation requirement with the faculty. On some campuses, the process of 
evaluation of administrators has been incorporated into local bylaws. I would 
strongly urge that you consider this and consider proposing that such a 
consultation requirement with appropriate process be extended to all senior 
administrators, especially academic administrators.

Dan Murphy: Just wrapping up. Lastly, the committee survey on local support for 
campus governance is nearly completed, and we’re very pleased with the data that 
we have received so far. We have a couple more campuses to go. We are organizing 
it for analytical purposes and we will assemble the best principles and issue 
that report probably in the fall. Any other questions? Dick?

Dick Miller: Just a comment of cyber-security. With the campus-based CIO group, 
we have been monitoring this policy. Like so many things around security 
nowadays, these are edicts that are coming from on high. We filed two documents 
of suggested changed. I’m going to be meeting with Will Palgrin who is running 
that part of OFT that is overseeing this later this week. If, as representative 
of the faculty, you wanted to come down or if Joe wanted to come down with me, I 
think that if would be helpful in making sure that they understand that we are 
not like the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Dick Collier (Albany): Dan, is there any progress on the response to the 
Chancellor’s draft to the Trustees concerning breaches in academic integrity, 
campus responsibility, both to let the Chancellor know and then if the person is 
found guilty, exhausting all appeals on the campus, making certain the local 
governance body knows?

Dan Murphy: Nothing more that what is in the second paragraph in my report. Any 
other questions? Thank you.

President Hildreth: I would entertain a motion to receive and file for the 
record the report just given by Dan. All those in favor signify by saying aye? 
Those nay? The Graduate Committee. Gary? Okay. Operations Committee?

Paul Brodsky: Good morning. Initially, I’m going to talk about what we thought 
that Dave DeMarco would talk about yesterday. That has to do with the big 
project that we call “The Big Dig”. The Big Dig is a project that was trying to 
answer whether administrative growth has gone up and if faculty growth has gone 
down, which has been the perception that we all share.
	Our liaison is Dave DeMarco, and we essentially started off evaluating all 
of the positions in the SUNY system as to which ones we really did and didn’t 
want to look at. All of us have an identifiable number which represents them, 
what type of contract they have, etc. We went through hundreds of pages of these 
classifications to try to figure out who we really wanted to look at. We then 
picked the ones that we wanted to focus on, and then Dave DeMarco figured out a 
rather clever way of doing it. He picked a pay period in November over a ten-
year period and was basically able to see how many people were in the 
classifications that we were interested in looking at for this very specific 
ten-year period. Then we looked at it as a graph and statistics. It’s 
interesting that over a ten-year period the administrative growth has not gone 
up significantly, faculty growth has gone down relatively little in the ten 
years. There was a category of administrative infrastructure which has gone up 
dramatically. Where we are in the project is what Brian was talking about when 
he said that they have about one hundred and eighty projects in their office to 
look at. And that’s where “The Big Dig” is at the moment.
	We have been working on the budget handbook that Ted Turner has and the 
draft that we gave to the committee needed just minor tweaking. It will be ready 
for the September planning meeting, which will have the new senators. I think 
that it will be a good introduction for them and Ted will probably do a 
presentation on what the budgetary handbook is all about.
	Number three on our list is the cost of Gen. Ed. This is kind of like 
trying to lasso a cloud or something. You know that it’s up there, but it’s 
awful hard to get a handle on exactly where it is. We have started the project; 
it is in its very earliest stages. We are trying to identify exactly where we 
want to look for the additional costs, evaluating them in an intelligent way and 
coming up with a number which will give us an idea of what Gen. Ed. actually 
costs. At the Thursday Executive meeting, someone said that there was a study 
initially done which gave the initial amount that was somewhere between twenty-
five to forty million dollars. Obviously, administration isn’t all that 
interested in the cost of General Education, but we’re still looking into that 
and will try to have that.

Runi Mukherji: This is…(tape ends)

(tape begins)…another analysis of SUNY graduates in various degree programs and 
the way in which that dovetails or fails to dovetail with the label-market needs 
of New York State. That’s almost done and we are just waiting for two more 
pieces of information from the teacher education programs. We hope that that 
report will be ready for distribution in the fall, as well.
	There are some presentations that I wanted to tell you about, which I may 
ask Dan Kinney to update us on. This was a project that came up on our behalf. 
We asked Karen Volkman and Dan Kinney to look at the ways in which information 
management had been sort of implemented through the system and the ways in which 
the libraries and related structures have been used across the system. They have 
been looking at that, and it is culminating into presentations that they’re 
doing.

Dan Kinney: We took at look at the Provost website for all of the forces that 
were proved under that category, and all but a handful of campuses had infusion. 
So we thought that if we had a panel discussion to try to come at some best 
practices, that would ultimately help the campus curriculum committees with 
competency in Gen. Ed. We’re holding one at SUNY LA, which is at Stony Brook 
this summer, and one at CIT.

Runi Mukherji: Thanks. We also have a member on the committee who is working on 
a project which is a white paper on SUNY energy policy. This is really apropos 
at this moment, given our budget crisis, so that’s a new project that we are 
taking up.
       You will also see, on the other side of the committee report paper, a 
proposed amendment to the bylaws. Basically, it is the old charge to the 
committee and we’ve added a part of a sentence to the old charge, and that part 
of the sentence is in bold. We’ve changed two words which are “professional 
staff” and replaced it with “faculty”, which is a term that is used in the Board 
of Trustees which includes professional staff and faculty. We are proposing this 
change because it more accurately reflects the kind of work that the Operations 
Committee does. The earlier charge to it was somewhat more specific and had to 
do with employment practices and affirmative action, which remains with our 
charge, but we wanted to add to it the things we are doing in terms of best 
practices and methodologies the committee has tackled in the last four or five 
years. Should I read the new charge?
       The proposed charge is the charge to the University Operations Committee, 
and it reads as follows:
       
       “The committee shall be concerned with the effective participation of the 
faculty and University personnel policies, including equal employment practices 
and affirmative action. The committee shall also be concerned with the 
development and administration of the budgetary and planning activities of the 
University and shall undertake research and analysis and shall make appropriate 
reports and recommendations on models, methodologies and issues to best 
practices and/or policies and budgeting and operations. The committee shall also 
provide advice and guidance on matters relating to libraries, computing, and 
telecommunications.”
       
       I understand that the way this will go is that it is being presented to 
the Senate for its consideration, and then a vote for amending the bylaws will 
be undertaken at another session. 
       
Denny M: I don’t think that that is perfectly correct. The charges to the 
committee are not technically part of the bylaws. All that the Senate needs to 
do is approve a change in the charge, and I did note that on the nominating 
forms there was a charge to one of the committees that had been changed last 
September that should probably be changed. It is appropriate to bring it before 
the Senate and to have the Senate approve that charge. They can do it right now 
because it’s not part of the bylaws.

Runi Mukherji: Are there any questions or comments on the report itself?

Vince Aceto: I’d like to suggest what you might call the mother of all digs, 
which is that we are looking at, administration-versus-faculty on the campuses. 
It might be appropriate, though perhaps difficult, to take a look at what’s 
happened at System Administration. Over the years we were told that there was 
going to be a ten percent cut in staff, and just looking around, it seems that 
there are a lot more bodies down there than there used to be. I don’t know if 
that’s possible but…

???: I’m glad that you share Trustee DeRussy’s concern for that, Vince. The 
second point is that, based on her concern, rethinking Rethinking SUNY is taking 
place. Third, I would say, based on my own analysis, you are wrong. Fourth, I 
would draw your attention to the back-page article in this week’s Chronicle 
supplement which is headlined “First Kill the Administrators.” It was written by 
a colleague of yours at the University of Illinois on the subject of whenever 
times are tough, the first thing we do is shoot the administrators. In any 
event, I just wanted to make those points.

Judy Adams-Volpe (Buffalo): I would just like to suggest to Dan Kinney and Karen 
Volkman that you consider submitting your presentation at a conference in 
November prepared by the GEAR Committee. That would be a wonderful presentation 
to look at best practices in the information management competency. It would be 
great.

President Hildreth: All those in favor of receiving the motion, signify by 
saying aye? Opposed say nay? Receiving the report. Now, what we are going to do 
is to take up a motion to change the charge to the Standing Committee. Do we 
have a motion to that effect? Maureen, would you explain the change? Runi?

Runi Mukherji: It’s just the addition of that bolded part, that sentence about 
doing research and analysis, and issuing reports on methods and methodologies 
and models and best practices that have to do with budgeting and best practices. 
That’s what we do and what we’ve been doing for a long time, it just wasn’t part 
of the charge.

President Hildreth: All those in favor of amending the charge to the Operations 
committee as stated, please signify by saying aye? Opposed, nay?

Public information committee? No? Student Life committee? Peter?

Peter: Lorraine Horner, our coach here, sends her regrets. She was occupied and 
not able to attend. You have our written report. I’ll amplify number four. It’s 
good to know that someone listens to our reports at these meetings. Dick Miller 
listened and, as you remember, he made a comment that this was of interest on 
the international students and very important for the regional plan of SUNY. We 
have discussed issues related to a conference, and there has now been a 
conference call with people at SUNY. We’re in the process of co-sponsoring a 
conference on international students. We’re also very pleased to continue our 
collaboration with the Undergraduate Committee, because they have agreed to 
sponsor this as well. There are a lot of issues, as you know, on international 
students. We talked about some of them last time, and more have come up. For 
example, the INS regulations are draconian. Most recently, there is now 
prohibition for the dependence of the person with the main Visa for taking 
courses or participating in programs. They have to obtain their own Visa and 
outside of the country. This is really a problem. The registration is also not 
happening very effectively since the computers at INS are not able to receive 
and process very well all of the information that is coming in from around the 
country.
	There are cultural, admission, and retention issues that are very 
important in regard to international students. So we’re thinking about a very 
early conference, maybe sometime in October. The location is nice and central; 
we were thinking about Buffalo, but it is going to be in Binghamton. That’s our 
report.

President Hildreth: I would accept the motion to receive and file the report for 
the record? All those in favor signify by saying aye? Opposed, nay? Thank you, 
Peter.
	
Undergraduate committee? John DeNisco.

John DeNisco: Thank you, Joe. You can see that it’s a fairly lengthy report, but 
I think that there are a couple of major things that we want to highlight. We 
have been working very closely with the Student Life Committee. One of the major 
things is after that retention symposium to put forward a template that could be 
used by all campuses. The committees that were both working on it have divided 
it up in terms of definition and a template outline, so we’ll be continuing to 
work on that collectively over the next year.
	John Porter from Systems came in and gave both groups an excellent 
presentation on demographics and looking at retention graduation rates. I tried 
to highlight some of that in the report.
	The committee itself has been working on three main topics in terms of 
assessment, plagiarism, and international education. The committee put forward a 
questionnaire to the Executive Committee. The committee was especially 
interested in looking at technological changes and implications through use and 
programs, once approved, not really being funded. The committee has asked us to 
go back and look at and broaden the perspective of that questionnaire, so we’ll 
be going back and doing that.
	In terms of plagiarism, our sub-committee worked rigorously doing some 
informal consultation and looking at a variety of things. We knew from the 
planning meeting that it was a fairly hot topic, and the committee has 
recommended to the Executive Board that some sort of presentation go out to the 
body as a whole. We proposed something in a plenary or as a symposium, and the 
committee has charged us back with taking a look at what we think would be 
relevant issues and then deciding how we want to present it. The committee will 
continue to work on that.
	The international committee is taking a different road. We are concerned 
about our faculty and students with endeavors and incentives to study abroad. 
The committee is working on a survey and surveying the directors of 
international education to determine what kinds of programs are available, as 
well as to see where we can go in terms of some kind of a symposium. We’ll be 
looking at these international student issues in the coming meeting in October. 
Any questions?

Ken O’Brien (Brockport): At the bottom of page two, there’s admission 
selectivity. Are those categories representing the tier categories within SUNY?

John DeNisco: The way I understand it is that each school has an opportunity to 
determine how they want to be selective in their admissions criteria. In other 
words, sixty percent of their admissions fall in the category where their 
average is ninety percent or higher and their scores on the SATs are 1100 or 
higher.

Ken O’Brien: I’m not sure, but I think that these particular groupings are not 
quite accurate. I think that the groupings have a sliding scale that adjusts 
high school average to SAT, and what we have here is the bottom of both. The way 
it actually would work is that students with 1000 SAT would need somewhere 
around an 86% or 87% average to be included in Group II. As you go up the SAT 
scale, the high school average drops. I would urge folks to check on that.

John DeNisco: I was just trying to get the gist of it. Any others?

President Hildreth: I would accept a motion to receive and file the report for 
the record. All those in favor signify by saying aye? Opposed, nay? Campus 
governance leaders? No. Old business?






(There is a question in the background from a man from Stony Brook. There are 
several comments by unidentified speakers in the background.)

Norman Goodman (Stony Brook): The committee has asked us, through its chairs, 
for advice. That’s really all this is. They are of at least two minds and they 
would like some guidance from the Senate. That’s all this is. They will have to 
come back with a recommendation one way or another, which we will then vote on. 
All they are asking for now is some guidance, and I don’t see any reason why we 
can’t provide that for them within a time limit.

Joe Hildreth: It seems to me that the committee is the body of people who are at 
loggerheads, and it would be more helpful to the committee were we to respond to 
them. I agree with Vince Aceto: when there is a bill or a proposed bill, it is 
much easier to get an informed response from the Senate.

President Hildreth: I think that in order to have a proper conversation about 
this, we would have to have background information provided, and I don’t know 
that we’re all that equipped to do that today. I think that I’m going to decide 
to not have that. Moving on. Other old business? Dick?

Dick Miller: Several years ago, a state-wide group was formed. The name escapes 
me, but Carl McCall has just assumed the presidency of it.

President Hildreth: New York State Higher Education Conference Board.

Dick Miller: It has been largely invisible. I think that the group may have 
joined it, but I would suggest that somebody reach out to Mr. McCall, because he 
may take that group in a direction that would be very helpful and interesting to 
the University. I would seize the moment and join him.

President Hildreth: Point well taken, and we have representatives who will be 
doing that. Other comments? Let’s move on to new business. Seeing none, I would 
accept a motion to adjourn. Wait just a minute. I almost did it again. 
	For those of you who would like to see a copy of the minutes from fifty 
years ago, we’ll let you do that. I have to share with you that it has been made 
clear to me at this meeting that I am a terrible proofreader, and I tend to just 
scan things very quickly. I asked Dick what he thought that we ought to be 
reading from it, and he pointed out a reference to little Joe Flynn giving his 
first poem in these. Well, I’m not going to read little Joe’s first poem, but 
we’ll have the senior Joe Flynn give him poem right now.


Joe Flynn: Thank you, Joe. It’s twenty-five years with the Senate and this is a 
farewell poem. It goes back, to some extent, forty-nine years where I chased my 
high school sweetheart out here to Cornell. It’s called “Frozen Swans”. It’s for 
Carol Colby.



Once the Cortland girls and the Cornell boys 
Would give it the old college try
In summer scamper over Frisco hills
Or linger in Parisian haunts,
Returning with coca in their coffee.

In the fall, we toyed with football,
In winter clamped empty beer cans 
On our saddle shoes and bucks,
And skated midnight waltzes 
On the ice.

The beat in the songs was that of falling waters
While the lovers peered into the welcoming gorges
Sensing the sweet and fatal pull of the world’s widening abyss.

Joe Hildreth: Thank you, Joe. I declare the meeting adjourned. Thank you very 
much. Our next meeting will be in October at Oswego.




 Submitted by James McElwaine
Transcribed by Holly Tatnall 





[T1]Is this supposed to be ACGE, as mentioned later  on page 9?
1