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.