University Faculty Senate
Proceedings of the Winter 2003 Plenary
SUNY Geneseo


________________________________________
Friday Plenary Session

President Joe Hildreth: I’d like to call the meeting to order. Our first item of 
business is the roll call.

(ROLL CALL)

Now it’s my pleasure to introduce our host senator, Bill Gohlman.

Bill Gohlman: Thank you, Joe. Welcome, all of you, to Geneseo, the garden spot 
of western New York. If you get a chance to take a look at our village, please 
do, but don’t spend more than about five minutes at any time outside a warm 
place. We’re very proud of our village and college. My guess is that the next 
time the Senate meets here there will be a guided tour of our new integrated 
science facility which is in the process of being built at some point in the 
near future. We’re very proud to host you here and one of the reasons that we 
are proud is that we have a very fine relationship between faculty and 
administration. This is in large part due to our president who is also a 
colleague of ours, I think he’s just finished teaching a course in the English 
department and I guess he got his grades in on time. He is one of us and we are 
very appreciative of that. It’s my great honor and privilege to introduce 
Christopher Dahl, president of SUNY Geneseo.

Christopher Dahl: Thanks, Bill, I did get my grades in on time and filed them 
electronically for the first time in my life. My field is Victorian literature 
and intellectual history, so the fountain pen is state-of-the-art word 
processing technology for me, and so handing in grades online was a great 
accomplishment.
       I’m delighted to join Bill Gohlman in welcoming you here. As Bill 
suggested, I generally feel pretty much at home in this kind of environment 
because in my previous career as a faculty member and department chair at the 
University of Michigan, I spent more time than I care to remember in shared 
governance at that institution in the 1970s and 1980s. We had the University 
Senate Assembly which, for the three campuses of the University of Michigan was 
the equivalent of the University Faculty Senate here. I had the dubious honor of 
chairing the Rules committee of that body during a period which the two regional 
campuses were attempting to get better representation. I’ve spent more time than 
I care to remember in bodies of this sort and I think that this work is very 
important.
       I assume that all of you were adequately chastened by the cold coming out 
here. We generally talk about the weather in western New York and across upstate 
New York and it has not disappointed all of you who have made your way here. 
Rochester, like Buffalo, is trying to promote itself and they have a new 
campaign which is attempting to promote Rochester and its metropolitan area as a 
good place to move to and for business. Their ads take on the weather issue by 
talking about the climate and they say that the climate is great in Rochester 
because it is great for the Arts, education, and technology. So in welcoming you 
here I want to talk briefly about the climate at the State University of New 
York at Geneseo.
       First, we are a public liberal arts college. That means that we are 
committed to undergraduate education of the highest quality, liberal learning, a 
rigorous curriculum, and our teaching mission. I’m particularly proud of the 
teacher scholars that this campus has always been able to boast about. It’s very 
interesting that a lot of those outstanding teacher scholars are also involved 
in faculty governance. We’re very proud of this faculty and I’m proud to be part 
of that and proud of national awards for university teaching in fields ranging 
from psychology to math. I’m proud of the fact that we have had two professors 
of the year: Bill Cook and Steve Padalino, both of whom have been active in our 
college Senate. Geneseo is in many ways a very special place. We’re also very 
proud of the climate for shared governance here. Our college Senate comprises of 
not only faculty but also administrators and students and that seems to work. 
Both the Provost and I sit on the Executive Committee of Senate so that there is 
very good communication between Senate leadership and the local college 
administration. We have tried to have a very open budget process where there is 
once again a joint administrative and faculty committee that tries to connect 
budget to planning and we try to be very open in that sense. We also have a good 
climate for community partnerships here in Geneseo. I do urge you to go up onto 
Main Street. You will be having dinner at the Big Tree Inn which is one of three 
major projects in which our foundation have invested in preserving the historic 
character in our main street, which makes a big difference in terms of the way 
people perceive Geneseo. We’re proud of the role we play in a rural county where 
agriculture is our biggest business and where we are the largest employer. We’re 
very proud of the way that we have tried to preserve the historic character of 
Geneseo and aid the local community while improving the amenities for students, 
faculty, and their parents.
       I’m sorry that we are at the end of our intersession term and that there 
are not a lot of students on campus at this time. I would love to have you see 
the real heart of the operation which is people rather than buildings.
       I’ve just returned from the national meetings of the Association of 
American Colleges and Universities, the organization that speaks for liberal 
learning in all sector of American higher education. A lot of the time we spent 
in the last several days was involved in discussing how to inspire undergraduate 
and graduate students to become part of their communities and to work for the 
improvement of their neighborhoods, states, their nation and the world. It 
occurred to me as I was thinking of this meeting that one of the things we do as 
faculty members and administrators is to attempt to model the behavior that we 
would like to see our students exhibiting as they go forth into the world. I 
think that one of the things that you people here today are doing by 
participating in the University Faculty Senate is to model the kind of civic 
engagement and involvement that we really need more than ever in these troubled 
times both in the world and in the State University. I commend you for that, 
welcome you, and thank you for coming here to join with us in the common work of 
excellence in higher education in the State of New York. Thank you. 
       
Joe Hildreth: I’ve had the good fortune to meet President Dahl before this 
meeting. He is a member of the teacher education task force and he was a 
presenter on a panel discussion for the academic standards subcommittee of the 
Board of Trustees. I can tell you that we have a friend in him and whenever I go 
into a room and see him there I feel a little more comfortable. So thank you for 
standing up for faculty. It’s good to see you in Geneseo. I was concerned that 
we might not have full attendance because of the weather. I think that it has 
had some impact but I’m pleased to see that a good number of you are with us 
this morning. I’m sure that each of us has stories to tell about coming down. I 
guess that everyone knows that this is why we call this plenary our winter 
plenary.
       I think that we are going to have a meeting this morning that is going to 
be productive. I expect it to be fully robust. We’ve got the major people in 
system that are going to be talking with you today. Chancellor King is going to 
address us this afternoon at two and he’s going to be staying for our sharing of 
concerns and respond to those. Our Provost, Peter Salins, will be addressing us 
at one-thirty and then Wayne Locust, who is the head of enrollment management 
for the SUNY system, is going to give us an enrollment report at the end of the 
day. This morning we are going have a stimulating presentation and discussion on 
the budget by Brian Stenson and then Professor Ram Chugh and David DeMarco are 
going to pick up after that and talk about our rational fiscal policy. I want to 
assure you that this session is going to bring you up to date on all current 
system administration and Senate activities and to bring you up to date on the 
budget. Given the time of year and the news of the proposed tuition increase up 
to $1,400, this is a timely discussion for us to have.
       I hope that you had a chance to pick up your copy of the rational fiscal 
policy report; it’s on the table. I’d like you to have the opportunity to get 
familiar with it. We also have other handouts that I think you will find useful. 
There is a handout on the general education conference, we have some catalogs 
that are from the fall SUNY student art exhibition, and we also have summary of 
my meetings which will give you an idea of some of the things that I’ve been 
working on.
       I’d like to mention what I consider to be the primary system activities. 
I’m not going to go into much detail on that because we have the Provost here 
and he does that well. When the Senate has had significant involvement, I’ll go 
into a little bit of detail.
       So let me talk about the advisory committee on general education. This is 
going to replace the Provost’s advisory committee on general education. During 
the Executive Committee’s meeting in New York this December, we had a very frank 
and lively discussion on this issue. Out of this discussion came the agreement 
everyone felt very good about. The process for approving general education 
courses is going to change from all of the courses being approved at the 
Provost’s office to most of the courses being approved at the campus level. We 
feel that that is absolutely the directions that things should go in. The 
advisory committee is going to come into play when there are disputes. One of 
the things that we discussed is the composition of the committee which is going 
to have four appointees from the Faculty Senate, four appointees from the 
Faculty Counsel of Community Colleges, and four appointees from the Provost’s 
office.
       We wanted to have as many disciplines as possible represented so Bob 
Axelrod and I got together and talked about our mutual appointments so that 
there wouldn’t be any duplication. I came up with the following appointees: 
Sandra Michaels, who is a former Senator from Binghamton whose discipline is 
biology; David Carson, from Buffalo whose discipline is history; Melinda Karnes, 
from Fredonia whose discipline is teacher education; and Norman Goodman from 
Stony Brook whose discipline is sociology.
       On GEAR I can report that thirty-three out of fifty-seven campus plans 
have been approved. That whole project seems to be moving along nicely. For 
those of you who don’t remember, GEAR stands for General Education Assessment 
Review and the group of composed entirely of faculty. It’s been a very good 
working group and it’s nice to see progress being made on that.
       You will remember the new vision and teacher education came out in a 
letter from the Provost a year or so ago. The implementation guidelines were 
just issued and I can give you some points on that. This is going to have an 
impact on campuses so you need to communicate this with your governance leaders 
and your other colleagues to make sure that they are aware of this. They want 
full compliance in terms of the new regulations by next fall and for some 
campuses that might be difficult. There was a survey done this summer which kind 
of found out where things are right now and how much difference would exist 
between what is currently going on at the campus level and the new vision 
guidelines. Campuses are aware of this and are working toward it. Some campuses 
have majors in elementary education which are not going to be allowed under the 
new program. Psychology is an example of that for teacher education. There is 
going to be some problems with some campuses with the eighteen upper division 
hours because there are many programs that require lower division hours. It’s 
going to be a requirement that is approaching the requirements for the major. 
Full implementation is going to need to incur by next fall.
       I mentioned that we have some handout on the General Education Conference 
which will be April 24th and 25th. That’s going to be in Syracuse so I hope that 
as many of you as possible will be able to attend that. There is going to be a 
general education assessment conference next fall but I don’t have a date on 
that yet.
       For those of you that can, please make your colleagues that are having 
their major assessed aware of our guide for the evaluation of undergraduate 
programs. That document originated in the Senate, it’s been endorsed by System 
Administration, and it’s an excellent document. I know that it’s possible for 
campuses to proceed as though this document didn’t exist. I have an electronic 
copy on my desktop and if you need one, just send me an email. I’d like you to 
bring it up at your home campus because it’s an excellent document. Even though 
campuses or departments may choose to not use that specific document I think 
that it is a good starting point and I think that many will adopt it once 
they’ve seen it.
       Let me move on to some Senate initiatives and activities. We just 
completed the fall 2000 SUNY student art exhibition. There is a catalog for you 
to take with you. It consisted of nineteen campuses and eighty-five student 
works. We had a very nice reception and by all accounts has been a very 
successful effort. We’re going to be doing one for the spring and that’s going 
to be beginning in February. We are going to have a best of exhibit following 
the spring exhibit and from that the Chancellor is going to bring up some people 
he knows from the New York State council and from some of the Museums in New 
York. They are going to select three works and the artists that created those 
works will receive a thousand dollar scholarship. We’re also going to have a 
series of art faculty exhibitions. The first one is going to be installed next 
week by Geneseo and there will be a reception for that. We are going to have a 
large number of art departments participate in this series of exhibitions. The 
Provost has a task force that is working on faculty development. I’m one of the 
co-chairs, and Bob Axelrod and Don Steven are co-chairs as well. We had a 
meeting not too long ago in which we talked about the charge which we divided up 
into three working groups. The first working group is going to be focusing on 
teaching, research and service. Susan Bastable is going to be a co-chair of that 
along with Caroline Curtis from the Faculty Council. There is a second group 
which is going to be working on recognition and reward. Marvin LaHood is a co-
chair of that along with Janette Chambers from System Administration. The final 
group is on best practices and reappointment promotion and tenure that whole 
process with Vince Aceto being a co-chair and June Pierson of the Faculty 
Council being the other co-chair. These groups will be making recommendations to 
the large committee in a meeting on February 5th which is going to be at SUNY 
Binghamton. I think that everyone who attended the first meeting was excited and 
enthusiastic about it.
       We have a Senate student transfer initiative. We have a group that has 
been working on that and the first order of business was to research transfer 
programs and states that are comparable to New York. We have researched the 
states of Florida, California, Maryland, Arizona and North Carolina and from 
that we identified some possible major components for our proposed plan which is 
very raw at this moment. We are looking at learning outcomes, we want to look at 
having a disciplinary committee to determine what learning outcomes would be 
appropriate for high transfer courses, we want to do some research in terms of 
the transcript that SUNY registrars develop for our general education program to 
see if that would be useful, and we are looking at the common numbering system 
which wouldn’t replace existing course numbers but which would be a SUNY number 
to be affixed to a course that would meet the guidelines that we ultimately 
develop. We will keep you informed about this throughout its development. Our 
next meeting is going to be February 5th following the meeting of the task force 
group in Binghamton.
       Last night at the Executive Committee meeting we discussed distance 
learning. There is an initiative in the Chancellor’s strategic plan to enhance 
distance learning. We talked about that plan and what our role should be in that 
plan. There are several goals that are in the plan: to have most campuses 
offering courses, to have a simplified payment in the financial aid process, and 
to have a new model of intercampus course sharing. For example, if there was an 
American history course offered at Buffalo for twenty-five students and only 
twenty-three seats were filled they would like to have a process available so 
that students anywhere in the system would be able to take that course and fill 
those two empty seats. Who would get the FTEs, who would pay and which campus 
gets paid are things that would need to be worked out. There is an interest in 
expanding to new markets, such as the military and corporations that would like 
to advance and would need some additional coursework.
       The Executive Committee feels that this is an important area. We’re 
concerned with faculty rights in terms of intellectual property rights, our 
traditional interest in the curriculum and our general desire to be involved. So 
we created an ad hoc committee on distance learning and asked Karen Markoe and 
John DeNisco to be co-chairs of that group. This morning they asked me to tell 
you to let them know if you are interested in serving on that because we would 
like to have a good working group formed as soon as possible.
       Bob Axelrod and I met with Chancellor King for ninety minutes in December 
and we shared our senate resolution which opposed system-wide assessment. It 
also incorporated two earlier resolutions. Bob shared a faculty council 
resolution which was opposed to assessment and we had a long discussion about 
that. The Chancellor asked what objections I’d heard and I mentioned that people 
were concerned about inappropriate disclosure of assessment information which 
could damage campuses, that whoever developed the tests would determine the 
curriculum and that we felt the curriculum belonged to the faculty and that 
campuses can’t support another unfunded mandate.
       During the discussion the idea of a Senate meeting came up but people 
thought that that might be too many people. We might have to pare that down but 
we’d like to have as many people as we can in such a meeting to talk about this. 
There hasn’t been a date set for that but I wanted to report on that issue.
       There is a policy on misconduct in faculty research that the Chancellor 
has grafted and shared with the Executive Committee in December and we looked at 
the proposed policy. I think that it’s fair to say that the Executive Committee 
was supportive of the Chancellor’s effort here. The policy refers to campus-
based procedures on academic misconduct and research and wants those campus-
based procedures to be scrupulously implemented. If the procedures don’t already 
have it, they must provide for public disclosure of all cases where guilt has 
been determined. The disclosure must take place during a regularly scheduled 
meeting of the faculty governance organization. The final point was that the 
campus President should notify the Chancellor within seven days whenever an 
allegation of faculty misconduct has occurred and any penalties imposed on the 
faculty member. The Chancellor will report this information to the Board of 
Trustees. There was an incident at the University of Albany that most people 
feel could have been handled better and so the Chancellor was trying to cover 
this. We were appreciative that he shared this policy with us. The Executive 
Committee felt during our discussion that the policy was getting into an area of 
terms and conditions of employment that was covered in the contract. I was 
directed to contact UUP to discuss this. The representative that I spoke with 
indicated that he had checked with their people and they thought that it was 
covered by the contract. I told them that I would report back to the Executive 
Committee and the Senate and I will call you back. It was the sense of the 
Executive Committee that the UUP should perhaps be the voice for faculty on this 
issue and that was my directive from last night.
       The Levin Institute came up during our plenary in October and among the 
questions was how it originated, who was consulted and if is this the 65th SUNY 
campus. I brought this up with Chancellor King in a meeting and expressed our 
strong desire for formal involvement with the development of the Institute. The 
Chancellor then showed my subcommittee that is working on curriculum and pointed 
out that there are several SUNY faculty on the committee. I thought that we 
ought to have some SUNY Senate appointees, perhaps three and the Chancellor 
agreed with that. If you are interested of know of someone who would be a good 
choice, please get those names to me. They do need to have backgrounds in the 
areas that the institute is going to be working with: international relations, 
international commerce, international law, and language and culture studies. If 
you have that background or know of a colleague that does, have them get in 
touch with me.
       We need them to not only go to the meetings, but to report back. One of 
the things that I am trying to do with the Senate is to report back what I hear 
in the meetings that I attend. It’s important that our appointees in any group 
report back so that we can consult with one another and communicate a decision 
that is reflective of the faculty and not just an individual.
       We are going to be spending a great deal of time talking about the 
budget, our rational fiscal policy and a proposed request to increase tuition. 
Following the Board of Trustees meeting last Friday in which this request was 
made, Chairman Egan indicated that some members of the Board would be working on 
Rethinking SUNY II My notes indicate that the reason for this is to achieve 
greater efficiency in system administration and to continue the advances in 
quality that are ongoing in SUNY. Chairman Egan is going to lead that group and 
he will be joined by vice-chair Randy Daniels, trustee Ed Cox and Bob Wagner who 
is a financial officer at the University of Buffalo. We will keep you posted.
       In conclusion I just wanted to say how much I appreciate the opportunity 
to serve you as President. I try to conduct that appreciation every day by using 
four principles: communication, consultation, respect for your opinion and 
quality. I am continually impressed with the people that I get to work with, 
especially the SUNY faculty but also the SUNY system administrators. I feel that 
I am very privileged to have this opportunity. 

If you have any questions I will be willing to answer them.

Marvin LaHood: I think that this group ought to show some appreciation for the 
way that Joe has conducted our business for over a year and a half.

Joe Flynn: Could you tell us a little bit more about this rather extraordinary 
discussion you had with the Chancellor on system-wide assessment? This has been 
a hot item with the Senate for many years going back to the original disclosure 
by President Aceto of an RFP that had been filed at that point by the Provost. 
It advertised for company created tests. The Senate has gone on record time and 
time again to oppose not only system-wide assessment but came very close to 
passing a resolution that we didn’t even want to discuss it. So is there 
something in the works behind the scene that prompted a ninety-minute 
discussion?

Joe Hildreth: Bob Axelrod

Bob Axelrod: We were charged by the two Executive Committees, the Senate and the 
Council, last June 21st when we met jointly. On the agenda we talked about the 
system-wide outcomes assessment prospect and we were charged to meet with the 
Chancellor and express our opposition. After a number of postponements by the 
Chancellor we finally got to meet the Chancellor to discuss this issue. 
Strangely enough it was following the academic standards committee meeting back 
in November. Trustee DeRussy stresses in every single report she gives the idea 
of system-wide outcomes assessment. Over the last six months to a year it was 
openly stated that this is something that we are looking at and it was stressed 
that this will be a difficult prospect because there are so many diverse 
missions in students and campuses, so it was held off. She strongly stressed the 
need to pursue system-wide outcomes assessment at the last academic standards 
committee meeting. She basically charged Don Steven to pursue and look further 
into this area as well as the possibility of a system-wide test be it an 
existing national test or a test of our own. She feels it’s critical that there 
is some type of comparison of campuses, that there should be accountability to 
the public and that the public should know which campuses are not doing the job. 
I think that the Chancellor did indicate last year that there would be no 
system-wide outcomes assessment process without discussion and input by the 
faculty.
	We met with the Chancellor and I had a list of faculty council opposition 
statements with reasons that there should be no outcomes assessment, one being 
that there is already a plan in place: a campus-based process that is 
comprehensive and rigorous. This would just be another layer of the same thing. 
This would be duplicative, expensive and time consuming. A system-wide test 
would not make sense in regard to in intellectual engagement. This would 
compromise that because it would force faculty to teach to the test. The 
Chancellor is basically for system-wide outcomes assessment. He is for 
accountability. We mentioned that the campus-based assessment is doing that by 
working towards improvement of general education disciplines and is also holding 
the campuses accountable. He gave a whole presentation on the need for system-
wide outcomes assessment and accountability for about fifteen minutes. We 
finally said that faculty is not against outcomes assessment and it’s not 
against accountability. He also indicated that the Faculty approved the 
Provost’s recommendations for outcomes assessment. I said that we approved 
campus-based but that we never approved system-wide outcomes assessment and that 
we have been opposed to that from day one.
	The outcome of the whole thing was that he wanted everyone to sit down and 
discuss it. He wanted representatives of the Senate, the Council and the 
Provost’s office to sit down and discuss system-wise outcomes assessment and to 
come to an agreement. We submitted a resolution opposing outcomes assessment and 
he came back to say that he agrees with the Provost’s recommendation for 
outcomes assessment and the need for accountability. He strongly hopes that the 
Faculty Council will work towards some sort of resolution and help advance this 
initiative. We agreed that we would sit down and form a committee sometime in 
the spring. It will not be a large committee because that would be unmanageable 
in regard to discussion. I think we decided on six and six - both Executive 
committees and the Provost’s office. This isn’t written in stone. But this 
process gives us the opportunity to have a strong voice in the matter in the way 
we did not with general education. I believe that it behooves us to sit down 
with System Administration and see what we can do to work something out with 
them.

Joe Hildreth: If we do get a request for a meeting, I would like to have as many 
people involved as possible. I want us to keep moving on the agenda, but I 
promised that I would give Peter Nickerson a couple of minutes.

Peter Nickerson: I need ninety seconds. I’m the chairman of the nominating 
committee. According to the bylaws the nominating committee is composed of the 
third-term senators who are Senators Nickerson, Durand, Goodman, Kinney, 
Phillips, Markoe, Kitzmann, O’Shea, Cleland and Miller. We are going to meet at 
lunchtime at one of the tables. The bylaws say that we need two candidates so if 
those of you who are interested in running for President could tell me, and then 
we will talk about that. The position has a number of different perks that Joe 
knows about. One is the Faculty Senate airplane and the other is the house in 
Florida. That’s in New York.

Joe: At this point, I am going to turn the agenda over to Jim McElwaine who will 
give the Executive Committee report.

Jim McElwaine: The Executive Committee met in a joint session with the CUNY 
Executive Committee on December 12th at SUNY Optometry. The meeting began at ten 
o’clock and the CUNY representatives showed at eleven-ten. Joe has covered most 
of the topics that we discussed. There was a sharing of comments and concerns in 
which we discussed budget issues, the stopping of tenure clocks as fiscal 
policy, potential NYPIRG alliances and a brief discussion of TAP audit problems, 
particularly as they seem to affect CUNY. We also began discussion about the 
possibility of having representation by the President of the University Faculty 
Senate on the Board of Trustees. I believe that Joe is pursuing this.
	After discussing the TAP audit the CUNY representatives exited and the 
University Faculty Senate Executive Committee continued in a session in which we 
discussed GEAR and certain of the applications there as well as the process of 
continuing of the registration courses that satisfy GE requirements. There were 
miscellaneous reports. We began to embrace the issues of academic misconduct; 
Joe briefed you on those. We received standing committee preliminary reports and 
then we once again discussed the constitution of ACGE from PACGE. These 
committees appear on our horizon again and again and I will say that everyone in 
this committee felt that we are on a resolution of many of the tensions that 
have occurred over general education, especially with regard to ACGE and PACGE. 
This is in no small part due to the very hard work and wonderful dancing of 
Donald Steven. I think that we are all indebted to him. The meeting adjourned at 
four-ten in the afternoon.

Joe Hildreth: The next portion of our agenda is the sharing of concerns by 
sector. There is a listing of the rooms here. University Senators will meet in 
Room CU322. The Comprehensive Colleges will meet in the Hunt Room. Ag and Tech 
Colleges will meet in CU324. Specialized Colleges will meet in CU325, Health 
Science Centers in CU328 and the Campus Governance Leaders in CU330. I want to 
try to respect that we are giving you an hour. We are starting twelve minutes 
late. I hope to see you here at eleven o’clock so that we can start our budget 
report. If you need a little more time we’ll try to give you that because I know 
that this is a very important part of the agenda. You will be given the 
opportunity to share the concerns of your sector with Chancellor King/Keen this 
afternoon.

Joe Hildreth...going to be the budget report and the rational fiscal policy 
report. I know that Chancellor King is going to be talking about the proposed 
tuition increase this afternoon. Brian, we’ll let you start with the budget. If 
you could give us a Budget 101 presentation - where the money comes from and 
where it goes, I think that learn something every time you do that.

Brian: Thanks, Joe. It’s always a pleasure to address this group and I’m looking 
forward to it even more next year when we go to Joe’s Florida home. Joe asked me 
to provide a budget report to you and that’s the way it’s shown on the agenda. 
I’d like to start with Joe’s favorite chart. You can see where the money comes 
from. This is actually helpful to describe the budget context for the State 
University. It sets the stage for the discussion that you’ll hear later: where 
tuition fits in, our operating budget and how rational tuition policy and fiscal 
policy might affect the University. The white slice of the pie chart is the 
Community Colleges. Out of the $7.2 billion, our spending total for the State 
University, $1.3 billion is for the Community Colleges funding. That’s not just 
the State’s share, but it’s the tuition’s share and local share from the county 
sponsors and so on.
	The rest of this pie represents the spending of the state operated and 
statutory colleges of the State University. We’ll continue in that clockwise 
direction. That service and fringe benefits total about $800 million. Those are 
usually paid directly by the State of New York in a different part of the 
budget. It doesn’t come to State University but it funds and the educational 
facilities that we occupy. Not the residence halls; those are paid by room 
rents. The State also pays a major chunk of our fringe benefits. We have to pay 
the debt services out of revenues for other facets of our budget. We have $500 
million in our residence halls and other auxiliary service programs. Those are 
self-funded programs. Residence halls are run through the state budget and are 
paid by room rents. The auxiliary services are the faculty-student associations 
or auxiliary services corporations that run a variety of programs that directly 
benefit the faculty and students: food service, book stores, vending machines, 
etc.
	$1.2 billion is accounted for by our three SUNY hospitals at Stony Brook, 
Brooklyn or Downstate, and Syracuse or Upstate. There is also a relatively 
smaller veterans’ home run on Long Island in association with Stony Brook. That 
money comes primarily from patient revenues, federal government, Medicaid and a 
subsidy of about $90 million from the State of New York.
	Sponsored research of the State University run through the research 
foundation is $600 million and climbing, as you know. The self-supported 
programs and endowment is a large category. It is a billion dollars in total. On 
the campuses the self-supported programs are funded by user fees, assessments or 
student fees. The technology fee program, the athletics fee, student health 
fees, and all of those sorts of fees are part of the self-supported program 
component of our budget otherwise known as IFRs (Income Fund Reimbursables). 
Endowment is the spending out of the endowment fund of the SUNY-wise endowment 
as well as any campus-based foundations that might have endowment and 
restrictive gifts and so on.
	The largest piece of the pie is what we call a core-instructional budget. 
We try to coin that term to capture the essence of the program. It funds the 
basic instructional program of the State University: main education, 
departmental research, administrative, expenses of the University, maintenance, 
President’s salary, bureaucrats, utilities, everything where there is no other 
discreet source of funding. The core instructional budget is nearly $1.9 billion 
and there are two major sources. One is State support and the other is tuition 
and a small amount of other campus revenues. That’s roughly $1.1 billion State 
support and about $700 or $800 million is campus income, mainly tuition. That is 
the portion that is distributed on the basis of the Budget Allocation Process or 
performance-based budgeting. It used to be called RAM but we changed it when RAM 
took a larger role to avoid confusion. That is the portion of the budget that is 
the focus of attention in most of what the University does on the budget-basis. 
The University Trustees approve an overall financial plan after looking at what 
the available resources, state and tuition. The Trustees then do the allocation 
to the campuses of the state share. All of the tuition revenues go back to the 
campus where is originated. Are there any questions on this before we move into 
the rest of the discussion?
	I will point out that the funds besides the core instructional budget 
provides some flexibility to the campuses in financial management. If there is a 
small reserve built up in one fund, the campus can use those reserves for 
certain purposes. Indirect cost recoveries that are part of the sponsored 
program share are available for unrestricted use by the campuses. They help 
supplement the core operating budget but are in no way major substitutes. We 
differ in that respect from some of our colleagues in the private sector.
	I would like to talk about the operating budget in some detail. I’ll start 
with the current year even though we focused last week with the Trustees on the 
upcoming year.
We are in reasonably decent shape compared to public systems in other states 
where they are going through massive midyear budgets reductions or significant 
midyear tuition increases. We have not done that but we weren’t left unscathed 
in the budget that passed this year. Back when the State enacted its budget for 
the current year, which is 2002-2003, we absorbed a measure of underfunding. The 
portion of our collective bargaining costs that would normally be paid by the 
State were not funded, along with inflation and the additional cost that we 
incur with enrollment growth and sponsored research growth that are all part of 
our BAP formula. We also absorbed a rather small expenditure ceiling of about 
$11 million at the beginning of the year. The Division of the Budget exercised 
its prerogative by capping the amount of the state support that we could spend - 
lower than what was appropriated by the legislature. There was about an $11 
million ceiling.
       The midyear cut that we absorbed was relatively modest in size. After 
taking a careful look at the midyear budget state update that was available in 
October and November, the budget director asked agencies to reduce the remaining 
amount of state supported spending by about five percent through the end of the 
appropriation. We objected on the basis of the items that were unfunded at the 
beginning of the year like collective bargaining and the things that had been 
taken out of our budget in prior years and we comprised on what was a little 
less two percent. We are working with the campuses to implement that.
       Campuses have been able to manage all of these budget hits through 
voluntary means. The retirement incentive was liberally applied and made 
available by almost all of the campuses. We had relatively liberal rules on 
refilling positions in the faculty ranks. We had about eleven-hundred people who 
elected to take the retirement incentive and we are getting information from the 
campuses regarding how many of those will be kept vacant for next year. Outside 
of that, enrollment is way up from last year both in the state operated colleges 
and the community colleges. Applications are continuing to surge, our research 
is up, and our capital investment and reinvestment program continues.
       The outlook for the state budget is pretty grim for the year, and looking 
to be even grimmer next year. There is a potential deficit the state faces in 
its current year that has been informally estimated to be $2 billion. This is on 
a cash basis. These numbers are not managed on an accrual basis, purely on cash. 
We look for a more precise estimation next week when the Governor releases his 
Executive budget. When enacting the current year budget, the State had exhausted 
most of the open reserves that it had set aside during the good years. They have 
about $715 million remaining rainy day fund. It can only be used at the end of a 
year to close a budget deficit and it has to be repaid in annual installments 
over, I think, five years. The State has the ability to manage that deficit down 
or, in some cases, away. They can delay the income tax refunds until April and 
they used to do that routinely. They have gotten out of that habit but that can 
swing hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. The State can delay 
spending and they actually did that with the current budget back when it was 
enacted. Part of the money we receive in lieu of tuition from the TAP program 
has been delayed from when we would normally expect to receive it in February 
and April into July. They can do that across the board and the State can also 
accelerate cash payments. One of the things that used to irk small businesses is 
that the State would require a pre-payment of estimated sales tax receipts in 
March. The State has a lot of ability to manage cash. If all of those items fail 
the State can do internal borrowings from some of its other dedicated funds like 
transportation funds or even lottery money. If the State wants to take another 
approach, they can borrow the money through the public credit markets. It’s an 
issuance of an actual note which has not been done since I did it last in DOB in 
1990 or so. It’s a good investment if they are available.
       You may know that the Governor has proposed closing this deficit with the 
issuance of bonds secured by the revenue stream from the settlement with the 
tobacco companies. A lot of states have done it for operating or capital 
investment purposes. There has already been objections voiced by some members of 
the legislature so we are not sure if that is going to happen. If it is not 
passed and there is still a $2 billion deficit, we will have to fall back on 
some of those other mechanisms.
       The outlook gets worse in the next fiscal year. Spending has increased by 
significant rated in many of the categories, primarily hospital revenue, 
sponsored research and a few others. Debt service and fringe benefits has 
actually increased sharply due to additional investment in SUNY’s capital plan 
and increases in fringe benefits rates and payroll costs.
       Next we have a quick overview of the resolution and our budget process. 
There is what the State is experiencing without using any official numbers. It 
is predicted that the revenue losses that we have seen in the current year will 
continue this year and next due to the combined effect of the 9/11 attacks and a 
general economic weakness in the nation. Unfortunately for us it hit New York 
the hardest financially for obvious reasons. Although there aren’t any official 
estimates available, informal estimates for the budget gap next year range from 
$8-12 billion on a general fund budget for about $40 billion. If spending is 
left unabated next year it might be $45 billion and the receipts would be $35 
billion leaving a $10 billion budget gap.
       To start formulating the budget, the budget director asked agencies to 
hold their spending requests next year to the same level as the current year. We 
don’t expect agencies to get what they are receiving in the current year next 
year but it was a starting point designed to signal the difficulties ahead 
without alarming anyone three weeks before the governor’s election. That affects 
the core budget only.
       Our budget requests conformed to the guidelines established by the budget 
director but we requested that if funds were available, we would use them to 
apply to the rising costs that we would incur next year. We also wanted the 
ability to spend more of our university income. This wasn’t intended to set the 
stage for a tuition increase but due to increased activity at the campuses some 
of those other funding categories will continue to grow in revenues and we want 
the appropriation authority to spend that. Although it is university money and 
not state support, it must go through the state budget in many cases. It has to 
be appropriated. Some of the sponsored programs and some of the auxiliary 
spending and campus endowments don’t have to be appropriated. Our perennial 
request is that the State provide additional operation flexibility for our 
hospitals and allow the hospitals to access capital so that they can invest in 
new programs, meet community needs and generate money.
       It was said that the SUNY budget request would be done in December. We 
missed that. The Executive budget recommendation will be made by the Governor 
next Wednesday. He has until February 1st this year. The Chancellor will appear 
before the legislative fiscal committees. We’ll be doing briefings with the 
legislative staff and our government relations expert is setting up meetings 
with individual legislators and leadership in the legislature. We have already 
briefed the legislature on our budget request and we will talk about the 
Governor’s budget recommendation and what it means for SUNY. If the budget is 
done in April or May we will translate that into a financial plan for the state 
university in June before the fiscal year starts on July 1st.
       Next we see the various appropriations that are included in the State 
budget. Several items are not appropriated and you won’t see them here. You can 
see the current year number and the request for 2003-2004. A couple of items 
show how we have complied with the call letter and that is in the State 
Operations proportion of the budget. Funding for some of these categories is up. 
Residence halls are a good example. We have more students living on campus in 
the residence halls and we’re building more of them. Campuses have typically 
increased rates by modest amounts each year. For all those factors we are going 
to need to spend more money next year so we ask for appropriation increase of 
$20 million to accommodate that spending.
       Next is a summary of the items that we have asked to subject to the 
availability of funds. It’s broken down into two categories and this is for the 
state operated and statutory colleges. The top three items are for unavoidable 
or built-in cost increases. The collective bargaining increase that is going to 
be paid will be paid as scheduled. There is no question about it not being paid. 
The total cost will be about $18.7 million for the campuses. The end of prior 
year enrollment grown would generate an additional $7 million in spending even 
if we did not enroll another student next year. This is because we use a three-
year weighted average culminated in the planned enrollment for next year. You 
drop four years ago and add the new higher plan number and that results in an 
increase in the weighted enrollment number for the campuses.
       We added two new items here even though the situation is relatively 
bleak. We think it’s important to put out a statement that we would use the 
additional funding to enhance some quality initiatives whether it’s merit 
scholarships, competitive awards for faculty, honors programs for students and 
so on. There is a need to fund these kinds of activities even if there is a 
difficult budget situation, but we need money to do it.
       Campus development funds are designed to recognize that several of our 
campuses are in transition from two-year programs to four-year. Our current 
formula doesn’t have resources in it to fund these activities on an acceptation 
basis and we would need additional funding for that.
       If no additional money were available in our operating budget we would 
face a budget gap from the occurrence of the top three items. Our cost would be 
going up $40-some million dollars and we wouldn’t have the resources to pay for 
that and would have to absorb the gap. On the community colleges, the approach 
taken was consistent with that of the state operating colleges. The basic 
operating budget…
       
       …is before we need the additional spending authority to accommodate the 
increased activity in our self-supported programs. There is no state tax money 
involved; we just need the appropriation.
       A significant note is that we have been successful over the last three 
years in getting off-cycle increases in our ability to invest in our residence 
hall facilities. Five years ago the state enacted a five-year capital plan for 
SUNY and we ran through the residence hall portion of that in about two and a 
half years. During the past two years we have gotten supplemental authorization 
to increase the amount of bonds that the campuses are issuing through the 
dormitory authority to fund new construction and major rehab projects along with 
increases in appropriation to let us use our own reserve money. We have repair 
funds generated by campus resources that are being used increasingly by campuses 
to fund some of the smaller rehab projects at the campuses.
       In 2002-2003 the legislature continued the level of subsidy that was 
initiated in the prior year. That was $92.1 million of state support and that is 
designed to recognize the explicit costs of the hospitals, as they are public 
entities. Compared to their competitors they bear additional costs from higher 
fringe benefits, higher salaries, more liberal time and attendance accrual 
policies than the non-profit private hospitals. We worked out a formula that 
articulated these additional costs and then translated into state support of 
$92.1 million.
	We are still pressing the state to give the hospitals more operating 
flexibility to let them compete on a more equal basis, mainly in procurement, in 
setting up positions in classified ranks that are more applicable given today’s 
healthcare needs. They need access to capital. The hospitals did not get much 
money in the prior capital plan and they are starved for capital investment 
dollars both for ongoing repairs to their physical infrastructure and for 
investments in new programs which can aid the bottom line in hospitals.
	The hospitals have incurred significant deficits over the past several 
years and that was translated into a loan. It was a STIP (Short Term Investment 
Pool) that is part of the money that the State would use if it internally 
financed the current year deficit. The hospitals have made a payment of $14.7 
million of that obligation.
	That sets a stage for a discussion of the resolution. I’m not going to go 
into this in excruciating detail. The resolution, by and large, tracks this 
presentation. You can think of it in three different components. One is: Keep 
our state support flat next year compared to the current year. Two: If funds are 
available then we would like to invest them in these items. And three is the 
item that is generating all of the attention. It is virtually certain that all 
programs receiving state support will see a reduction in next year’s budget. The 
Governor held out public security programs as an area that may be walled off 
from these cuts.
	Reduction in State support reduces our ability to pay for current 
operations, especially in light of some of the cost increases that I just went 
over. The statement simply says that the reductions in State support would need 
to be offset by increases in other university revenues, i.e. tuition. This is 
not relating to community college; this is state university tuition only. In 
passing this resolution the Trustees articulated a simple equation: if State 
support drops we have to consider tuition increases. Given the SUNY operation 
budget history over the last ten years, we don’t think that we can absorb much 
in the way of additional cost efficiencies.
	The Trustees set a cap of fourteen hundred dollars on the magnitude of any 
potential tuition increase and the fourteen hundred dollars refers to the 
resident undergraduate tuition rate only. It’s $3,400 now and at most it will go 
up to $4,800. There would be increases in all of the other categories of our 
tuition schedule such as non-resident undergraduate and graduate programs. We 
have talked about commeasured increased that will give us some ability to 
structure some of the increases that might happen in the other tuition 
categories to reflect various factors including where we are competitively with 
out-of-state rates. Some of those professional and graduate programs have 
increased tuition significantly over the past five years.
	There has been no technical action by the Trustees to increase tuition. 
They simply made a statement that was meant to alert lawmakers and potential 
tuition-paying students and families that we would have to increase tuition if 
we receive a large reduction in State support.
	We believe that a tuition increase is doable in System Administration. We 
looked at the tuition rates of our neighboring states and focused primarily on 
the middle-Atlantic and New England states. Most of the students who benchmark 
our tuition compared to the other states do it against those.  Obviously some 
students go to Michigan or California, but by and large we are looking at the 
nearby states.  
	We know that the tuition in some of the Southern and Western states is 
much lower than ours but we are going to see how we stack up against them.  We 
looked at the demographics: Our high school student graduating classes are 
increasing sharply and our applications are way up.  We therefore think that 
there is a residual and strong demand for SUNY education.  
       We also looked at the TAP (tuition assistance program) of the State of 
New York and recognized that as it is currently configured, the TAP protects 
those that are at the lowest end of the income scale from the negative impact of 
any tuition increase.
       I expect that the Chancellor will delve into this tuition increase issue 
in more detail.  He may run through a series of charts that put some numbers 
around the concepts I just talked about in terms of our competitive position 
with other states, where we are in absolute dollar amounts and percentage 
increase since 1995 and 1996 (which is when we last had a tuition increase) and 
some information on the TAP, and how that would help the students be held 
harmless.
       Are there any questions that you would like to ask?

Marvin LaHood (Buffalo): Brian, according to page 4 you are going to send a 
Chancellor up on the hill to ask for 1.858 billion State tax dollars to the core 
instructional budget, which is the same as this year.  But what you’re really 
thinking is that they’ll say, “We’re going to drop you X number of dollars,” and 
then you’ll have to increase tuition X number of dollars if you want to stay at 
$1.858 billion.

Brian Stenson: That’s exactly right. Let’s make up a number. If the 1.858 number 
were reduced by $100 million from State support, we would ask for roughly $100 
million in aggregate terms in increased ability to increase tuition.  

Marvin LaHood: So what we ask for in tuition is going to depend on what happens 
in those conversations up on the hill. In terms of what the governor might be 
willing to do for us.

Brian Stenson:
	If by some fluke the State support was not reduced in the Executive 
budget, we would not be seeking to increase tuition by $1400, and tuition might 
be off the table entirely.  We’ll take a look at the Executive budget and then 
make a preliminary assessment of what we would need to do.

Marvin LaHood (Buffalo):
	One thing that the Senate will be presenting is that we’ll be tied into 
the higher education index every year for tuition increase.  So even if they 
didn’t decrease us this year, would we get into a rational fiscal policy and ask 
for something tied to the higher education index?

Brian Stenson:
	Yes, we’d like to. That’s clearly one of our intents. If you look at the 
history over the years, you see long extended periods where the tuition is flat 
and is followed by a sharp peak. This pattern continues to repeat itself.  We 
looked at seven neighboring states where we had annual information. In most of 
those states, they have increase tuition seven years in a row while we held flat 
for seven years. We think that an annual growth program that is modest and 
reasonable is more predictable for the campuses and the students. If tuition 
were to go up significantly next year, you’ll have a situation where thousands 
and thousands of SUNY students have been paying $3400 per year with no increases 
at all over the course of their education, and now we have to shoot up and make 
this budget whole. We’ve absorbed all these cuts, and if State support drops to 
keep the overall level of funding constant we would have to increase tuition.

Joe Flynn (Alfred): Is this a one-shot tuition raise?  It seems to me you’re 
projecting a budget gap that’s five times the current gap for the following 
year. By the same logic, does that mean that we’d ask for a $7000 increase in 
tuition?  It seems to me that $1400 is a sticker price.  That’s got to be a one-
time increase if we’re looking at a $10 billion gap the following year.  Are we 
precluded from a tuition increase?

Brian Stenson: The $10 billion budget gap that people are talking about is for 
the 2003-2004 fiscal year, which would be affected by our tuition increase.  It 
would be anticipated to be a permanent tuition increase.  So, using the $1400 
tuition increase maximum, it would go up to $4800 and stay there.  We’d evaluate 
it the following year in the context of the proposed 2004-2005 State budget. 

Joe Flynn: Wouldn’t it be more logical to propose an out-year tuition increase 
so that maybe we could increase the tuition by $1400 over a three year period?  
That would seem to set the floor for some kind of a discussion of indexing and 
an introduction of a rational tuition policy.  Right now, it’s a stop-gap 
measure.

Unidentified speaker: Joe, the answer to that is depending on how that step 
might relate to this year’s cut.  We could end up with 75-$80 million real 
reduction from the current year’s budget that would be taken out at the campus 
level.  It would impact our ability to maintain quality and to deal with the 
number of students we want to maintain.  It’s our thinking that, assuming TAP 
remains intact, the kind of increase that we might have to inflict in one step 
followed by an indexing, assuming the State budget’s reduction is a permanent 
reduction to a new base, is the price we have to pay now for the last seven or 
eight years of the rational policy that is proposed.

Brian Stenson: It’s a cash budget basis that the State uses.  The State does a 
one year budget and puts out projections for one or two years past the Executive 
budget, but does not identify ways to close that budget gap.  We’ll know next 
week what the Governor is projecting for 2004-2005, assuming enactment of his 
2003-2004 budget.  We’ll know at that time if there is a residual budget gap or 
surplus, but they’re not required to either propose or enact measures that would 
maintain balance over a period of years.  I agree that the better approach would 
be to phase in the cut, and we’ll phase in tuition to account for it. But if it 
is, as Dick said, a huge cut and we start phasing in tuition and we don’t close 
it every year we have a budget gap of millions of dollars.

Joe Hildreth: I felt I had to stop the questions so that we can get on with our 
presentation. I’d like to bring up Ram Chugh and David DeMarco. I would like to 
express my appreciation for the other people who served on the task force: 
Maureen Dolan, Bob Axelrod, Diane Gherkin and Ted Turner. We also received some 
additional technical assistance from Wayne Diesel, Brian Stenson and John 
Porter.
	We passed a resolution in Binghamton, almost one year ago: “…resolve that 
the Chancellor working with the University Faculty Senate, government bodies, 
and other appropriate constituencies to develop a long term rational fiscal 
policy to include, increase State support and to address such factors as 
enrollment growth and inflation to ensure the quality of public higher education 
in New York State.”
	I think that we did that in a way that is balanced, intelligent, based on 
good data, and reflects people that have an understanding of financing higher 
education. It is a pleasure to turn the program over to Ram and to David to take 
you through this document.

Ram Chugh: Thank you, Joe. We had a conference on December 11th on the economic 
impact of SUNY which went from about 9am to 5pm. There was going to be a 
snowstorm that day and my half hour presentation was cut down to five minutes. I 
know that have very limited time and are trying to reorganize our presentation 
in a way so that we have time for discussion. When everyone comes to a Senate 
meeting like this and participates in the discussion of issues and challenges 
confronting SUNY, I feel very energized and proud to belong to the SUNY family. 
Many former Senate presidents continue to be involved in the Senate and I think 
that we benefit from each other in that way. David and I are very pleased to be 
here to make the final report. This report is in response to the task force that 
was established by the Senate. The resolution was passed a year ago.
	The basic goal that guided the work of the task force was to set 
recommendations. The recommendations are to promote long-time stability in the 
funding of SUNY or how to minimize instability. We are well aware that prolonged 
instability and unpredictability in funding can have serious adverse impacts in 
the oppression of SUNY. We want to make SUNY of the front ranks in public higher 
education. Keeping this broad goal in mind, the task force examined and studied 
the following issues: What are the key elements of a stable funding policy? How 
can you be rational in an irrational world? We wanted to study some of those key 
elements. (2) We looked at the sources of funding for SUNY, how the funding has 
become stable and unstable, and what the different sources of instability are. 
As you will see from the slides we are about to show, a lot of the instability 
comes from the State funding. We also looked at the trends of funding for public 
higher education in other states and what the national trends are. We wanted to 
look at New York State in a broader context of the U.S economy. We looked at the 
causes and consequences of prolonged in stability in funding. Then we looked at 
the possible approaches which can be implemented to promote long-term stability 
or to minimize instability.
	When making our recommendations we tried to act very responsibly and take 
into account the physical constraints confronting the State. We tried to be 
constructive and be very comprehensive. The language in the recommendations is 
sometimes direct, sometimes indirect, but everything is covered in a very 
comprehensive set of recommendations.
	The goal was to make SUNY achieve its academic goal of excellence. Let’s 
go through the transparencies very quickly and then we will have time for some 
discussion.
	These are the key elements for the overall rational funding policy. We 
want stability of overall funding so that we can plan predictability and want 
growth in funding for new programs, initiatives and any mandates passed by the 
State. We want to make sure that we spend that money that we get very wisely. To 
maintain the effectiveness and efficiency, every unit needs some degree of 
flexibility in managing those funds.
	We want the funding to help provide accessible and affordable education 
for our students. We also want to maintain diversity in sources of funding. The 
State funding is one source and we would also like to increase our funding to 
research through annual giving and a lot of other sources which are identified 
in our report.
	What are the sources of funding for SUNY? We can separate the funding into 
two sections: State and Non-State. Some State funding is appropriated and some 
is not appropriated. Some comes from tax revenue sources and some of it doesn’t. 
Funded tuition revenue is paid by the students but is has been appropriated. 
Income for reimbursable is a campus-generated revenue but has been appropriated 
by the State.
	This next transparency provides you with the changing sources of funding 
in national public higher education as a whole and covers fourteen years from 
1980-81 to 1993-94. You can see that tuition and fees have increased at a rate 
of 42.6% and State endowment has gone down 21.3%. The funding sources have 
shifted from one to the other and support from State taxes has been declining 
the portion of the student revenue.
	What is really happening to the State expenditure? Higher education is an 
area which has been experiencing cutbacks. Medicaid has increased dramatically 
and higher education has declined.
	These are the overall trends and in the funding of SUNY are based on the 
two or three pages of data analysis. We demonstrated in the attached pages that 
these conclusions are based on work on those numbers. The direct State support, 
the operating bud get, has declined thousands of dollars over the years and the 
indirect State support has increased subtly.
	One of the reasons for the financial instability is the economic 
fluctuation which all states are experiencing right now. Higher education has 
been experiencing cutbacks due to Medicaid and other mandated expenditures. 
Higher education does have other ways of raising money. SUNY has sixty-four 
campuses so a unified approach is not easy. Last is that we face competition 
with private sectors in New York State.
	The consequences are the difficulty to maintain academic quality and 
services for students, engaging long and short term academic planning, 
undertaking academic initiatives, and being competitive with other higher 
education tuition.

Joe Hildreth: This was discussed last night at the Executive committee and they 
voted to bring the task force report to the floor with this resolution. This is 
an opportunity to endorse this which would become the long-term position of the 
Senate. With that in mind, let’s open to questions about the report, knowing 
that we would like to have a vote on accepting the report before we go tot 
lunch.

Judith Adams-Volpe (Buffalo): If we are going to advocate a tuition policy 
that’s based on an index, should we also be thinking about saying something 
about collective bargaining for SUNY? Shouldn’t our thoughts on collective 
bargaining also be part of this tuition policy?

David: The recommendation that talks about unfunded mandates has an example of 
collective bargaining and says that collective bargaining should be funded all 
the time.

Judith Adams-Volpe: But what I’m asking is if collective bargaining should take 
that same index into consideration?

David: If I were in the union I wouldn’t necessarily do that.

Paul Brodsky (Optometry): Joe…this is just something you brought up last night 
at dinner. You said that you asked what the $2 million deficit translates into 
and the answer was four thousand jobs. When one thinks of the impact that that 
has on individual campuses, it becomes a much more real number.

Joe Hildreth: The problem is not just whether or not we have the tuition 
increase or whether or not we accept this report. The problem is that most 
people are expecting a reduction that could be fairly substantial. A reduction 
not offset by a tuition increase would have a substantial impact on the system. 
We need to keep that in mind.
	There is a motion to accept and endorse the resolution. Is there a second? 
Yes. Are you ready to vote on that?

Pete  (Binghamton): The report is very exp-licit with a set of recommendations 
and talks about concepts. I’d like to suggest that the wording “fundamental 
concepts” be changed to “fundamental concepts and recommendations” so that we 
make it clear that the set of recommendations is what we really want to send to 
the Chancellor and push.
Joe Hildreth: I could accept that as a friendly amendment.

Ed O’Shea (Oswego): I’m concerned that by supporting an incremental tuition 
increase, key to the cost of living index, that the Governor’s office is going 
to look at this part of the resolution and ignore the part that says that we are 
asking for an increase in State support. I’m afraid that by doing that we will 
be inviting a regular decrease in base State support for SUNY. I appreciate this 
report and all the work that has gone into it, but I feel that it is an 
idealistic report. I’m afraid that in the practical order of politics, this is 
going to somehow work out to hurt SUNY.

Joe: In the recommendation that Ed is referring to we do ask that the percentage 
of the State general fund allocated to SUNY should not decline but should 
increase over time.

Gary Kitzmann: Can we separate the motion from the report? I would like to 
accept the report but I would like to wait on the motion. I would like to move 
that we separate… (End of tape)

Joe Hildreth: ...I think that we should vote on this as it stands and I think 
that we would be willing to entertain and discussion and possibly a resolution 
to support a specific program.

Joe Flynn: Back to the distinction between accepting and endorsing. If we accept 
the report there is no implicit action that the Senate would further require. If 
we move to endorse the report, it will subject it to a higher level of scrutiny 
by the Senate. The Senate could accept and endorse this report and at the same 
time, in a subsequent motion, vote against the tuition increase. I fear that all 
the good work of this task force should not be put in any sort of limbo and that 
we should bear our powers of scrutiny with an understanding that we are going to 
move towards the endorsement of the fundamental recommendations of the report. 
In doing that, the discussion will probably lead us to the areas where the 
report is silent and perhaps there needs to be further inquiry.

Unidentified speaker:  It seems to me that this report is well received by the 
Senate. There may be some desire to tweak it but there seems to be no pressing 
reason to not pass a resolution.

Joe Hildreth: That sounds like good advice. I am willing to postpone unless 
there is an objection.

David King (Oswego): One of the difficulties here is that a number of people in 
the room have just seen this morning. I think that it is very important that the 
voice of the Senate be heard on this issue. We talked about that in the 
Executive Committee. We need a sense if people are prepared to not accept the 
report, but endorse the report. This would empower the president of the Senate 
and Executive Committee to work with the Chancellor without getting hung up on 
the language of that implementation, which we have already agreed to separate. 
To lay the groundwork for anything, we need to endorse the report and the 
recommendations in it if there is a consensus on that. A lot of hard work went 
into it and I’m sure that there are people in the room who would like to have 
stronger language on some things, but it seems that the option is to have no 
statement from the Senate at all versus the goals of laying out principles of 
stability is important in the budget. The interdependence of the elements of 
those recommendations is the thing we have never had. We should focus our 
attention on those recommendations.
	My point is that, if people are still digesting this, then maybe we should 
wait on this until this afternoon.

Joe Hildreth: Do we want to adopt the report as Senate policy?

Carl Wiezalis (Health Science Center at Syracuse): Don Steven attempted to make 
an amendment earlier relating to opportunities programs. If they are absent from 
this report, it is an important omission. If we have an opportunity to add 
something to this report by amendment, that would be good. Even if it is twenty-
six opportunities programs, that would be okay with me. Maybe we could do it if 
Ram says that this is not in the bigger report. We would then be accepting a 
report which includes what I consider to be a very important element.

Tim Phillips (Cortland): About the indexing of tuition...routinely that runs 
sex, eight, ten percent a year, so we could be increasing tuition %8 or %10 a 
year, and it could take nine or ten years for the tuition to double. That would 
allow the State to rely even further on students to pay more than their share. 
The report clearly states that that is already occurring. It is going to give 
the State a vehicle to raise tuition much more than perhaps the CPI.

David King (Oswego CGL Convener): The point to be made is to assert a series of 
principles which are embraced by this report and recommendations which I don’t 
think can be isolated or separated. They are interdependent. I see this not as a 
final step but as a first step where the Senate would go on record endorsing the 
notion that these elements are in fact interdependent. In the past, tuition 
increases are political football in this state; increases tend to come only in 
fiscal crises. The thrust of this report is to attempt to provide some stability 
and to make a statement by the Senate that these are principle which we embrace. 
It would empower the Executive Committee and the Senate over time to continue to 
work with this. If we try to anticipate everything that is not here we could 
have a long litany of amendments. The point is that we want to be able to adapt 
over time. Issues are going to arise that none of us can anticipate at the 
moment and we would like to have the Senate and Executive Committee work with 
the Chancellor and the Trustees to make the case for whatever. We don’t know 
where the cuts are going to come.
	Unfunded mandates include a lot of things. We should embrace the 
principles involved in this. 

Unidentified speaker:  Over the long period of the gestation of this report, 
there was always the idea that if we followed the index, we recommended that 
there would not be a corresponding drop in State tax support. Today we got 
warped because we are now looking at a tuition increase that is going to be 
based on a decrease in State support. This report never intended to tie tuition 
to the index unless we had reassurance that there would not be a corresponding 
drop.
Ram Chugh: If you look at all eleven recommendations as a single package and the 
tuition rate goes up we have a very strong statement that there should be no 
corresponding decrease in State support. If we raise money through our endowment 
or any other sources, there should be no decreases in State support. Those lines 
are very clearly stated in the recommendation. We are very much aware of that 
fact. We have one of the adverse consequences that the support provided to 
students from the minority population will be diversely affected. We did not 
focus on singles programs because that would be getting into too many issues. 
Our idea was to propose broad principles and looking at the interdependency. I 
can say that we went through at least ten different versions of the 
recommendations. You are very helpful in trying to phrase it in \language that 
would be acceptable to the Senate as a whole.

Dick: About twenty minutes ago I suggested that we refer this matter back to the 
Executive Committee tonight after we have a chance to talk about it with the 
Chancellor this afternoon. Tonight the Executive Committee could prepare 
whatever resolution based on this discussion and this afternoon’s discussion and 
bring it back tomorrow in writing. I don’t see any reason why we have to take an 
action this afternoon.

Joe Hildreth: It does seem the sentiment to postpone voting. If there is no 
objection, I am going to postpone further discussion until we can find time 
later in the meeting. I believe it’s time for lunch…

Joe Hildreth: We are fortunate to have the University Provost, Peter Salins, 
here with us this afternoon. He is going to give you in-depth information on 
system activities that I did not give you this morning. There will be a certain 
amount of time for questions after he gives his remarks. Let’s welcome 
University Provost, Peter Salins, to the podium.

Peter Salins: Thank you and good afternoon. Again it is a pleasure to be here 
with you. I made the trek all the way up here to the Central New York. It turned 
out to be a lot of a lovely day. I hope it stays that way.
	Let me quickly go through the things that we are trying to do in the 
Provost’s office that we have achieved or are about to achieve. I will then be 
happy to take as many questions as you’d like to throw my way. Not withstanding 
the concerns we have, especially about money, if we put aside the issues of 
finances I think that we are making a lot of progress. Let me go over a few 
things that I think will be of greatest interest to you.
	One of the things that we did in the Provost’s office when I first became 
Provost was to try to strengthen the relationship between the Provost’s office 
in Albany and the actual activities of the campuses, especially on the academic 
front. We developed the whole concept of campus liaisons and the office of 
those. We appointed individuals to be liaisons to the various sectors. When 
Steve POSKANSER was appointed, he was appointed as the campus liaison for the 
doctoral campuses in the system. He did such a terrific job that he became Vice-
Provost and he did a terrific job as that. He kept his portfolio as the liaison 
to the doctoral campuses. Steve has gone on to be the interim president at New 
Paltz. We continue to fill that function with Beth BRINGSHORD. As interim 
liaison to the doctoral campuses she did a terrific job but we had a search 
underway to get the permanent liaison for that position. I’m pleased to announce 
the Board has appointed Anne HUOT, who is the graduate dean at the University of 
Vermont. For those of you who are on the doctorate campuses that will be working 
with her, I think that you will find her to be a very warm and strong individual 
and someone who will help us work together to achieve the objective on those 
campuses. She is a biologist by training and she will be directed to work not 
only with all of the doctorate campuses in general but also particularly with 
the Health Science Centers and the Biomedical area. These are critically 
important and I would like to see us become even more supportive and 
knowledgeable about what is happening in those institutions.
	Enrollment planning is one of the critical functions in the Provost’s 
office. It’s one of those things that we do that you might not even be aware of 
but we lead the enrollment planning process in the system and the Enrollment 
Planning committee, which is led by Joe DeFillipo in our office, really sets the 
parameters for enrollment for all of our campuses. That feeds into the budget 
allocation model. I was very much taken with the report that your task force 
prepared on a rational budget policy for the University. I think that it’s a 
very strong report. I’m not going to give you advice on whether or not you 
should adopt it, but I thought it was a very strong and interesting report. I 
was struck in particular by two features.
	One was the idea of having a stabilization fund which I think is brilliant 
and well overdue. It would be very helpful in bringing us through these cycles 
which we are periodically subject to. The other was the recommendation regarding 
enrollment. I do believe that enrollment has to be tired to the resources and 
even though the general concept is that the campuses set enrollment targets 
which are, for the most part memorialized in the mission review memoranda of 
understanding, further refined in annual multiyear reports and plans that the 
campuses give us. Nevertheless there has to be some sort of recognition that we 
cannot have the enrollment outrun our resources by too large of a factor.
	What the enrollment planning committee did this year is to some extent try 
to constrain enrollment consistent with the MOUs and the campus enrollment plans 
to take a somewhat more rigorous look at plans that outstrip either the MOUs or 
the previous year’s enrollment plan submissions that the campuses have given us. 
The attempt is, and I think will be implemented, to keep the aggregate 
enrollment for the State operated sector to 2% above last year’s number to allow 
campuses in transition, which is some of our Technology campuses, and perhaps 
one of our comprehensive colleges to grow beyond that up to a level of about 6% 
but to keep the rest of the system’s campuses generally within a 1.8% growth 
parameter. It is very important to maintain some level of discipline on 
enrollment working with the campuses and being responsive to campuses 
aspirations and needs. But to send a message and to recognize that we have to 
have resources to cover the enrollment that we are responsible for.
	 We first did a comprehensive faculty survey across the system. I believe 
that all the campuses in the system participated. The format for the survey is a 
national format developed by the Higher Education Research Institute in 
California. Now that we have the results of the survey we are undertaking an 
analysis and we are going to be putting the data on CDs and distributing them to 
all of the campuses. You’ll find a lot of interesting information and you will 
have a much better idea of how faculty conditions in SUNY compare to those 
across the country and also, to some extent, the variation within the system.
	I’m not going to talk much about general education because at these 
meetings I generally try to avoid it. I understand that there was a report on 
the status of the change protocols in the general education initiative and I 
think that we have worked closely with you to develop a format that will 
strengthen both the results of the general education programs on our campuses 
and also the proper sense of campus role and procedures in doing that.
	 I’d like to spend a little time talking about New Vision in teacher 
education. This is one of our newer initiatives and I know that you have been 
very supportive of it as we developed it. Let me tell you where we are. One of 
the really interesting things is the development of the State University Teacher 
Education Center in New York City. It’s up and running and we’ve had that in 
place for about a year now. We did this at the very moment that the city of New 
York is undertaking major reform of its educational system. Mayor Bloomberg was 
able to achieve something that his relatively strong-willed predecessors were 
not able to, that is to get more mayoral control over the entire school system. 
He installed a new Chancellor, Joe Klein, to lead the system. They are 
undertaking what I think is going to be the most comprehensive experiment in 
urban education in the United States if not the world. Hardly a day goes by when 
the papers are not talking about aspects of it including today’s New York Times.
	At this critical moment for us to have the Teacher Education Center in 
place positioned to place our student teachers in the New York City schools, to 
work with our campuses to put together a team of faculty supervisors who will 
become very knowledgeable about what is happening in the New York City school 
system as this evolves that will enable us to take a lot of the new findings, 
insights and experiences back to our campuses. I think that that is a very 
exciting prospect and that it will be beneficial not only to the city and its 
schools but I think that it’s going to enrich our own Teacher Education effort. 
As far as the other aspects of New Vision, there are quite a few specific 
components. We have developed very specific guidelines which we have addressed 
to the campuses. We’ve given the campuses a fairly clear-cut timeline for 
implementing the various components.
       The final part of New Vision that concerns this group and the community 
college governance body is the Transfer Template project. As long as I’ve been 
in this job (this is about my sixth anniversary in this position) transfer has 
been one of the top issues. It’s been a big issue for the Trustees and for two 
Chancellors under whom I served and it’s been a big issue on the campuses. We’ve 
tried a number of different approaches to deal with it. The Trustees have passed 
several resolutions mandating smooth transfer but mandating isn’t enough. We 
built transfer issues into the final stages of mission review when we had our 
regional meetings. We had Jennifer Clark and Bill GARRING go around the state 
and meet on every single campus or at least with groups that represented every 
single campus to develop what we call a overall transfer action plan which we 
are in the process of implementing. 
       Ultimately transfer is not about mandates or even the broader features of 
the action plan. Transfer is program specific and almost all of the serious 
problems that we’ve had in transfer deal with particular programs, especially 
professional programs. The most common ones are Teacher Education and Business 
Administration. I think that the reason for that is the State operated campuses, 
your campuses, tend to have a program that is sort of predicated on the 
assumption that most of the students going through the program originated on 
your prospective campuses. Actually, anywhere from a quarter to a third of the 
students that are at your campuses originated at community colleges. That has to 
be recognized. What the Transfer Template in education is is sort of a pilot or 
precursor to a larger or more serious consideration of dhow we deal with 
transfer in these kinds of professional programs. We’ve had a committee working 
with both the community colleges and State operated campus representatives to 
develop a template which makes it very clear which components are to be offered 
at the lower division level regardless of whether they are at community colleges 
or on a State operated campus at the lower division. Those parts of the 
curriculum that are to be offered at the upper division level require a great 
deal of cooperation among campuses. It is not a substitute for or an alternative 
to specific articulation agreements among campuses but I do think that it is a 
better approach, if we can make this work, to have general templates that allow 
students from any of our community colleges to go to any of our baccalaureate 
institutions rather than depending on a series of bilateral arrangements.
       I think that it is going forward nicely. I’m not going to harangue you 
but I do expect all of the campuses in the system to work very strenuously to 
make this Transfer Template in Teacher Education a success. If we can get it to 
work in Teacher Education we will develop similar templates for business 
administration, nursing and other professional programs that span the community 
college and the baccalaureate campus environments.
       Faculty recognition and awards…Marvin, other members of the Senate and 
representatives from the Community College council are working with Janette 
Chambers and are putting together a set of recommendations on how we can enhance 
recognition for faculty across the system. I’m very much in support of that and 
want to thank Marvin and the rest of the group for working on that. Anything 
that we can do to further the recognition of the faculty is good. In the 
background we have the larger faculty development initiative which is a joint 
initiative of the Senate, the Council and the Provost’s office which will also 
develop a series of recommendations which will strengthen both faculty 
functioning and morale on our campuses, but specifically the issue of 
recognition and awards has to be developed further.
       One of the programs that we have had in the Provost’s office for many 
years, which I encourage you to take an interest in and advantage of, is the 
conversations in the disciplines. It’s not an expensive program or a huge amount 
of money that we devote to it, but it very much helps to further university wide 
discourse. In terms of university wide efforts, let me mention something that 
some of you may be aware of.
       Shortly after 9/11, Chancellor King asked me and other members of the 
system administration… (End of tape)
       
       …Research and other academic resources together to address some of these 
keys issues. The two task forces that dealt with the physical threats and 
infrastructure threats that the country and other with the biological and 
environmental threats. Yakov Shamash, the dean of engineering and vice president 
at Stony Brook, is heading one of the tasks forces and Bruce Holm, a vice 
provost at the University of Buffalo, is heading the one on the biological 
threats. The task forces have been busily at work and already we have several 
very specific multi campus proposals that were developed. The cyber security 
group, which is part of the infrastructure threats task force has a very 
concrete proposal which involves not only a number of the SUNY campuses but some 
of the private campuses including Syracuse University. The bio defense task 
force, chaired by Bruce Holm, is working also with campuses within SUNY and some 
of the leading biomedical institutions in the state are putting together a 
proposal to NIH for funding there.
	I first wanted to make you aware that these task forces exist, that they 
have been working and that they are effective, but there is a larger point. That 
is that this represents what is probably the most comprehensive multi-campus 
research effort that we have yet mounted in SUNY. It is a great precedent. If 
this works here, I think that it will be a very good format for inter-campus 
research to follow. One of the problems that we have in SUNY is that our 
institutions are small, as a whole, in comparison to their national peers. That 
is particularly true of our doctoral institutions and of our University centers. 
They seem big on the SUNY landscape but they are small in comparison to national 
peers.
	A lot of the competition for research funding nationally and for research 
visibility nationally is related to the size of the institution. We’re not going 
to make bigger institutions, so we’re not going to have anything big probably 
ever. We’re going to have to be able to compete in that environment by pooling 
our resources across the University. This is a very good paradigm of doing this 
systematically. We’ve had cooperation all through the years but this is a bit 
more comprehensive and systematic. I’d like to follow up and get beyond homeland 
defense in promoting this kind of effort.
	In the technology area, SUNY Connect is continuing to connect the 
libraries of the system. Because of SUNY Connect and the fact that we’ve been a 
bit more advanced that some of the other institutions of the State in entering 
this arena and because we are the host to NY-LINK, which is a national library 
consortium organization. We were asked to lead a statewide higher education 
library initiative. It began slowly but over the course of a y ear we’ve had 
meetings with more and more participation by higher education library 
representatives across the state and we now have a full fledged statewide higher 
education library initiative led by SUNY with the governing board. Almost all of 
the higher education libraries in the state are participating. The state 
education department and Commissioner MILLS have taken an enormous interest in 
this and his chief library representative, Janet Welch, is a member of the 
governing board.
	The state education department is probably in the best position to get 
some additional resources to help our libraries but until we develop this new 
framework they are going to spend this money the way they see fit. I’m not 
saying that it’s necessarily bad but it’s probably not consistent with the way 
we would like to see some of those funds expended. By bringing all of the higher 
education institutions and the state education department together, we have the 
ability to coordinate our activities in some key areas.
	One is that the libraries are much more important than administrators and 
others realize. One of the key concerns is content which is very expensive. In a 
period of budgetary constrain, one of the easier targets is the content 
acquisition on the part of the campus libraries. Only by pooling our resources 
and getting inexpensive collective subscriptions, especially to electronic 
content, can we afford to expand the total amount of content.
	The other is SUNY Connect on a larger scale. When it is completed in two 
or three years, all of our libraries are going to be electronically integrated. 
When asked how many volumes you have in your library, you’re not going to say 
350,000 or 1.2 million or 1.7 million, you’re going to say 18 million and 
growing whether you are at a community college or the University at Buffalo. We 
can extend that. If we can use this new organization beyond SUNY we can 
gradually create an electronic bridge to the city university libraries and most 
notably to the independent sector libraries. The members of this consortium 
include NYU, Columbia, Cornell, University of Rochester, RPI and all of the big 
private institutions. Then we are not talking about 18 million volumes but 30-50 
million.
	Basically, I think that we are making progress on all of the various 
fronts. Some of it is highly visible and widely understood. Other parts, like 
the library initiative, are below the radar screen. We are in a period of 
significant academic enhancement, improvement and cooperation. I think that it 
is going to take a while for all of this to be evident and for it to bear all of 
the fruits that we would like it to. We’ll be in a very different place in a few 
years from now even in a period of budgetary stringency. Everyone is concerned 
about money even though the best things in life are free. I want to pledge to 
you that my office and I will do everything in our power to make sure that we 
continue to make academic progress regardless of the budgetary challenges that 
we face.

Bob Axelrod: With regard to the homeland defense, is there any way that we can 
tie into Tom Ridge and that group in the federal funding? They have an enormous 
budget for homeland security… (End of tape)

Peter Salins: That is the context. Chancellor King was very much aware of the 
fact that the federal government was going to put significant new resources into 
this area. We’ve been continuously in touch with Congressman BOLERT in New York 
who was one of the leading congressional components of more funding for homeland 
security. These initiatives are essentially aimed at trying to shake some of the 
money from the federal money trees. Some of it will be competitive grants, NIH 
and NSF, but a significant amount, especially for cyber security, are going to 
be earmarked grants. New funding is being directed by Congress at this 
particular problem. The intention is for us to cooperate to take advantage of 
these of these new funding opportunities.

Ray Guydosh (Plattsburgh): I’m intrigued by the transfer template process and I 
am curious how you envision the process working as it multiplies and because 
operational. Do you see a requirement for the comprehensive college programs to 
accept particular courses offered in the community colleges for those majors?

Peter Salins: The short answer is yes. What it really involves is several 
principles. One is if we look at all of these programs as having a lower and 
upper division component that we try to get as much consistency in the lower 
division as possible so that we don’t have a radical divergence between the 
lower division curriculum at a community college and a state operated 
university. In teacher education that means that some of the professional 
courses could be offered at the community college level. Some of the clinical 
experience could conceivably be offered. On the community college side an 
understanding that, in order for this to be done without an increase in total 
numbers of credits taken, the entire general education curriculum has to be 
completed at the community college level rather than just seven out of ten 
areas. It puts a responsibility on the community colleges in terms of advisement 
and some curricular change. It poses a commitment on the baccalaureate campuses 
to be willing to have some of the specific professionally oriented courses 
accepted even if taken at a community college. The key idea is not that we are 
indifferent to the standards or criteria that the baccalaureate campuses have. 
The notion is just that if it is a lower division course on one of our state 
operated campuses, it can be a lower division course at one of the community 
colleges.
	Do I envision something like this in the other professional fields? Yes, 
and the only way that we are going to get at it is the same way that we did 
here. We put together a team of people from the two sets of campuses comprised 
of the specialists in that field.

Joe Hildreth: Chancellor King and 2:30 have both arrived so we are going to need 
to draw this to a close. Let’s express our appreciation. Our meeting are much 
better when we can have you here and we appreciate your time.
	It’s a pleasure to introduce our next speaker. The access we have to 
express our concerns to the key leaders of the system is great. I don’t have 
direct comparison but I tend to think that it’s at the top end of the scale.

Chancellor King: Thank you, Joe. It is a joy to be here. I truly love this part 
of the state and I am very fond of this campus.
 	Miller took me aside and shared with me the things that you have already 
talked about so I will try to be brief. You know about the budget and tuition. I 
would like to point out first that there is no question in my mind and we don’t 
know much more about the budget than anything you’ve read in the newspaper but 
it is eminently clear that every element of state government is going to take 
some cut in state funding. What differentiates us from many other parts of the 
government is that we do have the benefit of being able to charge tuition. 
Hopefully when everything is done, whatever the mix is of state support and 
tuition will fundamentally keep us whole. If you are working in the 
transportation or environmental conservation department you would probably see 
that whatever your budget is in the current fiscal year will be reduced by ten 
or fifteen percent, perhaps more. We’re trying as hard as we can to at least 
balance year to year. If we do that that will have been a rather extraordinary 
result given the conditions and circumstances that the state is facing.
        It has been made clear to me that it is the intention of the speaker to 
demand that at least a portion of the solution to this year’s budget would 
include an increase in general taxes and it has been made equally clear by the 
Governor that he doesn’t intend to raise them. That fight will ultimately be the 
centerpiece of whatever happens. The speaker has also made it clear that it is 
their intention to use the tuition issue as leverage politically for putting 
pressure on the Governor and the Republicans in the Senate to consider tax 
increases. The old admonition about, “Don’t look at this if you can’t stand 
watching sausage being made” is probably appropriate. Where we start matter a 
little bit but ultimately it is how we finish.
       I am hopeful that we will get to a position at the end of the process 
where we are not going to have to sustain any significant reduction in operating 
revenues regardless of their source. I am reasonably optimistic, but we won’t 
know until next Wednesday when the Governor announces his Executive budget, that 
we have a pretty good chance for a new multiyear capital plan. Dick Miller and 
his staff and Dave RICHTER and his staff have put together a very well 
constructed a thoughtful plan and even in a year like this I think that there is 
a possibility for us to get a commitment to initiate that. That would allow us 
to continue getting our campuses and campus facilities with at least the end of 
the twentieth century and maybe a little bit into the twenty-first.
       On the question of tuition I k now that there are a lot of different 
views being expressed and they are intimately intertwined with the Tuition 
Assistance Program. It is not clear what is going to happen to that program. It 
will obviously undergo an impact from the budget but I think that ultimately the 
important issues will be trying to preserve both the eligibility features of the 
current plan and the size of the awards that students can receive based on their 
income. This is an area that the Legislature has taken great pride in and has 
been very protective of.
       The other thing about tuition is that we have been the lowest in terms of 
the combination of tuition and fees. For example, if you look at Massachusetts, 
its tuition is very low but when you put in fees they shoot right by us. The 
proportion of the whole that our average fee structure represents is actually 
quite comparable to all but two of the eleven states that are reflected there. I 
know that a lot of people squawk about the fees but I think that they are very 
much in line with almost all of our neighboring states.
	Remember that the numbers that you are looking at are the current numbers. 
All of the information we have is that all of our neighboring states as well as 
most, if not all, of the rest of the states in the country will be raising 
tuition. If tuition goes up the full $1,400 requested, that $1,400 difference 
will be measured not against those numbers but those numbers plus whatever those 
states decide to do.
	Another thing that I wanted to talk about is an issue that came to my 
attention. It involves a question of research misconduct and/or plagiarism by 
faculty members. There was an episode where a faculty member was accused and 
ultimately acknowledged engaging in plagiarism at our Albany campus. The issue 
here that I would like your guidance and thinking on is the question of what the 
appropriate response of the university is when the case has essentially been 
concluded and the conclusion is an affirmative finding? My concern is that the 
notion of some sort of public notification. I think that the concerns that were 
raised by your colleagues at Albany grew out of the notion that first they 
believed that the episode there had been covered up and the administration there 
was very much concerned by a series of descriptions both in the campuses 
descriptions and in federal regulations pertaining to confidentiality.
       While it is clear and appropriate that confidentiality should apply at 
the start of the process when an allegation is made, through the investigation, 
and at the conclusion it is either determined that the allegations are not 
warranted or that they cannot be established, then confidentiality should 
continue to apply without question, in my opinion. But where there is an 
affirmative finding and it is finalized, then it would seem to me that there is 
a responsibility to make it public in some way and that the need for 
confidentiality is over. My larger concern is this: if we are to treat these 
cases from start to finish and regardless of outcome as confidential in all 
respects, then how do we as an institution deter other people in the future from 
engaging in similar conduct? If we do not make findings like this public in some 
appropriate way we then create the impression that these things are either being 
ignored or covered up and cannot, in any way, deter future misconduct.
       I have asked Joe to ask you and your colleagues to share your thoughts 
about this with me and I will look forward to your response. It would my 
intention, after I receive your advice, to go forward to the Board and ask them 
to establish some system-wide policies in this regard recognizing that the 
responsibility for establishing the procedures on a campus-by-campus basis 
reside with the Faculty Senate on those campuses and the administration. It’s 
not my intention to establish procedures, that’s your business, but at the end 
of the road of the circumstances I’ve outlined to assure that there is some sort 
of public disclosure. Just to conclude, I think that without it we run the risk 
of having what I consider to be one of the most precious attributes of the 
University compromised: our academic activity.

Joe Hildreth: I would like to begin our sector sharing of concerns. We have six 
sectors and one hour. Let’s begin with the University Senators.

Pete Knuepfer: I have a suspicion that the other sectors are going to have a lot 
to say about the tuition increase as well. The University centers have a little 
different perspective on it than many others because of our larger group of 
graduate students. We will concentrate our comments on that.
	We have two concerns at the graduate level about tuition increases and 
they both have to do with ways that graduate students are funded. A large 
percentage of graduate students are getting funding either in teaching 
assistantships or research assistantships. At the centers research grants pick 
up some or all of graduate tuition. At the teaching assistant level graduate 
tuition is paid through a rather limited source of funds that has been pretty 
flat at the state level for a long time. Our concern there is that if there is a 
rise in tuition for graduate students, especially in light of a completely flat 
budget, where is the money going to come from to cover graduate students’ 
scholarships? Will we have to look at having smaller numbers of graduate 
students that are funded in that context?
	The second thing we started talking about was some of the issues that are 
coming up. They are largely related to graduate students and research in light 
of the changes that have gone on since 9/11, both the Patriot Act and the 
changes in scrutiny of international students. Things like FBI interviews with 
international students, the new IRS regulations that are intrusive on privacy 
and time of people at the institutions to produce necessary records are a 
concern.
	The last thing that we talked about was issues of privacy in terms of 
computer use. Related to that are issues at the federal level of potential 
legislation that would restrict ways that copyright can be utilized in software 
and related fields. The kinds of issues specifically that seem to be showing up 
on the horizon are the potential for closed sources as opposed to open source 
software to be so strongly regulated by copyright that it would be impossible 
for a researcher to take an existing piece of software and modify it for their 
own use without threatening the copyright of the initial holder. There is also a 
concern in electronic archives of published materials that the holder of the 
electronic archive, which might be a private publisher, would have the right to 
remove materials from the electronic archive. That is already being done in some 
cases. The legislature would essentially preclude anyone else from having backed 
up that archive and still make those materials available so that public material 
could permanently disappear. Those are our concerns.

Chancellor King: On graduate tuition…it’s not established at this point and we 
have not made any decisions about the impact of undergraduate tuition on 
graduate tuition. We have been adjusting graduate tuition on and off over the 
last several years without any great fanfare, with perhaps the exception of the 
medical school. We are sensitive to and appreciate the concerns about graduate 
students’ scholarships and the utilization of those funds to have graduate 
students serving in a variety of capacities that benefit the University. We will 
do our very best to preserve those funds and enhance them to the extent 
possible. This is an area that can be enhanced independently in addition to 
whatever we get from the State.

Unidentified speaker: The revenue from any revenue tuition increase is available 
at campus discretion within academic program to be used to subvene [? sic] any 
stipend increases that were necessary to be offset. I don’t think that it has 
any kind of consequence for you at all.

Chancellor King: With regard to the other three issues that were raised, the 
Patriot act and the legislation are things that we follow pretty carefully 
through our lobbyists in Washington and through the national associations that 
represent colleges and universities. The two that are most significant for us 
are ACE and NOSALGIC. I can’t think of a instance in which we took a position 
different from the national associations which represent hundreds if not 
thousands of campuses around the country.
	With regard to computer privacy and copyright, it would be very valuable 
to us if you could write up what your concerns are and describe for us what you 
think the right standards ought to be to protect the authors of the software and 
to facilitate appropriate use of those products by faculty anywhere in the 
world, I would be delighted to take that information forward and get it into the 
national debate as it unfolds.

Joe Hildreth: That’s a great way to start and it fits in nicely with the time we 
have. Comprehensive colleges?

Ray Guydosh: We conducted one piece of business in the Comprehensive College 
sector because of some circumstances. We spent most of the time at the sector 
meeting mostly discussing three issues: the potential tuition increases and 
funding challenges in SUNY, the standardized system-wide assessment movement, 
and the potentials come from “Rethinking SUNY II,” that we have heard about.
	With respect to tuition and funding we see a potential for an increasing 
differential tuition between our colleges and community colleges as possibly 
driving lower division students towards community colleges rather than 
comprehensive colleges. We see the latter as becoming upper division 
institutions as more students go to community colleges. We see a blurring of the 
mission at the comprehensive and community colleges and even the SUNY two-year 
colleges as some of the two-year colleges and some state community colleges are 
beginning to offer four-year degrees. We see the funding resolution that was 
presented to the Board of Trustees having to be based on an assumption of steady 
funding when we need an increase in funding to advance the University in its 
mission.
	We see a need to link these tuition and funding considerations to a 
rational tuition plan. We see the under funding diminishing the quality and 
number of programs in SUNY and the comprehensive colleges. We heard, for 
example, of a decision to eliminate the graduate nursing program at Brockport. 
This is a program in a rural nursing that serves to benefit rural communities in 
New York State. We see a lack of consultation with faculty on how the effects of 
these budget situations are going to be dealt with on the campuses.
	With respect to standardized system-wide assessment, we see the University 
Senate kind of returning to the negotiation table about assessment when, in the 
past, the Senate has made clear many times its opposition to this idea. We want 
to point out that no one should underestimate the strength of that opposition 
among some segments of our faculty on local campuses. We are concerned that the 
strength of those oppositions may drive some people to the kinds of actions that 
would be embarrassing to SUNY at a time when we need a unity and a projection of 
a positive image.
	We already see the comprehensive colleges doing assessment using up some 
of our scarce faculty resources and trying to assess general education on some 
local campuses in their own unique ways, unfunded mandates and so on. We see the 
potential of this assessment being broadened beyond general education to 
programs that are common amongst our comprehensive colleges, like nursing or 
teacher education. We look at the example of our partners in secondary education 
having to deal with Regents mandates on curriculum and having to teach to these 
tests diminishing the quality of the education that might occur when the faculty 
chooses not to go beyond the basic items that are on that test. We see data from 
assessment potentially being used to discredit campuses and programs with low 
scores when we need to project a positive image in SUNY of the education we 
offer.
	With respect to “Rethinking SUNY II,” although we are not certain in what 
direction that is proceeding, we see looking back at “Rethinking SUNY I,” the 
establishing of a kind of hierarchy of the university centers and the 
comprehensive and community colleges. We see a potential in “Rethinking SUNY 
II,” for restructuring the system. We wonder about what will become of the role 
of the comprehensive colleges if that occurs. Our vision could be one of a 
changing structure in the SUNY system and the changing role and quality of the 
comprehensive colleges. We are concerned about that. The comprehensive colleges 
are going to have to engage in an appropriate strategic planning to deal with 
these kinds of changes to maintain as much quality as we can. We kind of shudder 
at potential visions.
	In conclusion, we would like to ask the Chancellor his vision for the 
comprehensive colleges given these issues.

Chancellor King: Let me start with your last question. My personal view of our 
comprehensive colleges is that I truly love each and every one of them. I think 
that the role that they play is at the core of the strength of this university. 
We are working very hard to grow the distinctive qualities of each of them. I 
think that one of the great strengths of this university is being able to say 
that whatever you want to study, we have a place for you. Whether the place is 
small or large, rural or urban, it is that diversity of places, sizes and 
program offerings that is at the core of what makes this university so great. I 
don’t see any reason to fear that the role of the comprehensive colleges is 
going to be diminished. If anything I think that they will be expanded. It 
doesn’t mean more campuses but it doesn’t mean less either. In terms of program 
offerings, they will be as diverse as the demand of our student body.
	Back to the larger funding issues. You raised a couple of questions 
pertaining to community colleges and the risk that the differential between 
whatever the new baccalaureate tuition is and the community colleges will drive 
more students to the latter. Make no mistake about this: everybody is going to 
be hurt in this budget. Community colleges are going to be at risk both at the 
state level and at the county level because the state budget is a very important 
element of county budgets. The counties really are the service delivery arm of 
the State government. As the cuts in the State budget ripple down through the 
rest of the governmental structure in our state, the counties are going to be 
impacted like everyone else. The fear that we have is that the community 
colleges are going to get caught between both of these principal sources of 
their funding. There is no question that it will have an impact on community 
college tuition. I don’t know what they are going to be and in our system the 
tuitions at the community colleges are determined at the local level. We don’t 
set them at the State level. I don’t think that there will be as great of a 
differential as it may appear now. I think that the community colleges are 
undoubtedly going to have to respond in some way and some of that will probably 
have to involve tuition.
	The other thing that you raised is the notion that there is a movement 
around the country for community colleges to become baccalaureate campuses. I 
have resisted that and think that it is the wrong thing to do. I think that it 
is important that community colleges remain so in the traditional sense. What we 
have permitted is for baccalaureate program, and sometimes degrees, to be 
offered at a community college but it is actually being offered by whichever of 
our baccalaureate campuses participates in partnership with that community 
college. I think there are legitimate reasons to do that in some instances and I 
have no problem with that. I would resist this movement because I don’t think 
that it is in our better interest.
	In terms of rational tuition policy, I think that there is broad agreement 
that this University needs one. This practice, now several decades old, of flat 
tuition for an extended period of time and then a big bump and then flat again 
is not the way to do it. I think that you will see at the end of the process 
that regardless of what this increment is going to be, that thereafter this 
board will adopt a policy of index tuition. Remember that tuition is considered 
revenue of the State as needed to be appropriated in the State budget. So we are 
always going to be captive to that process but I think that the legislatures 
themselves would very much like to get out of the business of being perceived as 
coming under the pressure of approving or disapproving tuition. By indexing it, 
it comes an automatic amount. The appropriation would change from year to year 
by whatever the index is and I think that it would be a much better way for our 
students and their families to proceed.
	In terms of assessment, I know that you have talked about that earlier. A 
few weeks ago I said to Joe and Bob Axelrod that if you have a Board of Trustees 
on one hand saying that they want assessment on general education outcomes and 
on the other hand the faculty refusing, you have a polarity of views. Between t 
hose two positions it seems to me if we understand what our respective real 
interests are, we might be able to find some rational compromise in between. I 
would just encourage us to keep talking about it. If people come to this with a 
point of view that they are willing to compromise, that would be both productive 
and avoid the consequence of these hard positions.
	Last, with “Rethinking SUNY II,” I think that what the Board is really 
trying to do is do their own assessment of what really came out of “Rethinking 
SUNY I.” Did it have the intended consequences? Have the things that were 
recommended been implemented? They are not looking for any major restructuring 
of the University or of reclassifying sectors. This won’t be as comprehensive an 
effort as the first one.

Joe Hildreth: I’d like to move on to the Technology sector.

Jeff: I would like to begin by expressing our gratitude to System Administration 
for acknowledging some of the special needs that the technology colleges have. 
Chancellor King began by saying that money can’t buy us happiness. At Alfred we 
have discovered that the lack of money can’t buy you happiness either. We have a 
number of special problems that are created by our unique circumstance.
	We are all in the phase of beginning to develop four-year programs at the 
colleges of Technology. We are in favor of continuing the two-year missions at 
our schools particularly because three of the colleges of Technology are de 
facto community colleges in rather remote areas. We have a great deal of concern 
for the types of students that we have that differ somewhat from some of the 
larger campuses in larger urban areas. We have a number of place bound students 
and some academically marginal students that we try to nurture through the 
programs. We still have a great deal of concern for those but I think the 
colleges of Technology are beginning to see that the future really lies in 
beginning to grow and reinvent our own missions without sacrificing our original 
two-year mission. I do appreciate that we are given a preferential treatment in 
the percentages of growth.
	The problems we’ve found in the process of moving from two to four-year 
programs are sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious, but they affect us in many 
ways. The development of new programs is causing us all to have to find new 
faculty. 
We have difficulty enticing quality educators to come in for four-year programs 
or in administration at our remote campuses. I’m hopeful that the Provost’s 
advisory task force for professional development will help address this problem 
of new faculty. Transferability of courses was mentioned as an ongoing problem 
and hopefully the University Senate committee on the transfer process will begin 
to work some of those problems out.
	The only other thing has to do with a thin State budget but all of the 
colleges of Technology were developed in approximately the same time period and 
are all undergoing the same stress of infrastructure decay. If you have traveled 
to any of the campuses you can see that there is a need to begin bumping funds 
back into the system to develop our infrastructure.

Chancellor King: There seem to be two points that you made that call for some 
response. The first is that I am reminded that as remote as some of our campus 
locations are, it’s not likely that we will move them. I have attended a number 
of these national conferences and there are people from parts of Idaho, Utah, 
and Montana that would think that Alfred is a bustling major metropolis.
	We are not insensitive to the needs of compensation and making sure that 
those levels are comparable to our peers around the country. It seems like we 
are chronically a step or two behind, but we are working very hard to try to 
address that. Some of that is a function of labor contracts which we don’t 
negotiate. Those negotiations get informed by what we know are national 
standards. The other thing was transferability of credits and those issues. I 
think that there has been a fair amount of progress on that issue and if the 
Technology campuses haven’t been included in the discussion you should be.

Joe Hildreth: Specialized colleges?

Karen: This sector is a peculiar sector. It’s made up of truly one-of-a-kind 
colleges but we do have concerns in common. Much of the time was spent 
discussing the relationship of SUNY campuses to the private colleges and in some 
instances there is a really chilly climate. It seems very dependent on the 
personalities of the administrators at the private colleges. There is a general 
feeling that SUNY leadership can be more assertive and that the role of the 
public colleges is not sufficiently acknowledged and there are real ethical 
concerns about that because public funds are involved. While everyone agreed 
that the public-private connections are extremely valuable, there is a general 
feeling that SUNY can do more and that the real accomplishments of the public 
sector is just not sufficiently acknowledged.
	Another concern was the implications of replacing full-time retirees with 
adjuncts and the implications for students who have difficulty finding adjuncts 
for out-of-class meetings and implications for carrying on the work of a college 
outside of the classroom with a shrinking number of full-time faculties. We 
certainly understand the fiscal necessity sometimes but there are real costs in 
continuing to do this.
       There are concerns about growing class sizes. Many of the specialized 
colleges pride themselves on having small classes and advertise that fact. There 
were comments about some administrative searches, including those for computer 
service personnel and there is a feeling that some of these searches are rather 
weak and that there are real worries about leadership and some of our campuses. 
There were also some comments about stalled capital construction project at some 
of the colleges.
       Finally, some good news. There is a former concern that is no longer a 
concern. That is the proposed Alfred State and University merger. There is also 
good news on the transfer front. There was a general feeling that transfer 
students are moving into the four-year colleges more easily and in greater 
numbers.
       
Chancellor King: The relationship between SUNY and our private partners is 
variable. We have two principal private partners and half of a third one. Alfred 
University, the private university, is home to two of our statutory colleges in 
fine arts and ceramic engineering that are physically on their side of the 
street. Our technology college across the street is Alfred State. The 
relationship between the administrators at Alfred University and the State 
University is quite positive…

…Our other major private partner is Cornell University which is the home to four 
of our statutory colleges.
	We have been working very hard in trying to build a stronger 
administrative relationship between our efforts and Cornell. There is no 
question that Cornell is a very different place and is happy to take our 
dollars. They seem less happy to take our advice. But we’re working on trying to 
improve that relationship.
	The kind of half partnership that I alluded to is at Syracuse where our 
students at Environmental Science and Forestry are able to take classes at 
Syracuse University. The school is physically on the Syracuse campus and I think 
that the relationship there is pretty good, despite the financial stresses from 
time to time in terms of what we get charged for our students taking those 
courses.
	I would add that as much as we may be distressed that our private partners 
don’t always want to acknowledge their relationship with SUNY, there are some of 
our own campuses that don’t. Before we turn our sights outward, we might was to 
consider turning them inward.
	In terms of searches for administrative staff, I think that those tend to 
run in cycles. Sometimes there are pools of very talented people who are out in 
the job market at a particular time and other times you just can’t find the 
right person. Patience is worth utilizing. One of the things that we have been 
committed to and is in the larger strategic plan that we have been working on is 
building our own in-house capacity to grow campus leaders. I am hopeful that we 
will get better at growing our own so that when these positions become available 
we will have successfully identified people and have a pretty good stable of 
folks from which to choose.
	Last, on construction projects…we are fairly close to selecting a new 
permanent leader for this construction fund.  I hope that we will be able to 
make an announcement within the next couple of weeks. Our focus has been to 
make, even across the experience ranges of our campuses, the relationship with 
the construction fund. In my view, the biggest problem is that it is very 
uneven. Some campuses have great experiences and other have terrible ones. We 
need to even it out on the positive side. This notion of customer service is 
very important and it is that watchword that we are using to evaluate candidates 
for that post.

Joe Hildreth: Health Science Center?

Peter: We discussed a number of issues, some of which were presented last time 
at our last meeting. The Health Sciences has a number of different professional 
which can interact with the students at the different campuses. We tried to do 
that at the different campuses but there aren’t any students. They are coming 
back tomorrow.
	We also mentioned last time that we don’t’ yet have representative from 
the Brooklyn Heath Science center. We’re asking if there is any progress in that 
area. 
	Concerns have been expressed by the medical students on the increase in 
tuition. Remember that they have had a regular increase the last couple of 
years. We mention that the market for health care professionals still remains 
strong.
	We also had several questions. What will the anticipated state increases 
in tuition and fees have on our potential applicant pool for SUNY. We are also 
concerned about the federal legislation that Senator talked about. What is SUNY 
as a system for bio-terrorism, disaster, response and military preparedness? The 
Provost answered some of those questions to some exte