University Faculty Senate			
Winter Plenary Transcript
SUNY Oneonta
January 29-31, 2004


President Hildreth convened the plenary at 9:05 am. 

(Roll call)

Joe Hildreth: For the past fifteen years Alan Donovan has been president of SUNY 
Oneonta. In that time enrollment at SUNY Oneonta has increased and admission 
selectivity has increased. Campus development giving has increased, which has 
used the creation of a new field house, an arena, and there have also been 
renovations to Human Ecology and all of the residence halls. Construction is 
almost complete on a new residence hall and I believe that it is scheduled to 
open in the fall of 2004.
	Two years ago SUNY Oneonta received accreditation for their education 
program and there have been extremes improvements that have been reported to me 
by virtually everyone in terms of the appearance of the campus. President 
Donovan has led SUNY Oneonta into the twenty-first century. So far our 
accommodations could not have been better. It is my pleasure to introduce the 
president of SUNY Oneonta, Alan Donovan.

Alan Donovan: Thank you very much. It’s my pleasure to welcome you to our 
campus. The last time I welcomed you was about eight years ago and it’s a 
delight to have you back again.
	Who was it that said, “May we live in interesting times”? This is a safe 
prediction because all times are interesting but these are especially 
challenging times for American higher education and more particularly, public 
higher education. In my fifteen years as President here I’ve seen changes in a 
number of different areas. Student behavior and expectations, restrictions in 
funding, enhanced emphasis on diversity and access, the number of new faculty, 
technology, and of course a focus on accountability and outcomes assessment.
        With all of these changes, however, some matters remain constant. I’m 
referring to the importance of faculty governance. I am very proud of the 
history of faculty governance at Oneonta. Our college senate, which meets on a 
regular basis, has a long and proud history of rigorous discussion on many 
issues, attention to detail, and maintenance of our standards of collegiality. 
I’m sure that the same is true of you as members of our University Faculty 
Senate. 
	As we talk about governance, change, and higher education, I would like to 
refer to a passage that always prompts consideration and discussion. It was 
written by Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who taught at the Harvard 
Law School for twenty-five years. This statement is about the principles of 
university life with a simple CASINS for governance needs the same careful 
reflection now as it did in 1957 when he made it.

“It is the business of the University to provide that atmosphere which is most 
conducive to speculation, experiment, and creation. It is an atmosphere in which 
there prevail the four essential freedoms of a university. To determine for 
itself on academic grounds, who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be 
taught, and who may be admitted to study.”

        In light of what Justice Frankfurter tells us our deliberations and your 
deliberations here take on an extraordinary meaning. I know that you realize 
this and that is why you are here and why each and every one of you makes such a 
commitment of energy and time to the task of vital system governance.
        Again, my salutations that you have joined our community. We hope that 
you have good work as you do this session. We are delighted to serve as your 
host. Thank you very much and welcome.

Joe Hildreth: I want to thank President Donovan again for hosting us. It is now 
my pleasure to introduce our host senator, Achim Koeddermann.

Achim Koeddermann: I love this community. I came here about ten years ago and I 
loved it but I like it better now. A new wind of change has come through here as 
the campus feels invigoration by new faculty and both the engagement of the 
faculty and the students have gone up since I arrived here.
	There are a couple of things that we do not have here. We do not have the 
best weathers and we do not have the best relationship with the new assessment 
process. Our current campus atmosphere is a little overshadowed by a frosty bite 
of yet more assessment. You just have to ask faculty members or students on the 
street and I beg you to ask them what they think about more assessment.	There is 
a new spirit which tries to get people in a convivial atmosphere and we felt 
that the new assessment initiative was not fostering such an atmosphere.
	However you are on a very convivial ground here. I am happy to chair a 
committee which is called the Convivial Committee here and this committee 
invites people from all parts of the campus to speak to each other. The campus 
is small enough that everybody knows everybody. It is big enough that you could 
avoid each other if you wanted, but I am happy to tell you that every few people 
do.
	The downtown area is beautiful and I hope that you will explore some of 
it. We have a town in which the mayor is a faculty member. We also have a very 
nice environment. You might find it freezing but if you find that it’s too 
chilly, go to our college cap. You will find that you can get very lost.
	A couple of new programs are the music industry majors, computer art, and 
the list will be long and exhaustive. If you want to engage teachers, that is 
probably the place to see them before they enter their career. You could also 
observe the opposite: the study of colder areas. Fitting to the temperatures 
here, we have a couple of the more foremost glacial specialists on campus.
	I had the pleasure to sit next to the president that gave us this warm 
welcome and it was coming from his heart. We can speak to the president on this 
campus and when the president shares the newspaper with a faculty member in the 
morning you know you are at the right place. We traveled together through India, 
we have a couple of programs that do outreach to the community, we have a very 
active program which gets out students involved in programs which include 
building villages and schools in India.
	Thank you very much for coming and I wish you a happy time here.

Joe Hildreth: Thank you, Achim.
	In terms of my President’s report, I’m going to give you a short synopsis 
of some of the issues that I feel we need to be focusing on.
	On January 20th Governor Pataki presented his budget for the new year and 
SUNY did fairly well compared to other state agencies. Most of the other 
agencies received a 5-10% cut as they did last year but SUNY’s year-to-year 
budget was actually up six million dollars. While we would like to be up more, 
we came out alright.
	Last year, SUNY’s portion of the capital plan (used for construction and 
maintenance of the academic buildings) was not released by the legislature. The 
problem this year has been taken care of because SUNY has agreed to specify the 
dollar value of each project per campus. As a result, the system expects the 
full $1.8 billion, which is actually $300,000 more than last year to be 
released.
	Governor Pataki has established a $350 million additional fund for capital 
construction. For this money SUNY must compete with the private colleges of New 
York State. The fund will be administered by a board that is composed of four 
appointments by the legislature and three by the Governor. Applications for this 
money will require a 3-1 campus match. Neither SUNY nor the privates will be 
able to receive more than two-thirds of the total fund.	
	Nothing has been decided about tuition but there has been some discussion 
in which Chancellor King has composed a small yearly tuition increase. It is 
thought that this would be linked to the percentage of increase in the higher 
education price index. Based on past increases, this would probably amount to 
$150-200 per year. This proposal could only happen if the State would agree to 
maintain State support at its current level and agree to fund negotiated 
collective bargaining increases. This proposal is very similar to our University 
Faculty Senate report on funding SUNY which we discussed last year.
	You recall that this year the SUNY allocation formula, the BAP, didn’t 
work as well as people had hoped. We ended up having many campuses have 
increases, some as high as 10%, while other campuses received decreases. The 
decision was made to take money away from the campuses receiving increases and 
give it to campuses that would have received decreases had the formula run 
intact. As a result there has been a lot of discussion about a need for a new 
funding formula. I have indicted that the Senate wants to be involved and the 
Chancellor has assured me that we will be, as soon as the committee is formally 
charged.
	Assessment is also an item to discuss today. We have reserved time later 
to discuss this. Campus-based assessment is being administers by the GEAR group 
and of the fifty-seven campuses, all but two have had their plans approved and 
are in various stages of implementation. This is, by all accounts, a big 
success. The phase of assessment that we will be discussing this afternoon is 
designed for accountability. The first phase, which is campus-based, is really 
designed for improvement of teaching. 
	We have a memorandum on the College of Nanotechnology. That was discussed 
at the Board of Trustee’s meeting this part Tuesday. I know that there is a 
desire to develop a College of Nanotechnology and some of the reasons for that 
are included in that memorandum.
	On the Levin Institute, I want to thank Achim and Karl for representing 
the Senate on the Curriculum Committee. As a result, I met with President 
Garrick Utley last week in order to discuss the current situation because I know 
that many of you have questions. We tried to discuss the mission, the funding, 
the faculty, and goals for the institute. He told me the Levin intends to focus 
on graduate education and that they are interested in international relations 
and commerce. They feel that their location in New York is an asset because they 
can draw upon the expertise of people that will be available to them in the 
city. They plan to utilize faculty from the other institutions and grant credit 
and degrees through them.  A lot of the details have yet to be determined but he 
is eager to work with us. I went ahead and invited him to come address us at our 
spring plenary meeting in April. We are going to be putting together a group to 
try to develop some concerns and topics that we feel faculty may want to 
discuss. 
        At the present time, the Levin Institute does not have any faculty of 
its own so we wanted to try to be a part of that development. I told President 
Utley that he would find faculty involvement to always make for better 
decisions. He mentioned that there is a search underway for a vice-president or 
provost. I told him that he should have faculty on that and he agreed and has 
extended an offer to the Faculty Senate to nominate a faculty member to serve on 
that search committee. I am looking for someone who would be working in the 
proximity of New York City and who has a background in international relations 
and marketing and has experience with faculty governance. The person with that 
background would be the person that I would like to nominate for the committee.
        Let’s move on to teacher education. A couple years ago new vision in 
teacher education was passed. That is now pretty much implemented. The new 
vision called for increases in the number of hours of pre-student teaching 
experience and student teaching, increases in full-time faculty, and encouraged 
NCATE accreditation. One of the aspects was to improve transfer and as a part of 
that there was a teacher education template that was developed. I have been 
informed that Herkimer and Monroe Community College have both had their programs 
approved for this template. This means that the first two years of students’ 
education can occur at these colleges and that there should be a seamless 
transfer for the designated courses without any problems. They are working on 
having more programs at their community colleges approved for this template. 
        In addition, SUNY is developing an experimental website which will align 
the two-year college courses with appropriate four-year courses. It is basically 
an online articulation agreement. I have been informed that State Ed intends to 
use this to register the two-year programs.
        There are some concerns about this. One large concern is that the cost 
of implementation of new vision has been quite high for colleges and that there 
needs to be some relief. We’re going to be working with a committee of education 
deans to see what we can do to provide support for that cost. There are also 
some concerns that with the increased number of two-year colleges that will be 
approved for the template there will be growth for which there is no room in the 
upper-division colleges. So there are still some wrinkles to work out but the 
implementation is continuing.
        I want to speak briefly about the Board of Trustees meeting in Stony 
Brook in January. When we originally received our invitation for the faculty to 
develop a proposal on assessment, we were given January 27th as a deadline 
because he was supposed to report back to the Board then. Both Kimberly and I 
were there ready to answer questions when that report happened but it didn’t 
happen. The meeting was mostly focused on a report by Admiral Crane on his 
efficiency study of system administration. The report was very positive and 
there were two recommendations for improvement. Two come to mind: out-of-state 
enrollment for SUNY be increased and trying to shorten the times of graduation. 
Millions of dollars could be saved in financial aid through students that 
graduate in six years but are able to graduate in four years.
        Briefly, about the faculty development task force. Kimberly Reiser, 
myself and now Ann Huot are co-chairs of this. We have passed out surveys to 
campuses asking questions about campus practices in various areas of faculty 
development. That was returned and the report has been written. We felt that we 
wanted to have more return than we received on the first time around. A second 
survey has been developed and sent to your campuses. They are going to be due 
back this spring and we’ll try to incorporate that data into the report and 
issue the report which will be a series or recommendations, not directives, 
highlighting what we consider to be best practices in various areas of faculty 
development. 
        Everyone that has worked on this task force feels that this was a good 
project and that there is a need for it. Not all of us have been doing things as 
well as we should and it would be nice to spread good examples across the system 
and encourage everyone to raise their standards.
        One of the things that I feel best about is the art exhibit that we 
organized. At this time we have organized, mounted, and hosted for SUNY-wide art 
exhibitions. We use the downstairs hallway in System Administration which is a 
beautiful space for this. We can display as many as eighty-seven works which is 
the number that we displayed last fall. We were able to have eighteen campuses 
across the system send in student work. We have produced some brochures on the 
handout table and I have received very good feedback from the students, our 
department faculty and from people who have entered the building.
        In addition to that we have been organizing faculty exhibitions which 
are in the gallery space downstairs. We have presented six faculty exhibitions. 
Currently, our colleagues from SUNY Plattsburgh have their work on display and I 
hope you’ll stop by and take a look at that.
        We are in the discussion phase of trying to expand our involvement in 
this area. We are thinking about having the work that we document for these 
brochures displayed on the SUNY website along with credit to the campus that the 
work comes from. This would more prominently feature the art of the system and 
give more exposure to our student artists who have been nice enough to support 
us in this. We are also in the discussion phase of including music and we would 
like to move into other areas of the performing arts when we have time.
	That concludes my report. Any questions?

David Carson (Buffalo State): Were the surveys on faculty development sent to 
the Provost or the campuses or the campus governance leaders…?

Kimberly Reiser: I believe Ann has sent them to the task force and is waiting 
for comments before they are distributed.

Joe Hildreth: So they haven’t been distributed yet. I stand corrected. I believe 
they will be sent to the Provost and the campus governance leader. Other 
questions? Thank you very much.
	We had an Executive meeting that started at two o’clock yesterday 
afternoon and ended shortly after 9pm. I want to see how our vice-president is 
going to be able to summarize that.

Jim McElwaine: Good morning. Since October we have met three times with the 
Executive Committee: November 14th with our colleagues from the Faculty Council 
of Community Colleges at SUNY Plaza; December 5th with our colleagues from the 
City University of New York Executive Committee; and last night, January 29th. 
With the FCC we began collaborative formulization of initial campus-based 
assessment. With CUNY one of our major discussions was standardized testing as 
well as the fact that SUNY needed to change its line-item approach to capital 
facilities and construction funds; both of which have happened quite 
wonderfully.
	Last night we had an extended meeting which talked about all the things 
that Joe just mentioned to you.  At the end of the meeting we received reports 
from the seven committees and several action items will be forthcoming to you as 
well as an Executive Committee recommended motion which we will submit for 
plenary vote governing assessment. That motion will be distributed to you later 
today.
	We received reports from the awards, governance, graduate, ops, public 
information, student life and the undergraduate committees. There will be an 
action item forthcoming from the awards committee. The governance committee has 
two action items prepared for your action as well: one on resources for campus 
governance and another for the inclusion of campus governance and the 
development of campus policies. With the awards committee we will have two 
action items concerning the University Faculty Senate award and how it is 
conferred as well as a discussion of the use of distinguished professorships. 
The graduate committee notified us of an upcoming research conference on April 
2nd-3rd. The operation committee presented us with a rough version of the budget 
handbook for all of the faculty. The public information committee…our new UFS 
site is up in beta format and there will be a working URL announced shortly. The 
student life committee is studying four concepts and will report to us briefly 
on Saturday the concept of Greeks in SUNY, looking at SUNY as a global 
university, and the upcoming survey on student engagement and its inclusion in 
our daily lives. The undergraduate committee will be looking at five topics for 
us. They have announced a spring plenary discussion panel on plagiarism and 
ethics as well as topics of discussion for transferability, retention, the SUNY 
learning network, and internships across the university…
	…Questions?

Joe Hildreth: Our next speaker is going to be Marty Ellerman. She is a senior 
staff member of SUNY legal. She supervises the legal staff that is working with 
our campuses. She’s been with Systems since 1980, I believe. She is going to be 
talking with us about some top legal issues for the SUNY system.
	Let’s welcome Marty Ellerman.

Marti Ellerman: I have developed a top ten list of legal issues that I think are 
important to the lives and work of faculty. It’s my list; people might disagree 
with me. In any event, everybody does love top ten lists. I’m going to go 
through the list and highlight what the issues are, perhaps some recent 
significant cases or legislative mandates that have come down and explain why I 
think that they issues are going to require some attention in the coming years. 
You’ll be glad to know that I’m not going to go into a detailed legal analysis 
of each of these issues, but if you are interested in these topics and want more 
information, I would be glad to answer any questions or talk to you afterwards.
	The first topic on my list is affirmative action because, as everyone here 
probably knows, the Supreme Court issued its rulings in the Gratz and Grutter 
versus the University of Michigan cases this June. At that point this was a red-
hot legal topic. Every college and university in the country, particularly the 
publics, has been waiting for this decision. What they did when it came down was 
to start a process of reviewing their own admissions, recruitment, and financial 
aid programs in light of the rulings. This slide summarizes the key rulings of 
that case. The first one is probably the most important because the Court found 
that there was a compelling government interest which they were required to find 
in order to uphold any kind of affirmative action program in the educational 
benefits of diversity. Because of that, Michigan could justify consideration of 
race in its admissions decisions. If you recall, they struck down what the 
undergraduate college was doing because it was too formulaic and had an 
automatic award of points for race. But they upheld what the law school was 
doing because they did what the second bullet summarizes: there was an 
individualized holistic student evaluation process. That has kind of become the 
buzzword now in affirmative action. We have learned something from these cases 
but there is still a lot of uncertainty. There are still potential plaintiffs 
our there who are still waiting to test the limits of the case. 
	In last Friday’s Chronicle of Higher Education, it was reported that half 
a dozen complaints have been filed with the U.S. Department’s Office for Civil 
Rights challenging some specific minority scholarship programs and other kinds 
of recruitment programs. As these get decided we will learn at least a little 
bit more about what the federal government think the Supreme Court’s cases 
means.
	At SUNY, the decisions are helpful but will probably have less of a direct 
impact than at some of the other institutions. However, we are doing some things 
and we are also going to put together a university-wide group to look at the 
eligibility criteria for some of our minority scholarship programs and take a 
look at trying to broaden some of those criteria. One lesson that comes from the 
Michigan decisions is the importance of defining diversity broadly and giving 
consideration to a variety of diversity characteristics. As we develop programs 
that serve the University’s compelling interest in the educational benefits of 
diversity.
	What is the role of the faculty in this? It’s significant. In deciding 
that pursuing affirmative action programs could be a compelling government 
interest, the Supreme Court gave considerable deference to the educational 
judgments of academics at the University of Michigan and that there were, in 
fact, benefits to the academic community from diversity. As universities began 
their review process at their own specific programs, they’ll have to demonstrate 
the same kind of educational benefits that flow from the programs. They can only 
do this by involving faculty in the review of your programs and consideration in 
the development of any new programs. This reflects some of the examples of other 
kinds of diversity factors that could be considered in an individualized review 
process.
	Topic two is sexual harassment. This has been a hot topic since at least 
the 1980s and in 1998 it took on some new urgency because the Supreme Court 
issued two decisions on the same day that created what lawyers call the 
affirmative defense to allegations of sexual harassment for employers. As a 
university we are an employer and we are interested in any kind of defenses we 
can use to allegations of sexual harassment.
	To take advantage of this affirmative defense to liability, a lawyer must 
prove that they exercised reasonable care to prevent and correct any harassment 
and that the employee unreasonably failed to take advantage of any preventive or 
corrective opportunities provided. There is no defense if there is a direct 
employment consequence from a supervisor’s sexual harassment of an underling, 
like if a job or a promotion is not given as some sort of a direct consequence. 
This only works in the hostile environment type of cases. There is basically no 
defense in those cases. The defense of having a procedure in place that allows 
an employer to find out about allegations of sexual harassment, and being able 
to prove that the employee didn’t take advantage of it, is a very important part 
of the University’s anti-sexual harassment defense in any kind of case.
	The defense is also important in cases involving students that claim there 
is a sexually hostile environment. In order to be liable, the educational 
institute must have actual knowledge of the harassment and failed to take any 
remedial action. In other words, they must show deliberate indifference to the 
harassment. If the institution obtains knowledge it must act promptly to correct 
the situation and prevent it from recurring.
	How do we do that? What happens when a faculty member gets a sexual 
harassment complaint or becomes aware of a sexual harassment allegation? We must 
not ignore it. We must take some appropriate action and these are some of the 
steps that I think would do us well in establishing that we had not ignored 
these kinds of complaints but had acted appropriately. One of the things people 
are always concerned about is promising confidentiality. A student might come up 
to them and say that they want to tell them about this incident but doesn’t want 
them to tell anyone else. The problem with that is that if there is some level 
of knowledge within the University, there has to be a reporting up the chain of 
command, preferably to an affirmative action officer who is the best person able 
to take appropriate action through our internal grievance procedure. It is 
almost impossible to provide a promise of total confidentiality. I would 
discourage people, particularly anyone in a management position, from doing 
that. They must be realistic and tell students that there is an obligation to go 
forth and make the University aware of these kinds of allegations.
	Another tricky situation is when a person comes in and says that they want 
to tell you about this but I don’t want to write anything down. Again, there is 
an obligation to go forward, act appropriately, and do the best that we can to 
look into these kinds of complaints, whether they’re done verbally or in 
writing.
	The last point is to avoid retaliation. From the perspective of a lawyer, 
it is always easier to prove retaliation than it is the underlying charge of 
sexual harassment or discrimination. It is very important that all of those 
people in a position of authority or a position to affect the employment or 
educational experience of that student to avoid any kind of action that would 
look retaliatory.
	A new development in this area is a very recent and well-written decision 
just issued by the United State Court of Appeal for the second circuit. In a 
SUNY New Paltz case called Hyatt vs. SUNY. This is a case of the professor who 
referred in class to his student because of a physical resemblance to Monica 
Lewinsky, even going so far one day as to admonish her to, “Be quiet, Monica, 
I’ll give you a cigar later.” The Court found that a jury could conclude that 
the course of conduct by the professor constituted sexual harassment. It wasn’t 
just once; it was repeated throughout the course of the semester. The Court said 
that it was sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the 
victim’s educational environment and transcended the bounds of propriety and 
decency.
	The good news for SUNY was that SUNY itself was not found liable by virtue 
of its employment of Professor Young alone. The Court, in fact, found that the 
campus officials, who were involved, including a department chair, dean, and 
others, responded to the students’ complaint reasonably and in a timely manner 
in accordance with appropriate procedures. That is what I might when I said to 
be sure that appropriate action is taken. The significant part of the case was 
that the court went on to find that the professor himself could be found 
personally liable for the sexual harassment. The case is now going to go to 
trial on the issue of what it was that the professor did and to determine if his 
actions did create a hostile environment.
	There is an interesting discussion in the case about the possible 
explanations that this professor might offer as to why he said these things to 
the student. The court said, “Professor Young articulates no defenses for his 
conduct and specifically has never expressly asserted that the comments 
complimented his classroom curriculum or had any other legitimate pedagogical 
purpose that might merit the kind of first amendment protection which has long 
been recognized in the academic arena.”
	A key question that is going to come up when this case goes to trial is 
whether New York State will indemnify this faculty member for any damages to 
Miss Hyatt if he is found to have sexually harassed her. Under the public 
officers’ law, the state will indemnify its employees if they are personally 
sued for acts “within the scope of their employment.” This is an unanswered 
question now. The attorney general will make the final decision. I can say with 
some measure of reassurance that in the twenty-some years that I have been at 
SUNY, there has never been a case, that I have been aware of, where the attorney 
general has said, “No, you are not entitled to indemnification.” I don’t want to 
scare people too much, but I think that this is a case worthy of watching.
	This is a nice segue into my third hot topic, which is academic freedom. I 
frequently preface my remarks on academic freedom by saying that faculty are 
often unpleasantly surprised when they learn that the courts have definitely put 
some limits on
the rights of faculty to express themselves freely. The Hyatt case is definitely 
an example of one of those limits on the area of classroom speech. In order to 
avail oneself of the academic freedom of the first amendment and protection in 
the classroom, a faculty member’s speech must be germane to the classroom 
subject and have a legitimate pedagogical purpose. For example: swearing at your 
students or calling athletes on your team (if you are a coach) by a racial 
epithet. These are not protected. On the other hand, using sexual examples in a 
writing class may well be. Or racial terminology in a class on the power and 
uses of language. These are the cases of Professor Sylva at the University of 
New Hampshire who won his academic freedom challenge to a sexual harassment to a 
sexual harassment complaint and Professor Hardy at Jefferson Community College 
(not SUNY’s Jefferson).
	Another important limit here is that the courts treat faculty of public 
higher education institutions as government employees. They apply a very 
standardized test for restricting the speech of government employees. First, is 
the speech relating to a matter of public concern? If it’s not, it’s not 
protected at all. Second, does the speech interfere with or disrupt university 
operations? If is does, the government can regulate it.
	The last area here is grading issues. Some faculty thin of this as a key 
and critical aspect of academic freedom. At this point in time, the courts are 
divided on it. The question I’m talking about is: Can a university tell a 
professor to change a student’s grade? There is a 1986 case from the University 
of Tennessee that said, “No, this is a matter of academic freedom.” This is 
probably a hollow victory because the court went on to say that the university 
itself had changed the grade. On the other hand, an April 2001 appellate case 
from another area said that the assignment of grades is subsumed under the 
university’s freedom to determine how a course is to be taught. It is the 
university’s freedom; not the professor’s. In that case, the university’s 
removal of the professor from teaching the course, because he refused to change 
a student’s grade, was held not to violate his first amendment rights.
	The only thing definitive thing I can say from the SUNY perspective is 
that if there is a due process proceeding that a student has been through and a 
conclusion has been reached, that a student does not deserve an assigned grade 
if, for example, because a professor’s allegation of cheating is not upheld. The 
university would step in to change a grade in those circumstances.
 	Topic four is the rights of disabled students. I wouldn’t have probably 
put this so high up on the list if it were not for some of the recent 
conversations that I have had with several administrators who are now in the 
classroom that tell me that this is an area of some real concern to faculty. 
According to one source I read recently, one in eleven students in today’s 
college campuses has a disability. SUNY is no difference.
	This slide reflects the laws on disability rights. These laws present some 
real challenges. What about the disruptive student in the classroom? We know 
that there is a real level of anxiety about those students who act out in the 
classroom. Can we just kick them out? What if they have a psychiatric 
disability? Can we tell them to get psychiatric treatment before they can come 
back to school after an incident? Some people think that that would actually 
violate the ADA to do that. What about accommodations for learning disabled 
students? There is an increasing number of learning disabled students on our 
campuses with histories of accommodations having been provided by their 
elementary and secondary schools.
	If we have notice of the student’s disability through appropriate 
documentation, we do have to provide appropriate and effective auxiliary aids 
like note-takers and readers. We also have to provide what is called reasonable 
accommodations. One thing I will point out here is that essential academic 
requirements do not have to be waived. If this issue comes up in a class that 
you are teaching, you have to be prepared to justify how a particular 
requirement is academically essential to the curriculum. For example, we did win 
a case of an Empire State college student with a mental disability who wanted an 
accommodation for what was called a residency requirement for his program. The 
accommodation he wanted was to attend that class over the telephone. The school 
said no, the physical residency attendance was critical to the academic program 
and the court agreed. It said that the attendance by telephone is not a 
reasonable accommodation. That is the kind of analysis that would be looked at 
on a case-by-case basis.
	Joe asked me about some of the requirements within the general education 
rubric. I am aware that some of those requirements have been waived for learning 
disabled students, for example foreign language requirements and sometimes a 
math requirement. But all of those cases are done after appropriate 
documentation is provided and a detailed medical evaluation is done to determine 
what kind of accommodation is necessary. 
	Next, privacy rights. This is definitely a growth area in the law. There 
has been a proliferation of laws passed on the federal level that are intended 
to make us all more secure that our confidential information is being protected. 
FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) we should all be aware of 
because that’s been around for a long time. That protects the confidentiality of 
students’ education records. More recently there was HIPAA and just when we 
thought that we had finished our review within the university of confidentiality 
procedures that was required by HIPAA along came a law called the GLBA (Graham-
Leech- Bliley Act). Did you know that, under that law, universities are 
considered financial institutions just like banks? This is because we give loans 
to students and get involved in areas like that. So we had to gear up again and 
make sure that each campus had a written information security plan that 
protected the confidentiality of so-called customer information, like credit 
card and social security numbers.
	To the extent that these laws raise sensitivity to confidentiality 
concerns and preventing identity theft, they are very helpful but they are 
rather confusing and hard to keep abreast of. Also, one questions their 
effectiveness on occasion. But there are some good instincts behind them. The 
state passed a law several years ago along these same lines that prohibits using 
social security numbers as student identifiers. This is somewhat along the same 
lines as the GLBA. Surprisingly, even though this law was passed a few years ago 
and we hope we communicated the information about it to the community, we still 
find that there are faculty members posting grades publicly using ID numbers or 
social security numbers. That should be a definite no-no.
	Security issues post 9-11. This is another growth area for university 
council and an area that can, and increasingly does, impinge on faculty 
activates. We are talking primarily about the U.S.A. Patriot Act and related 
statutes at the federal level. Some areas that we have had to follow closely are 
in the research area, like the control of so-called select agents. Those are 
highly toxic or dangerous biological agents. There have been increased 
procedures to register use of those and to control access to them, including 
what kind of foreign nationals can have access to those kinds of agents. Export 
control regulations actually have impact on us because they limit or require 
licenses for export of certain sensitive technologies which includes research 
findings. We now have electronic monitoring and tracking of foreign students and 
scholars through the SEVIS (Student Exchange Visitors Information System) 
program. We’ve had to develop protocols and responses for increased law 
reinforcement requests for information about students and others suspected of 
terrorism related activities.
	Faculty gets involved in some of these areas, particularly in their 
capacity as advisors to international students. We want all of the people who 
have the opportunity and obligation to work with international students to be 
aware of these requirements. They need to be brought to their attention 
regularly, looking down the road to when these students may be working, travel 
plans the students might have, the requirement that they need to maintain a full 
load and get advanced permission if they are going to go below a full load. All 
of these things have to be part of the knowledge base of faculty working with 
international students. Faculty might also conceivably get a request directly 
from law enforcement for student information so they should be aware of whatever 
campus protocols there are for releasing student information.
	Topic seven is computer use and intellectual property on the Internet. The 
legal issues coming out of our society’s increased use of computers are on the 
radar screen of anyone who reads the news media today. We’ve all read about the 
subpoenas and the lawsuits that the recording industry has been filing against 
students and others who download music. SUNY has not gotten any subpoenas or any 
lawsuits but we have gotten standard letters from the RIAA, the recording 
industry, putting us on notice of students who are downloading music and telling 
us to take appropriate action which I am able to tell you that all of the 
campuses are aware of their obligations and have been following through to the 
extent of having to impose discipline on students who willfully or repeatedly 
refuse to stop their infringing activities.
	Distance learning has created a whole raft of issues. Who owns the 
intellectual area, who owns the rights to course materials, what materials can 
be used? Another areas where computers seem to have created new issues is in 
plagiarism. The hot topic a couple of years ago was all of the plagiarism that 
seemed to be out there based on students using stuff they could get off of the 
internet. I now find that instructors are using their own software and their own 
Internet sites to identify plagiarized assignments. We have to keep one step 
ahead of the technology out there. Keeping abreast of this area requires keeping 
a very detailed knowledge of complex technical systems and terminology that not 
everyone has, including people in our office.
	I’m going to go quickly though topics eight, nine, and ten. Eight is 
conflict of interest. This is an area that bears a lot of watching, too. In our 
increasingly entrepreneurial university with its expanding economic development 
role, there seem to be more opportunities arising for potential conflicts 
between faculty’s personal financial interests and their responsibilities to the 
university. This is a national concern. The Feds are aware of it, several 
federal grants sponsoring agencies have issued regulations requiring applicants 
to do financial disclosure and for institutions to manage conflicts of interest. 
There are new proposals out there by the federal agencies on conflict avoidance. 
This was something that the New York State ethics commission picked up on 
recently when last year it decided to terminate SUNY’s special short form 
financial disclosure process for faculty. Some people have said that there is an 
inherent conflict in the state’s encouragement of entrepreneurialism in the 
academy on the one hand. It is an insistence that we adhere to strict conflict 
rules and procedures that are more suited to traditional state employees. So 
far, they have co-existed although there is talk about legislative relief on 
occasion. We do have to navigate these waters very carefully so as not to 
discourage creativity and incentives to new knowledge but also maintain the 
public trust. The decisions are made not for personal financial reasons.
	Topics nine and ten…I have no slides on them. I just threw them out to 
fill out to number ten. I’m going to wrap up with my very superficial 
speculations about what the future might hold. Legally, more statutes with long 
titles. I think that an increasing complexity has been observed in the legal 
environment. We have to go outside of our own offices more and more to retain 
legal specialists in some of these areas. At the same time, there is an 
increased complexity and increased risks of liability for the university. More 
and more policies and obligations are being placed on us.


Joe Hildreth: Given the increasingly complex nature of the environment in which 
we work, are there any plans for SUNY to publish a handbook or a guide for 
faculty so that we can we aware of what the proper action or course of conduct 
should be in our working environment?

Marti Ellerman: I think that you have identified an area where the university 
should get more involved. One step that is about to go public is that we’re 
developing a policy and procedure manual that will be put on the Web and that 
will be electronically accessible to all members of the university community and 
probably to the public as well. This will enable people to at least know what 
the policies are for various areas along with information about other resources 
and websites.

Joe Hildreth: I think that we ought to show our appreciation to Marty for 
addressing us. You should have our next document which is labeled “Mission 
Review 2.” Our next speaker has arrived and it is my pleasure to introduce her 
to you. Beth Bringsjord works in the Provost’s office and one of her 
responsibilities is mission review, which is getting ready to begin a new round.

Beth Bringsjord: Good morning. I want to share some background and context and 
talk about what we learned from the mission review surveys. I want to share with 
you some of the plans and priorities for this round of mission review. Most 
importantly, I want to highlight the important role that you all have as the 
role of the faculty in mission review.
	A lot of this is going to be territory that you know well. Mission Review 
was really born out of Rethinking SUNY. That is this Board of Trustees’ vision 
for the university and it still guides much of what we do throughout the 
university. We still see Mission Review as being the key vehicle for achieving 
the academic goals laid out in Rethinking SUNY. It is the core academic 
strategic planning process for the entire university. Mission Review represents 
the university’s most comprehensive planning initiative. It provides a coherent 
framework for system wide initiatives underway and it’s both complimentary and 
interpretive. We hope that it is consistent with what you are doing locally and 
it brings together planning initiatives across the university. We hope that this 
time through that that will be more the case. We are taking responses from the 
surveys that were distributed and from the meetings that were held and really 
trying to take in all of the input that we had. The biggest recommendations that 
we have had have really broadened Mission Review and looking at other areas that 
have a tremendous impact on academic outcome. In particular, that includes 
resource and facilities implications of academic plans. You’ll see that.
	 We think that Mission Review was a success for the most part. A lot of 
people said it was a tremendous success and I don’t think that’s too hyperbolic. 
We have sixty-one memorandums of understanding. These are concrete documents 
that are used all the time and are referred to. They draw a lot of attention 
across the state and even nationally. This is something that we can all be very 
proud of. As we start Mission Review 2, we want to really building on the 
successes that we have already achieved. We are already seeing tangible results 
from those plans that were executed as late as April of 2001. We are already 
seeing tangible evidence of gains that have been made. It’s not perfect and we 
want to strengthen the process.
	With this upcoming round of Mission Review, this is a particularly 
important juncture for the university because it was always conceived of as a 
cyclical ongoing process. The name Mission Review 2 is somewhat of a misnomer 
because it never stopped; it’s ongoing. We are now updating the plans. The first 
round ended with the memorandum of understanding that for the most part expires 
in December 2005. We have developed a process and a timeline that will conclude 
when the current MOUs expire. These documents frame a lot of the work that we do 
at System Administration and the work of our campus liaisons. That includes 
everything from presidential evaluations to campus visits as well as enrollment 
planning.
	We conducted a survey following the end of the first cycle of Mission 
Review. Surveys were sent out in the summer of 2001. We wanted to wait until the 
last one was signed and give campuses a moment to breathe and we wanted an 
evaluation. We sent out packets to the campus presidents and also asked them to 
distribute them to the folks that they felt were most appropriate. I think the 
next time we do this we’ll use a different methodology. We had about a thirty 
percent response rate which was somewhat disappointing, even with follow-up 
mailings. This time we’ll send them directly to the interlocutors, I think. We 
did get ninety-three percent of the campuses responding, fifty-seven out of 
sixty-one, thirty-two presidents and twenty-five chief academic officers. It’s 
also important that the people who responded had a lot of SUNY history. Eighteen 
percent of the responses were from faculty and I want to see that go up next 
time. Part of the reason I’m here is to work with you all in encouraging a 
higher level of involvement. We should have more input from faculty at the end 
of the next cycle of Mission Review.
	We were fairly successful in meeting our Mission Review goals. We 
generally had pretty low levels of disagreement. People either agreed or were 
neutral. There were some areas in which there were weaker levels of agreement, 
like encouraging intercampus collaboration, which is something that we’ve really 
struggled with. We’ve made some changes this time through hopefully to encourage 
that more than we did the first time. We are trying to focus our efforts on 
duplication of programs. In each of the areas in which we had somewhat negative 
feedback, we really looked at that very carefully and tried to strengthen the 
process. In terms of the mechanics of Mission Review, the feedback was generally 
very positive.
	The consensus was basically that this should be a five-year cyclical 
process and that’s what we’re going with at this point. We also asked whether 
Mission Review should be tied to Middle States accreditation or not. There are a 
lot of pros and cons to that. One of the best things about Mission Review is 
that at the end of the process we actually get a synoptic view of what is going 
on across the system. We can say things about sectors and regions and we would 
lose that if we were on a totally different schedule that tied each Mission 
Review effort for each campus to their middle state. Yet, there are aspects of 
it that are very relevant to Mission Review. We have tried to align some of our 
areas of inquiry with Middle States and there is nothing to prevent a campus 
from using the work that they’ve done for it to inform Mission Review and vice 
versa. I think that you’ll capitalize on the work that you’ve done in each area.
	There was an open topic item in which we asked what was incompletely 
addressed or not addressed at all in Mission Review. The first thing on the list 
was inadequate funding finances. A lot of concern that funding, finances, 
resources were not addressed sufficiently in the first cycle of Mission Review 
were open-ended items that campus respondents identified. With each of these we 
are looking to see how we can address these issues in a more effective way.
	Mission Review would have been more effective if more campus personnel 
were involved, especially faculty. We’re working on that. We also heard that 
each cycle should take no longer than a year. We definitely can’t do it in a 
year but we’re trying to get as close to that as possible. We heard that there 
needs to be better timing, as in not in the summer when most faculty aren’t 
around. What we have done in the scheduling is try to arrange the timeline so 
that the things that the campuses need to work hard on are done during the 
academic calendar. The things that are really the work of the system are done in 
the summers or when faculty is not on campus. We think that that is going to be 
an important thing this time around. During the first cycle, the document went 
out in April and the response was due back in September. We’re hoping for early 
February and not until the end of May, so they’ll have the full semester. I 
realize that that’s still a tough time frame but at least it’s the academic 
year.
	I think that most folks would agree that the documents that are generated 
become fairly significant and we’ll have all sorts of implications for policy 
development and resource allocation. When you look at the new template you’ll 
see much more attention to things like faculty development and faculty hiring 
priorities. I think you need to be part of the dialogue and I want to impress 
upon you the importance of getting your colleagues involved in those 
discussions. The other thing is that you serve as a communication conduit. This 
is an almost two-year long process. Things will emerge along the way and you’ll 
be meeting with Joe and your colleagues on campuses. You play a very important 
role in communication the issues that emerge during the process. I would be 
delighted to come back if that is something that you all want. You also play a 
key role in identifying system-wide issues that emerge because you have a 
system-wide perspective.
	And that’s about all I have. I think I have time to entertain a few 
questions.

Pete Knuepfer (Binghamton): One of the encouraging things about the first round 
of Mission Review is that there were opportunities associated with that for 
campuses to make arguments to System Administration for initiatives and support 
to start them, specifically financial report to start those initiatives. Is 
there going to be anything like that tied to Mission Review 2?

Beth Bringsjord: At this point we do not have a pool of funds that have been 
allocated for Mission Review funding. However, we are in the middle of a budget 
allocation redesign process and our chief financial officer is totally on board 
with this process and has seen the language on the important of aligning 
academic priorities with budget allocation. The means of the mechanism may be 
different this time but I am hoping that there will be funding to support the 
things that are important from an academic standpoint.

Joe Hildreth: Thank you very much.
	We will now break for our sector meetings and we’ll meet back here.

[Sector meetings]

Our sector reports are next on the agenda and I would like to start with the 
University Centers. 
	
Pete Knuepfer: There are two main topics that we wanted to pass along. First, 
the process of establishment of entities like the happening College of 
Nanotechnology either at Albany or the University of Albany. The concern there 
is twofold. The concerns are budgeting implantations and the turnaround of that 
budget, like overhead return. In a case like this, is the overhead return money 
going to be part of Albany or part of a totally independent college. That is 
unclear so that’s a concern because that obviously has budgetary concerns for 
what might have been or is the home campus.
	The other concern is the apparent lack of faculty oversight involved in 
establishing such a college and in overseeing at a university level. We bring 
this to everyone’s attention, largely because we now have what appear to be two 
precedents set. There may be more coming and these things seem to be done in the 
absence of faculty governance in essence. It’s a distressing kind of approach 
that is going on in the state and in SUNY, which goes far beyond the University 
Centers.
	The other discussion point had to do with presidential searches. One of 
the centers has just completed one and one of the centers is just completing 
one. In both cases, there have been a number of questions about the nature of 
the search process itself. I want to point out a couple of issues that we 
discussed. One is, in the case at Buffalo, there was no public disclosure of the 
final candidates that came to visit the university. It’s somewhat of a two-edged 
sword because it would appear that in cases public disclosure of a president or 
a potential president can have negative impacts on the person’s home campus. 
That has been linked, in some circles, to part of the reason that President 
Hitchcock resigned at Albany. She had been a finalist for a position elsewhere. 
It may be a reason why one would want, for the candidates’ purposes, to keep the 
lists of finalists private. That certainly goes against the grain of how higher 
education operates in this country and against anything having to do with shared 
governance. We see this as a very serious issue.
	In Albany, they are just starting the process of a new search and, in this 
case, there seem to be some issues related to how the faculty can choose members 
that will be on the search committee and at what point all faculty members on a 
campus have to be involved in a vote on who might represent the faculty. Is this 
something that is part of the Board of Trustees’ guidelines or something that 
could be as readily dispensed with as guidelines were in Buffalo? There is 
concern about what position the faculty will be able to have in presidential 
searches. It’s obvious enough to all of us that there is an increasing level of 
politicization of presidential searches in SUNY. As faculty we certainly need to 
try our best to try and maintain our position in shared governance. 
	We always talk about graduate funding and graduate stipends at SUNY have 
remained flat from the state level for a decade or nearly that. This year it was 
exacerbated by the fact that there was no coverage from System Administration 
for the increases in tuition costs that happened when graduate tuition went up 
extremely high this year. Campuses had to figure out on their own how to cover 
tuition scholarships, as that pool did not increase to match the increase in the 
costs of covering an individual student.
        The budget conditions in SUNY continue to be a concern. While the budget 
news that came through was certainly a lot more positive this year than it was 
last year, there doesn’t appear to be the kind of money necessary to even meet 
basic inflation increases that campuses have to face. The other concern is the 
availability of money across SUNY to support academic support services or 
instruction, specifically in terms of improving technology in the classroom. 
Monies are not being made widely available in terms of equipment and that 
includes instructional equipment.
        That ends our report.
Joe Hildreth: Let’s go now to the Comprehensive Colleges. Tim?

Tim Phillips (Cortland): There is a lot of emotion in our group about system-
wide assessment. Many faculty are upset about the timing of the letters from the 
Executive Committee and the deadline from the Chancellor, which kept a lot of 
the faculty out of the loop, as they were not available over the break. They 
felt it was neither fair nor practical and we wonder why the system continues to 
choose deadlines for times that they know do not coincide with the academic 
calendar.
	The faculty are also upset about the Executive Committee itself moving 
forward without sufficient consultation with the senators and with faculty at 
large. There is a general sentiment that people are upset about communication in 
general from the Executive Committee to members of the Senate and the faculty at 
large. They feel that they are not being completely informed about different 
issues. It is our suggestion that we tidy up the communication process and make 
sure that everyone is getting all of the information that is necessary for them 
to communicate to their faculty. The key developments that the Executive 
Committee discusses or that Joe encounters should be disseminated to the faculty 
on a weekly or bi-weekly basis so that people are kept up to speed during the 
entire semester and the summer.
	There was a comment that the Executive Committee should try to get more 
student involvement. They are a key constituency and group in all of these 
issues, so we should try to incorporate student involvement more at the 
Executive Committee level.
	If I could reiterate the adamant opposition to system-wide assessment that 
is felt by many faculty on many campuses at the comprehensive level...people are 
wondering why this and why now? Aren’t we already assessing G.E.? Isn’t the 
system duplicating efforts that we’re already engaged in? Why would we want to 
engage in another redundant effort? People are concerned about the cost of 
assessment and student compliance. Faculty, students, and even administrators at 
many campuses are still very unhappy with this mandate. Many still fear that the 
ultimate goal of system-wide assessment is invidious campus comparisons. This 
sentiment is not lost. People still have these feelings. One comment was that 
maybe system-wide assessment should occur at the alumni level. 
	Related to the legal presentation…I think it showed some deficiencies that 
exist. Faculty feel that we need more information and more training on a wide 
variety of issues related to copyright and other issues in this complex and 
dynamic arena. Maybe we could reinstate the legal department liaison to the 
Senate, if possible, so that we would have more communication with the legal 
department. The rules relating to these things are constantly changing and the 
faculty need more information regarding these changes.
	We would like to see the legal department more proactive in communicating 
information on rules, regulations, and guidelines to our campus libraries which 
could then communicate this information to the faculty at large. Faculty may 
even need training on all of the entire arena of electronic communications in 
terms of email content, managing electronic information, etc. It is a broad area 
and we think that faculty need more training in that area.
	Another issue is the proliferation of student fees on campuses. A couple 
of representatives found the excessive use of fees on campuses to be very 
troublesome. They found that these places a burden on students and maybe the 
Faculty Senate could do a systematic review of what fees are on individual 
campuses and provide information in a general way about what students are 
actually paying at different campuses. There seems to be a wide discrepancy in 
the fees.
	Fredonia has restructured its academic affairs. It has dropped the term 
“college” from its official name and is currently searching for three deans: 
Education, Graduate Studies, and Natural Sciences. If anyone knows of good 
candidates for those positions, please forward those names to Fredonia. 

Joe Hildreth: The Health Science Centers?

George Tortora:  One of the main concerns that was voiced was the funding of 
research faculty in the basic sciences and health science center. It was pointed 
out that there needs to be a balance between the needs for clinical revenue and 
the need to do research. This is in line with the Chancellor’s desire to enhance 
excellence in the SUNY system. We feel that there is a need to support research 
faculty and find a way to fund them and the students. We thought that perhaps a 
dialogue among health science centers and/or the doctoral institutions to 
compare techniques for establishing funding would be a good way to get started. 
It’s possible that some institutions have a better handle on this and those 
searching for methods could learn from it.
	We would also like to establish methods for optimizing mentoring methods 
for junior faculty. The whole idea would be to take a look at establishing best 
practices in this arena.
         That’s it.

Joe Hildreth: Technology Colleges? Ann?

Ann Donnelly: We applaud the agreement to continue the dialogue regarding campus 
based assessment. We have developed standards based in performance-based 
assessments that do not lend themselves readily to externally referenced 
measures. We have invested heavily in these methods of assessment as they serve 
both our students in our institutions and even the employers. We do not favor a 
value-added approach. We do support GEAR and accountability.
        We also talked about maintaining standards in courses with multiple 
sections and the standardizing of syllabi, especially with regard to adjunct 
instructors. We are eager to see changes in the BAP formula and we are confident 
that our sector will deservedly benefit.

Joe Hildreth: Specialized and statutory colleges?

Ron Sarner: Our first discussion item was a somewhat complicated situation at 
the College of Ceramics. The senior administration officer was a dean. That 
person was on the State payroll. In no small measure, the job involved 
representing SUNY’s interests and the interests of the Ceramics faculty and 
students within the Alfred University structure. That position was abolished in 
a matter that was characterized to us as rather heavy-handed. IT demoralized the 
faculty; they became rather desperate and feeling that there was no 
representation within the larger university structure. They ultimately opted to 
unionize as a private organization. One of the concerns was a broken chain of 
command. The Ceramics College is a SUNY unit after all. The representation to 
the state university of the needs and the concerns of the operations of that 
unit come from the Provost at Alfred University which was characterized to us as 
a conflict of interest: On the one hand to be concerned about preserving Alfred 
University’s revenue stream and at the same time trying to represent the 
interests of the faculty. No person can serve those two functions at the same 
time.
	This is being exacerbated with increasing costs for “accessory 
instruction.” It is something that occurs at a number of campuses where the host 
institution is paid by the state, the cost of providing typically the liberal 
arts and general education component. The cost of that goes up year after year. 
In some cases the contractual arrangement seems clear and in some it doesn’t. 
What is obvious is that the cost is consuming a greater and greater portion of 
the contract colleges’ budget, thus having a deleterious effect on the 
specialized nature of what remains.
	This is theme that we heard from all the stator colleges. The overriding 
issues are what is the relationship between SUNY and the statutory colleges and 
who in SUNY looks out for the State’s interest and the interest of SUNY’s 
programs? Those are legitimate issues.
	We also spoke about the place of higher education on the national agenda 
of the United States. Opportunities abound to work in programs abroad became a 
greater challenge particularly in maintaining a junior faculty.
	We did talk about assessment and we are supportive of the continuing 
dialogue. Thank you.

Joe Hildreth: Are there any further reports? Campus governance leaders, then.

Ken O’Brien: The discussion of the campus governance leaders focused on concerns 
dealing with system-wide assessment, specifically, as a group we would like to 
seek clarification concerning the proposed resolution that President Hildreth 
asked the campuses to endorse concerning system-wide assessment.
	We have two questions. The first has several parts. Do you, President 
Hildreth, feel that campus senates have given you a mandate concerning system-
wide assessment in response to your proposed resolution and, if so, a mandate 
for what? To continue a general discussion on assessment or to base the 
discussion on assessment on the four specific points that were included in your 
resolution?
	The second question that the campus governance leaders would like to have 
an answer for is how many campus senates voted to endorse your proposed 
resolution, how many voted to not endorse it, and how many campuses have you not 
heard from?
	Thank you.

Joe Hildreth: I will try to answer those questions for you when we get to the 
discussion item on the agenda. Let me try to give you some general feedback.
	The proposed resolution was to call for a continued dialogue. I have the 
responses with me from the campuses and I believe I have eight responses from 
our campuses, one definite no, and the rest indicated that they wished to go 
forward. We have some that we don’t have any responses for. I think that the 
purpose of having the discussion item on the agenda today was to give everyone 
an opportunity to talk about this, to ask questions, to have them verified, and 
then to have a formally documented sense of this body about whether we wanted to 
continue the dialogue or not.

(Lengthy discussions and debates about whether or not to continue the dialogue. 
President Hildreth maintains that an hour has been set aside later in the day 
for discussion on this issue.)

Joe Hildreth: And now Brian Stenson, vice-chancellor for finance and business, 
will be giving us the SUNY budget report.

Brian Stenson: The budget is a little more complex this year than it has been in 
past years. 
	This chart illustrates the all-funds budget of the university. This 
includes both things that go through the state budget and things that stay at 
the campus level. It gives a real picture of the totality of the activity and 
all of its components, including the state operated and statutory colleges and 
the community colleges. Some of the names might be a bit mysterious so I will go 
through some of them.
	Community colleges include all of the shares: local, state, tuition amount 
from students, research and self-funded activities at the community college. The 
next two boxes comprise the core-operating budget. It’s about $108 billion and 
change which makes it closer to $109 billion in the upcoming executive budget. 
That includes two big components: state tax dollars and the tuition and other 
income slice. This core-operating budget supports the guts of the operation of 
the university: the instruction component, departmental research, maintenance, 
administration, facilities, student services, counseling and so on.
	There are other areas of support. In the state budget, but not really 
related to SUNY, the state funds payments on our behalf for fringe benefits and 
debt service. That is the cost of the state taxpayers and is shown in the state 
budget. To be completely forthcoming, we include that in the all-funds budget. 
The next big slice is other appropriated funds. That means that they are 
included in the state budget but are not taxpayer support or tuition. About half 
of that number is the hospital activity and then you have IFR activity which is 
the self-funded programs on the campuses and the residence hall programs.
	The final piece of this pie is the so-called non-appropriated funds. Those 
are things that do not go through the state budget at all. They are not 
appropriated in the budget and typically don’t have to follow state rules about 
personnel actions and procurement vendor processing and so on. The biggest piece 
of that is the sponsored research public service, which is $800 million and 
change. Auxiliary service corporations and faculty student associations are 
about $200 million. They do the food service and bookstores on most of the 
campuses and other activities such as the local tuition and other activity at 
the statutory colleges. If you put that together, it’s about $7.8u billion and 
that goes back to the chart on the wall which shows you some of the information 
on that.
	The all-funds spending measure of the university has increased by nearly 
sixty percent in the last ten years. This is just a phenomenal growth. Much of 
that has been in the other appropriated funds category, particularly in 
research, public service, hospitals, and the self-supporting programs. The core 
instructional budget has increased from $1.4 billion ten years ago to about 
$1.850 billion now.
	The budget director, while preparing for the budget season, sends out a 
letter to the agencies that calls to the agencies to submit their requests for 
the year ahead. This year that letter asked agencies to hold their budget 
requests for the 2004-2005 year to the same level applied to 2003-2004. Clearly 
the state fiscal outlook had not improved dramatically so she asked that no 
agencies ask for additional state support.
	The Trustees had a two-part budget request. One was to be in strict 
compliance with the budget director’s letter and also that if additional revenue 
was available that state support would be provided to fund the costs that we are 
seeing due to enrollment growth. We want to be able to continue the current 
level of support and funding at the campuses even facing this incredible 
pressure for enrollment growth at most of the campuses. That number was 
identified as $35 million and was actually a two-year number. The Trustees also 
made a bold policy statement encouraging consideration of a rational tuition 
policy which means relatively small annual increases in tuition rates with the 
important provisory that the additional revenue would be additive to the state 
university’s budget and would not be used in place of state support.
	The governor did release the budget last week. The estimate for the 
current year show that the state budget is in balance and there are no carryover 
budget deficits and no extraordinary measures are required. For the upcoming 
year, the budget forecasts a potential budget deficit of $5.1 billion and that 
is if nothing was done to close the budget gap. Everything is additive but about 
$1.2 billion in net overall spending increases, primarily in healthcare and 
public safety programs, and $2 billion in revenue shortfalls relating to changes 
that are scheduled to take place in the tax law. The loss of $1.9 billion that 
was available in the current year’s enacted budget to balance this year’s 
spending plan. Every year the state budget includes a significant amount of one-
time non-recurring resources and in the current year there was about $1.9 
billion of that including at least $1.1 of federal money that was made available 
as part of some federal actions in Washington that helped balance the budget.
	The governor’s budget included a number of actions to close that budget 
gap, many of which are recurring, some of which are one-time revenues. The 
governor is also recommended restructuring some of the Medicaid and healthcare 
programs including a state takeover of some of local cost of Medicaid. Again, 
the burden of Medicaid on the county budgets is really causing significant 
impact on their other programs including support of the community colleges. On 
an almost across-the-board basis the governor recommended budget reductions of 
5% off of what the agency might have needed in the upcoming year. He has 
identified some additional revenues from expanded gambling and some other 
things. We assume that all of these proposals will happen and, after that, the 
potential budget gap in 2005-2006 is $2.8 billion. That represents about half of 
what they are facing in the current year and growing to $4.3 billion in 2006-
2007. That’s not too terrible.
	In that context the governor made recommendations for the state 
university’s budget and here we get into some of the complexity. State support 
would increase by a net number of $6.5 million and university income would 
increase by a net number of $19.6 million. It’s important to stop and look at 
this for a moment. State support is tax dollars and that is going to come in. 
Unless there is some mid-year problem from the state they are going to give us 
the entire $889.8 million that are recommended in the budget. The university 
income number is an appropriation that effectively limits what we can spend out 
of our own income. The vast bulk of that is for tuition but that is just an 
estimate and just an appropriation amount. It’s not even necessarily our 
estimate of what we will generate in the year ahead. We will have to take 
actions to make that amount of money.
	The number of state support is up $6.5 million and there are several 
individual elements that comprise that net increase. One is $2.5 million 
additional support for the Levin Institute and $2.5 million reduction in support 
for academic equipment replacement. There is an $820,000 reduction for EOP. 
General recommendations were made in various parts of the budget to reduce the 
opportunity programs by 5%. There is an increase of $3.8 million for a new 
program to pay lease payments on equipment that will be financed with 
indebtedness. $19.6 for the income increase relates back to the enacted budget 
of the year before. That is a significant difference in increase from what our 
spending plan was. The spending plan for university income was $946 million 
which is significantly below the $983 million.
	This increase is made up of three components. One is an allowance of $7 
million for potential increases in graduate and professional tuition rates. The 
Trustees would still have to take affirmative action, if they chose, to raise 
tuition rates for graduate and professional programs. There is also a small 
shift of a little over $4 million of a free that is now deposited in the dorm 
program. It’s up to us whether to do that or not. The final number is an $8 
million increase in payments from our IFR and dorm program for fringe benefits. 
That is how those programs are self-supporting to the extent that they have to 
pay their fringe benefits. Knowing that the rate is going up due to health 
insurance and pension costs, they said that that will generate an extra $8.4 
million for your budget which helps comprise that $19.6 overall income increase.
	I mentioned before that most agencies had a 5% reduction in their budget 
this year and we didn’t. That is because we have been working very quietly and 
diligently with the executive in the budget division to find an alternative to 
taking that cut. The main alternative there was to move the financing of 
equipment from the operating budget to the capital budget. It is a technique 
that many other agencies have used in the state of New York and it’s perfectly 
legitimate. As long as you can demonstrate that these are useful pieces of 
equipment that have a useful life of a certain number of year and therefore 
eligible for bonding, you can get either reimbursement or prospective funding 
out of bond proceeds.
	One of the categories of state support I have talked about in the past 
years is fringe benefits. This year in the executive budget they moved that line 
to show up in the SUNY budget. It’s only for presentation purposes; we don’t 
have to manage anything differently. It’s designed to show a little more of the 
total picture of the state support for SUNY in the SUNY page. It also kind of 
harmonizes the treatment of SUNY’s budget with CUNY’s. That is the way CUNY has 
been budgeted since they became a state agency.
	The state’s budget included recommendations for those programs and showed 
the increase in health insurance and pension costs as totaling $73 million next 
year alone and that shows on in our budget. Some of the numbers that you might 
see in local press accounts and maybe from the legislature will show this big 
number, but it’s really just for presentation. It’s more of a source of 
confusion that anything else.
	The other appropriations in the budget were either at or above the levels 
that we requested and we also got authorization to implement a program that we 
work on last summer to allow the campuses, under certain circumstances, to use 
some of the excess balances that are in the residence hall program for other 
campus purposes. To do this we had to remove a restricted provision in the state 
law and then refund half plus one dollar of all the outstanding bonds that had 
been issued in prior years for the residence hall program. We refunded more than 
a quarter of a million dollars of bonds for that and worked out a whole new 
protocol that sets up tests so that the campuses would have to lead these tests 
before any of this money could be declared excess. Those tests require rainy day 
funds for the residence hall program, reserves set aside for repair and 
rehabilitation needs, and the existence of a viable and fully funded 
rehabilitation plan for the residence halls. Once those are met, the campus 
could request the use of a portion of the surpluses that are in the residence 
hall program and can do that if they get our approval in central office. We try 
to make this a rigorous test.
	There are some recommendations dealing with our hospitals and medical 
schools. There is a state subsidy that the governor is recommending continue at 
current levels. That is $92.6 million and the state will continue to pay its 
share of the accumulated deficit of the hospitals. They found $13 million that 
they will put towards their share of that. Our hospitals will find their own 
resources to pay their share. The governor is also recommending that the 
university’s Trustees study a plan to convert the hospitals to non-profit 
status. That was recommended last year. There were no discussions with the 
legislature that I recall on that issue so who knows what will happen this year. 
The governor is recommending something different this year: he’s directing a 
group in the health department to conduct a comprehensive study of graduate 
medical education in both the public and private schools in the state. We have 
four within the state university. He is asking the health department to look at 
all facets of GME, including serving medically needy areas, the relative needs 
of different specialties in medical education, the costs factors, and so on.
The budget also includes a significant recommendation for the capital plan. In 
the year just ended, the legislature enacted the first three components of what 
the governor proposed last year in January and those components provide capitol 
funding and support for the residence hall program, the hospitals, and the 
community colleges. They did not act on the fourth element that was recommended 
which was the so-called educational facilities component. That covers all of the 
capitol program on a state-operated statutory college campus with the exception 
of the residence halls. It’s $1.8 billion over five years and by far the biggest 
element of that deals with the critical maintenance projects of the campuses. 
Those projects are itemized in the budget bill. 
        There is another $208 million for major projects and programs that 
aren’t lined out but are shown by campus. There is $25 million for minor repair 
projects at the campuses and $20 million for equipment. There is also a $150 
million appropriation for campus-funded projects. That is just to allow the 
campuses to track other additional outside sources of revenue and whether it 
comes from the auxiliary service corporation, the contractor, or a wealthy 
donor.
        The budget also includes $350 billion for a new program that would be 
available to all colleges. It’s a 3-to-1-match program which means that for 
every three dollars that a campus puts up; the state would put up one dollar. 
The vision on that is that this is a competitive grant process where individual 
colleges would put in individual requests for a particular grant. The only 
provisory was that no more that $250 million could go to any one of the three 
sectors.
        The recommendation for the community colleges is that there is a 
reduction proposed for the basic operating aid for community colleges. That 
program right now funds $2,300 per student and the budget would cut that by 5%. 
There is a difference in how the state treats enrollment at the senior colleges 
versus the community colleges. There were no recommendations made to cut the 
contract course program.
        Questions?

Pete Knuepfer r (Binghamton): There is a change in the amount of per-student-
funding to the community colleges. What is the net change that is going to 
happen in the community college budget from the $1.63 billion that the state 
currently gives them? Is that really changing by 5%?

Brian Stenson: No, it’s just the largest portion of the state aid to community 
colleges and that’s amount $350 million that is reduced by $14 million. You 
wouldn’t see a change in the number in the original chart. It’s too small.

Marvin LaHood: Those projections that you show, the $5.1 billion deficit next 
year…I’m just wondering when a state that was so generous as to put a lot of 
money into CREFT for me is not projecting any kind of a rebound in terms of the 
bull market.

Brian Stenson: Your question is very astute in the way that it reflects the fact 
that this state’s economy is highly influenced by Wall Street, but this is a 
huge state. It’s everybody who is reliant on that from one extent to another so 
there is a big driver down there from the stock market. The real money comes 
from underwriting ITOs and so on. There haven’t been a lot of mergers or 
acquisitions. Corporate profits are a huge part of our economy.
	Once you get beyond the city of New York you have a much more diverse 
economy than most people realize. You can see the results of that in the upstate 
area. There are a lot of areas that the economy is still sputtering along. 
Pensions are rebounding but it’s taken such a hit that they have had to make 
corrections for that the last few years. The real game now is to try to smooth 
out those corrections better.

Norman Goodman: I just want to remind you that, by the education way, the 
Trustees have a fiduciary relationship to SUNY. It is their job to protect and 
defend us and to define our needs. Despite what the call letter calls for, it is 
imperative that the SUNY Trustees spell out for the governor what we at SUNY 
need to do our job. If the governor and the budget director then choose not to 
put that into their message, that’s their decision. But having the Board of 
Trustees make that decision in advance for them is a violation of the education 
law and a subversion of the responsibility to us.

Brian Stenson: We believe that we can accomplish more over the long haul by 
working with the executive.

Tim Phillips (Cortland): Could you just explain the retroactive reimbursement 
bonds? Who issues those and who has to pay them back?

Brian Stenson: These bonds have been issued over the past decades for 
educational facilities and there are some balances that are still available 
under the control of the dormitory authority which issues the bonds and the bond 
trustees. They control this money and we effectively sent a letter to the bond 
trustees…
…As you can see, these are all bondable projects. Under the federal tax code, 
you can back eighteen months. It’s a requirement that we transfer $89 million 
from our IFRs to the state. These are bond that were issued in prior years for 
educational facilities projects and the state pays all of the debt service on 
these educational facilities projects.
	The new things going forward are COPS (Certificates of Participation). 
Those were short-term lease purchase, five years or less in length. The new 
effort going forward will be to do forty million of those per year and the state 
will pay the $3.8 million appropriation that they gave us.


Vince Aceto: I really think you’ve given us the macro but what we need is the 
micro because that’s where most of us live. In terms of the budget that was 
submitted by the Board of Trustees, were there any increases on even the micro 
level that were proposed by the Board?

Brian Stenson: I will admit that framed in a conditional sense was the increase 
of state support for costs associated with the enrollment growth.

Vince Aceto: I’ll be a little more specific. You have a little over three 
million dollars for the Levin Institute. Was that proposed by the Board of 
Trustees?

Brian Stenson: I don’t have that file with me and I can’t recall that answer. I 
can send it out to Joe whether we specifically asked for that.

Vince Aceto: There are such other SUNY units that really have little to do with 
us in terms of higher education, such as the charter schools institute. It would 
be interesting to know what their budget was and is and if there were any 
increases there. I don’t know where we can get that kind of information but I 
think that that is what we really need in order to look at this in depth and 
begin to see just how that all plays out. Were there any increases?

Brian Stenson: I don’t think that there was an increase for charter schools. 
That’s funded with one of our so-called university-wide programs. Look in part 
of the budget that shows the campuses are listed and right after that is a list 
of the so-called university-wide programs. There is a number in there for 
charter schools. In prior years there was also a budget in the State Education 
Department which also charters certain charter schools and then they transfer 
the money over to our charter schools.

Ron: Early in your presentation, when you mentioned the governor’s budget as it 
was presented, you noted that there was a decreased academic equipment 
replacement. You also talked about the bonding mechanism. What is going to be 
the net effect? Are we going to have less money to deal with equipment or do the 
two wash each other out?

Brian Stenson: This lease thing should be transparent to the campuses. They will 
proceed as they always have using whatever resources are available whether it’s 
the operating budget, technology fees, AER, or whatever, buy equipment on their 
own and then later this transaction will occur.

Ron: So then the net result is a decrease in the amount carved out.

Brian Stenson: Yes.

Achim Koeddermann: We now have heard that $2.5 million will be set aside for the 
thing that Vince just asked about regarding the Levin Institute and maybe the 
Nano Institute. We now have heard that $2.5 million will be set aside for that. 
Is this, percentage-wise, coming out of every other campus’ money and, if such 
an institution should need housing, if that institution would actually purchase 
such housing? Is this included in that $2.5 million or does that come from some 
other fund?

Brian Stenson: The overall recommendation in the Executive Budget is for three 
million dollars for the Levin Institute and that helped account for the $6 
million and change increase overall in state support. It’s new money in the 
university for the Levin Institute. It’s clearly not designed to pay for any of 
the capital costs of the Institute.

Achim Koeddermann: I fear that you cannot buy much real estate with $3 million 
for a new institute in New York City.

Brian Stenson: That’s right and they would need an additional source of money 
whether it comes in the SUNY capital plan or some other source of funds. $3 
million is more for the operating cost.

Joe Hildreth: Our next agenda item is a presentation from Carey Hatch, who is 
from our Office of Library and Information Sciences at System Administration.
	Carey?

Carey Hatch: Today I want to encourage you to take advantage of the rights that 
you have for the materials that you are producing yourselves. Secondly, I want 
to inform you about the status of the contract that we have for access to 
Science Direct which kind of ties in to this whole piece. Then I want to present 
to you some alternate models for scholarly publishing. I think that what we are 
doing now is short-lived and unsustainable.
	Everything that you are doing in SUNY is basically covered by either the 
Board of Trustees policy on copyright and some extensions granted to you through 
the UUP contract and appendix 8-23. I’m not quite sure what the status of the 
contract is now that it’s expired but I think that anything you create that’s 
not done in a work-for-hire environment you really own the copyright for. It’s 
up to you to either hang onto it or give it away.
        This kind of scenario works more in the scientific environment but it 
holds up in the humanities and social sciences, too. PhD recipient publishes her 
first article and one of the first things she does is sign a transfer agreement 
with the publisher. She receives no payment for it. Oftentimes fellow 
researchers will hear about the article but the library can’t afford to buy the 
journal, so that researcher doesn’t necessarily have access to the materials 
easily.
         An undergraduate in the same situation wanting to find information 
about that particular piece finds that the article is not available to them in 
the library. Again, they can’t have access. 
        Oftentimes, years later, the PhD is being considered for tenure and they 
are denied tenure because the publications aren’t cited enough and they don’t 
have enough research to grant them tenure. 
	When you look at this piece one of the first things that we do is probably 
that we turn the copyright over to publishers. Perhaps in a paper environment it 
made sense. Publishers guarded our copyright and they protected us. Now, more 
and more commercial publishers are in it for the profits and the money that is 
generated. They aren’t necessarily in it to protect your rights; they’re in it 
to protect their own rights and to protect their profits. Another thing is that 
you don’t receive payment for that article. Your intention is not to make money 
from it. Actually, the more that it is used and distributed, the better off you 
are. Your currency is in citation, prestige, promotion, and tenure. You have to 
separate and understand that your use of copyright is very different than many 
others who are in it for the money.
	After our PhD is denied tenure they decide maybe they should publish a 
book. Unfortunately, very few book publishers will touch it because there aren’t 
going to be enough copies to be sold to make it cost-effective. Right now, 
university presses publish about eleven thousand books between the U.S. and 
Canada. Expect that number to decline drastically. The university presses are in 
a severe crisis. They will be folding within the next two to three years in 
droves. It’s something that we need to acknowledge and we need to begin to 
understand the impact of how we’re producing materials, granting tenure, and 
sharing our materials to make sure that we all have access to the information 
that we need to make scholarship grow.
	The PhD candidate can’t get her book published so she goes to put 
something out on the Web under her own name and page. Well, her publisher could 
go after her for violation of copyright because she no longer owns the right to 
do that. She’s given it up by signing that transfer agreement.
	Right now we are working in an area with limited access and limited 
research impact because we don’t have the kind of access that we need. The 
impact cycle begins and the research is done. It leads to researchers’ preprint. 
It is submitted to a journal and an important process takes place. The preprint 
is revised based on the feedback from the peer review and the article is revised 
by the author. The post print is accepted at the publication and published by 
the journal and the researcher can access the post print only if they are 
working in an environment in which the library has access to that material. 
Libraries are increasingly unable to purchase that material.
	Hopefully you are aware that in we signed an agreement in 2001 for access 
to Science Direct. We now have access to over one thousand journal articles 
electronically across all of the SUNY schools. We’re spending about five million 
dollars per year on those articles. The arrangement called for us to maintain 
our levels of subscription and revenue with El Severe. Things have changed. Our 
budgets are shrinking. We’re extending the agreement for one year, primarily 
because we want to be able to communicate to you that we don’t think this model 
is sustainable any longer. We are using reserve funds to do it and those funds 
are coming out of my accounts and campus accounts. We are all struggling to make 
this happen and it’s going to happen for a minimum of one more year.
	That not being able to continue this agreement will mean is a significant 
reduction in access for our faculty members, graduate students, and 
undergraduate students in the university. Somewhere between one and four 
thousand titles will go away. I think that number is probably up more than that 
because, once we get out of the umbrella of this contract agreement, we go back 
to full price plus fifteen percent for electronic access which will mean that we 
will have to cut even deeper to get to the level where we need to be in terms of 
financial equipment.
	 In general, this isn’t unique. We’re struggling to maintain our 
collections because of the rate of inflation and research is growing. There is 
more out there now and you want access to more and more things delivered to the 
desktop. We’re having a hard time keeping up with that.
	So we want to change the model. It’s not just us; it’s a lot of 
institutions around the world that are starting to talk about significant 
changes in the scholarly publishing model. One of the simplest, easiest, and 
inexpensive models is called self-archiving. One you get the preprint, there is 
nothing stopping you because you own that preprint and nobody else does. There 
might already be places that you can put this. Let it go through the peer review 
process as you work with your journal publishers. Let is go through that 
process. We don’t want to interrupt that cycle at this point in time. 
        Once it comes out on the other end start to claim it back on the post 
print. Once you get the document that says that you are going to transfer the 
copyright to the publisher, don’t sign it as is. Amend it to say that you want 
to maintain copyright for certain uses and you take ownership back. Then we can 
take that post print and put it in an accessible archive. We can change the way 
that we acquire materials because that material will be freely available in an 
open-access environment. It’s much more powerful than the existing model.
	The other thing you want to do is to look for open-access journals to 
publish. They don’t necessarily have the prestige yet so you might want to go 
with the standard journals. If you do go with the standard journals be sure that 
you claim your right to maintain ownership. About fifty-five percent of 
publishers are now willingly accepting amendments to their copyright transfer 
agreements to allow you to do this. That is a significant change and you need to 
exercise this to allow us amazing possibilities.
	If the publisher does not accept your amendment you still have some 
options. You can create a core agenda. Basically, just create a document that 
states all of the changes between the preprint and the post print and self-
archive that as a separate document so that someone could go to the preprint and 
get essentially the same impact that they would from the published article.
	Promotion committees really have to start looking differently at the way 
you’re granting tenure. In the Humanities and Social Sciences books, book 
publication is going to be increasingly difficult. There are different 
alternatives for that that go along with this kind of model. We really should 
start looking at ways to reward people who are putting materials out in an open-
access environment. That is just as important as prestige.
	Faculty involvement is interesting. What has really taken place in the 
last year and half is your involvement. Libraries have been crying about these 
things for a lot of years now but only recently have faculty really started to 
get actively involved. It’s had a huge impact.
	What does the future hold? The discussions that we are having at very high 
levels are creating institutional repositories which are basically computer 
systems where we can store and archive faculty preprints, post prints, theses, 
dissertations, images, multimedia files, and just about anything. There is 
software in the public domain created by higher education institutions that 
allow us to do that, creating metadata standards which are basically standards 
that allow us to tag this kind of information so that we can access it easily 
after the fact. There are standards being proposed now that can go out and 
retrieve information across multiple institutional repositories to harvest 
information out of these repositories. There are archival tools and contracts to 
ensure long-term viability of stored content. We are very concerned about what 
is going to happen to these materials in the long-term and how we will maintain 
them. That’s on the table, too. The important thing about this kind of model is 
that it really increases research access which results in greater research 
impact.

Joe Hildreth: Thank you very much for a very informative presentation.

(Joe Hildreth begins the next portion of the meeting by reading two letters 
regarding system-wide assessment to help frame the following discussion.)

Joe Hildreth: I think that it would be good to introduce at this point the 
motion that the Executive Committee worked up. Norm, would you like to speak to 
that?

(Norman Goodman reads the Executive Committee’s motion which ultimately 
“recommends that the University Faculty Senate accept Chancellor King’s offer to 
continue discussions on university-wide campus-based assessment with the aim of 
developing a proposal on assessment that is acceptable to the SUNY faculty, 
system administration, and the Board of Trustees. The Executive Committee also 
recommends that the university Faculty Senate, in consultation with the Faculty 
Council of Community Colleges establish a committee to continue the dialogue and 
develop a proposal on assessing the foundational skills of general education.”)

Pete Knuepfer (Binghamton): As many of you know, Binghamton’s faculty senate 
recently passed a motion that is opposed to any further movement in university-
wide assessment.

(Pete reads the motion)

        The key points of the resolution are that, first; we are already doing 
much of what is asked, if not directly, then indirectly. Not just at Binghamton 
but at most campuses in SUNY. The second point is that this is going to be 
costly, despite whatever anyone tells us about it, and we’re already diverting a 
lot of resources on our campuses to do what we were asked and agreed to do thus 
far on assessment of general education. We see nothing to be gained from 
diverting further from the education mission of the university.
	Our faculty felt very strongly that nothing presented to them in any 
format over the last year provides a cogent argument for doing of moving forward 
on any kind of an assessment initiative that is either more uniform or 
externally based than what is being done at present through the campus-based 
process that has already been approved at the system level.
	Thus, we see no point to moving into further discussion because no point 
has essentially been presented. Behind that there is, to some degree, a 
rejection of the concept that assessment should be done exclusively for the 
purposes of accountability. Assessment for accountability is fine if it’s done 
in the context of trying to improve the academic programs but what limited 
justification has been presented in the context over the last nine months have 
been focused exclusively on accountability. Accountability to whom I’m not 
completely sure, other than perhaps in the context of a national movement 
towards arguing that all education has to be numerically accountable. You can 
obviously see the effects that that is having in the K-12 regime where it has 
been implemented most thoroughly both at the federal and state levels.
	I would remind all of us that last fall most campuses passed resolutions 
that opposed system-wide assessment. To my knowledge, none of those have been 
rescinded on the campuses. While some of them dealt directly with a particular 
memorandum of understanding, in fact most of them didn’t, this body passed a 
resolution in October that supported campus-based assessment that is done across 
SUNY utilizing the terms university-wide campus-based assessment and left the 
door open for further discussion. The response on that by the Chancellor was to 
welcome that discussion but to define the parameters of that discussion.
	My final comment would be that if this body does with to endorse and 
support the resolution that has come to us from the Executive Committee, that I 
think it would be appropriate to be very explicit that that continued discussion 
should not be predicated upon the points that the Chancellor has made, but upon 
the positions that the faculty have as seeing any worthwhile moves towards 
assessment at SUNY.

Norman Goodman: I support this resolution very strongly for a variety of 
reasons. I want to remind the body that in 1997 Ann and I co-chaired a task 
force that developed the program of general education for the campus. Included 
in that was a recommendation three that argued for an assessment process that 
was campus-based for general education. The faculty has never been opposed to 
assessing general education. We have tried that, we agree with that, and we want 
to do that.
	The issue initially arose with Peter Salins first speech to this body in 
which he detailed his desire for a single high stakes rising junior test. Joe 
mentioned before for us to think of where we’ve come from the point to where we 
are today. The Chancellor’s memorandum talks about not a high stakes single 
test, but university-wide campus-based assessment. We have moved the 
administration and the Trustees a considerable distance. Not as far as we’d like 
to go, but a considerable distance. The motion before you will give us the 
opportunity to see how much further we can go in meeting those kinds of needs as 
we think are appropriate. At this point, we don’t have an agreement that we can 
support. All that the Executive Committee is asking is essentially for two 
months more to continue this discussion and to bring back, to the campuses and 
then to this body, a decision on whether whatever proposal we eventually come up 
with is acceptable to us. I think we deserve to allow that to happen.

Dick Collier (Albany): My inclination, at the moment, is to support the 
resolution as long as it’s clear that nothing in the resolution should be 
construed as supporting, in any way, the four points or anything else in the 
Chancellor’s document because, in March, each of our campuses and later at the 
spring assembly we can tell System and the Trustees to do it their way.
	The real reason that I’m supporting this is that it was agreed by the 
Executive Committee that the dialogue will include inviting students and members 
of the Board of Trustees to participate in this group. This is critical to me 
because I think that our problem may have been having individuals from System 
serving in the interlocutor role. We don’t need interlocutors in this. Certainly 
we would want System representatives as stakeholders along with students, 
Trustees, Faculty Council, and the Faculty Senate. It is my belief that there 
may be something that can be done system-wide better than the individual parts 
of what we do. In an honest and sensible approach with no scheming or paranoia, 
it may be generally agreed that most of the four points that led to all of this 
really are worth doing but there are some legit objectives which can be met. 
With that understanding, I’m tending to support this resolution.

Bill Palmer (Buffalo): I would like to point out that this is a call for a 
proposal with really no specification about the content. One of the issues 
raised again and again in opposition to the old MOU from last summer is that we 
are already doing almost all of this, and any additional gains would be slight 
and very expensive in terms of resources and time, etc. At least one version of 
the proposal could say exactly that. This is not the world’s worst formulation 
and we might well proceed with it.

Kimberly Reiser: I wanted to give you an update on the Faculty Council’s 
perspective and their action to date. Twenty-eight of thirty community colleges 
have passed resolutions supporting the resolution of the Faculty Council which 
was passed at our plenary on October 4th. In that resolution we asked the Board 
to reconsider implementation of their resolution of June 17th. In addition, the 
President’s organization of community colleges (the APPCC) have written a very 
strong letter in support of the Faculty Council’s resolution. The chief academic 
officers have as well and the student assembly also passed a resolution in 
support. 
	At the time that all of our governance bodies were deliberating on our 
resolution, President Hildreth and I had asked to meet with Chancellor King to 
discuss university-wide assessment and what happened at your and our meeting. AT 
that time he discussed the revised proposal with us. We had a joint Executive 
Committee meeting and the Faculty Council Executive Committee felt a little 
differently than your Executive Committee. We made the decision to send a letter 
to our governance bodies asking them if they supported the four conditions in 
the Chancellor’s revised proposal. We felt that, because there was such an 
outcry on our campuses objecting to university-wide assessment, that it was very 
important that every faculty member have a voice in this incredibly important 
decision that we will have to live with for a very long time. As you all know, 
because of the timing of the request and the academic culture with vacation, 
etc, most governance bodies have not had the time to reflect on the revised 
proposal. Five of our campuses have and they have not support the revisions, two 
unofficially have not supported, and one officially supported if the conditions 
were addressed that everyone is concerned with.
	
Tim Phillips: I wanted to speak in favor of the motion primarily because it 
doesn’t bind us to anything. It would be a bad position to oppose it and we 
would appear to be too recalcitrant and I think it’s our duty as Faculty Senate 
to go back to our campuses and get a full assessment of how they feel. It’s 
incumbent upon us to find out how each of our campuses feel about this issue so 
that we can come back and say there are X number of campuses with this position 
and there are Y number of campuses with this position and this is how the 
faculty feel about this issue. I don’t think that we have a real measure of that 
at this point. A lot of people are feeling system-wide assessment syndrome at 
this point. It’s almost too much.

Runi Mukherji: We passed a resolution back in October that rejected the first 
resolution from the Board of Trustees on system-wide assessment and since then 
the Executive Committee has put out a statement which basically restates that. 
Our Senate meeting is today and my sense of it was that they would pass a 
resolution reaffirming the old one saying that we don’t think that we should be 
doing system-wide assessment if those four points still hold to be true.

Tom ??????????? (Morrisville State): I have some concerns because we have not 
had a meeting. We have not talked to our faculty representatives. We have to 
take a poll of the Executive Committee about whether to go along with a 
continuing dialogue with the Chancellor. Now I am supposed to vote on whether we 
should endorse this resolution which, by the way, I think should at least say, 
“Despite of our deep reservations, we are willing to continue the dialogue,” but 
I have no confidence that I can go back to my Faculty Congress. We voted 
unanimously against the process being imposed by the Board of Trustees and the 
Chancellor. I was elected as a representative and we’re getting a little bit too 
far. I’d be very curious as to how many Faculty Congress bodies have actually 
endorsed this decision to continue dialogue with the Board of Trustees. 

David Carson (Buffalo State): I support the sense of this motion but I do have a 
reservation about the timeline. There is now an assessment process that is 
underway. It is three years in duration. You’re only halfway through that three-
year cycle. By the way, the GEAR process that we’re under now is both system-
wide and campus-based. So I don’t see why we can’t let this process ride for 
another year and a half. I would like to see it have an opportunity to end so 
that we can assess the assessment and see whether of not we need to change what 
we’re doing now. It may be naïve, but I would like to see us finish what we are 
doing now and continue the dialogue, not until March 31st, but for another year 
and half.

Joe Hildreth: We are now at a point where we need to talk about things because 
of time. I know that there are more people who want to speak but I want to 
simply get a sense of what you want to do right now. We have other things on our 
agenda. The question I have is do you want to vote on this at this time or hold 
on this until Saturday morning?
	
(vote ensues on whether or not to have the vote at this time)

We have a friendly amendment that comes from Stephanie and Norm has taken a look 
at it. Let me read it to you and see if that’s all right with you. Based on the 
discussion about who agreed to pause, Stephanie suggested that we change “SUNY 
Board of Trustees” to “Chancellor of SUNY” and following “Faculty Council of 
Community Colleges” insert “and the SUNY Student Assembly”. 

(informal debate away from the microphone)

(Jim McElwaine reads sections of motion with various suggested corrections)

Joe Hildreth: I’m going to call for the vote on the motion as edited. We need to 
have a senators only vote. All those in favor of the motion please signify by 
raising your hand. Opposed? Okay, the motion passes. Thank you very much.

(meeting adjourns for the evening)

(meeting resumes Saturday morning]

Joe Hildreth: We’d like to get the meeting started. The first item of our agenda 
is the introduction of the president of the Faculty Council of Community 
Colleges. He has been nice enough to have been with us for the entire weekend so 
I wanted to get the program going. It’s my pleasure to announce President 
Kimberly Reiser.

Kimberly Reiser: Thank you, Joe. Thanks for including the Faculty Council in 
your meeting this weekend. I found your meeting agenda to be both thoughtful and 
provocative and I look forward to updating your community college colleagues on 
the good work that you have accomplished so far. 
	Eight eventful months have passed since my term as president of the 
Faculty Council began on June 1st.  The last two academic years have been 
particularly productive for each of our governance organizations with many 
common concerns and shared goals. At the June 6th meeting of the Faculty Council 
Executive Committee we identified several common critical areas for work the 
next academic year including faculty development, student transfer, teacher 
education and assessment. We left the meeting eager to address the tasks at 
hand. Unforeseen by us was the resolution calling for implementation of system-
wide assessment which was passed by the SUNY Board of Trustees on June 17th. 
Consequently, much of our important work had to be laid aside while we navigated 
through the tricky business of university-wide assessment. Due to the timetable 
regarding the MOU on university-wide assessment, we were forced to suspend the 
agenda of our entire fall plenary meeting and devote the meeting to a debate on 
the MOU. After serious and thoughtful debate the Faculty Council adopted a 
resolution on October 4th asking the Board to reconsider the implantation of 
university-wide assessment and support the GEAR process that we are all very 
absorbed with.
	To review, twenty-eight of thirty-eight community colleges have passed 
resolutions in support of the Faculty Council resolution and they have forwarded 
these resolutions to the SUNY Board of Trustees. The student assembly on October 
25th by resolution and the APPC and the CAOs by letter have registered their 
support for the position of the Faculty Council. At about the same time 
President Hildreth and I met with Chancellor King. He discussed the revised 
proposal which you debated yesterday. We both appreciated the invitation for 
continued dialogue and the flexibility of the new proposal. In order to 
determine support for the Chancellor’s proposal, the Faculty Council asked all 
campus bodies to review and then indicate their position. Due to the timing of 
the request and the meeting schedules of our governance bodies, only a handful 
of schools have had the opportunity to consider the proposal. By the time of the 
next Board meeting, however, most colleges will have deliberated on it. Five 
colleges do not support the revised proposal, two unofficially do not support, 
and one unofficially supports the proposal.
	That being said, I would like to close on a positive note. Although the 
last eight months have been trying for our governance organizations, we have 
joined hands to address the very serious issue at hand. I hope that continues. 
We have had two lengthy\ joint Executive Committee meetings and plan to continue 
to do so in the future. Although many of our issues are different on the 
community college campus, some critical pones are the same and we re making 
progress as we work together. We held a very successful GEAR conference in 
November and we continue to work on the faculty development initiative. In light 
of Admiral Crane’s recommendation in his report on efficiency and effectiveness 
at the last Board of Trustees meeting, we will probably have to reactivate our 
joint transfer committee of the last academic year which contained members of 
both the Faculty Council and the University Faculty Senate.
	One way in which to ensure success between our groups is for the liaisons 
to attend each others’ committee meetings. The standing committees of the 
Council are: academic affairs, community relations, governance, student life, 
and technology. I hope that you will participate in these committees. I would 
like to thank you again and wish you a productive and successful semester.

Joe Hildreth: We started a transfer work force before all of the assessment 
started and we got to the stage where we brought a preliminary proposal or two 
back to the Executive Committee where we got the impression that we needed to 
pause for a while. I am more than eager to work on that. It was nice to have 
Kimberly here and it is nice to attend these meetings with her and to have a 
second person to ask their opinion about the action that we just witnessed.
	We now will have our committee reports and resolutions. I’d like to ask 
Jim McElwaine to present the Executive Committee report.

Jim McElwaine: Good morning. The Executive Committee had a brief session this 
morning and discussed three issues. One was a question concerning the election 
of the vice president and the state of the bylaws. There was some discussion of 
a particular phrase in the bylaws which will be reviewed carefully. Elections 
and nominations will proceed as originally scheduled. Correct me if I’m wrong 
here, Joe.
	The second issue concerned a memorial plaque for Brij Mullick, a colleague 
of ours who died last year. We have decided with general approval to provide a 
plaque and a planting at a memorial site and Brij’s home campus, which is Utica-
Rome.
	The third and final issue was the Chancellor’s charge to us at dinner last 
night. Policies to formulate a description of the codes of academic conduct, 
particularly in the area of what he was calling academic misconduct, which I 
believe would be plagiarism and some ethical issues related to publishing and 
distribution. We will convene a brief committee on this composed of Senators and 
other appropriate representatives and we will look into a description of the 
moral components of this, perhaps stopping short of the legal descriptions of 
penalty that are out of our power. This has now been referred back to us by the 
Chancellor from the UUP’s arena which is where we originally punted the ball to 
as this was presented to us last year. We said that this seems to be a UUP issue 
simply due to the legalities and contractual issues concerned.

Kimberly Reiser: What was UUP’s position?

Joe Hildreth: We have a good working relationship with UUP and when we had this 
last time we looked at it, had a discussion and felt that this was terms and 
conditions of employment. I showed it to the union and they showed it to their 
lawyers and they agreed. We then gave it back to the Chancellor and said that we 
felt that it was a union issue. We also made it clear that we weren’t lawyers 
and didn’t want to try to get into a legal interpretation. We decided this 
morning that we are still not going to get into a legal interpretation and the 
Chancellor gives it back to us as an academic issue. That is our responsibility 
but we will inform the union that this has been done and they can discuss the 
legality of this issue if they want. We want to make sure that we uphold our 
end. We want to impress upon people that we are going to communicate with the 
union right away so that they can understand that this is not our desire but 
simply a request from the Chancellor.
	The awards committee?

Marvin: The Chancellor award for excellent and faculty service is now afloat. 
The deadline is March 15th. The ordinary deadline for Chancellor’s awards this 
year is February 15th. This now includes language that says that service and 
faculty governance can and should be considered. That will not go into effect 
until the next academic year. That is a very important thing for this group as 
people have worked very hard and we are very pleased about that. We also voted 
to award a medallion to distinguished faculty awardees. The Executive Committee 
has been very supportive with including new language for these awards. 

Justin Giordano: The first resolution…this is the thing that I really wanted to 
dedicate the year to. Recommended use of distinguished ranks on campus and 
across the system. Norm, tell them why you think that it was a good idea to do 
this even though this, in a way, is a part of getting into the language. 

Norm Goodman: In all seriousness, people with distinguished titles have as part 
of their responsibility to contribute both to their campus and across the 
system. That has never really been implemented and what the committee is 
suggesting be done is that we take seriously what our responsibilities are and 
to contribute to the areas of the system which are our expertise.

Justin: It depends on the campus, but often distinguished professors are just 
forgotten. What I am hoping will happen to this is that, if you approve whatever 
language is necessary, we will then forward it to the Chancellor who will 
forward it to all presidents and provosts. Those looking at this may then begin 
to use distinguished professors both campus-based and across the system.

Joe Hildreth: We are now ready to open this up for discussion. Seeing no hands, 
I think that we are now ready for a vote. All in favor of accepting this 
resolution please signify by saying “aye.” Opposed say “nay.” 

Marvin LaHood: The second one is also new. We gave the University Faculty Senate 
outstanding service award was given to Joe Flynn a few years ago. The candidate 
is to be chosen from the nominees by the Faculty Senate Executive Committee and 
a plain up-or-down vote at the plenary; no discussion. All persons who have 
worked on the Senate in any capacity are eligible. The Executive Committee would 
present the plaque and plan the ceremony, probably for a Friday plenary, and 
everything else.

(Debate and discussion whether or not to allow the Executive Committee, not the 
entire Faculty Senate, to choose the recipient of the award ensues.)

Joe Hildreth: What we are proposing is to change the second sentence under the 
first bullet to read: “Recipient to be chosen from nominees by Faculty Senate 
Executive Committee. We have chosen to delete the third sentence: “Approval by 
full Senate at plenary by up-or-down vote.” All those in favor of the amendment 
please signify by saying, “Aye.” Those opposed, nay. The ayes have it.
	Now, all those in favor of the service award as presented by Professor 
LaHood, please signify by saying, “Aye.” Opposed, “nay”?
	We now need to simply receive the report from the awards committee by 
general consensus. Seeing as how we have no objections, I am going to move on. 
Governance committee?

Ray Guydosh:  We have two proposed resolutions. Starting with the report… We are 
working on four projects this semester or at least we were until the Executive 
Committee recently charged us with an additional one. We are speaking about the 
project on redoing the governance handbook. We now have the former governance 
handbook in a digitized format and we are going to be reviewing what we have in 
order to determine what we want to keep of that in the next edition. We are 
looking for what other documents we want to add that the Senate has dealt with 
and created since the last handbook. We invite you to make some proposals if 
there are some documents that you feel need to be part of the governance 
handbook. Just drop me an email and I will communicate that with the folks on 
the committee.
	The committee is working on the examination of processes for evaluating 
senior administrators on campus. We have recently concluded that that really has 
two parts and so we will be working on them separately. One of those parts is an 
examination of the processes that are used in evaluation procedures of senior 
administrators and we hope to have sometime soon a proposal on what an 
appropriate set of processes is. Most of the processes would probably include an 
evaluation instrument and that is the sub-issue. We are going to be examining 
some evaluation instruments that are used in other places within the system 
around the country.
	The seemingly never ending project of assembling bylaws from campuses and 
trying to identify particular themes and examples that illustrate them so that 
people who are revising or creating new bylaws on campus have something to work 
with. We have digitized most of those and we are now going to associate examples 
with those various themes. We hope to have a report on that for you by the 
spring plenary.
	The committee has been working on a project that has examined resources 
that are available for the process of campus governance at the local campuses. I 
want to turn this over to Marilyn so that she can explain what has been done 
with that document and then we will move on to a couple of resolutions that came 
from that. 

Marilyn: A group of three people worked to create a survey instrument which we 
sent out electronically posing about thirteen questions which we asked the CGL 
of various campuses to respond to. The questions essentially clustered around 
physical support office space, staff, and budget. We were also curious about the 
role of the CGL representing the faculty at academic ceremonial occasions like 
commencement as well as the presence that the CGL was able to present in 
administrative committees that were concerned with academic questions of the 
dean’s council, for example. We had some difficulty identifying the CGL, which 
was kind of interesting. The questions were intended to elicit fairly short 
answers to make it easier for the CGL to respond quickly so that we would 
maximize the amount of the response we got. The downside of that was that the 
answers were sometimes unclear and ambiguous. I took the data and tried to make 
as much sense out of it as I could. I decided that it didn’t have to be 
absolutely precise as long as the general trends were clear. When you look at 
your own campus the answer may not be exactly what you think it is and I would 
be interested to know that so that I could go back and correct the data. So, the 
committee took the data and worked up some recommendations.

?????????: We do have two resolutions to bring to the body today. The first one 
responds to one of the data trends that we saw that there is an uneven pattern 
of adequate of lack of adequate support for a faculty governance body…

…Achim?

Achim Koeddermann: The provisions that we have here would actually describe what 
to do on which campus. Isn’t that against the notion of respect? Wouldn’t you 
expect that a campus respects governance and does those things? If we try to 
legislate something that we do not have the power to enforce, couldn’t that 
backfire?

????????:  No, we don’t have power to enforce it. It’s a sense of minimum 
standards and there are places that do not adhere to things that this body would 
regard as such. If that statement is helpful, good. If not, it’s certainly good.

Norman Goodman: I was on the governance committee a number of years ago when we 
had a similar proposal. The then chancellor said that he couldn’t tell the 
presidents what to do. Well, now we have a new chancellor and system 
administration does tell presidents what they have to do. That is what mission 
review is all about. It is perfectly appropriate to ask the Provost and the 
Chancellor to work with the presidents on the campuses to provide the 
appropriate level of release time, support, and resources that governance needs 
to function. It is a message that we need to continually send.

Donald Steven: I would imagine that both the Chancellor and the Provost would 
receive this resolution as a welcome resolution. Each in there own way would be 
able to encourage this. I know that the Chancellor has a great deal of respect 
for this body and I am sure that he would not tell the presidents what to do but 
would share his experiences and encourage them to support governance on their 
campus. The Provost might be in a poisiton to lay out a more explicit regiment 
that might correspond to this resolution.

Joe Hildreth: Are you ready to vote on the resolution? All those in favor say, 
“Aye.” Those opposed, “Nay.” Passes without dissent. 

???????: The second resolution has two points. The title is “Campus Recognition 
of Campus Governance Leaders” and the resolution speaks to the sense of the 
committee and the Executive Committee that there are places within the system 
where the role of campus governance is not as publicly visible as it might or 
should be. The resolution tries to enhance the visibility of campus governance 
by incorporating its leadership into appropriate events. The resolution part 
reads, “Therefore be it resolved the University Faculty Senate recommends to the 
chancellor of the provost that each SUNY campus designate its campus governance 
leader or her/his designee as an exhibition member of the appropriate 
administrative committees that deal with campus-wide academic policies, planning 
and operations, and designate its campus governance leader or her/his designee 
as its faculty representative in appropriate campus-wide academic ceremonies.”

Joe Hildreth: Discussion? Ready to vote on the resolution? All those in favor of 
the resolution, please signify by saying, “Aye.” Those opposed, “Nay.” Passes 
without descent.

???????: That concludes the governance committee’s report. I’ll let Joe do the 
receiving.

Joe Hildreth: If there are no objections to receiving the governance committee 
report we will move on. Graduate and research committee? Gary?

Gary: The committee has been heavily involved in putting this program together. 
It’s a closed-door conference workshop for SUNY. The purpose of the conference 
is to apply relative information to help junior SUNY faculty members obtain 
research funding. Fortunately the people who are listed in bold print are the 
people who have accepted and will be at the conference. The people in regular 
print have not accepted. I went to the sector meeting yesterday and impressed 
upon them that if you are a senator from those particular units, please get back 
to me with the people on the list in regular print. The title of the workshop is 
“Funding Your Scholarly Workshop on Getting Grants.” Please go over that because 
it is very important. The conference is going to be held at the Nanotech Center 
in Albany. The research foundation has funded this. The final approval for the 
workshop was given by the Executive Committee. Auxiliary monies are being 
produced and provided by the University Faculty Senate and system 
administration.
	The preliminary letters have been sent out with the program. The persons 
who will be responsible for sending the junior faculty members are the 
presidents. The main emphasis is to get the comprehensive colleges involved in 
more research. This is not designed mainly for the research centers because we 
know that they have a complete infrastructure developed and utilization is 
already in place. They do get major grants.
The overheard actually rotates inside your institutions and produces more grants 
and opportunities for junior faculty to become very full productive. One of the 
things I would like to mention is that students who are involved in research or 
have professors who are turn out to appreciate their education much more and 
that is why we are recommending it. There are no resolutions at this time.

Joe Hildreth: If there aren’t any objections I would like to accept the report. 
Operations committee? Paul Brodsky and Runi Mukherji.

Runi Mukherji: Good morning, everybody. This proposal is pretty much in its 
final form in terms of the text. At this time I would like to ask for your 
approval for the budget handbook in the form that it’s in so that we can proceed 
towards getting it available to you in electronic form and a small number of 
copies will be printed as hard copy for those of you who might want that. 

(Discussion of how to print and bind handbooks, what people would prefer, and 
expenses to do so.)

In terms of the committee we have two different projects that are ongoing. We 
will present one of the reports at the April plenary. We are calling it “The Big 
Dig.” You asked us to look into the levels of administrative versus 
instructional support across the SUNY system. We reported a piece of what we are 
doing to the Executive Committee and got some interesting feedback.
	We are also working on an update of a study on gender distributions across 
faculty ranks in SUNY. We hope that that will be available in April.

Joe Hildreth: If we have no objection, I would like to receive this report. Our 
next report is from Public Information. Paul?

Paul Johnson: Thank you, Joe. At the last plenary, the Public Information 
committee had a single task to bring up a website. At the last plenary we showed 
you some sample pages. Melissa Bishop has completed work on all of the pages. 
She has worked with Carol and Dick Wheeler to transfer and to provide that data 
on the new site. Dick Wheeler has stripped the old 0sites of content that was 
pertinent and transferred it t the new site. The old sites have been taken down 
and no longer exist. That has been the source of some problems. DNS servers 
around the world have been notified of two address for the Faculty Senate site 
www.ufs.suny.edu and ufs.suny.edu. For reasons at the moment, both of those 
addresses go to the main Stony Book page. As soon as the first site results in 
going to the University Faculty Senate website as opposed to the main site for 
Stony Brook, an email will be sent providing that link which you can then 
bookmark.
	Joe and Carol will be working diligently to provide current information on 
the site and we will then begin the long process of maintaining currency and of 
learning the various types of information that we can successfully handle on an 
open site. We want to ensure that documentation for the spring plenary is 
available to you. The balancing act between this website and list serve will be 
the process that we explore over the next few months and we will hopefully 
respond to your criticisms in the spring.

Joe Hildreth: This will be an ideal issue to have up there. We are going to post 
minutes of every meeting of these group and I intend to send those out via the 
list serve as well. It would be nice to have some of the background information 
that we have shared today so that someone could go there, click on assessment, 
and be up-to-date in terms of where we are. If we could get this up next week, 
that would be great. We’ll keep our fingers crossed.
	If there is no objection then we will receive that report from Public 
Information. Student Life committee? Peter Nickerson?

Peter Nickerson: The committee has been looking at Greek life on campus. This is 
a controversial issue but a timely issue as well. There are a number of aspects 
that we are concerned about and are obtaining more information about. Something 
that is of immediate interest are the unrecognized groups on campus; those 
groups that used to be recognized but no longer are. These groups are a problem 
because there are safety issues involved and there is no longer any supervision 
by the campus. This is something that we are all worried about and we have to 
figure out a balance there.
	Ed Englebride is our system administration liaison and he is also involved 
with other student life groups. There were three of them including us. There is 
going to be a campus safety symposium that we are interested in. This also 
includes issues of disruptive students. One of the interesting aspects is self-
mutilation. Apparently this is on the rise and is a way for students to relieve 
stress. We heard a great deal about this anecdotally but this is something that 
is entirely new to me. There are other issues in residence hall related 
especially to mental health issues. The issues are: Who provides the services? 
What level of service is supervised? Who checks to make sure that students have 
taken medication or not?
	Our committee is very much involved with planning and implementing the 
“Enhancing SUNY” as a global university. Reports are that the conference held at 
SUNY Binghamton is over and the report is now complete and has been submitted to 
the Chancellor for appropriate action. We hope that he is going to release that.
	The committee is also interested in one of the instruments for assessment 
which is the survey on student engagement. We are trying to obtain more 
information on how effective it has been in those units in the system. 
	One of our committee members is still a residence faculty person in the 
residence halls. We are interested to know if any other faculty members still 
live in the residence hall in SUNY.

Joe Hildreth: If there are no objections, I will assume that the body receives 
this report. Let’s go to our undergraduate committee. Norm Goodman?

Norman Goodman: We had several topics and we work in a kind of subcommittee mode 
as most committees do. We have one on plagiarism and ethics and we have a 
presentation being made at the spring plenary here. You will get more 
information about that at that point.
	We are looking into the whole set of transfer issues and particularly into 
what has been called a western-region model of consultation among the 
appropriate campuses so that there is an ongoing communication and discussion 
about these issues.
	There is the whole area of retention which as you recall is a very 
significant aspect of the budget. Every campus really is focusing on the issue 
of retention and we are trying to get a useful and concise definition of 
retention and to prepare a template and guideline on issues related to 
retention.
	We had a subcommittee last year that looked into the SUNY learning network 
and presented a report to the committee for its consideration. It detailed the 
facts I mentioned in the report. We want that subcommittee to continue to look 
at issues not only about what is going on with the SUNY learning network but 
what is the approval process for getting costs into the network. What are the 
criteria, who does it, and so forth. We know that the discussions so far about 
success have been in terms of how many students complete but we often are given 
numbers completing instead of percentages completing. There is no other 
information about the quality of success and we want to look into that as well.
	We have a reawakened project from about five or six years ago to look at 
the projections of the SUNY undergraduate student body and demographic 
characteristics of them over the next decade or two and to ascertain to what 
extent that will be similar to or different from what we have now. Also, f it is 
different, what kind of programs and services would be required for that 
different mix of students. There was a report in 1998 by a subcommittee and I 
have taken that report to modify it and bring it up-to-date. It is in draft form 
and poses a series of questions to relate to John Porter to get what data he has 
available to answer the questions and to look at what kind of data might be 
obtained.
	The whole area of internships, service learning, and experiential learning 
is being explored in terms of what those different terms mean in terms of the 
actual academic programs and examples of best practices that we could share with 
campuses around the system.
	Finally, there are two back-burner issues. We were very much interested in 
the international student symposium. We were also concerned about to what extent 
the technological resource is necessary for program success is included in 
analyses of program evaluations. We decided that in the next version of the 
handbook on academic program assessment, we would include some statement on 
assessment of technology resources.

Joe Hildreth: I don’t see any objections and so I assume that we will receive 
the report. Campus governance leaders, do you have a report? Nominating 
committee? Pete Knuepfer.

Pete Knuepfer: The people who are outgoing senators who are completing their 
terms were asked to recommend and arrange for some nominations for the next 
vice-president two-year term to start in June. We have two names to forward at 
this time and a possible third name pending. I want to bring a potential issue 
forward on one of the names. 
	The first name to forward to you is Jim McElwaine, who is the current 
vice-president and has agreed to stand for reelection and Achim Koeddermann from 
Oneonta. The issue to bring to your attention relates to Professor McElwaine’s 
candidacy. He is in his sixth year as Senator of Purchase and the bylaws state 
that the vice-president needs to be elected from the sitting members of the 
Senate, which he is. He would not, however, be a sitting member of the Senate 
for the next two years as he has used up his time as Senator from Purchase. The 
bylaws state that any regular member of this Senate is eligible to serve as the 
vice-president for one year beyond the expiration of his/her three-year term as 
a Senate member. In such case the vice-president secretary shall become a non-
voting member of the Senate and the union shall be represented by regularly 
elected successor.
	The issue is the difference in interpretation of that terminology and if, 
if elected, Jim McElwaine would be eligible for a one-year or two-year term. The 
Executive Committee is of the opinion that he would be eligible for two years 
but that he wouldn’t be a Senator in that second year but could still serve as 
vice-president. I want to bring that point to the attention of the broader body 
to see whether that interpretation would be consistent or acceptable, in which 
case Senator McElwaine can stand.

Joe Hildreth:  What the Executive Committee was asked to do…

…in such case the vice-president secretary shall become a non-voting member of 
the Senate and the campus shall be represented by a regularly elected successor.

Does that conclude your report, Pete? Any questions for Peter?
This brings us to old business. New business? Stephanie.
Stephanie: For the community colleges there is the Association of Presidents for 
Public Community Colleges. As I have traveled around and visited different 
campuses, I have talked to many presidents and one thing that they don’t have is 
a group where they can come together and freely discuss their thoughts. I would 
really love to see them have the opportunity to bounce ideas off one another 
besides when they meet for system administration meetings with the Chancellor 
and other departments. I also feel that this is something that they can’t create 
on their own and it may be something that the students and faculty could 
possibly help them with.

Joe Hildreth: Any other new business? We are almost to the point of adjournment 
but before that we have a Senate poem. Dick Collier?

(Dick Collier recites sonnet)

Joe Hildreth: The dates for out 137th Plenary meeting up at Upstate Medical 
Syracuse are April 22nd-24th. With that, I declare this meeting adjourned. Drive 
carefully!


[Meeting adjourned at 11:10 am.]


Presented by Jim McElwaine
Transcribed by Holly Tatnall
1
UFS Winter Plenary
SUNY-Oneonta 2004