University Faculty Senate
Proceedings of the Fall 2003 Plenary
SUNY Oswego
October 23-25, 2003



________________________________________
Friday Plenary Session, October 24

Joe Hildreth: I’d like to call the meeting to order. 

Susan Camp: Good morning. I am a very new faculty assembly chair at SUNY Oswego. 
As campus governance leader, one of the first responsibilities that David King 
told me about is that we were going to host this meeting in a few months. We 
have been working very hard over the last four or five months to produce a 
pleasant and effective venue for this very important meeting. I think that you 
have come to one of the most unique and wonderful campuses of this great system. 
You will be able to explore the Oswego campus and community while you are here 
since there isn’t any snow. Oswego State has much to offer us, our students, our 
colleagues and our friends.
	Please enjoy your visit to our dynamic campus. I mean dynamic because 
things are changing all the time. If you need any assistance you can ask any of 
the Oswego staff, our next speaker, Senator Luther Peterson or myself.

Senator Luther Peterson: Thanks, Susan. I am the new faculty senator from SUNY 
Oswego. My honor this morning is to introduce the president of the State 
University of New York at Oswego. Deborah Stanley was appointed Oswego’s 10th 
President by the Board of Trustees. Prior to her current position, she was 
interim President from 1995 to 1997. After joining the faculty at Oswego in 1977 
and attaining continuing appointment in 1984, President Stanley served as 
Executive Assistant to the President for five years and also the office of Vice-
President for Academic Affairs and Provost. A member of a number of local and 
regional boards, she serves as a commissioner for the American Council of 
Education and on the NCAA Division III President’s Council. She previously 
served as Chair of the Policies and Purposes Committee of the America 
Association of State Colleges and Universities.
	As is true of our sister campuses of SUNY, we at Oswego seek to provide 
the best possible education for our students along with the best possible 
educational environment. We feel fortunate that President Stanley takes an 
active role in leading us in what is truly a pursuit of excellence. Under her 
leadership Oswego has developed innovative programs for first-year students, 
both academic and residential, whose success can be measured by increased 
student retention. President Stanley initiated the Presidential Scholars program 
which raises more than $200,000 each year for students’ scholarships.
	I do part of my teaching in the Honor’s program and can testify that the 
Presidential Scholars program is enabling us to attract a fine CADRAY of 
exceptional students. At the same time we faculty sense a remarkable concern for 
our teaching and personal welfare. There are new awards for teaching, advising, 
and research. We have been able to hire many new faculty members in tenure-track 
positions and have added an MBA program and a number of baccalaureate programs. 
Stunningly and remarkable for me to say, it has been a long time since I have 
heard our faculty engaging in that favorite pastime: President bashing. The 
accomplishments don’t end there. Under her leadership we have upgraded our 
campus technologically and received national accreditation for the college’s 
School of Business and School of Education. For the first time since I arrived 
thirty-three years ago, we are building. Major renovations have been completed 
and there are more to come. Just last Friday there was a groundbreaking ceremony 
for a new campus center. This place is on the move, in a large part due to 
President Stanley. I give you our President: Dr. Deborah F. Stanley.

President Stanley: I am thrilled at those remarks because I think that they 
truly captured the spirit of this campus. It attributes the spirit of this 
campus in the wrong direction. The sprit of this campus comes from the faculty 
and staff and our students, who are the main and prime movers of the renovation 
and renewal that is going on during my time here. I’ve been on this campus for 
twenty-seven years. I am a faculty member of Oswego and a tenured one, having 
earned that rank during my time in the heart of the institution.
	Good morning, I do welcome you all here for the 135th plenary meeting of 
the SUNY Faculty Senate. If you are visiting here for the first time, I hope 
that you will be able to get around campus. If you are returning, please walk 
around. I think that there is much for you to see. I know that you have a lot of 
important work to get to and I am going to get back to that in a moment. Let me 
brag for just a few moments here because I think that it is well deserved and 
that this campus has earned a brag sheet a foot long.
	We are award-winning first year programs. We have a mix of eight programs 
for all of our first-year students. Many of you come from campuses around this 
system and you experience first-year students in different ways. Part of what we 
are is 1,350 freshmen students that come to this campus every year. We take in a 
new cohort of more than two thousand students every year. That is your work and 
it’s different on every campus. It’s a major opportunity for us because we are a 
residential campus focused on native students to bring our first-year programs 
together and we’ve done it very well. We’ve worked with faculty, advisors, and 
mentors in mind. We have won the 2003 Outstanding Advisement Award from the 
National Academic Advisement Association which is a part of that first-year 
experience.
       We have had a lot of exciting and important events. We’ve instituted new 
programs in academic affairs, we have human-computer interaction, arts therapy, 
we’ve established a new academic department in health promotion and wellness, 
and we’ve established capstone experiences in the entire curriculum in arts and 
sciences. We’re very proud of that. We can synthesize all of the learning that 
takes place during students’ time here. We are also proud of our accreditations 
but also of the national accreditation of our School of Education and the 
international accreditation of our School of Business.
	These are innovations on our campus but I know what you are here for. You 
will be spending your time deliberating serious and important matters that will 
impact the life at all of our institutions. I don’t use that word lightly. The 
University lives and breathes through our faculty, staff, students (both current 
and future), and our alumni.
	Through my twenty-seven years at the academy, I have every confidence that 
this group in particular has the integrity and the good faith. That will be 
employed in the pursuit of your responsibilities as members of this great 
university. You do sit here to represent the work, prerogatives, and the 
traditions of faculty but I also know that you understand that you are not mere 
agents of the faculty. You are, in a collective sense, through the Senate 
fiduciaries of the mission of the University: to learn, to search, and to serve.  
You are guardians of the enormous asset of our students. Your tasks here are not 
about the conditions of your work but of the conditions necessary to engage the 
human intellect in its highest abilities and at various individual stages of 
development, to catch the human spirit through all of the alchemy of a healthy 
university and to catalyze those along the lifelong journey of transformation 
through learning and action.
	You have a solemn task. I wish you well. Enjoy your time here at Oswego.

I think that it would be appropriate to now have roll call. Jim?

(ROLL CALL)

Joe H: I would like to welcome you to Oswego. It’s good to see you. I’ve had a 
chance to speak with many of you. Let me also give a special welcome to our 
campus governance leaders. It’s a pleasure to see you here and it was nice to 
meet with you last night. I like the relationship that we have with campus 
governance leaders and I would like to continue to build on that on that 
positive collaboration.
	If the volume of emails that we have received in the past few days is any 
indication, we ought to have a very energized meeting. It’s been quite a task to 
read all of those but I know that it reflects the passion that exists on the 
issue that we are going to be dealing with today. There are going to be some 
aspects of the meeting that are going to be interesting. We will hear from Dr. 
Candice Young who is a former CGL from Truman State and who is going to talk 
about trends and assessment in the nation as well as at Truman State. We have 
invited Susan O’Malley who is the chair of the CUNY Faculty Senate and who will 
report on the assessment that is currently being done at CUNY. Wayne Locust is 
going to come and speak to us with an enrollment update for the system. Brian 
Stenson is going to present a budget report which is of concern to everyone. We 
are going to have the University Provost, Peter Salins, report on the Provost’s 
Strategic Academic Agenda. He game this presentation at the September Board of 
Trustees meeting and it was a nice outline of things that he is planning for the 
University. I’m sure that you will find that interesting. Then we will begin our 
discussion on system-wide value-added assessment. I’m sure that that will be a 
lively discussion.
	We had a very successful international student conference on October 2nd 
and 3rd at SUNY Binghamton. The purpose of the conference was to explore ways to 
be able to enhance international enrollment in the system as well as retaining 
students. There were many discussions that were about using websites to recruit 
international students and a wonderful key note speaker. To give you an idea of 
the success of the conference, there were 197 registrants and 192 of them 
actually attended. That is the highest that I’ve ever heard of at a conference 
and I have heard nothing but praise from everyone who was associated with it.
	There is going to be a SUNY assessment conference on November 13th and 
14th in Albany. I know that many of you will be attending and I think that it 
will be very useful. The Executive Committee will then be meeting with the 
Faculty Council Executive Committee on the afternoon of the 14th. We are going 
to be talking about areas of mutual concern. I am pleased to report that ACGE, 
the advisory committee on general education, is now operating. There has been a 
change in the way that general education courses are approved. Courses are now 
approved at the campus level and only if there is a problem there will they go 
to system. This is a committee that has been developed by the Provost’s office 
and it is currently reviewing courses. It seems to be functioning well. In terms 
of GEAR, the campus-based plans for general education assessment, almost all of 
the fifty-seven campuses’ plans have been approved. They are up and running. It 
has been a tremendous success. Mission review is starting round two and Beth 
from the Provost’s office is going to be heading up that effort. There is 
concern that faculty become more involved than they were on some campuses in the 
last round. To ensure that that occurs, we are going to be having an Executive 
Committee meeting in Oneonta in January so that you will have an opportunity to 
voice you views and to add to the planning for this process.
	As you know, the higher education conference board is a group of 
stakeholders in higher education in New York State. It is designed to be an 
advocacy group, especially with the legislature. I attended a meeting in which 
the groups were asked to submit items for the legislative agenda. The two items 
that the Executive Committee submitted were that we try to have the legislature 
pass a bill that would allow for the SUNY faculty president to be a full voting 
member on the Board of Trustees which is the case in CUNY. The second 
legislative item was that we would like to see the legislature drop the 
principles contained in our rational fiscal policy for SUNY report in terms of 
the way that they fund the state university system. 
	There is a faculty development initiative that is being sponsored by the 
Provost‘s office. It has three co-chairs. I’m one, Kimberly RISER of the Faculty 
Council is the second, and Anne Huot from the Provost’s office is the new co-
chair who is replacing Don Steven who is still going to be on the committee but 
will not be serving as co-chair. There is a draft of a report that is in the 
reports. It will be making a recommendation or identifying best practices on 
faculty development in the traditional area of research teaching service and so 
on.
	We are in the process of developing a new website. The problems that we 
were having with the old website really had to do with the ability to maintain 
it and to provide it with up-to-date information. One of the primary charges to 
our public information committee during the planning meeting this September was 
to take care of that. They have been working very hard and we have the website 
ready to go live and on Saturday morning you will see that website. The 
photograph that we had taken this morning is going to be on the first page of 
that website. Beginning with this meeting, all of our resolutions will be 
available simply by going to that website, thanks to our secretary, Carol 
Donato. You will be able to search for past resolutions and it should expedite 
the flow of information.
	I will finish my report by telling you about June’s Board of Trustees 
meeting. This is our first meeting for many of you since it occurred. I know 
that you have heard bits and pieces of it and since we are going to be spending 
a lot of time this weekend discussing university-wide assessment, it will be 
useful for you to hear what happened this summer. Let me give you that 
background. This afternoon we are going to ask Vince Aceto to give you more 
extensive background on the Senate’s involvement with the assessment issue.
	I met with Chancellor King in December 2002 along with the president of 
the Faculty Council at the time, Bob Axelrod. We presented the resolution that 
basically combined with earlier resolutions which were in opposition to 
assessment and were the faculty’s views. During this meeting, he was very 
interested in having representative from the Council and the Faculty Senate meet 
with a group from the Provost’s office to present the concerns that the faculty 
had about assessment which were leading to this opposition. We agreed to do that 
because it seemed to be the appropriate thing to do. We started that discussion 
group and it was led by Don Steven. We’ve tried to keep everyone involved as 
much as we can. This was evolving into the Memorandum of Understanding. While 
this was going on we heard that Trustee DeRussy was going to present a 
resolution calling for the implementation of system-wide assessment. This was of 
concern but we were informed that this would try to be handled internally. That 
was our assumption and then on the 16th of June, I was in Potsdam when I 
received a call from the Chancellor who asked if I had received his resolution. 
I said that I hadn’t and he said that I would be receiving it that day because 
he was going to be presenting a resolution at the board meeting tomorrow. That 
was pretty much the end of that conversation. When I looked at the resolution 
and realized that is was something that the Senate would not want to see passed.
	We got to the board meeting early the next day and managed to meet with 
the Chancellor and some others, and Kimberly and I strongly urged him to not 
present that resolution. Trustee DeRussy was there as well. There was a lot of 
discussion and the discussion did reach a conclusion and then the board meeting 
started. We went into the audience not knowing what would happen. During the 
board meeting Chancellor King’s resolution was going to be voted on. I must 
recognize that Trustee Stephanie Gross was the only Trustee that voiced an 
objection to voting on that resolution since they had only received it a few 
days before the meeting. That is not in accordance with the Trustees’ bylaws. 
Bet no other Trustee would second her motion to table it for more time. So the 
resolution passed. I was not allowed to speak in the meeting until after the 
formal business of the Board.
       When I spoke I made an extended statement of the fact that the Faculty 
Senate does not support this resolution. President Kimberly Riser then expressed 
much the same. This was reported to you and we made a decision later in the 
summer to return to the discussion group to continue the work that we had done. 
I know that the representatives that were chosen were sincerely representing the 
views of their constituencies and we thought that it was important to finish 
that work. The work resulted in the final draft of the Memorandum of 
Understanding which you have and which I hope you have the opportunity to 
discuss with your colleagues.
       That is what happened and that brings us to this meeting. We will have 
the opportunity to hear some of the perspectives in terms of assessment of 
higher education in the nation. We will hear what is going on in CUNY and will 
have a discussion in which you can discuss the views of your campus so that we 
can collectively get a sense of what the Senate’s position needs to be on this 
issue. I would then propose that we have a group that will meet after the 
meeting this afternoon where we will draw up a resolution based on the 
discussion on the floor that seems to capture the sentiment of the group. That 
will be ready for you to review on Saturday morning. We will present that and it 
will be discussed and that will be followed by a vote on that resolution. We 
will then have made a decision on the course of action for this issue. I want us 
to have a fair and informed discussion.
       I will now ask Jim McElwaine to provide you with the Executive Committee 
report by condensing four hours into four minutes.

Jim McElwaine: We discussed several topics. One of them was the discussion of 
various presidential search and hiring practicing that continue across the 
system and particular instances at Buffalo and Utica-Rome including a temporary 
dual presidency at Rockland Community College as well as the issue of 
investigating foundation stipends to supplement presidential salaries. We also 
looked into the establishment and are moving vigorously toward the establishment 
of the blue ribbon investigative panel which would be somewhat external to the 
University to examine the simultaneous operations of both the Board of Trustees 
and system administration. We are expecting membership on the budget allocation 
process advisory group. It seems to be destined for re-visitation. We received 
two action items from the awards standing committee that will be discussed 
tomorrow in the deliberations concerning system-wide assessment, which has been 
renamed value added assessment and the attached MOU.
	There are two main streams of thought that emerged last night. One has to 
do with the concept of principles and that we must take a concerned stand 
against an issue and another stream of thought had to do with pragmatism that 
collaboration must continue towards an issue of perfect timing to stop 
conversation. I am instructed to not try to affect any of your opinions because 
we want absolute participation today. Those of you who are new, please speak up.
	Are there any questions?

Norman Goodman: We had a very vigorous discussion at the Executive Committee 
yesterday and the position there was to not preempt the discussion here and to 
allow people to state their opinions.

Judith Adams-Volpe: Could you elaborate a bit on this blue-ribbon panel that you 
mentioned to investigate? What was the interaction with the Board of Trustees 
and system administration? Who is generating that board?

Joe Hildreth: What we would like to do is to bring in some national authorities 
on the traditional parameters and responsibilities within the constituents of 
higher education. What are the parameters for this system administration, the 
Board of Trustees and the faculty? What are their mutual responsibilities? We 
want to have a panel discussion at the plenary meeting in Oneonta in January and 
to try to bring in some people from outside New York State who have been looking 
at these questions in depth. We have a sub-group that will be meeting to look at 
this as well.

Jim McElwaine: Any more questions? That concludes my report. Thank you.

Joe Hildreth: It is now my pleasure to introduce our featured speaker on 
assessment today, Candice Young.

Candice Young: Good morning. I listened with great interest to the discussion 
and I know that it will be interesting for the rest of the day. I always learn 
more than I impart.
We are still practicing assessment in Missouri. I don’t think that you ever get 
it right. I would certainly offer a number of perspectives because it hasn’t 
been a process that has had a single direction over the last thirty years. I 
would also mention just a couple of the ways that I, as a faculty member, came 
to interact with assessment. I am a professor of political science at Truman and 
I came to Truman in 1980. Assessment began before I got there and I certainly 
became immersed in assessment very quickly when, as a third-year faculty member, 
I was told that I would be heading up the institutional effectiveness portion of 
our accreditation report and that I was expected to use assessment data for 
every question they asked where assessment data existed. I had a committee of 
eighty faculty members on various portions on that document to work with. 
       At that point, I felt as though I knew absolutely nothing about 
assessment; I’d just been trying to teach my classes. It was a quick learning 
process. I also served on the Faculty Senate for many years at Truman. I was 
president in the late 1990s and went on to serve a tour of duty as president of 
the Missouri Association of Faculty Senates. That is our association of four-
year institutions. I am now on the governor’s commission that is looking at the 
future of higher education in the state of Missouri and I’m getting a whole 
different perspective. It has been an interesting experience. One of the things 
that we are looking at is a centralized system of higher education that I know 
you all have here. Hopefully I will come away with some knowledge on that.
       I think that one of the reasons that we are called upon to talk about 
assessment is that through assessment we transformed our universities. When I 
came to the university, we were a regional comprehensive university with over 
140 programs. Today we are a university that has been given the state-wide 
mission for liberal arts and sciences serving high-ability students in the state 
of Missouri and we have forty programs. Assessment was what put us in the 
position to be considered by the coordinating board for this mission, not one 
that we asked for or one that a lot of us would have chosen. Quite frankly, I 
think that assessment was more dynamic when we were an open-admission 
institution, but we can talk about that later. While the circumstances that led 
us to assess are unique, it was a president with a vision; not a state mandate, 
I think that a number of the things that we have learned are transferable.
       Our president was really pretty mild-mannered, but for someone who was 
really considered visionary with his leadership style, that would not have been 
your first impression of him. He was not a great speaker but someone who was 
definitely an intellectual and a voracious reader. He started asking us 
questions about how we knew that we were making a difference with our students. 
How do we know that our programs are of high quality? He lamented the fact that 
the country tended to define quality in terms of private institutions with great 
resources. We looked and came to a value-added definition of quality that worked 
extraordinarily well in a relatively open-admission institution but is not 
nearly as successful in a highly selective institution.
       He talked to us about the British model which he was very enamored with 
in the sense that faculty members were mentors to students and that you, as a 
faculty member, were preparing students for an exam that an external examiner 
would create. He thought that the relationship established through that 
mentoring was a better relationship between students and faculty. So he was 
trying to figure out how to make a large institution work under a British model 
without having us actually carry out the time-intensive process of that.
       The president that we just had retire from the institution, the third 
since I have been at Truman, talked about how in the 1970s President McClain 
asked the campus who was taking responsibility for the degree as a whole. The 
last president talked about how none of the chemists that he worked with wanted 
to do that. They were willing to only take responsibility for their classroom 
and their course. They weren’t willing to take responsibility for the major as a 
whole, much less the degree as a whole. This question becomes extremely 
complicated in today’s’ time frame because so many of us have students that 
don’t come to just one institution but whom are a product of multiple 
institutions.
       Are GPA and credit hours earned sufficient to assess student learning? I 
suspect that is a question that you are asking yourselves right now. The 
evidence to support that isn’t very good. The literature on GPA is pretty well 
known that. It is extremely difficult to assess what a student has learned by 
looking at a GPA. We were challenged to think that maybe be ought to be doing 
more than that. In my own kids’ education in public schools, what are the 
methods that you use to identify how well they are doing? For me grade cards 
were not terribly instructive. I’ve learned the most about my kids when I went 
to the classroom and spent time there, which I did once a week when my kids were 
in grade school and they actually let us in the building to help. I learned by 
reading their papers, looking at their projects and when the standardized 
Missouri assessment materials came back with standardized numbers. Grade cards 
didn’t really help me understand what they had mastered and where they stood 
relative to others. It is very easy to get defensive about the assessment 
movement and I have certainly experienced that feeling myself at time. On the 
other hand, as a parent or a student, I think that they deserve alternate 
strategies to identify how well they are performing.
       Dr. McClain made a huge impact on the state of Missouri and in getting 
the entire state to think about how we reward quality instead of quantity. One 
of his great accomplishments was to move the state away from a per pupil funding 
formula. On the campus, he told us to think similarly. He didn’t want to know 
how many students we taught; he wanted to know how much they learned. Are we 
accountable and to whom are we accountable? I think that it was beyond being 
accountable to tax payers, although that is clearly central for a public 
institution. It was also important to think in terms of being accountable to 
society. That is what gave us the greater sense of purpose in our processes. He 
talked about what it was that society needed and what it was that people in the 
community thought that they were and were not getting from students who had 
graduated from institutions of higher education. The other unique feature of our 
accountability discussion was that we talked about being accountable to national 
disciplinary standards. It wasn’t enough to simply satisfy the tax payer or 
society; it was also important to think in terms of if you have a student who 
has graduated with a degree in political science, what it is that the national 
groups are saying that political scientists need to know and are able to do. It 
was important that our program be instep with that unless we had some very 
compelling rational not to be.
       One of the more intimidating mantras of the president was if we are 
nationally competitive. That we served students of few means financially and 
that we owed it to that student, if they wanted to go on to graduate or 
professional school, to provide an education that enabled them to get there. He 
said that in terms of the test scores he was seeing (LSAT, GRE, MCAT, etc.) this 
was not happening and that we were not doing a good enough job. He was clearly 
raising expectations and he did as a result of ten years of gentle persistence.
       We instituted a lot of curricular change. It was an extremely exciting 
period as we essentially came to terms with dismal test data. I know that it is 
the standardized tests that are so controversial here and part of my message is 
that you can live through it and it can be useful. We ignored the data quite 
effectively. It would show up in our mail boxes in the spring and we would out 
and out ignore it.
       We had a vice president that worked very closely with the president. As a 
result of having a vice president that had, more or less, a photographic memory 
for data, he would say things like, “What do you make of so-and-so and the score 
they got on this test?” He knew these individual students as well or better than 
you did. He would prod a little bit. “Why do you think that happened? What do 
you know about that transcript? What kind of classes did they take?”
       After a couple of years of him asking those questions and you not really 
having any answers, faculty started to feel like we were better than the test 
scores were suggesting. We had a fair number of students who had high GPAs and 
test scores that were in the fifteen to twenty percentile range. We weren’t bad 
mouthing the tests. We could have gone to each classroom and told them how 
horrible these exams were. The administration started to encourage us to go and 
take the exams. We knew nothing about the exams. We had been involved in the 
process of choosing them, but there were so few to choose among that there 
really wasn’t a lot of reason to do a great deal of research. So we started 
going to take the test and faculty members would return complaining about a 
question or two, but when their scores came back six weeks later, they thought 
that the tests were pretty good.
       In political science we went to take it as a team. We didn’t want to take 
the test individually. We were promised complete anonymity; they were sending 
test scores to our homes. The university did not hear about them until the 
faculty started running down the hall with their ninety-nine percentile scores. 
But we took the test as a group and it was a very hard test. We were having our 
students use the old GRE field test and it was a ruthless exam in terms of the 
questions. We didn’t have an answer sheet when we took the test and we argued a 
fair amount about what the right answers were on some of the questions. But 
after we did that and felt that the test was so unbelievably hard and that 
explained everything, we found out that you only had to get sixty percent right 
to score at the ninety-ninth percentile. Our curriculum certainly covers far 
more than that.
       Some of us went into our classes the next week and quizzed some of our 
students about the few things that we knew they had heard and were not satisfied 
with their responses. It resulted in really getting to our egos and we really 
sat down and decided that instead of having a cafeteria-style curriculum where 
essentially any ten courses added up to a degree, that we would structure the 
degree systematically. We would acquire more efficiency in the use of our 
faculty resources as a result of that structuring. Our division had a social 
science into letting up team-teach the capstone course that we added to our 
curriculum in exchange for dropping a number of upper-level electives that drew 
relatively few students. It was probably the best deal that we ever cut. Those 
were the best faculty meetings ever. You would go, sit in a classroom with 
students, and learn from each other. It was as close to a graduate seminar as we 
ever got. We then would know what to try to do in our structured curriculum to 
change that and we systematized a set of skills into each of these required 
courses so that we know that when our students graduate, that they have been 
exposed to particular kinds of assignments and research. We are absolutely 
convinced that our students are far better served by this curriculum and that 
they learn far more that they did before. 
       We had value added testing in general education in the early years. We 
had value subtractive in math between the freshmen and junior students’ scores. 
That really isn’t all that CIRPrising because it’s the first thing that you 
forget. The vice president would put up these charts in division meetings once a 
year and it was pretty appalling that we had value subtractive math and that we 
had almost no growth in science. We made curriculum changes there, too, that 
immediately produced changes in the test data. The standardized data was a 
clear-cut picture that something had changed. We used this focus on learning and 
our ability to beat the national averages to recruit. We started taking the best 
1,500 hundred that we could get as opposed to the first 1,500 we could get. That 
changed the institution enough so that when the coordinating board started 
looking for an institution to be the liberal arts and sciences university, we 
were the likely candidate.
       All of this led to what we call a self-reflective culture which refers to 
an institution that consciously asks itself, “What are we doing?”, “Where do we 
want to be?”, “How will we get there?” and the hardest part, “How will we know 
when we have gotten there?” The vice president was very good at enforcing this. 
Any time you went to his office to ask for something, this was specifically what 
you would have to do. He would say that he was more than willing to figure out 
how to allocate these resources, but we had to be able to tell him what 
difference it would make in five years.
       This is the standard quality paradigm. It’s easy to say, it’s easy to 
recite, but it’s very hard to do. When I say that we have been practicing 
assessment for thirty years, I would say that we have done this well on a couple 
of occasions. It’s very hard to maintain this sort of focus and it takes great 
leadership to get it done.
       In 1985 we changed the mission of the institution. It took a very 
methodical effort on our part to continue to try to recruit those students. Just 
because you say that that is your mission standard, it doesn’t mean that that is 
what happens. We were asked to set up a five-year plan and then we were given 
five years before the state would send in their team of evaluators to see if we 
had, in fact, achieved the mission change. Over that period we had a huge list 
of objectives and thanks to the good leadership and good communication with all 
the parts of the campus, we were able to produce results in virtually every 
single area. We did not meet our graduation rate objective, but by the end of 
five years we already had the best graduation rate in the state. That is the 
area that we continue to work on. We are getting very close now after fifteen 
years.
       Student ability went up but that doesn’t solve everything. There are a 
lot of people in the state of Missouri. If you have great students, you have it 
made. We tend to get students who have very high aptitudes but often never 
opened a book in high school. That is a whole other problem. It is through 
assessment that we found out that these were kids who studied, in most cases, 
less than five hours a week in high school. We started having conversations 
about what to do with these students. How do we get them to be intellectuals?
       Time on task went up. That alone may be enough to justify the time that 
we’ve spent on assessment. We thought that they were studying, but through their 
own self-reports they were studying six to ten hours a week in college. Our 
average student now spends sixteen to seventeen hours a week on studies. That 
still isn’t our goal or what our faculty hoped for, but we feel pretty good 
about the increase.
       Retention and graduate rates are both up. About forty percent of our 
students now go on to graduate and professional schools. We took the liberal 
arts and sciences mission and one of the things that the state told us was that 
we needed to keep several programs in service to our region. For example, we 
have a very good nursing program that may not ordinarily be seen as part of a 
liberal arts and sciences institution, but because of the need for teachers in 
the northeast region of the state and now being the only four-year public school 
in the region we have kept that program.
       We have a thriving business school. They are central to who we are and 
what we do. They are perhaps the strongest supporters of a very rigorous liberal 
arts curriculum. They think that it makes their business graduates a very 
different kind of student. 
One of the things that we had to watch then was what was happening on the 
national exams with this whole new kind of student. Obviously their aptitude is 
way up so there is going to be an increase in scores. The vice president kept 
telling us is that we have to make sure that all of these measurements show that 
we are achieving an education that is worthy of this student population. The 
scores went up but the question was whether or not they were going up as fast 
and as high as we wanted.
       We have a writing assessment. Right now we are undergoing massive 
revision of that assessment instrument. Foreign language placement skyrocketed 
under graduate research as expected. We have about seven hundred students each 
year involved in undergraduate research. Study abroad programs went way up.
       What can we learn from Truman’s experience? Multiple measures are 
extremely important. That would be one of the things that I would really 
encourage you to think about. As they are pushing this standardized test over 
here you all have to come up with additional things that you do so that if, for 
some reason, this standardized that is being forced on you does not say what you 
really think is happening on the campus, you have a whole other set of data that 
you can use in your defense. The multiple measure strategy is sort of the 
ordinary recommendation, but in your instance you need to be moving on that 
front very aggressively.
       For us, common campus-wide requirements have been extremely useful. This 
doesn’t seem to be something that is usually adopted nationwide. I go to 
campuses all over the country and everyone on campus is doing something 
completely different. It makes it very difficult to have conversations and for 
the administration to use assessment effectively in setting agendas and plans 
for the institution. I would encourage you to think about it. We have a central 
office that takes care of a lot of the bureaucratic elements of assessment. We 
have a common survey that everyone on the campus uses. They collect and report 
it and we are expected to use it, but we don’t have to do the administrative of 
the instrument. The testing that we do is also administered by the campus 
office. They keep the data. We are encouraged to do additional things and some 
disciplines do a lot of additional stuff. Let’s look at what the system looks 
like here.
       Freshmen take surveys. The CIRP is the national survey out of UCLA that 
Alexander Aston does and they take that the first week that they are on campus. 
The CSEQ is out of the University of Indiana and it is given to students at the 
end of their first freshman semester. In our original model, they would have sat 
for the general education exam that week as well. The decision has been that 
that paradigm does not work as well because the students come in at such a high 
level. We don’t need to test them multiple times in general education because 
they have already demonstrated by virtue of their admission materials that they 
have high levels of proficiency in general education areas.
       Juniors take the CSEQ survey again. That is the same one that they took 
at the end of the first semester. They sit for either the CAP or the AP exam. 
That is where they take their general education assessment. That is part of our 
funding for results in the state of Missouri. They aren’t required to take this 
test. The state has a funding formula where you are given a financial incentive 
for every student to take the test. You get an additional bump in your 
recommendations for budget depending on how many of your individual students 
scored above the fiftieth percentile on that exam. Motivation becomes a key 
issue.
       Seniors take a senior exam in their major field. They have to take a 
nationally recognized exam. They take the gradating questionnaire which is a 
locally developed instrument. They do a liberal arts portfolio and every senior 
has to have a capstone course in each of their majors. Many of our students have 
multiple majors. The capstone course is also where we collect the liberal arts 
portfolio. It is the faculty in the major who are responsible for collecting 
those portfolios, even though they don’t really focus on the major; they are 
asking for materials for a number of liberal arts categories.
       Our success has come, in part, because we do both qualitative and 
quantitative measures. The examples of qualitative measures that you will see 
are cooperatively graded exams. Our definition of assessment is that the faculty 
member in the classroom cannot be the only assessor. We have sixty group 
members, three groups of twenty that read for a week after school is out every 
summer. We read eleven hundred portfolios every summer. It is an incredible 
experience. You sit around a table with twenty people that you may have working 
down the hall from you but with whom you rarely talk about academic matters. 
This is an opportunity to have those really rich conversations around the table 
as you are reading actual student work. Capstone courses, especially where they 
are team-taught, are dynamic assessment strategies. Our success has not been 
very good where a single faculty member teaches them because it becomes 
extraordinarily difficult to structure time outside of class to communicate with 
other faculty members about what is happening in that capstone. Some major have 
done it successfully, but not many.
       A number of our disciplines have an interviewing process with every 
graduating senior. The faculty members come together to figure out what the 
assessment is going to look this. That process is the most exciting of all 
because you have to sit down and figure out what it is that you really want 
students to be able to do. That is the great value of assessment. Those 
conversations have been the most successful part of it because these are the 
people who are actually implementing the instrument. 
       However, it is difficult to report qualitative assessment to external 
constituencies in a way that it makes sense to them. The experience that you 
have, by sitting at a table with a group of twenty colleagues and having these 
conversations, are so rich but when it gets written down in a report and sent by 
email or on the web to faculty members, the richness dissipates. They have to 
read a lot of material to come away with what really happened there and even 
then it is difficult to communicate. They need to be there to appreciate the 
benefits. You can’t report these things very effectively to the state 
legislature; they’re not going to read a thirty page report. It’s also difficult 
to communicate these things to faculty members who weren’t at the table on our 
own campus.
       These are extremely expensive instruments if time is part of your 
equation. Our psychologists are probably the most critical of these instruments. 
In their view the only things that they can rely on are the standardized testes, 
unlike many of our professors who feel that only the qualitative instruments are 
good.
       National surveys are becoming more and more popular. NSSE has certainly 
had a huge impact nationally. This, again, is out of the University of Indiana. 
The CIRP and the follow-up survey to the CIRP are also very influential. For 
those you get national data. You can request the universities by name that we 
consider to be peer institutions and they will send you back a set of scores 
compared to ten peer institutions. There are concerns here about appropriateness 
of the tests and their fit with the curriculum. I assume that is the reason why 
you are toying with the idea of writing one yourself. Certainly look at what is 
on the shelf. Writing one yourself is a major undertaking although a number of 
states do it.
        Without campus-wide dialogue, none of the assessment matters. Most of 
our campuses in the country are in the mode of, perhaps not resistance, but 
passive appliance. Let them test; we will go about our business without paying 
any attention to it. So how do you structure campus-wide dialogue to have the 
exam data be relevant? Of course this can’t be the only data that is relevant; 
you have to look at multiple forms of information.
       One thing that must be emphasized is that assessment data is not the 
goal. All of the sudden the goal is to achieve “X” on the writing assessment. 
That is not the goal. The goal is to have students write well. Faculty members 
got very incensed when we had a president that talked about assessment data as 
the goal. The learning objective is the goal. It’s the way that we’re talking 
about it that’s important.
	Success of assessment goes beyond the techniques that you use. We have 
used the same techniques and we have had years that assessment has been good for 
us and years that we have completely ignored it. The system itself can be 
successful or not depending on the culture within which it operates and the 
leadership that you have on your campus on all levels: students, faculty, and 
administration. It facilitates and builds upon a shared vision. If you don’t 
have a shared set of objectives assessment makes no sense. It requires 
involvement of the campus community. It necessitates ongoing attention. If it is 
going to be a vital part of the campus culture you can’t get it and then ignore 
it. You get new faculty and new students every year. You have to maintain 
attention to it or it quickly dissipates. The best thing about assessment is the 
attention that it brings to student learning, which is our central purpose.
	I will leave it at that. It is a cultural exercise. Without a supporting 
culture it really doesn’t have much impact. I will entertain some questions if 
we have time for that.

Joe Hildreth: We have time for a few questions.

Judith Adams-Volpe: I congratulate you on a program which seems to be highly 
structured and effective at your institution. It is what you said at the end 
that I think is the rub for us in SUNY. You said that you must have a shared set 
of objectives for assessment. It makes little sense. We’re talking a system here 
that goes from community colleges to Cornell. It goes even a few blocks from 
Environmental Science to Upstate Medical. We also have mandated assessment of 
general education almost in place. We have done that but it is campus-based. I 
wonder if you can tell us how you managed to make the multi-faceted part of your 
assessment get to the higher level within the Missouri system. What is being 
talked about here is a single test that most of us fear would be the only thing 
reported externally.

Candice Young: Reporting is obviously a problem but I can tell you that the 
coordinating board in the state of Missouri does report the test scores 
currently on the general education exams that the campuses use, but we don’t all 
use the same one and we don’t all administer it at the same time. It may be even 
more problematic in some ways that it is all on the same page.
	It doesn’t get a great deal of attention. I’m always amazed at how little 
attention the newspapers pay it because it seems to me a huge potential for 
misuse. I see a little bit of it being done. You’ll see it reported in a few 
places with the percent pass-rate on the exam which is a mandated test in the 
state of Missouri. I am surprised that it has not been used more. Maybe it is 
because the coordinating board has been cautious when it talks to reporters and 
talks about how you have campuses that are situated differently and that it is 
difficult to make cross-institutional comparison even though it is all on the 
same page.
	How do you get there? I would be trying to get it done at the 
institutional level in terms of the common set of objectives. I know that you 
all are trying to come up with this system-wide exam because that is what they 
are telling you to do. The CLA is the better strategy because while the subject 
matter that the test is on comes from the gamma of the general education 
curriculum, the test is about the students’ ability to engage in critical 
analysis and their abili0ty to communicate it. That is, presumably, what we want 
from all of our students in every instance that you just described. Its 
reporting technique is to show you along the grid by ability level of your 
students. I really think that what they are trying to do, in terms of their 
objectives, is the way to go. I am opposed to assessment strategies that test 
what I call bits. I think that this is one of the things that have been 
happening nationally over the last ten years. Everyone is trying to assess their 
little goal. It gets to be a sea of assessing a lot of bits and I think that you 
are better off thinking about it more holistically so that we don’t try to 
assess every outcome of our general education program.
	So I would set your goals by campus, except that maybe you would have a 
standardized exam for the state. You are reporting other data besides the test 
scores. It is impossible, in my mind, to be good in a system-wide type of 
curriculum. You don’t want the faculty to have to teach their curriculum page-
by-page and have to apply to make a change, as they do in Phoenix.

Pete Knuepfer: My understanding of the CLA program and the other part of Rand 
Corporation’s study was that they did a two-year pilot and now they are doing a 
six-year more advanced pilot at which point they think they will have something 
that they can really work nation-wide. I find it curious to find that the state 
of Missouri is thinking of adopting that approach.
	Also, I wanted to know if you could elaborate on something that you 
commented on earlier on. The value-added approach was not nearly as successful 
in the selective institution that you have now become. Could you clarify what 
that means to us?
Candice Young: The first part was the Rand project. This year they are doing 
fifty campuses. Our coordinating board apparently seems to think that we ought 
to have five or six in that pool. Each year they are going to be expanding. They 
have piloted it in 2002 with fourteen institutions and this year they want 
fifty.
	In regard to value-added, with standardized instruments are not very good 
at giving you much room for growth. If your average student comes in and 
immediately scores at the ninetieth percentile or better, your ability to make 
gains is marginal, especially considering that the first time they took the exam 
they were extremely motivated because it was a deciding factor in whether or not 
they got into your institution. By junior year, they have adopted the culture 
and they don’t need to show you any more. So it has been very difficult to get 
the kind of gains we want.
	We have used some value-added strategies in some other areas. With the 
CSEQ we are trying to look at the level of student engagement and the level of 
activities on various behaviors are and what the changes are between the 
freshman and the junior year. We have looked at value-added also several years 
during the portfolio years. We have asked students to submit something from 
their freshman year and something from their senior year in a particular 
category. The problem there is that the prompts are not aligned well enough 
frequently to make great claims about what you have learned during four years.

Joe Hildreth: I know that we have some more questions but look at the time and 
look at how tight things are. I have been bluntly told in past meetings to not 
cut the sharing of concerns part of the meeting short. With your permission, I 
would like to have the remaining questions asked of Candice during our 
discussion period.
	We are now going to go to our sharing of concerns and Susan is going to 
tell us where those meeting rooms are located. 

(break)

Joe Hildreth: I would like to introduce our next speaker, the University Provost 
of the SUNY System, Provost Peter Salins.

Peter Salins: Good afternoon. It is always a pleasure for me to be with you.
	I will take us through the presentation. We call it “Going Forward,” and 
it represents the better part of a year’s work in my office. What you are seeing 
is the final distillation in PowerPoint. There is actually a thoroughly 
elaborated document that I think is available to you.
	We call this the strategic academic agenda. It’s grounded in essentially 
three things: a vision of academic excellence and national prominence for the 
university, a framework for achieving high academic aspirations, and especially 
to develop processes of implementation that gain university-wide support. A lot 
of people have brilliant ideas in terms of substance but process matters a great 
deal. Three key components of planning and research so that we know why we are 
doing what we are doing: a set of key academic initiatives that are designed to 
achieve rising student expectations, stronger academic programs and faculty 
excellence and effectiveness, and accountability and continuous improvement.
	In each case we have an overarching goal in the case of planning and 
research. IT is to raise academic aspirations and to build an expectation of 
academic excellence. Among the specific action items in this component, the most 
comprehensive is what we call Mission Review Two, for the period 2005-2010. 
Mission Review One was very effective in creating an overall set of guiding 
principles and framing parameters for every campus. We think that the second one 
will be a further improved version of Mission Review One. We are redesigning 
Mission Review in response to a university-wide survey that we did. It is going 
to be both broader and deeper. This time we will involve the construction funds 
and talk about facilities on our campuses. We will involve the finance office to 
discuss money and the student affairs office to talk about student issues. As 
for as the timetable, we are going to launch the initiative with the guidance 
documents early in the spring, probably in February. We are going to ask the 
campuses to return the mission summary documents to our office by the summer and 
we will spend the summer reviewing them. In the fall we are going to be out on 
the road. We will visit every campus in the system and enter into dialogues with 
campus representatives. We will hopefully be able to conclude the process in the 
spring of 2005. It will be better and quicker as we have the existing memorandum 
to work from. This is very important because it enforces the view the mission 
review is not just a one-shot thing. This is a living, continuously evolving 
process. Even though we go through major events, we will be doing continuous 
annual follow-ups.
       Related to this is state-mandated master plan for 2004-2008. SUNY has had 
pretty good luck at convincing the state education department that ours qualify 
as the ingredients of the master plan. This happened a few years ago with 
Rethinking SUNY, which was accepted as the master plan at that time. The last 
cycle before the current one, we got them to accept Mission Review One and its 
summary as the master plan. We are going to be doing the preliminary draft this 
fall and we will share it with the university community in the spring. The 
Chancellor and the Trustees will officially adopt it in the spring and then we 
will transmit it next summer to the Commissioner. 
       With your strong support we created the advisory council on general 
education which has a number of your colleagues as members. ACGE is going to 
reexamine some of the learning outcomes beginning with mathematics. It should be 
starting this fall. We have already put a searchable list on the Internet of all 
the general education offerings of every single campus. We are going to continue 
to work with the registrar’s group on transfer and tracking issues. We are also 
going to do a first-time analysis on the changes that have taken place in 
course-taking patterns among these key subjects.
       We do have a math task force made up almost entirely of university 
faculty looking at how we can strengthen the math component of teacher training, 
especially in terms of elementary education. That task force is meeting as we 
are meeting here. Secondary education is a different kind of problem: we don’t 
have enough people who want to become math teachers. In elementary education we 
have a lot of people who want to become elementary school teachers but they need 
stronger task grounding. The task force is making recommendations in terms of 
number of math courses that elementary teachers need to take as well as the 
content of them.
       We are going to have a new project under development similar to the one 
in the math area with language arts. We put together a task force to look at 
training teachers. We are also going to launch a fellows program. The way the 
fellows program would work would be that since it is very difficult to get 
students to major in secondary education with math or science as their 
concentration. We are going to go to any campuses that would be interested and 
make an offer to recent math and science major graduates. We will offer to get 
them in the New York City schools starting immediately. After they have 
graduated they would receive a regular salary in that position given the recent 
changes in pay. We will work with the campus from which the student graduated to 
develop a professional curriculum which is consistent with both the state 
education department standards and New York City’s own evolving perspective on 
teacher training. That will begin in the summer before the fall of the first 
year of teaching and will continue through the fall and spring terms. It will 
conclude in the summer after the first year at which time the fellow can sit for 
the permanent certification and get a master’s degree from the institution from 
which they came. All of their tuition is paid for by New York City. It is a very 
interesting prospect.
       The graduate programs that we have at SUNY across most of our 
institutions and especially out university and medical centers are among the 
most important programs in the university. They are also among the most 
expensive. For the most part they are fine programs, but we need to focus more 
specifically on whether they have the resources that they need and if they are 
achieving what they intend to achieve. We have organized a committee of 
graduated deans across the university that has been meeting with Anne Huot in my 
office to develop metrics for evaluation. We are going to try to collect and 
analyze it in the spring. We are going to build the results of whatever analysis 
we do in Mission Review Two so that we bring to the table the ability to discuss 
these graduate programs with some of the relevant important information and 
data. A very large part of the university’s aggregate state support goes into 
these programs and we need to make sure that they are as strong as they can be 
given their costs.
       The Trustees have made it very clear that it is very important that we 
enable our community college graduates to transfer seamlessly into our upper 
division programs. This, as a goal, is years old and is right up there with 
apple pie and motherhood. Nevertheless, it is an issue that never quite goes 
away, partly because the anecdotage overwhelm the facts and we try to make it 
clear to everyone who is interested that everything is much better than they 
believe. We have a transfer action plan that is going to be implemented in the 
fall. We have to complete the implementation of the teacher education transfer 
template which is a good precedent for doing this in other areas. Transfer is no 
longer about general education because general education courses transfer 
automatically. But even in the past transfer was not as much about general 
education as it was about particular professional programs. So what we did in 
teacher education, we are going to do in the other big transfer areas: business 
administration, nursing and engineering. By looking at this program by program 
and bringing together the representatives from the community colleges and upper 
division specific programs we can hopefully solve that and lay it to rest.
       Finally, we have the transfer problem resolution mechanism. I got so 
tired of the negative anecdotes about community colleges that I sent a letter to 
every president and Provost in the community college sector to ask them to 
personally give me the individual cases. Any student that comes to you and says 
that they can’t get into whatever campus for whatever reason, I want to know 
about it and I promise to resolve each and every one of those cases. I have 
gotten zero cases back but the mechanism exists. I’m absolutely sincere and I 
have the staff to do it but I don’t know what it takes to kill some of this 
anecdotage but I think that we can deal with every single case.
       We, the faculty senate and the Provost’s office, are jointly the sponsors 
of the faculty development initiative and the membership of the faculty 
developing task force. Don has been leading that effort and I believe that we 
will have a report to distribute this fall. We are going to use the spring to 
get comments on that report and begin implementing the initiative in the fall. 
This is a very positive kind of initiative because it focuses on the kind of 
support that you need. I want us to spend a lot of time thinking and worrying 
about the environment in which you all work. This represents one significant 
first step in that.
        Academic preparedness is something that is brand new but something very 
important and represents what is happening in the Regents arena. The day before 
yesterday there was a legislative hearing on the Regents high school graduation 
standards. The purpose of the meeting was to try to wound the Regents standards 
on the basis of some of the problems that they have had in implementing them. 
There are two sides of that point. The Regents have said that they want all high 
school graduates in the state to meet particular curricular and proficiency 
achievement standards. I agree with that. We do want well prepared students. I 
hope that the Regents standards will prevail in the end but I am not going to 
wait for that miraculous day when every single high school graduate in the state 
of New York passes every one of the Regents exams with a high enough score. I 
think we need to start looking ourselves at what we would like students to have 
taken in high school and the levels of achievement and proficiency that they 
should have. We don’t need uniform expectations but it is high time that we 
start discussing these issues. This fall, after some preliminary research on 
patterns of high school course-taking by looking at transcripts, I’m going to 
impanel a task force to look at this to address what we should expect incoming 
students to have done. Hopefully we will have preliminary data that we can 
incorporate into the Mission Review process.
       An area that generally resides below the radar but is important is the 
learning technology that is available to use. Some of you here are techies, some 
of you are emerging techies, and some of you are tech-phobic. There is a mixture 
across the whole university. But there are a lot of exciting things that we can 
do with the new university technology. We have a whole unit in the Provost’s 
office that is dedicated to this. The most visible product of their efforts is 
the SUNY learning network which grows year by year. We would like web 
enhancement for most of our courses across the university and we have developed 
a template for that course space. We would like to establish partnerships with 
particular companies that provide academic technology. We want to develop the 
academic software initiative.
       As we do all of these things we have not forgotten about access and 
opportunity. We have concerns about these built into Mission Review and our 
master plan. It is an ongoing mission in our EOP programs and our educational 
opportunity centers. We are going to increase services to the disabled 
population. We tend to increase those and we have also made a commitment to the 
governor’s office to increase services to the aging population. We are going to 
do more for all sectors of the state population.
       The final component is accountability and continuous approval. Those are 
highfalutin words but we take it very seriously and so do you. The goal is to 
sustain a culture of accountability and continuous improvement in everything 
that we do. Some of the specific action items are going forward for the first 
time this fall. We are preparing an academic outcomes report. The data that goes 
into it is data that we have readily available but we are organizing it in a way 
that more systematically allows us, the Trustees and all stakeholders in the 
university to understand the progress that we are making. We are going to look 
at data on student success and learning outcomes which are now emerging form he 
campus-based assessment initiatives not revealed by campus lest anyone start 
worrying about that. There is a lot of stuff on enrollment including selectivity 
and diversity of the degrees granted, status of the major initiatives, and so 
forth. We are going to be presenting the first report to the Board of Trustees 
either late this fall or very early in the new year.
	On the assessment initiative there are three components: campus-based 
assessment of general education, of the major, and perhaps the value-added 
assessment of general education. In terms of the first, it has been a great 
success and really is a tribute to you and your colleagues in the community 
college sector. Campus-bases assessment is enormously complex and detailed 
activity and it is a wonderful success. I want to commend all of you on the work 
that you have put into it. The Chancellor and our office were both very 
impressed with the honesty of the results that we have gotten from the campuses. 
It turns out that not all students are meeting or exceeding learning outcomes. 
There is work to be done to get more of them to succeed. But the very fact that 
we have brought it this far and to this level of detail is a remarkable 
accomplishment. Do not think for a moment that I don’t remind the Chancellor and 
the Board of Trustees of that fact. That is context for the discussion that has 
been ongoing about the third component but it is important.
	Campus-based assessment of the major may not seem like a big deal but it 
is. Our university center campuses generally have done assessment on a five to 
seven year cycle. At many of the other colleges it is even less universal. We 
have gotten fifty-six of the fifty-nine of the campuses ready to agree to 
subject every single professional major program to this process. Four hundred 
programs were used in the last academic year. Campus results from that are being 
used as we look through new program proposals in those fields. The 
implementation guidelines have been strengthened and campuses will not complete 
program data summary tables where each program would indicate the number of 
majors, graduates, and faculty assigned to the program and an estimate of the 
resources allocated to the program.
	Finally, there is value-added assessment of general education which I am 
going to skip over because you’ve had a lot of time to talk about it and you are 
going to talk about it some more. I don’t want to influence or contaminate the 
open and refreshing dialogue on that issue that you are going to have.
	In conclusion, we see the strategic academic agenda for this coming year 
as encompassing a very broad scope of initiatives on a fairly unprecedented 
scale. This is a kind of jigsaw puzzle that we are working constructively on 
together to have the maximum positive impact on the academic life of our 
campuses. Clearly, we see the kind of work that we are doing with you as 
transforming the academic reputation of the university and building a lasting 
foundation of higher aspirations, actions, and accountability. None of this 
means much unless it really gets built into the culture of the university. Now, 
if there are any questions I will be happy to answer them. Thank you…

Brian Stenson: It’s good to see everyone here again today. I know that you have 
a steady influx of new faculty senators and I want to discuss some of the 
reasons why when you look at the state university our resource based measures 
don’t always look so great. There are a lot of reasons for that and I want to go 
into them a bit. Although I went over the current year’s budget outlook at your 
planning meeting in September, Joe Hildreth and I decided that reprise of that 
might be in order. Frankly, there is no news on the state budget since the time 
that I did it in September, but there are people here who were not here in 
September and you may have new senators for all I know.
	I’ll begin by describing SUNY’s overall budget structure so that we can 
put this year’s budget and the challenges that lie ahead in some context. For 
those of you have heard some of this before or know all this already, my 
apologies. Before I start I want to give you a sense of the scope and scale of 
the state university. It’s really a mammoth undertaking. Our all-funds budget is 
$7.8 billion and that is larger than the all-funds budgets of fourteen states in 
the country. It is a startling statistic. The university system has a total 
workforce of nearly seventy-seven thousand people, making it the third largest 
governmental employer in New York behind the rest of New York State and New York 
City. We manage nearly a hundred million square feet of space and that is just 
in the academic buildings and the residence halls. When you add in maintenance, 
administration and other buildings, it is bigger than that. It is a huge 
undertaking and is actually the equivalent of twenty-seven pentagons. The 
university is the second largest user of energy in New York State. We have a 
built-in cost base between the employee work base and energy which, as you know 
from your own household budgets, is certainly uncontrollable and almost 
unpredictable.
	I mentioned the all-funds budget but I want to describe what exactly that 
is. I’m going to go through the key numbers. This chart illustrates both the 
basic components of our spending picture and the growth in the all-funds budget 
over the last decade. We’ll look at 2003-2004 starting at the bottom. We have 
state tax dollars for our operating costs and that total is about $883 million 
this year. Tuition and general campus income is the next one. It’s $946 million. 
Then there is other state support and the state there pays debt service and 
fringe benefits, not part of our budget, but the state pays it in other portions 
of the state’s budget. Next is other spending that is at the campus and is part 
of the state budget but is really campus money. That is primarily made up by 
hospital revenues and the so-called IFR (Income Fund Reimbursables) budgets on 
campuses. Those are self-supporting programs financed by fees and charges. The 
top gives us a true all-funds picture of the entire state university and is the 
community college component. That, by itself, is $1.6 billion. The growth in the 
all-funds budget since 1993 was 59% in aggregate terms.
	Now we will focus on the state operated and statutory campuses excluding 
the community colleges and the hospital component of our budgets. When you drop 
our those two components, we still have the same growth pattern since 1993 and 
1994 starting at about $3.1 billion ten years ago to $4.9 billion right now.
	Let’s look at the core operating budget. That is the account from which we 
finance the basic functions of the university: instruction, academic support, 
student services, general administration, maintenance and operations, etc. That 
has grown much more slowly, as you can see. The overall growth rate has been 29% 
in the last ten years. The total increase in the core budget has been $417 
million since 1993. You should know that collective bargaining costs alone, the 
costs mandated by the state as part of its collective bargaining wage 
negotiation agreements included in state legislation, has actually consumed all 
of that growth and more. $417 million more has been imposed on the university 
for mandated salary increases. That core budget is supported by two major 
revenue sources: tuition and state support. Although the overall core budget 
hasn’t changed much in the last ten years, the composition of that core budget 
has changed dramatically. There have been some periods of growth. In the past 
several years we did get some modest increases in state support, primarily tied 
to the cost of those collective bargaining agreements that I mentioned. These 
period of somewhat steady and modest growth have been interrupted by sharp 
adjustments. When the state’s business cycle and tax collection picture 
deteriorate, state support is reduced and tuition is raised. We’ve really only 
had two broad based tuition increases which were in 1995-1996 and again this 
year, 2003-2004.
	When we look at the core budget for each campus, we determine it according 
to the budget allocation process. Tuition revenue is assigned to each campus 
that generates tuition. State support is allocated to each campus on a basis of 
a set of formulas. That is the general background on how the overall university 
budget picture looks and works. I want to review what happened this year and 
describe a bit about where we stand now.
	I’m sure that you all know that the state was faced with an enormous 
budget deficit this past year. It stemmed from the economic malaise in the 
nation even after the recession officially ended and the specific effects in New 
York State after September 11th. The governor faced a serious budget deficit in 
the current year and we knew well before the beginning of this year that the 
budget picture for the state was not good which included the budget picture for 
the state university. Chancellor King led a major effort to maintain our overall 
level of spending even though we had to recognize that the conditions may well 
change. The Chancellor focused on the record of the past several years where 
state support for SUNY did not increase in line with state support from other 
state programs and where tuition was frozen. This pattern hurt our ability to 
cope with cost increases that resulted from our improvements in quality; the 
collective bargaining agreements; inflation, both in general purchases and 
equipment and energy inflation, which has really hurt our campuses; and 
enrollment growth, unsupported by state support; and an increasing emphasis on 
sponsored research and the need for operating investments to secure additional 
research. 
       All of these things have led to increases in cost pressures on our 
campuses. This chart illustrates just one of these cost pressures and it is 
enrollment and how it affects our largest cost: personnel and payroll costs. 
Here is a graph of enrollment in the state operated statutory campuses. This 
represents the all-funds work force in the state university. That is everybody: 
faculty, administration, people in the core budget, librarians, etc. It also 
includes hospital employees, people who are running the residence halls and so 
on. So we focused on this and the impact of rising enrollment and the 
projections of continued increases of enrollment would have on our budget. The 
governor understood this and proposed a $1,200 tuition increase. We were 
supportive although we understood the impact on students and their families, but 
that would have generated a modest net increase in our overall budget. He had 
recommended a substitution of state support for tuition and we actually believe 
that, properly managed and if we structure the tuition increase the way we 
wanted to, we would actually generate a little more money. That would have given 
us a little extra money in the budget this year. The legislature saw things 
differently and demanded that the tuition increase be held to $950. Legislature 
tried to compensate for this by suggesting raising out-of-state tuitions by 
close to $5,000 but we feared that it would drive students away and actually 
cause a net reduction in our revenue. So, in June, the Board of Trustees adopted 
a resolution that raised tuition for all categories of students but held the 
basic tuition rate for undergraduate students who were residents of New York to 
$950. The other tuition rates in our schedule were increased by greater amounts.
       In terms of overall revenue generated by the tuition increase that amount 
of revenue approximately equaled the size of the state support cut. The 
operating budget was really unchanged from the prior year. The key thing to 
remember is that this is sort of apparent state of stability masks some very 
difficult issues. I told you about these before. They are the key to 
understanding what is going on with the campuses this year and the challenges 
that lay ahead next year. To really appreciate that, you need to understand the 
tremendous variety that we have among the campuses and the budgets of those 
campuses. Many campuses have an operating budget that is mainly supported by 
tuition. At other campuses, the vast bulk of the funds come from the state 
subsidiary. This unevenness is because of the types of programs operated by the 
campuses. Some of the programs are extremely costly, as much as $75,000 a year 
per student and are not supported by tuition in any great extent. Other cost 
elements, such as research and public service, are not tied to enrollment and 
therefore they are not tied to tuition.
       This illustrates the overall point using BAP (Budget Allocation Process) 
numbers for 2003-2004. They reflect only the state support calculations under 
the BAP and exclude the kinds of deductions that we are forced to take 
subsequently. The numbers show how different types of campuses derive vastly 
different amounts of state support and the categories of the budget formulas 
that they get that support from. Those numbers depend on the types of activities 
supported on those campuses.
       The doctoral institutions derive 70% of their state support funding under 
the BAP from the enrollment related activities. Over a quarter of the money 
comes from research and public service compared to the other two sectors whereas 
doctoral institutions generate over 25% of their money from research and public 
services. The comprehensive and technology colleges are very small: 5.6% and 
2.3% respectively. They get 90-94% from the enrollment. There is a large 
disparity. When we have to reduce state support, which we did on a proportional 
basis this year, some campuses get hurt worse than others. The doctoral 
institutions get 65% of the total financial plan amount from state support. The 
comprehensive colleges get 40% and 46% in the other colleges. So there is a 
large disparity in the campuses’ reliance on state support versus tuition and 
where the money is actually generated in the implementation of the state BAP 
formula for those campuses.
       This next handout illustrates the impact of this scenario on an 
individual campus and the kinds of challenges we face in developing this year’s 
financial plan. The numbers on the sheet roughly represent real campus numbers. 
We have deleted the names to protect the innocent. 
       Campus A represents an institution with extremely expensive programs. 
Most students are in graduate and professional programs and consequently pay 
much higher tuition rates. The state support per student is extremely high to 
help meet the cost of education, for example, the costly medical education which 
is about $75,000 and tuition which is about $16,000 now. We don’t have the 
philanthropy support that other colleges do and we certainly can’t pay it mainly 
by tuition so the algorithm in our BAP model provides a significantly higher 
level of funding for medical education. Campus B is a more traditional 
comprehensive college. There are some beginning graduate students but most 
students are undergraduates in this example and study primarily in less 
expensive liberal arts programs. As a result, Campus A receives most of its 
operating budget support from the state subsidy while Campus B has a much more 
even split of its funding sources.
       In developing this year’s financial plan, we first updated the state 
support portion of the BAP for enrollment and sponsored research changes. WE 
then had to reduce the state support amount for each campus to match the amount 
included in the state budget. We first built up the base and figured out what 
would be a calculated amount of state support and then prorated everybody down 
to match what was included in the budget.
       I know that there have been some questions on some of campuses about how 
we did that. We didn’t single out a particular group of campuses and we didn’t 
single out one particular campus. We did it across the board, first grossing up 
the numbers to reflect a full running of the BAP formula and then reducing 
everyone down to the same percentage. That percentage reduction was just over 
20% in the state support. In other words, if this formula was fully funded, we 
would get 20% more state support than we are getting now. We then added the 
amount of campus income from the tuition increases. In the case of Campus A, the 
campus income would increase from $11,000 to $12,600. That is a pretty 
significant increase. Campus B would go from $19,300 to $25,000 as there are a 
lot more students there. We then compared the calculated BAP amounts which were 
a total amount. There are fifty million for Campus A and thirty-seven million 
for Campus B. We compared those numbers to what was available for each campus in 
the 2002-2003 fiscal year. For Campus A there was a sharp reduction in the 
amount of spending available to Campus A because of a significant reduction in 
state support. The increase in campus income doesn’t come close to offsetting 
the overall state support reduction. The total is down sharply from the prior 
year. If you look at Campus B you will see almost the reverse. Sate support was 
reduced by the same percentage of change but the revenue increase was $5.7 
million which more than offset the reduction of $2.7 in state support. The 
result of this step of the process was that Campus B would have received a 
funding increase of about $3 million whereas Campus A is down by almost $7 
million.
       We made a policy decision this year that in this difficult environment: 
major tuition, enrollment, and energy cost increases. We needed to preserve the 
ability of all the campuses to maintain their current programs and services. We 
implemented a tried and true budgeting technique ensuring that no campus would 
receive less than they received in the prior year. To do this we reduced the 
support for campuses like Campus B who have otherwise received increases, and 
redirected the revenue to campuses like Campus A who would have faced 
reductions. There are eight campuses in the condition of Campus A that would 
have had big reductions and twenty-three campuses like Campus B with big 
increases. The bottom line is that eight campuses received exactly the same 
amount as they received in the prior year and twenty-three campuses see very 
small increases. The increases are in the range of 1-2%. The amount of money 
that was shifted around in this way was about $50 million.
       We know that this is a difficult decision to make and, at Albany, a 
difficult action to absorb at the campus level. We know that several campuses 
are facing extremely difficult budget challenges this year. It is especially 
true for the small campuses that are serving increased numbers of students. Part 
of the plan that we implemented in the past several years in close cooperation 
with the Provost was to raise the enrollment for some smaller campuses that we 
did not think were economically viable to stand on their own at that level of 
enrollment. We worked carefully to expand the enrollment. In six cases we 
brought in the academic program offerings to focus from almost exclusively 
lower-division education to a full four-year education. In the case of the 
Institute of Technology at Utica-Rome, we went the other way. They had focused 
exclusively on upper-division in the prior years and we worked with them to 
broaden that. We worked at those campuses to try to change their academic 
mission focus. The good news is that in most cases the campus enrollment grew, 
the bad news is that they didn’t get more money to deal with the increased 
numbers of students. It left them in a difficult position.
       We are very aware of the situation and the Chancellor has directed us to 
be very creative in our search for new sources of money. We are doing that now 
and looking at every possible source of relief by trying to find pockets of 
money around that we can use to assist campuses. It is still early to share 
details and unfortunately it is still too early. We have not reached the point 
where we can divulge them. I want to make sure that everyone understands that we 
are working hard on these projects.
       Looking ahead, New York State is still projecting a budget deficit of 
about $5 billion next year for 2004-2005 and a similar gap in 2005-2006. We 
obviously don’t know the impact of that budget and how the government will close 
that budget gap on the state university, but we are working closely with the 
governor’s office in the Division of the Budget, continuing our message that we 
tried to convey last year about the need to maintain an overall level of 
funding. We know that there is one major difference next year and that is that 
it is an election year. Speaker Silver has already come out publicly against a 
tax increase. I don’t think that he addressed the tuition increase specifically. 
It is hard to believe that elected officials would jump up and down eagerly 
about the prospect of a big tuition increase in an election year. The past eight 
years have shown you that politicians don’t like to increase tuition even when 
there is no election.
       We are telling the state that we have managed these years of flat budgets 
in a way that has forced us to be more creative and efficient by controlling 
costs wherever we could. We are also telling them that we are about at the end 
of our ability to make these kinds of economies. There is very little additional 
efficiency to be wrung out of the system. We are trying to be as creative as we 
can. Trustee Stephanie Gross heard this on a conference call yesterday. We are 
getting increasingly exotic and almost elaborate in our efforts to manage energy 
costs. We are buying electricity directly from something called the ISO 
(Independent Service Operator). We are bypassing the normal utility process to 
try and buy it directly from the power producers to save overheard costs and 
some of the state taxes that are indebted in some of the rates that you and I 
pay as customers. We are actually going to be getting into the business of 
buying electricity directly for some of the state offices in Albany. But that is 
a lot of work for relatively small savings. We have saved $500,000 so far since 
last December with only a portion of the campuses are fully on the program.
       The message that we want to share with everyone in SUNY is that we need 
to try to control spending again this year and brace for another difficult 
budget next year. We understand that this is difficult to do especially in the 
light of the history that we have gone through. But if we manage our budget 
wisely, we can preserve the gains that we have made and go forward on the 
agenda.
       Thank you again for giving me the change to address you. I will be glad 
to try to answer any questions that you may have.
       
Peter Knuepfer: I have a question about language using the term “flat budgets”. 
I actually wish that I could turn the clock back and vote again in this group 
for the budget in the spring. It was all there and I looked at all of the text 
again, so the information was there. But flat budgets is what it is called but 
it’s not flat because it is flat plus additional increases which are, in 
reality, what we really live with. This group voted for a cut. At Alfred we have 
a 20% deficit and we are being asked to level our budget. We have students 
making t-shirts to sell to save the college and I wish that we would stop 
calling it balanced budgets because, in fact, misnaming it misrepresents it to 
the legislature.

Brian Stenson: I want you to know that when we talked to the legislature in the 
governor’s office in the Division of the Budget about our budget position 
picture, we include what is technically called a baseline budget. For the year 
that we are in now we identified all of the built-in cost factors that we had to 
bear: mall collective bargaining increases, general inflation and the energy 
inflation. We focus on that stuff. We don’t do it publicly. This group would 
certainly understand that when you go in the general public it is difficult and 
very few people can understand it.
	We know that even though it was flat year-to-year in aggregate terms, when 
you compare it to the built-in cost base that we faced, it was short of what we 
needed to continue current operations with updated cost numbers like salary 
increases. We have pressed that point to the legislature. We have also done an 
exercise with our campuses to focus on the impact of that baseline budget gap 
that each campus faces and identified what each campus did to manage the gap. 
Part of the gap we face this year is a carryover from the prior year again. We 
had a bigger gap in the prior year and the campuses closed last year’s budget 
gap by using non-recurring money. We might have drawn down the reserves in some 
of the IFR programs and their stabilization fund which is their rainy day fund. 
We know that there was a holdover of last year’s budget gap that got built into 
the current year and that is what we talk about to the state, the fact that we 
are running out of options and we don’t have a lot of reserves. They understand 
that but the problem is that every agency in the state government is facing that 
and we are one of the few agencies that didn’t receive a reduction on a year-to-
year basis. Other state agencies might have had the same cost pressures that we 
were facing but they actually had less money in the year before to deal with it. 
We keep focusing on the issue that you rightfully raised.

Pete Knuepfer (Binghamton): Brian, I have been hearing from various sources that 
there is intent to change aspects of the budget allocation plan. Can you give us 
any insight? This year you obviously ran away from it effectively in terms of 
trying to reallocate. Can you give us any insight on what kind of approaches or 
changing priorities will be looked at for that?

Brian Stenson: We don’t know the change in approaches yet. We are working with 
our friends in the Provost’s office. There are two kinds of things that we have 
to address. We absolutely have to address how to cope with the impact of what we 
did this year. By moving $50 million from twenty-three campuses to eight 
campuses, we really set the BAP on its head. WE know that if we continue to go 
forward with something like that it just undercuts the general operating 
objectives that we had when we implemented the BAP. Those were 
understandability, predictability, transparency and use by the campuses as a 
planning tool. We know that we can’t continue that way indefinitely.
	The second area that we are looking at is in response to some Trustee 
interest in inserting more performance based measures into the BAP. We call the 
BAP performance based funding and it is to some extent. IN normal years it 
aligns the campus allocations to enrollment and tuition. When it is fully 
funded, everything works well. But this year it doesn’t. What we are trying to 
do is identify some measures of more traditional performance measurement to help 
influence the amount of allocations. It’s premature to say what we are planning 
on. We want to keep true to the basic principles and we don’t want it to be 
overly cumbersome. So we are going to start to try to find ways to influence the 
budget allocation numbers in a way that meets the interests of the Trustees.

Anne Donnelly (Cobleskill): I’d like to know the status of the SCAP funds and 
when they will be released to the campuses.

Brian Stenson: There were two programs that we held up allocations for. Part of 
our thinking was that when we did the financial plan we had good reason to 
expect that there would be a strong possibility of a very serious mid-year 
budget correction in the state government and we identified two programs that we 
would hold up to use as a buffer for that. If we pulled one hundred people we 
would have one hundred five candidates to withhold on that basis. We picked that 
program there and another one. We are still trying to monitor the situation in 
Albany; we still do not know if there is going to be a mid-year budget revision 
or not. I can’t tell you if it will or won’t be released or when it will be 
released.

Bob Rogers (Fredonia): The way that I understand the BAP model was to reward 
campuses doing “the right thing” in terms of enrollment growth, etc. Then, all 
of the sudden, it kind of went out the window. If BAP gets adjusted to different 
criteria what is the incentive to campuses to actually follow that criteria 
given the fact that it could very well change at the last moment?

Brian Stenson: That is a good question. Let me step back a bit and talk about 
the situation that we faced before we implemented the BAP. You are on the right 
track in terms of the general incentives that we were trying to build in. I 
would prefer to characterize it as we are leveling the playing field for 
campuses having funding tied to enrollment.
	The previous method that we used was extraordinarily more complicated than 
what we are using now. Campuses did not necessarily get additional state support 
for enrollment growth. Most of the incremental changes from year to year were 
limited to the tuition amount and that didn’t adequately fund campuses that were 
seeking to increase their enrollment. What we tried to do, and what I think 
worked reasonably well for the first four years was to have a system with full 
funding and campuses with full enrollment got funded for that increase. They 
would get both state support money and additional tuition revenue.
	Last year, the state did not give us enrollment funding for campuses in 
the BAP model and we had a situation which was what we had been previously 
worried about where the overall amount of state funding was flat but there were 
some campuses growing and some that were staying the same. In that situation we 
had campuses that were happy to maintain their current enrollment rate but they 
were losing money to fund enrollment growth at other campuses. That was probably 
the worst outcome.
	This year we are forced by circumstance to do this adjustment at the end 
of the process to try to put in a short term fix that balances as many needs as 
we possibly could. We know that it doesn’t work right and that we had actually 
encouraged campuses in some cases to raise their enrollment. Other campuses 
worked strenuously to have them maintain enrollments. But some campuses we 
worked with a lot to raise their enrollment and we know that we didn’t fund them 
fully for it. Given the outcomes that we had this year in the state budget, we 
didn’t have an awful lot of choices. We understand that the system that we have 
now doesn’t work well.

Ray Guydosh (Plattsburg): You mentioned holding up SCAP funds to maybe deal with 
allocation. What was the other category?

Brian Stenson: The other thing was academic equipment replacement. Thank you.

Joe Hildreth: I know that we have more questions but we don’t have the time and 
we must keep moving on our agenda. Let’s thank Brian for an informative report…

…All those in favor of dispensing with the verbal sharing of concerns this 
afternoon in favor of a written report which will be submitted, if possible, 
tomorrow morning please signify by saying “aye”. Opposed, “nay”. The ayes have 
it.
	We will now go onto our next item of business. I am pleased to have with 
us the president of the CUNY faculty senate, Susan O’Malley, and CUNY currently 
has an assessment for our rising juniors. I ask her to come and share what is 
going on with assessment at CUNY. Susan, thank you for coming.

Susan O’Malley: At CUNY my group meets every moth with the Chancellor. My 
Executive Committee meets every two weeks and another thing is that I sit at the 
Board of Trustees and make a lot of noise. I don’t have vote but we have a 
committee structure, so I have a voting faculty member on everything that comes 
up with the Board of Trustees. It is a very different structure but that does 
not mean that we did any better in testing.
	I racked my brain for what would be the most useful for you because the 
CUNY testing wars were 1997-2000 and are over. I think what would be useful is 
the description of the two assessment tests that we have for every student to 
take. The Trustees’ resolutions, our resolution, the cost of this…why test? What 
is the motivation? What are the dangers of testing and what can be done to make 
a bad situation better?
	I brought a lot of handouts so that you can see the descriptions of the 
test and how people did. You can see the Trustees’ resolution of which there 
were nine. The first test is the ACT basic skills test that every student must 
take if they didn’t do well on the Regents or the SAT. This is a test in reading 
and writing and we also have a math test. The reading test is untimed. It’s all 
done on a computer. The writing is an essay with extraordinarily dumb questions. 
The math test is not difficult enough. If students do not pass the test they 
must go to a community college unless they are an ESL or CSEQ. The test is used 
for placement and for exit from remediation that everyone says is a bad idea. It 
is a very poor test. The faculty thinks that this test and getting rid of 
remediation in the senior colleges has lowered standards. I know that it touted 
as having raised standards but the faculty doesn’t think so.
	What our Trustees wanted was a nationally normed test. They did not trust 
the faculty to devise their own test, at least in terms of this ACT test. They 
wanted it nationally normed so that we could show that CUNY is doing fine. The 
CPE is the rising junior test. I guess that this is similar to what they want to 
do to you. Maybe it’s not. Every student must pass this test to graduate from a 
community college or to start their junior year at CUNY. This is a very high 
stakes test. If you have to give a test this test isn’t so bad. You can see 
copies of it. It is faculty designed. Students are given a substantial essay to 
read and discuss outside of class and then come to the testing situation and 
they are given another short essay and fairly decent questions to write an 
essay. They have two hours to write this essay. They then have another hour to 
do something that the Trustees wanted to put in that has to do with reading 
graphs and statistics and integrating that into the same argument as the essay. 
I think that it is a three-hour test. It’s very long. The faculty tried to grade 
and read it but it was absolutely exhausting trying to get faculty together to 
do it. I’m afraid that it is now off in Iowa being read.
	The bad point is that it is high stakes testing. You may take it three 
times; if you do not pass it the third time you are out. You may appeal for the 
fourth time and they may perhaps give it to you. We haven’t had this test long 
enough to have all the lawsuits start but I think that they will start within a 
year.
       The problem with tests is that they drive curriculum no matter what you 
do. A stupid test drives stupid curriculum because it is what you do in college: 
read books and essays and write critically on them. I don’t mind this test so 
much because it is what I do anyway. I don’t feel that it is really teaching 
towards the test but some people just cannot perform on a high stakes test. We 
need a PEEL procedure that they have not let us had.
	Trustees’ resolutions went from May 1997 to September 1999 and with 
faculty resolutions in 2000 battling back and forth nine resolutions. You would 
think that you had the Trustees and what they wanted and then it would slither 
away into something else. One resolution doesn’t always guarantee that that is 
the way it is going to be. They started out with the ACT test and all that stuff 
and then they went to the rising junior and then they said that you can’t 
graduate from a community college without the rising junior. We argued that it 
should be transfer but they refused that idea. So now you finish your community 
college work and then if you don’t pass this test, I guess maybe they transfer 
to SUNY, I don’t know.
	Why test? I know that for CUNY the reason was that Benno Schmidt and Crow 
did a report on CUNY. It was called “The University Adrift” and was done with 
the RAND Corporation and it was about thirty volumes. It just went on and on. 
The idea was that we would be established as adrift and then we would bring in 
testing to make us moored or no longer adrift. I think that the tests were used 
to give CUNY a better reputation. I don’t think that there is any other reason 
except for maybe control. We had a much worse Board of Trustees at that time 
with Mayor Giuliani exercising great control and Pataki with less control.
	That has been the reason for CUNY. SUNY, I don’t know. We started with a 
value-added test but that seemed so excessively dumb because value-added means 
that you have to give a test in the beginning and then a test in a few years. If 
that doesn’t drive curriculum, I don’t know how you could devise a test that 
doesn’t unless maybe you did something like a proficiency exam. IT seems to me 
that at SUNY it has to do with having to show the legislature that your students 
have learned something. Those that don’t do well should get less money. That is 
sort of what Brian just said.
	I know from the news clips that I’ve gotten about this SUNY testing that 
it is a done deal. They would like the faculty to agree but the news clips that 
I have gotten say that it is happening. They also say that it will be used for 
recruitment when a campus says that they have so much value-added to their 
students. I hope that it isn’t used to close colleges. That is my fear, but 
maybe it’s just paranoia. 
       About cost, I know that it is over a million a year just to administer 
the test. I called one of the vice Chancellors yesterday to say that I was 
giving this talk and I have to know how much it costs. I’m going to call back 
again for the costs. It is astronomical, particularly the first year when you 
are putting the tests in, but then a lot of money every year to administer the 
test.
       The dangers of testing are: expensive; test-driven curriculum; and I 
think that it reduces the value of education. Do you remember when you were in 
college? The excitement of learning was so great. I also think that it is a loss 
of belief in faculty, at least in was in CUNY’s case. They didn’t trust the 
faculty to do proper assessment.
       What to do? I’m getting faculty to do focus groups on new initiatives for 
the master plan. They have asked me to do that. Of course, one of the focus 
groups was on testing and remediation. I think that if we ask for certain 
studies to look at what these tests have done that maybe I could somehow push 
against them by showing that these tests don’t really make much of a difference 
in a student’s overall GPA; they just harass students. I know that I have to get 
an appeal for the rising junior test; it’s just not right to just kick out a 
student. For the ACT we need to have higher cutoff scores and the faculty needs 
to be the ones to decide when student get out of remediation.
       Do you have any questions?

???: In that million dollars for expenses, does it count what you have to pay 
out in Iowa to grade the ACT?

Susan O’Malley: I think so. It’s over a million but maybe I’ll make a phone call 
to see if they have gotten the figure yet. 

Jim McElwaine (Purchase College): Susan, about how many students do you 
administer the test to every year?

Susan O’Malley: I’m not really sure, but we are up to about 213,000 students at 
CUNY and everyone must take the rising junior test at some time and they often 
take it two to four times. We do a lot of testing.

Bob Rogers (Fredonia): When you were talking about your Chancellor kind of 
backing away from the testing, is that from anything that the faculty said or 
did? Or is it just part of the whole anti-high stakes testing thing that is 
going on at all levels?

Susan O’Malley: I think that he tends to follow trends and there is a trend 
against testing. It is also very expensive but in the eyes of the state and the 
media, CUNY is flying a lot higher than it used to.

Dick Eckerd (Binghamton): To what extent has the faculty participated? Do they 
play any role at all in the administration of these tests? What are those rules?

Susan O’Malley: We initially designed this CPE test. That is why the faculty 
liked this test better. Now I believe that we selection the reading passages and 
some of the questions. But it is now read in Iowa because it is such a long 
test. We do have involvement but not that much.

Joe Chillberg (Fredonia): I was wondering if in the pre and post test era where 
CUNY was kind of seen as a poor institution and I heard you say that the 
reputation has enhanced or increased. Has the testing in any way contributed to 
that or to student motivation to address this kind of motivation? Do you have 
any data on that?

Susan O’Malley: I think that the testing has contributed to the perception of 
CUNY being a more rigorous place. That is all I can say. I don’t think that it 
has actually improved anything. I think that it is difficult to get the students 
to take such a test if there aren’t some high stakes involved. Even with them 
the students just didn’t show up the first couple of times the test was offered. 
They were told the third time that they had better show up.
	If you want to talk later at the reception or at dinner, I would be happy 
to. 

Joe Hildreth: This brings us to the discussion that we are going to have on the 
SUNY system-wide value-added assessment. Vince Aceto offered to give a bit of 
history of the senate involvement with system-wide assessment. I think that 
would be a good way to start our conversation.

Vince Aceto: Thank you. The history of system-wide assessment really started 
back in the late 1990s during my final two years as the president of the faculty 
senate. I discovered one day by accident that the Provost had prepared a request 
for a proposal of the development of a standardized test to be used for a 
system-wide assessment initiative at SUNY. That really surprised me ad I 
immediately contacted my campus president and chief academic officer. They knew 
nothing about this. I then sent a fax to all of the SUNY campuses, the 
presidents, the chief academic officers, the CGLs, and the faculty senators with 
copies of the RFP asking what they knew about this. No one knew anything about 
it. It was a total surprise. The response was quick and swift. In a matter of a 
week or so, the RFP was put on hold and I was asked by the Provost to meet with 
the associate Provost to see if the two of us could sit down and craft some sort 
of an understanding in terms of how the Provost’s office might proceed with an 
initiative for system-wide testing.
	I immediately contacted the Executive Committee and we discussed this in 
great length. Ultimately the talks broke down completely; it was hopeless. We 
got hung up on four requests that we had and wanted to see for an advisory 
committee to work with representatives from the Provost’s office on exploring 
the possibility of system-wide testing with a standardized test.
	Those four factors were:
(1) To examine the experiences of other higher education institutions that were 
or had been engaged in system-wide assessment.
(2) We wanted to investigate what the cost might be.
(3) What are the educational benefits for having this kind of system-wide 
assessment?
(4) What is the feasibility? How does it really happen operationally?

       We could not get a common agreement with the Provost’s office on that and 
it died at that point. It looked like there wasn’t going to be any further 
discussion dealing with system-wide assessment. Subsequently, at our meeting at 
Delhi, the Executive Committee met with the Provost and we discussed a number of 
topics that were of concern to both of us. One of them had to do with system-
wide assessment. I regret that the Provost is not here because I dislike having 
to quote a person that is not present. This is a quote that I would stake my 
reputation on: “Look, if the Provost wants to give a standardized test, the 
Provost will give a standardized test and no faculty group is going to stop me.” 
Maybe the Provost has changed his mind but I think that it is important to 
recognize that this initiative has a history and is deeply imbedded in system 
administration. It didn’t suddenly come out.
       After this we decided as a faculty senate to maybe address this in a more 
formal way. We were going to meet at the Stony Brook campus so we invited a 
number of participants from the campuses to talk about their campus-based 
initiatives for assessment. We also invited Barbara Cambridge who, at that time, 
was the director of the assessment initiative of the American Association of 
Higher Education. She had devoted several years of her career to study this 
whole idea of assessment. We had the whole program videotaped. She gave a very 
good presentation and we made certain that Provost Salins was there. I know a 
representative from my campus at Albany talked about our assessment and 
longitudinal assessment which had been going on for a number of years as well as 
two other campuses. We then asked the Provost to speak with us about his views 
and his reactions to what they discussed that afternoon. His views did not 
change a bit. He was adamantly in support of some kind of system-wide 
assessment.
       We took those videotapes and made them available to campuses. Many 
campuses did ask for copies so that they would have some idea of what was being 
discussed at that point. That was in 1998. The president after me did engage 
himself in some discussions of some sort of an assessment process.
       So here we are and just this year we are being presented with a proposal 
for system-wide assessment. It has been characterized as being from the Board of 
Trustees. I remind you that the Chancellor presented this proposal to the Board 
of Trustees who were the ones to adopt it.
   	What is significant about this new document is that it is formalized in 
terms of an action by the Board of Trustees. Also, if you read the document, you 
look at all of those "where-ases" you get very comfortable with them. It is what 
we all agree on in terms of assessment and accountability in SUNY. Then the be-
it-resolved clauses begin to flush that out in terms of a procedure and 
methodologies that is part of the command and control that typically has 
operated in many academic matters in SUNY. All of that was happening in the 
context of what Joe described as a committee that was attempting to negotiate 
some kind of a Memorandum of Understanding which I commend the Provost’s office 
for. I think that the Provost learned from the last experience that he had to 
engage faculty in this. I think that the success of the Memorandum of 
Understanding clearly demonstrated that when you work with faculty 
collaboratively, good things happen.
   	In addition, in this document there is a resolve clause with a significant 
phrase that indicates that assessment results are used appropriately in support 
of improving the teaching and learning process. They got the terminology down 
this time and no one could quarrel with an assessment based on that.
   	What needs to be recognized is that teaching and learning take place on 
campus. They don’t take place at system administration. If you are going to have 
assessment, which is the improvement of teaching and learning, it seems to me 
that it ought to be based and take place where the teaching and learning takes 
place which is on the individual campuses. We have a level of lack of 
understanding of the academic process to think that this idea of a single test 
imposed on all of us is going to somehow improve the quality of SUNY and its 
public image. I just don’t think that that is going to happen. I will leave it 
to you to decide for yourselves as you continue this discussion this afternoon.
   
Joe Hildreth: I would like to respond to a couple of concerns that were 
presented to me earlier and then we will walk you through the points of the 
Memorandum of Understanding. I hope that you can see that we have tried to be as 
balanced in the presentations of this material as we could and we will try to 
maintain that balance.
	The document that Vince referred to has been distributed in the past. That 
basically lays out the thinking of that task force at this time. That is the one 
that is referred to from time to time in the discussions that you have heard.
	The first notion was to get some sort of sense of the discussion in the 
Executive Committee. We chose not to go into any great detail on that, not to 
keep that discussion secretive, but simply not to bias the debate that is going 
to take place on the floor. To give you a sense of what happened, there were 
three possibilities that were discussed.
	The first one was to continue the opposition of the senate to university 
system-wide value-added assessment and to indicate our displeasure with the 
process that was used this summer in a resolution and yet to endorse the 
Memorandum of Understanding in order to preserve faculty governance 
participation in the process. The reasoning for that was that there was a sense 
that this would be implemented and that we thought it would be better if the 
faculty governance participated in it than other faculty. Another tract that was 
discussed was to simply say no to the process, system-wide value-added 
assessment, and to the Memorandum of Understanding. The sense of that was that 
it was a principal stand and that was the course of action that the senate 
should take. The third one that was discussed and did not receive a great deal 
of support was to another vote of no-confidence. Those are the three issues that 
took up the time of the group.
	One of the reasons that we expanded the Executive Committee by inviting 
committee chairs in was to expand the representation and the opportunity for the 
people in the Executive Committee to be able to report out to other members of 
the senate. That was done in the spirit of openness and I am very comfortable 
sharing with you a quick synopsis of that three to four hour discussion.
	One of the things that I would like to do before we get started is to give 
you a twelve point discussion of the contents of this Memorandum of 
Understanding. I have received enough comments from people that led me to 
believe that they didn’t really understand everything that was in here. 
-The proposed pilot that is being talked about here will only test the skill 
areas of mathematics, basic communication, critical thinking, information 
management and the understanding of the methods scientists and social scientist 
used.
-Value-added will measure student growth by assessing student knowledge upon 
entry and at a later date use the same assessment measurement.
-The national survey of student engagement will probably be used to investigate 
the campus factors that influenced student growth.
-The Provost’s advisory task force identified two forms of assessment: campus-
based, which is currently being pursued on most of our campuses, was designed to 
be used for the improvement of teaching; system-wide assessment was thought of 
as being used for the purposes of accountability.
-The Memorandum of Understanding addresses four primary concerns which are 
listed in the back of the appendix. We were concerned that inappropriate public 
reporting of data would be done, that standardized tests would lead to 
standardization of the curriculum, that assessment should be campus-based, and 
that the assessment initiative would be expensive.
-The Memorandum of Understanding allows for flexibility by allowing campuses to      
develop an alternative approach. There was quite a bit of concern expressed 
during the committee meetings that were asking why campuses couldn’t do this, so 
that was incorporated into the document.
-The Memorandum of Understanding outlines plans which would only involve six 
volunteer campuses. At the end of the pilot a full review and would be conducted 
to try to evaluate the success of that effort. IT would be done by faculty 
governance, campus presidents, chief academic officers, the Provost, the 
Chancellor and the SUNY board.
-The cost of value-added assessment will be paid for by system administration.
-Assessment results will never be used to punish, publicly compare, or embarrass 
students, faculty, courses, programs or institutions either individually or 
collectively. Only aggregate reporting of data will be used.
-The final feature of the Memorandum of Understanding is a timeline. 

       That is a reasonable summary of what is in the document. I want to make 
sure that our discussion today is based on informed information and knowledge. 
With that we will open the floor.

Tim Phillips (Cortland): I am the rep for the comprehensive college so I thought 
that I would summarize the sentiments that were expressed during our sharing of 
concerns. It should be recognized that there aren’t any campuses that have 
passed the resolution in support of the Board of Trustee’s resolution. There are 
now twelve to fifteen campuses that have passed resolutions against the Board of 
Trustee’s resolution.
	Their resolution represents a slap in the face to the faculty. It 
undermined shared governance, it has violated a partnership, and it is a 
betrayal of trust by the Board of Trustees to the faculty. The faculty is very 
angry about the way that they proceeded. We want to make sure that we express 
that we are not against assessment. This must be communicated positively and 
emphatically. We are all very much engaged in assessment. We want to make sure 
that we communicate that to the general public. We want to keep assessment 
campus-based. There is an assessment officer at Buffalo State that stated that 
there is no instrument that they know of that could be effective in achieving 
the goals that they are looking for in the system-wide assessment efforts. There 
are doubts about the quality of standardized tests that are available. There was 
a document that was circulated from Washington State that looked at a bunch of 
standardized test and they found all of those tests to be unacceptable. The fact 
that system says that they will pay for the effort is credulous to many. We are 
not naïve; we understand the budget situation. Where will these funds come from?
	Will system-wide assessment lead to identifying programs and colleges that 
are not performing up to the Board of Trustee’s standards and lead to the 
elimination of programs and even the eventual closing of campuses? There was 
some support expressed for the MOU and the work done by that group. There is 
fear that the assurances that are in the MOU will be ignored as we can no longer 
believe the word of the Trustees. The betrayal that this resolution represents 
leads many of the faculty to not trust the things that they say. There is some 
sentiment to appear as in favor of assessment as being more sensible than the 
Board of Trustees by offering a reasonable plan that can not be used as a 
propaganda tool against the faculty, We must be cognoscente of the fact that 
system-wide assessment is happening all over the country and that we will be 
painted as obstructionists if we just refuse. We realize that we are in a 
political battle and that we have to play the image game. We have to show the 
public and we have to reach out to our students, their parents, our union, and 
all other constituent groups to side with us. We realize that assessment must 
continue in a meaningful way, maintaining the campus-based systems and 
continuing to improve the quality of the educational experience at SUNY.
	That captures most of the sentiments.

Joe Hildreth: It was suggested to me that we have the sector responses first and 
then go into the individual comments. I thought that was a reasonable 
suggestion. Do you all agree? Yes? University centers?

Peter Knuepfer (Binghamton): When our sector met I actually steered us away from 
too much of a discussion on this because I didn’t want it to dominate our 
discussion. However, we did talk a little bit about the assessment issue and I 
think that it would be fair to summarize it with the following statement. 
       We emerged from this morning’s presentation by Dr. Young really 
appreciating the very effective program that has been done by a single 
relatively small campus and it boggles our mind to imagine doing something even 
as remotely thorough as that at one of our larger campuses let alone across the 
system. Also, we would reflect the comment that I made earlier that it appears 
that at Truman State, they have come to recognize that at selective institutions 
value-added approaches are ineffective.

Joe Hildreth: Technology sector?

Ann Donnelly:  We are very concerned about assessment. We feel that we are the 
most vulnerable of the sectors because we are the closest to open admission. We 
very much feel that it will be used for budget decisions.

George: The health science sector was also concerned about assessment. The 
students that come to us have already completed all of the requirements. We 
talked a little about how it could affect us. I think that the major point that 
we want to get across is that all of us in health sciences have been totally 
immersed in assessment our whole lives because all of the professional programs 
have accrediting values. We do many of the things that we are talking about 
today. We are involved in sight visits; all of our exams are looked at with a 
fine-tooth comb; we have testing, not only in the didactic field but in the 
clinical practical field, with direct observation as well as written tests. We 
have input from clinical faculty and meetings with them. We have a number of 
organizations that regulate us not to mention board exams and written licensor 
exams. We have been living with this our whole lives and I can tell you that I 
live with it not only from the academic point but from the clinical hospital 
point. WE do very much the same thing in the hospital.
	We also do campus-based assessment. We give proficiency exams at the 
beginning of the undergraduate programs on writing and math skills and, if 
needed, students are given remediation both in the health science centers and on 
the campuses. We have performed many of the ideas that have been put forth this 
morning. Our real concern is that every campus is different and it should be and 
we reiterate that it should be campus-based, not system-wide.
	Thank you.

Ken O’Brien: There was a broad ranging discussion that you sat in last night for 
about two hours and then a forty minute follow-up today. The discussion this 
morning focused, to some extent, on the presentation given about Truman State 
which left us in awe of what they had done over a very long period of time and 
there were a couple of comments made about that.
	Firstly, it isn’t quite relevant to the issue at hand for us. One of the 
hallmarks of distinction is that the SUNY proposal and the MOU proposal is for, 
all of our differences aside, a system-wide piece and what occurred at Truman 
State is a genuine shift of a campus culture. That is probably more easily 
achieved through campus-based assessment. The second point was the reports that 
are coming in on resolutions that various campuses have passed. The number right 
now is thirteen resolutions that have been passed by faculty governance bodies 
in the fall, all of which are against value-added university-wide assessment. 
Most, but not all, of them specify the MOU as well. There were two others that 
were passed last spring. That makes a total of fifteen out of whatever the real 
universe ism but thirteen of sixteen of the university colleges and centers have 
passed such resolutions.

Joe Hildreth: It has been suggested that we might ask Don if he would like to 
give a comment from the system on this issue. Then we will go to individuals to 
give a balanced presentation of the various groups.

Don Steven: Just a couple of points in no particular order.
	I believe that my understanding of the reasons why value-added assessment 
may not have, in the experience of Missouri, to have been effective in selective 
institutions is that it may not have had enough headroom in the testing.
	With respect to the cost, it is not that monies that would be spent on 
this would come from monies that would normally go through the regular 
allocation process to campus. As on your campus, system administration has 
discretionary funds and it chooses in any one year what the priorities are for 
those funds. It is also helpful to indicate, in respect to the CUNY experience, 
that we are talking about assessing a representative sample once every two 
years; not all students every year.
	Anne Donnelly brought up this point with respect to funding. The task 
force on the assessment of student learning several years ago was quite clear in 
addressing the need to be very clear that nothing like this would affect campus 
funding. I noticed while you were talking and I was thumbing through the MOU 
that it is silent on that to a fault. We would have to go back and put language 
into it to provide that assurance but it should be there.
	We do have to understand that the process which describes within itself a 
process for a campus developing its own campus-based version of this should not 
be viewed as a model that is university-wide to a fault. The MOU itself 
describes that a campus, if it feels strongly that this is a shoe that doesn’t 
fit, can develop its own process.

Joe Hildreth: Now, if we have some individuals that would like to comment, we’ll 
entertain them.

Kathy Tomaino: I want to say that the Faculty Council has generally felt that we 
have been equal members of the discussion group. We felt that Don Steven had led 
the meetings in an utmost professional and collegial manner.
	June 17th was when Chancellor King’s resolution was passed by the Board of 
Trustees. On June 20th the discussion group met with the Chancellor for two 
hours where members of that discussion group expressed outrage and 
disappointment that the discussion group’s efforts to develop a MOU were being 
circumvented. The discussion group then decided to meet to draft a letter in 
response to the Board’s resolution.
	On July 1st the discussion group met and drafted a letter to be sent to 
the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor. After the meeting and before the 
meeting was sent, Joe felt that he should first discuss the letter with the 
Executive Committee, which was going to meet on July 25th. The Executive 
Committee decided to follow through on the decision to send the letter, not a 
resolution, stating that the Faculty Council wants to continue campus-based 
faculty driven assessment, oppose system-wide assessment, and rescind the 
resolution. I would like to quote the last paragraph of that letter:

“Therefore the faculty respectfully requests that the Board rescind its 
resolution. It also requests that the Board of Trustees support the process of 
discussion and collaboration that has already begun between the faculty and the 
Provost. We remain committed to working with system administration and the Board 
of Trustees to more the State University of New York to the forefront of higher 
education.”
 
       We did not receive any letter from the Board of Trustees but the 
Chancellor did respond and I would like to quote two paragraphs of that letter 
from Chancellor King:
       
“While I understand the faculty’s concerns about the abbreviated consideration 
of the resolution, the content is highly consistent with the substantive 
discussions that were ongoing with faculty prior to its adoption. As a result, I 
do not concur that the resolution should be rescinded.
I am committed to fulfill the terms of the Board resolution which explicitly 
recognizes the vital role that the faculty will and must play in the development 
of this initiative. As always, I thank you for sharing the concerns of the 
faculty in a frank and helpful way.”

	The next discussion group after that was scheduled for September 3rd which 
for most of us was the first week of classes. Some of the Faculty Council 
Executive Committee members felt that the Faculty Council members’ contributions 
were not being recognized and appreciated. The Executive Committee voted to send 
only Kimberly, the Faculty Council president, to participate in the meeting. 
After that meeting the Faculty Council Executive Committee did vote to have all 
of the Faculty Council discussion group members return to the table. On 
September 24th the entire discussion group met to continue the work on the MOU 
and you have a copy of the final draft in your packet.
	The fall Faculty Council plenary meetings were held in the first week of 
October. We spent a day and a half discussing the SUNY-wide assessment. We had 
four resolutions under consideration and the one that you see was the resolution 
that was finally passed by the Faculty Council. I would like to tell you that 
this vote was not unanimous. We were all across the board and some felt that if 
we just said no to SUNY-wide assessment that, “the train will leave the station 
and we will not be on it.” There were some people who felt that we should 
express our concern about SUNY-wide assessment and that there should be an MOU 
that could be signed by the Board of Trustees, SUNY administration, and people 
that would be able to say that there is a vote on that.
	We sent that letter and resolution and we received no response from the 
Board of Trustees. Keep in mind that the only response that we have received so 
far was the sure brief message from Chancellor King in an email to Kimberly. I 
would like to read this to you because it may give you a perspective on where 
the Chancellor is really coming from.

“Kimberly, I am disappointed in the SCCC. This resolution appears to preclude 
further discussion or involvement by the Faculty Council in the process of 
developing a system-wise value-added assessment plan. I think that that will be 
viewed quite negatively by the Board and risks having this effort proceed 
without input from the Faculty Council. Bob King.”

       I am really glad that I got to speak because I want you to really listen 
to what the message is. I know that we are all against system-wide assessment 
but I think the handwriting is on the wall. Some people feel that if we don’t 
stay on the train that is it going to leave without us and that system 
administration is going to say that this is a resolution as we can see from the 
paragraphs that I read from Bob King.

Don: I would just like to underscore a few things that I know from firsthand 
experience about the Chancellor’s steadfast commitment to trying to work with 
the faculty to develop this together. That is the nature of the essential 
bargain that he feels should be between the leadership, system administration, 
and faculty. At no time has the Chancellor, the Provost, or myself every wanted 
to go ahead without you. We don’t want to see the train leave the station 
without you. We have and we continue to try to reach a set of common 
understandings on these issues.

Stephanie Gross: The Board hasn’t met since that resolution that the SCCC passed 
so I don’t know besides being at that meeting…it might be a little preempt. I 
don’t know if this is clear but in the resolution it says that the faculty 
should be playing a part in this no matter what. Even if you choose not to sign 
this Memorandum of Understanding, your involvement is still there. I suppose 
that the Chancellor’s feelings might be that you are choosing not to get 
involved at all, but you still have a part in this just as the students do.

Kathy Tomaino: Notice in the resolution that we did not say anything about the 
MOU. That was part of another resolution and we just wanted to have this 
resolution say that we are opposed to SUNY-wide assessment and that was it.
	I also want to point out the last paragraph of his resolution. During our 
plenary session we didn’t have an opportunity to ask the Chancellor about this. 
He was explicit to say that community colleges are bound by the state education 
law to abide by the resolution that was passed. I do want to comment that not 
all people were against the MOU. We really didn’t want to address that in our 
resolution. 

Joe Hildreth: Thank you, Kathy.

Tom Hogle: I just want to take this opportunity to say that at Morrisville we 
have some major concerns. First of all, as is well known, we have the highest 
minority population of students on our campus of any SUNY campus. We also have a 
high level of skills remediation programs. We have a high attrition rate, yet we 
are dealing with a population that has not been engaged in higher education 
historically and it is almost a boot-strap approach for us. 
       When we do graduate students with an associate degree they are well 
prepared to go on and do very well but the fact that we have this population 
means that the attrition rate tends to be high. We have already heard from the 
Provost that they are not happy with our attrition rate. That is a squeeze on 
one side. Now we are hearing that we will have to have value-added and that we 
are going to have to test our students as they come in and as they leave. I 
don’t care what you say; any program policy has winners and losers. To say 
otherwise is to simply defy reason. Also, we have an agricultural technical 
sector that doesn’t even need to meet the general education requirements. For a 
history teacher, for example, some of our agricultural and tech people don’t 
have to have the sequence of either western civilization or American history. 
Thus, their social studies assessment scores are probably going to suffer.
       We have concerns about this process and we are being pushed and pulled in 
opposite directions in the interest of assessment. We feel that we will suffer, 
if not this year or next year, than the year after. To sum up the resolution of 
the unanimous vote by the faculty congress of Morrisville, I will read the last 
resolution:
       
“The faculty of Morrisville state college continues support for existing campus-
based assessment but emphatically opposes the Trustees’ resolution of June 17th, 
2003, urges that it be withdrawn, and encourages the university faculty senate 
to defend academic diversity.”

Mike Andolina: The information that has been gathered according to a friend of 
mine at the Albany and Tech (?) union is that if this information is generated 
in a public institution and becomes part of a public record, the freedom of the 
information act guarantees public access to that information.
	Even is the Provost assures us that there won’t be any comparison or data 
being used in a punitive way, this might get tried in the court of public 
opinion to the media. I don’t think that we have control over any of the 
information. It is going to be accessible.
	The second point is about the train leaving the station. I don’t think 
that the Provost is the conductor; the Trustees are. It may have already left 
the station.

Cherry Searle (Buffalo): I hear so much passion and I feel so passionate myself, 
but I want to be on the train. I want reason and I do not want us to lower 
ourselves to the Trustees level. They have lied to us and they have cheated on 
their bylaws. I want us to be above that level. I want whatever we decide here 
to be at a higher level than how they have treated us.

Norman Goodman (Stony Brook): Most of you know where I stand. You have seen a 
flurry of email back and forth the past couple of days and I want to outline 
that for you now.
	The faculty of SUNY, this body, has said no on at least three occasions. 
Each time the issue of system-wide assessment has come up, we have considered 
it, thought about and discussed it, and we have done some research on it. Why do 
we say no? It is not in the best interest of our students, faculty control over 
the curriculum, or the reputation of SUNY. An article I read the other day 
linked us to the high school standardized test. We don’t want to be SUNY high 
school. We have said this over and over again; there is no need for us to say it 
again.
       The point today is the MOU. I want to point out that it is simply an 
instrument of system-wide assessment. If we reject system-wise assessment, which 
we have done, it makes no sense for us to consider a mechanism to affect that 
system-wide assessment. We worked on the MOU with the Provost’s office and we 
came together to see how far we could go together. This last draft of the MOU 
represents that.
       About the considerable costs of this, Don Steven mentioned that there are 
flexible funds within administration in which they can develop their priorities 
to use this. We could use those flexible funds right now. Most of our campuses 
are hurting and have had to let go faculty and staff. If there are flexible 
funds for this, give it to us now.
	If we are afraid to stand up for what is right academically for us and our 
students, then we deserve this. We have been undermined and betrayed before. 
There is a pattern to this. Every time we agree to cooperate to see if we can 
ameliorate the worst effects of what the Trustees and system administration has 
introduced, we ameliorate a little bit but we are still left with what we don’t 
want.

Achim Koeddermann: I believe that we teach not only content but character. When 
we teach character we also try to stand for what we say. We have an obligation, 
not just to ourselves, but to our students. If we do something which is out of 
character and give in to something that we have said we won’t, we will cut 
ourselves and the system.
	We cannot afford this form of assessment because we need the collaboration 
of our students. If our students get angry, they don’t have the chance to go 
elsewhere. Our faculty members may not openly resist, but have you ever worked 
with disgruntled colleagues? Do you want an entire system of them? Do you know 
how much that will cost the reputation of SUNY?

Judith Adams-Volpe: I cannot support the MOU. I realize the incredible work that 
has gone into this and I am grateful for that work. We have, throughout SUNY, 
wholeheartedly collaborated with the Chancellor and the system in establishing 
assessment of general education. Provost Salins showed us today that the in 
place assessment that we have can be presented in a manner that can be 
compelling evidence to the Board of Trustees about the value-added effects of 
our general education program.
	This train rhetoric is a train wreck to our students and for our mission 
to New York State. I cannot vote for the MOU or for any of the assessment.  

Luther Peterson: I wonder if it would be well for us to have the undergraduate 
committee to look at ways in which we might improve upon the campus-wide 
assessment programs that we have in place at this point in time. We are doing 
good job but perhaps there is more that we can look at in that particular part 
of our program.

Pete Knuepfer: Campuses have made an immense investment over the past few years 
in campus-based assessment in general education programs and their outcomes 
recognizing the great variability that there is in those programs. Before any 
attempt is made, at a pilot level or otherwise, to move something that 
supercedes that, we have to see whether this system works and whether or not 
there are weaknesses. If there are, we need to fix them before we try to 
superimpose over the top of that something else.

Vince Aceto: I can’t help but comment on the high level of discourse that we 
have engaged in. This is a tribute to the faculty of SUNY. I regret that an 
issue as critical as this is not being experienced by the Chancellor. He has 
been at a lot of our meetings and he is not here today. I have great difficulty 
in terms of the process that led to the resolution passed by the Board of 
Trustees. Process gives you a product and there is a real sense of déjà vu about 
this. When general education came up it was presented to the Trustees two days 
before they were going to vote on it. Some of them wanted to wait until they 
could talk about it but no, they had to do it that day.
	So what if Candice DeRussy wants to introduce a resolution? If it isn’t a 
good resolution on system-based assessment, let her present it. But just let the 
Board of Trustees discuss the pros and cons just once of that particular 
resolution. Given the present Board and the present leader of that Board, that 
will never happen. I don’t think that that is an insignificant part of this 
discussion because it means that we are party to a very private kind of decision 
making that never sees the light of day and one that never enjoys the kind of 
discourse that we have had here today.
	That taints the whole process and therefore the whole rational that the 
Chancellor presented as to why he had to present his resolution to prevent 
Candice’s resolution. That is nonsense. If it is not a good resolution, then the 
Chancellor should have had the strength and integrity to stand up and say that 
this is a bad resolution and that he doesn’t recommend it. I don’t think that 
that is too much to ask of the Chancellor. He is our academic leader and he owes 
us the kind of integrity and honesty that we are engaging in here this 
afternoon.

William Baumer: I suggest that we do two things. First, we thank the Trustees 
for their interest in the quality of our academic programs as represented by the 
resolution. I mean that seriously. The second thing that we should do is to 
point out that all of the specifications of the Trustees’ resolutions, including 
the provision for specific campus programs, and endorse the continuation and 
application of that as fulfilling these requirements as specified by the 
Provost. 

Joe Hildreth: Stephanie Gross will be our last speaker.

Stephanie Gross: As a member of the Board of Trustees, I sit on the Board 
because I am elected president of the SUNY student assembly. I represent 411,000 
students and it’s not an easy task.
	We voted on Candice DeRussy’s resolution not seeing the Chancellor’s 
resolution and our Executive Committee unanimously voted against it. Our fall 
conference will be coming up on October 31st on Lake George and I will ask them 
to make a stand on the Chancellor’s assessment. While I do not have what they 
will come up with based on Candice’s, and that is all that I can say so far.
	Joe and your Executive Committee have both done an excellent job 
representing you. This is your chance to make an extreme impact and say how you 
feel by either voting against or for it, but making clear that this is your 
first stand as a group. When I come to the fall conference I will ask the 
students and make it very clear how they stand. It’s not just me; it is them 
mandating me. I am a leader but I am also their messenger and their message is 
not for statewide assessment.

Candice Young: I would just like to say that our experiences about assessment 
have overall broadened our curriculum, not narrowed it. Part of that is the 
leadership context in which it was developed but also because, in the end, if 
you are going to have a conversation about what students should know and be able 
to do that it usually causes you to think a little bit harder about what your 
students needs as opposed to what we individually want to teach.
	I would encourage you to think not about how much money it might cost in a 
single year to do standardized assessment but to think more in terms of funding 
in the long term. How do you persuade the public? Maybe you should think less 
about you versus the Board or the Chancellor and more about you versus the 
public. Right now we are not held in high esteem by the public. There is plenty 
of evidence out there to support that and you have to think more about how your 
neighbors would respond to whatever it is that you come up with. They are the 
real audience.
	 I’m also confused as to what it is that you agreed to several years ago. 
My recollection was that there was a piece of what you agreed to that said that 
there would be an assessment piece that would be designed statewide for 
accountability and advocacy. I wonder if you aren’t better off telling them what 
you will do rather than what you won’t do. The big loophole in the Memorandum of 
Understanding is the flexibility clause. It essentially gives you permission to 
have statewide campus-based assessment and design your own system…

Norman Goodman: When you talk about flexibility being an option, it’s really not 
an option that we want because it would still require system-normed grading 
which is what we are opposed to.
	Secondly, this senate bought into statewide assessment in the Provost’s 
group report. But you weren’t here, Candice, to know that that was because the 
leadership led us at that time that was rejected for a second term. The faculty 
here in the senate made a decision which they later regretted. What you are 
seeing in the three resolutions that we already passed against it and in the 
discussions this weekend is that the faculty and staff now and for the last 
several years have said no.

Joe Hildreth: We are going to need a group that is going to try to put together 
in some form of a resolution a summary of the comments made. When would the 
people involved like to do that? Okay, after dinner…



________________________________________
Saturday Plenary Session, October 25


Joe Hildreth: I would like to move to a few quick action items by the awards 
committee and then we will have the rest of the morning to deal with the issues 
that we have been working so hard on. If I don’t hear any objections we will go 
to the report from the awards committee. Justin?

Justin Giordano: Good morning. I trust that you all picked up a copy of the 
report. We met on September 12th in Albany and we plan to confer again on 
January 15th and May 7th. We have developed a Chancellor’s award for excellence 
and faculty service which is similar to the Chancellor’s award in excellence and 
teaching. This was activated in September of 2003. We voted on the criteria for 
distinguished service professor which may include exceptional leadership and 
local and system-wide faculty governance. This will be one of the two 
resolutions that we would like you to vote on. It also voted to present the 
medallion to distinguished faculty awardees. This is the other resolution. We’ll 
conduct a year-long discussion on the use of distinguished faculty and how they 
can be utilized to enrich SUNY .We are also working on the results of the survey 
which was conducted last year by the committee. That is the report in a 
nutshell.

Joe Hildreth: Please get out your resolution from the awards committee dated 
October 25, 2003 regarding the medallion. All those in favor signify by saying 
aye? Opposed, nay? Passed. Next. All those in favor signify by saying aye? 
Opposed, nay? It passes without descent.

Justin Giordano: Thank you and that’s it unless there are any questions.

Joe Hildreth: Carol has extra copies of the motions that we just passed. Jim, 
the Executive Committee report?

Jim McElwaine: Good morning. The Executive Committee met this morning to finish 
the articulation of three motions that we are recommending to you this morning. 
We are recommending three different motions concerning system-wide value-added 
assessment in response to the Trustees’ resolution 98-214 which empowered 
system-wide value-added assessment. We will also be bringing forth a motion for 
a sense of the body.
	We met well into the night with many volunteers here. Thank you and kudos 
all around for the language. I thought that it was a very productive meeting. 
That concludes my report.

Joe Hildreth: You have before you a sheet with three motions on it. We are 
making a small editorial change on the first one. (discussion in the background) 
The Executive Committee drafted this last night and it is put forward for your 
consideration. Let me read it for you. (more discussion back and forth on slight 
wording changes) I think that we are now ready to vote. All in favor of the 
proposed amendment as read to you, please signify by saying aye? Opposed, nay? 
It carries. 

(The wording of motions two and three are discussed and debated extensively and 
are eventually amended and passed. The faculty senate also accepts the motion to 
receive, but not to adopt, all of the individual reports)

Joe Hildreth: I think that we can now move on with the rest of the agenda.

Paul: At the planning meeting the public information committee agreed to produce 
a working version of the university faculty senate website. Melissa Bishop from 
Stony Brook has produced a document that you will see there. Many of the links 
are live. The website itself is not fully populated but it is of the design that 
has been approved in the past by the senate. Please don’t copy down the URL that 
you see there. The Executive Committee agreed to go live with the university 
faculty senate website under a URL which will be specific to the senate. It will 
be of the order of ufs.suny.edu.
	All of the various navigation buttons that you see there have been 
discussed and presented to the senate and I expect that you will receive a URL 
with the actual address of the working website within a week to ten days. There 
will places for the committee and historical documents and all of the committee 
minutes and so on will be published here.

Joe Hildreth: I want to thank the public information committee for their hard 
work and for doing this. It will mean that the motions that we passed today will 
be available on the website along with our committee reports. One of the 
problems that we have had in the past is ongoing maintenance and timely 
maintenance. We are working so that we can do this completely in-house and be up 
to date so that when these things are sent in they can be posted on the website. 
This is a great step forward. Thank you very much. Any information that you 
would like to see posted on the website should be sent to Carol. Let’s always go 
through Carol to make it simple.
	Is there any old business? Is there any new business?

Kathy: I would like to thank you so much for the warm and sincere welcome given 
to me by many of you yesterday morning. I also want to thank you for 
appreciating my comments as a member of the Faculty Council and for our liaison 
relationship as fellow SUNY faculty colleagues. Thank you.

Joe Hildreth: Thank you for being here, Kathy. I think that you really added to 
the discussion. Is there any more new business?
	I want to thank you for all of your hard work, energy and sincerity. I 
hope that the documents that we produced today reflect that and we will get 
those out to you electronically before we leave today.
	There is a motion to adjourn. All in favor please rise.




Transcribed by Holly Tatnall
 Submitted by James McElwaine