Chair: The Chancellor is not coming tonight. Ernesto Malave is coming but the Chancellor is not. He has an event at 6 o’clock. He says that there is nothing new to say about the budget. Rumor has it that tomorrow Governor Pataki will veto the proposed Senate / Assembly budget. Then, he says, he’ll have more to say.

At 7 o’clock Vice Chancellor for Budget and Finance Ernesto Malave will address the plenary. This will most likely be our last meeting of the year. If there is an emergency, we will hold the meeting on June 10, but this is unlikely unless the body gives me a signal right now that you really want to meet on June 10.

Professor Crain (Psychology, City College) – The Student Affairs Committee thought, not knowing what’s happening with the budget, that we ought to be ready to meet so we can respond with more force as a group to whatever the proposal is. There are some wild proposals that, if true, would be devastating. It was the opinion of the Student Affairs Committee that we should be ready to meet as news comes.

Chair: Yes. And it will be going through the Board of Trustees meeting in June. So it might be wise for us to meet.

Professor Kaplowitz (English, The John Jay College of Criminal Justice) – Actually, on June 2 the Fiscal Affairs Committee meets, which is a Monday, and at that meeting it’s expected that there will be proposals for tuition restructuring. By then there will be a budget, assuming that the Governor does veto and the Assembly and Senate override the Governor’s veto. It may be contested in court as a budget but it will be a budget, which will allow the Board to act, and the Board wants to act as soon as possible so students know before September what the tuition picture will be. So whatever is voted on by the Board Committees on Monday, June 2, and Tuesday, June 3, which is when all the committees meet, the time it would be voted on by the full board is June 23, and there will be a hearing on June 16. So our June tentative meeting was very wisely set.

Chair: And so you’re suggesting that we meet. OK.

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – I would suggest that at the very minimum we leave it up to the Executive Committee to decide whether we have this meeting or not, whether it’s opportune, and that the sense of this group be that we should have a meeting if the Committee feels that this is indicated.

Chair: Should that be a motion to leave it up to the Executive Committee or does the body want to take a vote themselves whether or not to meet?

Professor Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) – This is hardly the first time we’ve been faced with this decision. I can think of at least fifteen other occasions. Unfortunately, they’ve usually had to eventuate in meetings. I would strongly recommend that the option stay open and that the decision be made so that members of this body be notified of what happens, let’s say within two or three days, because I think there’s not doubt about it that whatever comes up we are going to be facing one of the biggest crises we’ve had since the mid-seventies, and that is a huge gap, which I’ve been predicting for three months now, between the two- and the four-year college tuitions. This alone is enough of an issue for this body at least to start thinking about meeting. I am not particularly thrilled with it because I already have something to do the night of June 10.

Chair: All right, so the feeling is that we should save the date of June 10, and I should let you know a week before. I will be informed by the Executive Committee that will be elected tonight. Is that acceptable to the body?

Over the summer you will receive a mailing asking you to sign up for committees. Please respond. I would very much like more of the work of the UFS to be done in committees. We’ve been somewhat successful this year, but I would like to be more successful. There will be a new committee on the planning of conferences; I hope some of you will join. Please e-mail me or call the office if you have any ideas on how to improve the work of the committees.

At the May 6 meeting of the Executive Committee we voted unanimously a motion of confidence in Professor Manassah. This afternoon I posted on the UFS news the following:

"At the May 6 meeting of the UFS Executive Committee the Committee unanimously voted a motion of confidence in Professor Jamal Manassah as Chair of the Faculty Advisory Council for undertaking over the past year a tireless and highly principled mission to improve the CUNY Research Foundation. His grit, technical expertise and unswerving pursuit of the truth have been without parallel."

At this moment I would like new Senators to be introduced.

Kathryn Richardson, do you want to say something?

Kathryn Richardson (Nursing, New York City College of Technology) – We’re not getting as much response as we would like to the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program call letter and there is an unexpected vacancy in Chemistry. The deadline for sending your Curriculum Vitae has been extended to May 16. I’d just like to read some information that Stasia has gotten together for us. I just wanted to let you know about some of the competition that was out there for 2001-2002, and these are some of the areas that have vacancies this year. We do have some people for them but we need more.

Art History and Visual Arts awarded 36 grants last year totaling over $121,000

Comp. Lit. and Languages awarded 31 grants totaling over $111,000

Education awarded 38 grants totaling over $149,000

Sociology 21 grants $77,000

Chemistry 37 grants for a total of $123,000

So there is a lot of work out there to be done and we need nominees. As I said, there is a vacancy in Chemistry, Education, we have nominees for Sociology, Art History and Visual Arts, Comp. Lit. and Languages, Health and Human Services and Health Sciences, but we need more. There is also an unexpected vacancy in Anthropology. So, again, if you could talk this up on your campuses and see if you can get some people to send in their vitae. I just want to give these out. The date on here is May 9 but I have already told you that it’s been extended again for another week. Thank you.

Professor Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) – I just would like to ask for a moment of respectful silence for Jean Ellis. There is a short statement in the back of the room about Jean. Jean was the Executive Director of this body longer than anyone else was. She came in mid 70’s just on the cusp of the big crisis and was one of the most indefatigable laborers to get the Senate running, to get us involved, to bring new people together, and she just never stopped working. She was affected by a stroke about a decade ago and has been in a nursing home and apparently finally died peacefully. Jean was an amazing individual before coming to the Senate. She has to have been one of the first women ever to get a Fulbright enabling her to go to Oxford. She was a noted scholar of English Medieval history and would have indeed had a career in that had not Finch College closed down with no warning, and that ended her career in the early 70’s. In any case, she was totally devoted to us, at least to your ancestors in this group; some of us were there when she was. I would ask the body to think about her for one moment. Thank you.

This is a little more cheerful. Those of you who were here last year in the fall of 2001 after the towers went down may recall a panel that we put on in this room. One of the participants was Professor Stuart Schaar of the Brooklyn History Department. Since this body has recently been engaged in an issue with the Brooklyn History Department that wasn’t particularly felicitous, I thought I’d bring in a felicitous issue. Stuart and Marvin Gettleman, who was a City College graduate class of ’57 and in fact a buddy of mine, have produced the Middle East and Islamic World Reader, which has been touted all over the talk radio circuit. It is a very fine book. It’s a collection of documents with introductory commentaries. Considering the way this issue has divided campuses, including mine at this very moment, I don’t think it’s a bad thing for us to have something like a scholarly work on this subject. If you would like, I can put the title on the blackboard with all the publishing information and I have one copy that I’m loath to hand it out because I want to have it back, but anybody who wants to see it may at the end.

Professor Baumrin (Philosophy, The Graduate School and University Center) – Dr. Ellis was a really magnificent woman of the Senate and served for fifteen years as Executive Director. She did all of our work magnificently and set the tone for many of the things that we do as a matter of course. In the obituary of Dr. Valenski, one of our most distinguished faculty members from Baruch who was Chair for four years and head of the CUNY Academy and a Senator, it is noted: "Dr. Ellis served as Chairperson of the faculty from 1959 [this is at Finch] to 1965 and again from 1972 to 1974. She was Chairperson of the AAUP Chapter from ‘70 to ’72, then sadly she had to participate as a member of the Finch College President’s Ad Hoc Committee on Financial Exigency in 1972-73 and the Committee on Merger Negotiation, ’73-’74, neither of which could prevent the closing of the college." I called your attention to that because it was our open enrollment policy that destroyed Finch College, and subsequently two years later we got ours from the fiscal crisis, and of course as you know we may get it again.

Vice Chancellor Ernesto Malave – Where do I begin other than to say that Karen Kaplowitz said it all in her e-mail to everyone about where we are with the budget? Let me begin with the simple stuff, the City of New York. Mayor Bloomberg last month, April 15, released the budget for CUNY that was not entirely surprising. We pretty much knew what the contours were. I understand that some folks here are new to the Senate. I welcome the new Senators and forgive me if I assume that you’ve been here before. I will try because of that to frame my presentation in a way that recognizes that you were not here the last time I came before this group.

Professor Kaplowitz (English, The John Jay College of Criminal Justice) – This is the first time that Ernesto is here as the Vice Chancellor of Budget and Finance and he deserves it, so let’s support him.

Vice Chancellor Ernesto Malave – Thank you. I assume all community colleges are here. Is BMCC here in the house? I want you to know my professor of American History circa 1979.

The City of New York – the Mayor had recommended for the CUNY community colleges basically a flat budget, despite the very real pain that is being experienced by other city agencies in the City of New York, and you all know what I’m talking about: there are lots of lay offs, there are lots of major budget cuts. The City of New York’s budget for the community colleges is flat, and the reason it is flat, the reason there are no cuts, is because there is a provision in the State Budget that mandates that the City of New York provide the same level of funding: It’s called the Maintenance of Effort Provision in the Budget. No doubt Mayor Bloomberg and company in the Budget Office of the City of New York would like to have the ability to reduce CUNY, not because they want to but simply because it maximizes their options. But the State Budget for the City University of New York prohibits the City of New York from providing a level of funding that’s anywhere below the prior year. To the extent that there were no cuts in the current year for the community colleges that budget condition effectively gets lined out into next year’s budget, so the City of New York is providing about $124 million for CUNY today and it’s going to provide $124 million for CUNY tomorrow.

In addition, the City Budget did a number of other things. Every time the Mayor issues a budget for 2004, the fiscal year beginning July 4, they also make changes and alterations to the current year. Just for the record, in the current year, and if you are from a community college and you saw the increase in enrollment you know what I mean, there is about $6.9 million increase in the tuition budget for CUNY this year as a result of the revenue that was generated by all those students who came to CUNY. That increased our budget by roughly $7 million and, in addition to that, as you know there was a technology fee that was levied this year. The City of New York also recognized that in the budget, so the budget technically went up in ways that are completely transparent to the colleges because they were already spending at this level. It went up by $9.7 million to recognize a revenue that we had already been planning on spending because it had already been projected in our budget, and the City technically recognized that. So you’ll see, for those of you who watch this very carefully, - I don’t know how many of you visit the Mayor’s web site or the Budget Division web site but if you do I feel sorry for you because it is really difficult to navigate, - but in any event you will see an increase in this budget of $9.7 million in the current year, and that reflects all this new revenue. Going to 2004 the budget for the City support is flat but the City of New York, for reasons having to do with the way in which they do budgeting, did not recognize all that increased revenue associated with the enrollment in the current year. This is not something to worry about. So, technically speaking, in next year’s budget you’ll see a $9.7 million decline in real numbers, and if you’re wondering what that’s about it’s not because the City policy has changed but merely that the revenue people in the Budget Office chose not to recognize the increased tuition this year. And the reason they chose not to recognize it is likely because the volatility of enrollment; they were wondering whether or not we can actually sustain the 8% increase that we received this year. Secondly, they don’t know what they’re going to do on the question of tuition, so what difference does it make? So they decided, "why don’t we just wait until the fall, when we know the enrollment, when we know the tuition, then we’ll set a revenue budget." But the key thing with the City of New York is that their contribution to the community colleges is flat. That’s OK this year because there are not too many increased costs next year; it’s not OK in a time where we see the collective bargaining agreement, but right now it’s not a bad thing to be in, given what you are hearing and witnessing with other monies in the City of New York where there are massive cuts being levied. For those of you who work at community colleges today you know that there are no cuts and there are no cuts projected for next year, depending on what we do later on, and I’ll come back to that.

The City of New York did, however, because they’re not constrained by the State Law in community colleges in this category, recommend the elimination of the Vallone Scholarship Program. There is about $5.5 million that we receive in aid from the City of New York that now goes mostly to senior colleges, because the Vallone Scholarship program is for students who have above 80 averages, and so largely those students tend to gravitate to the senior college; that scholarship program has been recommended for elimination. That is effectively the only real change in the budget for the community colleges, so it’s a pretty stable environment. The City Council of New York that is now considering the budget is the body that created the Vallone Scholarship Program; it’s very near and dear to their hearts and it’s very likely that they’ll find a way during budget negotiations with the Mayor to restore either the whole or some of the program or restore it in some fashion that permits some level of the program to exist. We don’t know because the City Council is faced with tremendous pressures from many groups that are dealing with very difficult budgets. In a time when folks are being laid off at the Department of Education and culture groups and funds for the homeless are being slashed, in this environment even the City Council would find it difficult to completely fund a program that’s largely merit based. So don’t be shocked if at the end of the day they’re unable in this environment to restore the program in its entirety. Nevertheless, I think they’re making a pretty good effort from the last reports I’ve been seeing from City Hall.

As you know, most of the action in the City of New York is related to what’s going on in Albany, and I’ll shift to the State Budget. We can always come back to the community college budget and answer questions. Governor Pataki, as you know, and for those who don’t, I’ll repeat it very quickly, recommended a budget that basically cut State aid by $90 million for the senior colleges and proposed to replace that with tuition. So the Governor recommended $90 million in cuts and $121 million in tuition increase and, for those of you who remember my presentation several months ago, the question was what will they do about it, because in addition to that they had also recommended major reductions in the TAP program and a restructuring that called for a third of the award to be deferred to some time when they graduate. And there were also cuts of $17.3 million recommended for the community colleges. That was the Governor’s opening position and the Legislature did the following: on financial aid and TAP they completely restored the TAP program to its existing condition; they made no alteration, they completely restored it. And, I should have mentioned originally, in addition to the $90 million cut in State aid in the CUNY budget there was also a recommended elimination of the financial aid component of the SEEK program, so the SEEK program has sustained a $7.3 million reduction. That was also part of the Governor’s Executive Budget. The Legislature, in doing what they do, restored $7.3 million for the SEEK financial aid so SEEK was made whole, and completely restored the $17.3 million reduction in aid to community colleges. Just to backtrack a little bit, the City of New York had a flat budget for community colleges; for the State of New York their per FTE funding remained the same, which actually means a slight increase in the budget for community colleges because the enrollment, and of course you know what happened when the tuition revenue went up. So the community college budget is in a pretty stable environment.

Outside of the reduction to State aid for the SEEK financial aid program the Legislature did nothing. They didn’t do anything to restore any State aid reduction to the senior colleges and left standing the Governor’s executive recommendation to raise $121 million in tuition revenue. That’s what they did. After negotiations and after the process they basically concluded that outside of TAP and outside of community colleges, K through 12 matters more, health matters more, and criminal justice matters more. And when it comes to the senior colleges they decided that they could not afford in their effort to restore some of the cuts that the Governor proposed of almost $2 billion to do anything about the tuition number. But, having said that, they were trying to make an effort to reduce, for political purposes, the $1,200 tuition increase, because the $121 million revenue requirement was associated with a $1,200 tuition increase. Just to backtrack a little bit, if you recall back in I think January, the SUNY Board of Trustees requested a $1,400 tuition increase; you remember that; and you also remember in October we did not call for a tuition increase. The Governor’s response was $1,400 is too high, why don’t you do $1,200. So the Governor came up with a budget that called for a $1,200 tuition increase and the Legislature let that stand. But we have to do something about this $1,200, we have to reduce it somehow, so what are we going to do? They said, "well, let’s keep it under $1,000," very simple in Albany. They kept it under $1,000 and they came up with the magic number of $950, and the TAP budget was funded by the way to a tuition that permitted to $950. But what did they do? Well that would cost roughly $30 million to reduce the $1,200 to $950, and they had no intentions, or maybe they did originally but it fell out at the end, of giving us $30 million in State aid. We were hoping that they would take that $90 million cut and reduce it to $60 million, but they didn’t do that. What they said was, "charge the non-resident students for the price of reducing it from $1,200." These are politicians, remember, so their calculus was for those who are not part of their local decision-making; "let’s simply levy the charge against them," and it was simply just another revenue stream. In Albany there are revenue streams and this was simply another revenue stream, and the revenue stream was, "CUNY, you figure out a way to make up the difference by simply paying special attention to the non-residents." Well, special attention to the non-residents in Albany math is about $3-4,000 increase in tuition for non-resident students. So you do the $950, everyone seems to be happy with that in Albany, but only in Albany, and do $4,000 for non-residents. That’s what the Legislature handed us. That’s not what the Governor handed us, that’s what the Legislature handed us. Now the Governor, I think tonight’s the night, has until tomorrow to either accept or reject the Legislature’s budget, and I think in Albany right now …what’s the best phrase that they have? I was talking to some staff members in Albany and it’s very quiet in Albany right now. It’s sort of like they’re in the eye of a hurricane and it’s really quiet, and they expect it to blow up tomorrow and the next day into this hurricane that will be the State Budget. Unless something happens overnight, and don’t be shocked if it does because that’s possible too, we’re likely to see a very messy situation in Albany where the Governor decides to veto the budget actions and create conditions that the Legislature will have to override. And then the question will be whether or not the overrides will stand. I’m not going to bore you with a very lengthy process to do overrides; it is very tedious. The last time the Governor did this was in 1998 and he issued 1,400 vetoes, specifically line item vetoes, and the Legislature, in order to reverse that, had to spend an enormous amount of time doing one by one vetoes, which could take three weeks. Nevertheless, Controller Hevesi will then have to make a decision when the Legislature acts, if they act and override, what budget to register for the State of New York, and then we’ll be in a position to act. So that’s where we are with the State, and our response from the very beginning was to create a Trustee-Chancellery group; Trustee Joe Lhota was the Chairman of the Committee on Fiscal Affairs and we have student representatives and a number of Trustees and us in the Chancellery, and our job is to figure out what are we going to do in this environment so that we can at least think about this. We had an opportunity to listen to the Faculty Senate, to the Professional Staff Congress, to the University Student Senate, DC 37 I think is communicating in some other manner, so we did our due diligence. We met with all the groups, we heard their views, but we have a very difficult situation ahead of us. A number of months ago I told you that we only had basically two options: figure out a way to raise the revenue for the University or we do what nobody wants to do, which is retrenchment. I think the Chancellor was right when he said that whatever we do we’re not going to do retrenchment, we’re not even going to pretend that we’re going to do retrenchment, because in the early 1990’s when we didn’t actually do retrenchment we went through the exercise; it was a very difficult process that served nobody any good purpose and it was a very corrosive process, so I think to his credit, in fact I know to his credit, we put that of the table. We decided that one way or the other we’re going to figure this thing out, because we’re not going to go back and commit the mistakes we made in the early 1990’s and in 1995 when we raised tuition by 33% and still laid off 40 staff. We’re not going to do that again.

Having said that, the question is how do you do it in a way that the system can tolerate? The only thing I can say is that the students who met with the Trustees were fabulous. We’ve got to give them all the credit; they understand the world in which we live in and they understand the connection between the University’s need to raise revenue and the need to raise tuition; they know that it hasn’t been raised in 7 years, they know that something has to give, and what they don’t want to give is the services that they get. We have to figure out how to come up with a revenue policy, in the next few weeks I imagine, that does all those things, that permits the University to move forward, to advance, to meet our objectives, because it is our very clear view that we can’t afford not to. We’ll take whatever hit we need to take because we’re absolutely convinced, for those of us who’ve been around for a long time, that it would be a tremendous mistake for us to repeat the mistakes in 1995 and actually raise tuition and not deal with the needs of the colleges. So right now we’re engaged in a process, my office, the Chancellor’s Office, the Vice-Chancellor of Academic Affairs, everybody is engaged in giving us the best possible advice, and you’re no different. I have Karen in the Budget Committee of the Faculty Senate, Al Levine, the Chair of that Committee, and Stefan, who are trying to make sure that we do the right thing. It’s clear that tuition is going up, it’s not clear how much it’s going up, and we’re still grappling with that situation.

Let me come back to the community colleges. The Legislature said, "think about $4,000 increases in tuition for the non-resident students." Typically in the country when colleges and universities set tuition rates, just so you know, the rate for non-resident students are generally whatever it costs to do business. The cost of education is generally speaking what a non-resident student should pay. If you wanted to go to New Jersey they’re going to make sure at Rutgers that because you’re not a resident of the State of New Jersey you don’t get the benefit of the subsidy that Rutgers gets from the State of New Jersey. Well, at CUNY we don’t quite do it that way. At CUNY on average it costs, and let me exclude the Graduate School and professional schools, roughly $10-11,000 a year at a senior college to educate the student. That’s the cost of doing business at CUNY for FTE, but we only charge $6,800 at the senior colleges for non-resident students. So we already have a not insignificant gap in the norm in the country regarding the pricing of non-resident students. The Legislature perhaps picked up on that. We have to ask ourselves when we establish our pricing structure who are we looking after? Are we looking after the people of the City of New York, who we are charged to serve, or are we interested in the pricing for those who either come from other states or foreign nationals who come here for an education? In short, should the students who come from the New York City school system get charged a higher rate because it is our desire to make it less expensive for non-resident students in relation to what other colleges and universities do. That is something that we’re grappling with, but what really makes it difficult is the community colleges tuition structure. Right now if you’re at a senior college you’re getting charged $6,800 if you’re a non-resident student to attend. So you want to go and get a degree at Lehman College and you can do that and you can pay $6,800 a year or you can go to Bronx Community College and pay $3,000 a year, because that’s the difference. Right now it costs $3,200 as a resident student versus $6,800 as a non-resident, so that’s a pretty wide gap. You can argue that $6,800 is, for us bugeteers, too small, but given the resident rate that’s not insubstantial. At the community colleges it’s $2,500 per student for residents but only something over $3,000 for non-residents, so it’s almost a $4,000 difference in attending Bronx Community College versus attending Lehman College if you’re a non-resident, and that partially explains why I think roughly 35-40% of our international students attend community colleges. Let’s assume we go to $10,000, just for the sake or argument, at the senior colleges for non-resident students and we do nothing at the community colleges. Now the gap is $7,000 between a non-resident student at a community college and a non-resident student at a senior college. So you see the conundrum that we feel we’re in? Outside of the general non-resident rate we have a $700 gap between community college tuition at $2,500 and senior college tuition at $3,200. The question is, if we do $950 we’ll be over $4,000 at the senior colleges and we’ll be at $2,500 at the community colleges, now we’re looking at a huge gap. So I think we have effectively made the decision that something has to give on the community college side for two reasons: one, for the reason I just said, and secondly, perhaps a more profound reason, when I look at the statistics, and I like to focus on BMCC because I remember when there were full-time faculty at BMCC. About 30-35% of the instruction at schools like BMCC and LaGuardia are taught by full-time faculty. Now if that’s not a tipping point I don’t know what is! 70% is taught by adjuncts, or I’d rather say part-time faculty. We have to be very careful as a university not to create a system where at a community college you have instructional support levels that are frankly just not sustainable. We can’t let that continue, we have to do something about that and we’re absolutely committed to doing something about that. So we’re going to change the pricing structure colleges for the community colleges as we change the pricing structure for the senior colleges. It will be modest because the budget scenario for the community college does not argue for a major tuition increase, but part of the problem is that we have gotten so used to people taking our wallet and giving it back to us with a little less in it that we have forgotten what it’s like to have what we’re supposed to have to run the University the way it’s supposed to be run. So when someone doesn’t kick you in the face and take your money you’re happy and glad and thankful. We could succumb to that very quickly by saying, "look, the State restored the aid to community colleges, the City of New York’s budget is flat, leave it alone." Today the City of New York is stabilizing our funding but tomorrow who knows what they’re going to do? I think we have to make investments in the community colleges and I think that basically calls for a modest increase in tuition at the community colleges and a correction of the pricing structure for the non-resident students. It will raise important revenue. Otherwise, even though we have a flat budget, we have continuing costs next year of at least $4 million in the community college budget. In this environment I don’t want to tell Antonio Perez at BMCC, who’s already struggling with $35% of instruction taught by full-time faculty, "by the way, since you’re the biggest community college in the system and you roughly get 20% of all the dollars that go there and if I have a $5 million problem you have to start cutting $1 million Mr. Perez." I refuse to have that conversation. So what we want to do is create an environment at the community colleges that we can begin addressing the level of full time faculty. Just to meet our goal of 70% of full time faculty we would need 720 faculty at six colleges just to be at where we want to be. We’re not going to be there overnight but we have to begin making a dent in that figure of 700, and if that’s a couple of hundred full time faculty I would love nothing more to see our college Presidents at the community colleges generate 200 more full time faculty, and we’re going to try to do that. It’s a tough problem for us, I don’t want to suggest that this is easy because we are confronted with the issue of whether we are one University or whether or not we’re going to simply go ahead and tolerate the situation where the community colleges have a very different pricing structure and a very different educational environment and we’re going to have the senior colleges with this other environment.

That’s the thinking in 80^th Street. We are in the middle of a very difficult process. No one at 80^th Street is envious of the process that we’re about to undertake and it’s our job to figure out how to do it fairly in a way that the system can tolerate it, because let me tell you the other thing, you were all reading the paper today and they’re going after the State budget director really bad, they’re taking her down, but remember that of the $11 billion budget problem the State of New York finds itself with today, of which what we’re dealing with is only a piece, there is about $4.5 billion in borrowing from the tobacco settlement. Unless you think they’re going to rue the increased taxes again in a significant way next year, the State of New York in the next year’s budget is staring at a $5 billion deficit as we speak today. That’s what they’re looking at. So after we go through all of this, after the State says, "go ahead, SUNY, CUNY cut the work force, do all that for this year’s budget," next year’s budget is at least a $5 billion deficit. As we think about the things that we have to do we also have to be mindful of what we’re likely to face. In the next few weeks that I issue a budget allocation we are likely to be faced with a mid year budget reduction, so it’s the early 1990s all over again. We can play the early 1990s exactly the way we played it before and in 2003 look like a University that decided in the early 1990s to simply just take it and not think about whether or not it needed to generate revenue. We need to be mindful of those who aren’t even thinking about going to CUNY for another ten years because the decisions that we make over the next few weeks will govern how we look ten years from now, and it’s about my little cousins and the like who are six or seven years old who ten years from now will be thinking about a CUNY school. The only real question is what’s CUNY going to look like, and I like to think that the decisions that we make over the next few weeks are governed by that, not by how it feels on campus today. As much as I think that’s important for all of us, we have to remember that the decisions that we make will affect how we look ten years from now. And I know that’s a little difficult when you’re in classes and you’re dealing with all the local issues, but just try to think about that point. You’re not going to be in this room, some of you will be in this room, those who were elected today will be in this room, but many of you won’t be ten years from now.

Professor Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) – The disparity between any increase, assuming it’s an increase, in the community college tuition, the disparity that will exist between the two- and the four-year colleges, is obviously going to have an impact on enrollment, and I would like to know what the University is thinking in terms of stuffing students into community colleges who would ordinarily come either to comprehensive or to regular senior colleges. Secondly, the implications of this increase for out-of-state students are devastating to the graduate programs. It’s particularly devastating for us because we, unlike everyone else, including SUNY, do not give the students the kind of tuition remission and fellowship support that they get everywhere: in Albany, in Stony Brook, in Buffalo, in Binghamton, Rutgers, NYU, etc. This already puts us behind the eight ball in attracting good graduate students, which undermines the whole adjunct population. This circle goes on and on and on. Graduate students who are smart and undergraduates know that in one year they establish residency, so basically they’re hit for the first year in all of this, but they still don’t get any of the other kinds of support, and I can see a University in which particularly the sciences, but even the rest of us, are really going to get undermined in this scenario. / Vice-Chancellor Malave – Let me first speak on your first point. We have already begun, based not on any scenarios associated with a major shift in enrollment as a result of tuition, to advise certain community colleges that they have grown beyond their limits and they are under no obligation, and in fact are under an obligation, to limit their enrollment to no more than where they are. You know who they are--it’s BMCC, which is already 8,000 students above where they should be - that enough is enough and that they can’t sustain that anymore. On the issue of graduate non-residents and on the issue of tuition remission, two things: one, we are very sensitive to that issue and as we come up with a pricing on doctoral students we’re doing so very mindful of the following: that it is our intention to do tuition remission for doctoral students at CUNY one way or the other. So we recognize that we already need to fix something that’s broken in a very difficult environment, but as I like to often say, at the end of this process we’re still going to have $1.5 billion and we’re simply going to have to choose what our priorities are carefully, and among those we’re dealing with the very significant issue of tuition remission for graduate students, particularly those and frankly only those who either engage as part of our workforce and in research. So, if you’re working at CUNY and/or if you’re engaged in research at CUNY, as far as I’m concerned you shouldn’t have any tuition. We’re absolutely committed to doing that and we will be doing something, I’m just not in a position today to reveal it; we will be in a position as we move forward on the pricing structure not to undermine the very action that we’re about to undertake. Now, it may not be that we’re going to be able to do it all in one year on the tuition remission, but we’re clearly engaged in an exercise to over the next few years completely eliminate that. And you will see as part of our discussion on what the pricing structure should be what it should be for the graduate non-resident students that are highly valuable at CUNY and that we want to make sure we continue to get. I assure you none of us are doing this unmindful of what our core mission is and we’re not going to do anything to undermine our mission. We’re not going to do something that next week or next month or next year is going to come back and smack us in the face, and that’s why, whether it’s our discussions with the Budget Advisory Committee of the Faculty Senate or the Doctoral folks at the Graduate School or colleagues, particularly in the sciences, who constantly remind us of this problem, we’re going to do something about that. If we do it right we’re going to have a tuition policy change that hardly changes or has virtually no change in the pricing for doctoral students. The issue of the non-resident undergraduates is another matter, but the non-resident graduate students I know is something that’s very important to the colleges and I assure you that it’s not going to look like what you may think. It’s going to be something that recognizes that we value those folks very much and we’re not going to raise their tuition; if at all, we’re going to go in the other direction.

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – Many of these graduate students not only are not from New York City, they’re not from the United States, and if the out of state tuition increase applies also to these doctoral students who come from China or Taiwan, there will be serious problems in these programs in the interim. So if I hear you correctly, we will have a problem in September that may be alleviated in future years for the tuition. / Vice Chancellor Malave – No, I didn’t say that. I said it’s possible that come September there will be no change in the pricing for doctoral students, no change at all, and hopefully a year from now we can eliminate even the one that we have today if we do it right. But that’s the question, what will the system tolerate? That’s always an interesting question and we are very mindful of the need to strengthen our graduate programs, not to weaken them. So we’re not going to weaken them, I assure you, not deliberately we won’t.

Professor Daniel Habib (Geology, Queens College) – My question has to do with tuition disparity between the community colleges and the senior colleges, which I don’t think you answered. I’m asking you not to answer it, but before I do I want to tell you that I’m old enough and I’ve been here long enough to remember the time when the Governor was setting up the State University and when he invited the City colleges to join. And what was the big hue and cry at that time? We are tuition free, we don’t want to become part of what you’re doing, you’re charging tuition at the State University of New York and we have no tuition. And what was the net result? We charged tuition and we were not part of the State University system. The whole problem I think has to do with tuition. I want to ask you why there is this disparity between the community colleges and the senior colleges? The community colleges, if they charge tuition, would still be available for minority students, or underprivileged students would still be eligible for TAP and various other kinds of aid, but if you were to bring up the tuition to the level of senior colleges, number one you would not have the difficulty of the students going first to the community colleges and then having difficulty transferring to the senior colleges, and number two you’d have more full time faculty at the community colleges, and number three the upstate politicians would love it and maybe they’d give us more money. / Vice Chancellor Malave – There’s one general answer and that is that at CUNY, because as you said it was free for 129 years, questions of tuition were just alien, so when we were forced in 1976 by that Governor who became Vice President to raise tuition we didn’t do it right. That’s the short answer. But in 1976 the tuition for senior and community colleges was indeed identical and then in the early 1980’s it began to show a slight difference. That happened because, once the senior colleges separated from the City of New York and were no longer part of the municipal budget structure and became part of the state budget structure, the Albany Legislature and political process governed the pricing of tuition and the old budget. So when the State punched a hole in the senior college budget it then had to make up that hole with tuition revenue. The municipal government didn’t punch a similar hole in the community colleges, so if the City of New York is funding the community colleges and the State of New York continues to fund them there will be some basis for increasing it modestly but nowhere near what it would be required to increase as a result of what was going on at the senior colleges. In the early 1990s, when there were four tuition increases, that’s when the gap went from first a few hundred, then $400, then in 1995 to $700. And that’s really what happened, we moved to the State for the senior colleges, it was part of the deal to save New York, and as a result we became part of that process that punched all kinds of holes in the budget forcing revenue. A common and a comparable action did not occur on the City side, and that’s why even today we’re confronted with the decision where we are about to raise tuition up to $950 but at the community colleges we can make the argument that we’re not getting cut. We need to do something but we can’t do $950 at the community colleges. On what basis do we do that? And just to eliminate the gap we’d have to do $1,500 at the community colleges and it’s already among the highest in the country anyway. Those are the complications that we all have to live with and we are.

Professor London (Political Science, Brooklyn College) – In your remarks you talked about how increasing tuition at the community colleges and also imposing tuition at senior colleges would give us a chance to start to meet some of the goals of the master plan, provide some stability. Now I understand and I know that you understand that we have really no choice in terms of our current situation with respect to increasing tuition other than retrenchment, layoffs, a devastated university. However, I just think it’s important to understand that increasing tuition is not a way to give this University a future or stability either. It’s the rock and the hard place that we’re between and I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that. Since 1990 we’ve lost in inflation adjusted dollars and now with this new budget about a half a billion dollars, and what we are now charging in tuition we’ve lost in state aid. What we’ve given with one hand we’ve gotten with the other. We’re still in an under funded State so that the increase in tuition I don’t see is really a way for us to see a brighter future. If anything we are moving more down the road of not being a publicly funded university, just the opposite. What really concerns me in this new state is that we really don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know what impact the increase in tuition will have on our senior colleges, how we will be competitive, how students will view us relative to the privates. Somebody said earlier that TAP would take care of the increase; in fact TAP would not take care of the increase for a large part of our student body, the part-time students, the financially independent students who have no dependents; that’s a significant group. So we don’t know. I remember when you were here earlier and you gave us a very convincing argument when you showed us a number of charts about the increase in enrollments and tuition you said, "we don’t really know." / Vice Chancellor Malave – I agree, we don’t know. / Professor London – So I think that we’re in a very dangerous period. Really my question was going to be, since you agree that we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, that we have to tread very lightly in considering what to do with the community colleges and what the relationship really will be between the senior college tuition and community colleges. / Vice Chancellor Malave – I agree that we don’t know but there are a lot of things that we don’t know. That doesn’t mean that we’re blind to our environment, that we can’t make our best estimates as to where we think the world is going to be. I could have told you, in fact I think I did, a year ago that this is likely where we will be today. Of course, I didn’t know that for sure, but I had a pretty good inkling, and that inkling came from 20 years of experience in the University and witnessing the actual effects of tuition increases and always being reminded of what the professors always tell you about critical analysis and due diligence. I can tell you with pretty good assurance where things are likely to be. I can’t guarantee that they will be there but neither can you. That’s the world we live in, that’s not new, and so all we can do is take the best information that we have given the environment. I know we have a few economists in this room, I know that I can go to an economist and give him a set of scenarios and they can give me a likely outcome of behavior based on those things, and we’re doing that. How many economists have been proven to be correct? I understand that, I understand exactly that I can be here 7 months from now saying, "oops, we really blew that one," or that "we got it mostly right." I suspect that we’ll get it mostly right because the people who are engaged in this thing are not rookies, they’ve been engaged in it for a long time and are getting the benefit from everybody and from all sources and I think we can figure this thing out. It’s not that complicated, I think we have it. But we do need to be mindful of the community college / senior college split and we are. Every day we are mindful of it.

Professor Friedman (Developmental Skills, Borough of Manhattan Community College) – Congratulations, Vice Chancellor, on your permanent appointment at this auspicious time in history. I just want to preface my question with the statement that I think we all appreciate the real complexities of this issue and being between a rock and a hard place. It’s interesting to me that we have heard more about community colleges in this room in the last few months, not so much from you but from the Chancellor: "We’ve got to do this for the community colleges, we’ve got to do that for the community colleges." We have never heard this before and I think it strikes some of us as a little questionable as to why all of a sudden we are so concerned about the full time / part time ratio at the community colleges, which by the way I have been finding out is really outrageous when you compare, and I hate to compare because none of us have a lot of full timers, a community college with a population of X and a senior college with a population of X and the disparity between the full time lines at college one and college two; they are so great, I was really amazed. Since we have to be in this conversation, I have two questions. One is you said "modest figure." We know that there are numbers out there, so just give us a little range, not less than one and not greater than two. What do you mean "modest" at the community colleges? / Vice Chancellor Malave – I know I’ve thrown this figure out before. I don’t think we can do anything more than at the high end $300-400 at the community colleges a year. So you’re looking at $150-200 a semester at the highest end. / Professor Friedman – Second question. Vice Chancellor, there has to be downsides and upsides and, looking to the future, what are the projected downsides to an increase? To me that doesn’t sound modest but maybe to my colleagues it does. We raise tuition let’s say $300-400 at the community colleges, what are the potential downsides for us? We’re supposed to be open access institutions. We have the poorest students in the nation. Might we not loose some of our most at risk students? What do you project on that end as a possible downside at the community colleges? / Vice Chancellor Malave – It’s very difficult to know the answer to that and let me tell you why. We did three tuition increases in the early 1990s and after every single one of them enrollment went up; three in a row, and enrollment went up three years in a row. Why did that happen? The answer is very complex. It has to do with one, the general state of the economy, two, who’s graduating from the school system, that is a finite pool of students. Sometimes in the graduation rates from the public high school system the projections are on the upside, depending on where you are. You could be in Queens and the high school population is burgeoning and you can see an increase in the pool of applicants that are likely to attend. Secondly, on the issue of what’s called poverty, if you’re poor in New York today, the State of New York has an assistance program that covers tuition. / Professor Friedman – For less than 40% of my students. / Vice Chancellor Malave – I’m talking about a class of individuals that we all care about, that is the very poor in the City of New York. The poor in the City of New York today go to school and get it financed with the TAP program. That’s why we’re all concerned about the TAP program, that’s why we were all fixated on making sure that they fix the TAP program. And why were we concerned about that? We were concerned because that was a safety net for the poorest students. Having said that, we also know there’s a whole class of students that are part time and that a rate increase affects them. We know that and it’s hard to determine what a 23 year old decides to do with his or her life when the pricing goes up 15%. Do they choose to suspend their aspirations for higher education because the price went up by 15%? I don’t know, maybe they do, maybe they don’t. When I think about the students who go to Monroe college and pay $8,000 I wonder what they were thinking when they could have gone to BMCC and to Bronx Community College for $2,500, and I assure you the students at Monroe College are exactly like the students at Bronx Community College, but somehow they’re figuring out how to pay $8,000 for the luxury of going to Monroe College. So I don’t know and I’m not going to pretend to figure out what’s behind the motivations of a 23 year old who’s thinking about going to school. I remember when I was there, that was me. Obviously, there are some people that a pricing decision of any size will affect their behavior. What we can do in our determining what it should be for the whole system, after all we have an obligation to the City of New York and to the people of the City of New York to have a system that makes sure that’s available to provide the education, and I know that whenever you change the price people are affected, but at what level of analysis do we determine who do we protect? I think, and the Chancellor has made it very clear to the Presidents, that it’s their obligation for those students who, for example, perhaps are at the junior and senior years and perhaps are no longer even eligible for financial aid, if they have a pricing change that they’d be likely with the undocumented tuition issue that we were confronted with that there be a scholarship fund set aside to provide relief for those who need it, who are near graduation, to whom a 30% increase in tuition will matter as to whether or not they graduate. There are things that we have to do, whether it’s for international students who can’t afford it - you may recall in 1992 when we raised tuition we set aside a million dollar fund for foreign students who we believed because of the pricing change would have difficulties. Those are the kinds of things that we’re going to do to make sure that nobody chooses not to come to CUNY because somehow the price went up 15% at the community colleges. We’re working really hard and the colleges have to do it, the Presidents and Student Affairs have to make sure that they identify all those students who are likely to be vulnerable. I’m preparing a schedule for all the colleges of all the students who are most likely to be affected by the pricing change, that is those who are not going to get it covered by TAP. We can identify that group, we can identify that class of students and communicate with them and bring them in and let them know that this is likely to have an effect on you, we’re worried about whether or not you’re going to choose not to go to school, we are just as sensitive as everybody else, but we’re confronted with a decision as to what kind of university we’re going to be. And come hell or high water we’re not going backwards. We’ve already been there; we’ve lost over 1,000 full time faculty over the past 15 years and we have to do something about that. Now it may be that we’re not going to be able to fund that Master Plan and we’re not going to be able to do the things that we want to do but we can figure out how not to lose any further ground, and that’s what we’re committed to do and in a way that’s sensitive to everybody.

Professor Gallagher (English, LaGuardia Community College) – Just as a point of information, can I ask you how large those tuition increases were in the ‘90s when enrollment went up every year? / Vice-Chancellor Malave – They were several hundred dollars, I think $200-300 each year. / Professor Gallagher – So perhaps not all together the equivalent of $950. / Vice-Chancellor Malave – I think that’s why the Chancellor has said, and I’m sure you all read the paper, he went to the City Council and said, "we don’t really like $950." And that’s why he’s charging me and says, "Ernesto, we can’t do $950. You’re going to have to figure out a way not to do $950." So we’re looking to bring that down to something less but at the same time be sensitive to all the other constituent groups, graduate students, doctoral students. We have a $121 million problem. / Professor Gallagher – Those are preliminary to a statement then you can respond to. Another point of information: one of the reasons that we can’t raise community college tuition, as it seemed to be suggested, to four year college tuition is community college kids are much poorer. As Anne Friedman pointed out, typically at BMCC and other community colleges less than 40% of students qualify for TAP. It’s a very different demographic than you have in four year colleges. The point I want to come to is, you very clearly and in many ways persuasively presented the plan for a tuition reform at the University and the plan for raising community college tuition. How we’re behind that plan, I find two conflicting arguments. You may remember at the Budget Advisory Committee you gave out a list of tuition increases at various institutions comparable to CUNY across the country, public institutions, in the last seven years when we haven’t raised tuition. And you said quite rationally, "look, University of Texas went from such and such to $1,300 more" or whatever the number was. You can’t do that with community colleges. You can’t use that argument. It has to be an entirely different argument because, as you said, community college tuition already is among the highest in the country. So whatever we raise it we are going to put it literally off the charts and we’re going to raise it among the poorest community college students in the country, and I think that’s going to be a problem. If I could sketch out a scenario, I think we’re going to create long-term problems with this structure. We’re going to raise the tuition an appreciable amount at the four-year colleges, which I think is going to drive people to the community colleges, which are already full. But that will be taken care of, I’m being cynical here, I admit, by the students who can no longer afford to go to the community colleges because of the tuition rates. So they will make way for the students who are pushed down from the four-year colleges. I just have to underline what Anne Friedman said: for twenty years we’ve been saying we don’t have enough faculty at the community colleges and we’re just a little bit suspicious when you come from the administration, I don’t mean you personally, I don’t want to attack you here, but you come and tell us, "you know what, you need more full time faculty." We’ve been saying that for twenty years, so why didn’t you believe us? And, on top of that, I have seen all these plans to add new faculty. Look at all the ones we’ve had across the University in the last three or four years, and we have programs to add 150-200 full time faculty, and you get the numbers at the end of the year and we’ve added three or maybe lost seven. I doubt very much that that money will end up hiring very many more full time faculty at the community colleges. Indeed, let me just put it in personal context, we have in my department 85 adjuncts and roughly 25 full timers. It’s not going to help a great deal, although certainly I wouldn’t turn it down, if we had 27 full timers and 81 adjuncts. It’s not going to change the ratio appreciably. / Vice-Chancellor Malave – This cynicism around our rhetoric on community colleges… / Professor Gallagher - Justified suspicion. / Vice-Chancellor Malave – This year we grew by 11,000 students and it was an enormous number. BMCC added a thousand students, I don’t know what they did with them, but I do know that last year BMCC had no business with the rate that they were at on the level of full time faculty. You also have to remember what the past 15 months have been like. I started sort of acting as Vice Chancellor back in October of 2001, just one month after September 11, and that event did all kinds of things. Giuliani was Mayor and right before September 11 we had a budget to hire 100 full time faculty at the community colleges and he got up and said "emergency cuts $1 billion, 7.5%." We ended up being in court and we did all that and had to hold off because we didn’t know whether we were going to have the money. And then of course Giuliani hung out for a little bit longer and then he came back and the question was what were we going to do now with funding for the community colleges. And the best we did with City Hall was to fund the collective bargaining agreement and got none of the money. So let’s just acknowledge that over the past 18 months it has been a pretty rocky environment both in the City and the State, and in that environment of a great deal of uncertainty we can have our plans and we did allocate revenue to the campuses to hire, but then what did we do? We had an early retirement incentive in the midst of our hiring effort. So on the one hand we want to hire 300 but on the other hand 400 are disappearing to the incentive. You are faculty, you know how hard it is to hire full time faculty. I can tell you as your Chair that you have five new lines and I don’t know how long it will take you to fill those lines but it takes a long time to hire full time faculty, particularly in the midst of this environment. So the net numbers will show that maybe not a lot has been gained but people have been hiring full time faculty, some campuses better than others. Anybody from Kingsborough here? I know at Kingsborough they’re growing full time faculty in ways that perhaps at BMCC they’re not. We’re saying that whether you welcome or not the rhetoric at the community college we have been under pressure too internally to meet the needs of the community colleges. When the Chancellor and others finally get it, if you will, why don’t you just accept the fact that we’re getting it? / Professor Gallagher – I’m glad you’re getting it, but I’m even talking about before the recent series of budget cuts. I’m talking about 10, 15 and 20 years ago.

Professor Moore (Student Personnel, Queens College) – I just want to express two concerns of the Student Affairs Committee: One is that by raising tuition inordinate on foreigner international students we might price them out on certain special programs that contribute very much the reputation of CUNY, like engineering, computer science and other sciences. I also want to express a special concern for international students who have already been going here for a long time and are maybe a year or a year and a half away from graduation. To dramatically increase their tuition once they’ve gone here for such a long time under another price I think would be just a tremendously unfair thing. / Vice-Chancellor Malave – I agree, and we’re struggling with that issue and hopefully we’ll figure out what the right tuition is.

Professor Hastick (Social and Behavioral Sciences, Medgar Evers College) – Mr. Vice Chancellor, congratulations. I want to thank you again for a very clear presentation. Usually numbers fail me but somehow you have a way of making it very clear. I want to underscore two points and then I want to ask a very quick question. You indicated earlier that the students at Monroe College are exactly like our students. I don’t think that they’re exactly like the students at Medgar; I don’t think so but I haven’t done my research. Students at Medgar are poor immigrant students, single parents raising families, trying to work and go to school, the whole nine yards. We need to hear from you because we have not heard about those colleges that are both two-year and four-year. Where do we stand? That’s one question. I also hope that in your continued deliberations you will keep people like Al Levine in the room to help clarify who our students are and to, again, share some of the same concerns that Professor Crain has talked about, a lone voice crying in the wilderness for as long as I have been on the Senate. Our senior administration at Medgar Evers College has reassured us that renovations slash construction plans are on target. We’re waiting with bated breath but we need to hear from you. Our classes are extremely overcrowded, when it rains some of them leak, you know. And I’m being very honest, I’m not being dramatic, I’m telling you the truth. So we need some reassurance from you that construction, capital dollars, whatever you call it are still on track. / Vice-Chancellor Malave – We wouldn’t be engaged with designers and architects in a way that those bonded dollars work unless the funding is in place. In fact you really cannot begin spending a lot of those bonded funds, so we’re very confident that Medgar Evers is clearly on the path where it should have been 10 years ago and will have its new campus on time. I know President Jackson very well, he’s one of our finest Presidents, and I’m certain that the plan that they’re on right now will be carried out, if anything sooner rather than later. So I wouldn’t worry at all about the capital program. This issue of two and four-year colleges is sort of overlooked in the presentation. It is a concern that we have with respect to the pricing. If you’re at Staten Island or at Queensborough, if you’re at Medgar Evers or New York City Tech or John Jay and you’re paying $3,200 to go to Medgar Evers for an associate degree or you can go to a community college and over a couple of years save almost $2,000, why go to Medgar Evers? It seems like a poor decision for comparable programs; sometimes you want to go because of a special program. One of the concerns that we have with this issue of the community colleges is exactly the comprehensive colleges because they have associate degree programs. If now the gap is $700 and it goes to $1,500, why would anybody go to some of the two year programs, unless it’s only John Jay because only John Jay has the political science program, and who knows how long that will last, but right now that’s the only one. The reason I say that is because Monroe College is developing a criminal justice program and is going to take those students from John Jay unless John Jay figures out a way of collaborating with Bronx. The point is that if you get to $1,500 now, that’s a $3,000 decision someone is going to make over a two-year period. Now if they go to school over three years it’s even more, it’s almost a $5,000 decision between going to a comprehensive college for two years as opposed to going to a community college. And now we raised tuition at the senior colleges but we forgot we were for a moment an integrated University and we didn’t do the right thing at the community colleges, and then suddenly we have a budget situation at the senior colleges with all these students leaving that’s undermining the senior colleges. We’re also not interested in doing something that will undermine the senior colleges. So that’s why I described it as a conundrum because it really is. Nobody asked for this thing and nobody said, even in Albany, "what about the unintended consequences of doing what they did?" You know how Albany behaves, and we are suffering as a system by the behavior of the folks in Albany, and it’s very difficult in that environment to figure it out. On the capital program Medgar Evers is fine but the issue of community college tuition is yet another one. We’ve toyed around, although I don’t know where it’s going to end up, whether we should have a different tuition for the comprehensive colleges. For example, should the two-year programs at Medgar Evers have a different tuition? Let’s say we go to $4,000 at Medgar Evers four-year program just for the sake of argument, we throw a number out, do we need to go to $4,000 for the associate degree programs? Can we keep it closer to $3,200, let’s just say go to $3,600 and keep it closer to the two-year programs? That may be something that we’ll have to end up doing in order to protect the interest of the comprehensive colleges, or we should make everybody a comprehensive college. There’s no good reason why they can’t all be like John Jay, Medgar Evers, Staten Island. Those are all fine institutions, and if many private colleges in New York can figure out how to have a…can you imagine a school or educational institution that can’t figure out how to have a program of study for someone who doesn’t want a baccalaureate degree, but at CUNY we do that well. At private colleges they figure out a way in their vast educational enterprises to create programs that service the needs of all New Yorkers, not just those in baccalaureate programs.

Professor Fridman (Kingsborough Community College) – Thank you for your lucid presentation, almost all of which I was able to follow. One of the things that we’re doing at Kingsborough, as you and the Chancellor have been continually keeping us informed of the budget situation and particularly this question of tuition raises, is to keep our faculty also informed so that at certain general faculty meetings we’re taking your information to the rest of our colleagues. I don’t know to what extent that goes on elsewhere, but that was something that we were interested in doing. I want to add one of my concerns, not only for the students that I actually teach or remedial students as well as elective or freshmen, some of them are very poor – one woman, just to give you a small example, in addition to three children works 70 hours plus takes a full time program – these are students that I’m concerned about, but another concern I have is not simply the question whether they can continue in college but the question of whether standards in my own classroom will deteriorate as students struggle and add to their work hours, since I found that the question of work dramatically impacts on the kinds of things that I can do in the classroom and the resistances against which I struggle. I also wanted to, if you don’t mind, clarify some of the numbers that you gave. You talked about the cost of an education at a senior college, I didn’t get that number, and you didn’t mention the number at the community college. / Vice-Chancellor Malave – It’s approximately $10,000 at the senior colleges and approximately $7,000 at the community colleges. / Professor Fridman - $7,000 takes into consideration the fact that there is 70% adjunct. / Vice-Chancellor Malave – No, just the actual cost right now. If you do the numbers on average it costs roughly $7,000 per FTE for a student at the community college. / Professor Fridman – Even though there are fewer full time faculty. / Vice-Chancellor Malave – That’s correct. / Professor Fridman – And you said current tuition at the senior colleges is what? / Vice-Chancellor Malave – $3,200 for resident students and $6,800 for non-resident students. Those are all undergraduate. / Professor Fridman – And at the community college / Vice-Chancellor Malave – $2,500 and $3,076.

Professor Manassah (Electrical Engineering, City College) – Good evening Vice Chancellor. My colleagues have spoken very eloquently about both the teaching and about tuition. I want to talk about something else, which is the role of the University in generating new knowledge; I’m talking about research. There are a lot of resources that the University is getting to research that comes in the capital budget. Every time that there is a new building, every time that there is a new project, there is literally something like 15-20% that comes in terms of what’s called equipment or furniture budget. These are going under the radar. We know very little about them. I think the Chair of the Senate has requested some information about that. I think it is important that we get this information. It’s very important that we also know where is the money that’s coming for research either through special allocation or through special gifts to the University, because it is a little bit annoying to see the list when one looks and sees some of the expenditures that are going through within the University and then there is less than one furlough that can be given to professors per college for a sabbatical with one semester full pay. I sat down and went through the arithmetic a little bit and, excuse me for being a little cynical about it, but I computed what I came to know were the numbers from five senior colleges and what would be the adjunct replacement for these for the last year. Guess what, it was less than the salary of one President driver and the cost of his car. Well, you know, these are important issues. I know that within this University, within the administration so far, it seems that they have their certain priorities with respect to research. We passed a resolution in this body, we want the faculty to be involved in those decisions. We want to know what is really going on in terms of some of the research. I think there is now a great committee led by a fantastic person for the cluster lines, I’m talking about Leslie, but I think that you know there are a lot of things that are going on - you know about them, I know about them, and there is no need to make lists - that are going in terms of some of those things that we really need to know about. We need to know where the money that’s coming from the Dormitory Authority is going with respect to research; we need to know that basically that money is not being squandered. / Vice Chancellor Malave – I’m going to say I don’t know the answer to your question. At CUNY we have a Vice Chancellor for Budget and Finance and we have a Vice Chancellor for Facilities Management and Construction. Let me just go back to the capital budget as I remind you that I don’t manage the capital budget, and so I really can’t help you on exactly where the dollars go because that’s a question that you can either ask the Chancellor, and I’m sure he will have an answer for you, or you can ask the Vice Chancellor for Facilities Management in terms of how they allocate the capital budget. I should just point out that we have no capital budget right now for the senior colleges. The Legislature, when they did the operating budget, passed it, they sent it to the Governor, the Governor is considering it, but the only thing they did on the capital budget was $55 million for the community colleges. That was it. There is no standing capital budget for the senior colleges going forward, and don’t worry about Medgar Evers because that’s old money. The Governor had recommended $981 million in the senior college capital budget for CUNY and they had lined it out. The Legislature, for reasons that I could spend a half hour on, decided that they didn’t want to adopt that budget, so there is no budget for the senior colleges right now. The other thing is, on the capital budget side, the mysterious fund that you described, the B&E fund that was generated from interest earnings on bond sales that was then used to allocate to the campuses for a variety of things. That also doesn’t exist anymore. Last year the Legislature adopted a new bonding scheme using the personal income tax that eliminated that funding, so now the State has committed to those things that used to be funded with B&E funds. Minor repair issues and things that had to get done will now be funded directly in the capital program, so you can see it, arguably, when the budget is adopted until the appropriation and it’s no longer sort of this mysterious might. Finally, we are still very committed to an all funds budget process at CUNY. It is the mantra of my office, and as far as I’m concerned we have to have an all funds budget that includes the capital budget, that includes the research foundation, that includes all other auxiliary revenues. The bottom line, that is what we’re committed to do, that is a priority of my office, but this is a huge system and the fact of the matter is some of these things take time. When I asked the people on the administrative side, and I think I’ve said this at your conference last year, what would it cost so I can have the mother of all information systems, so we can have all of this disclosure? And you know California State University right now is in the middle of a process of overhauling their administrative structure, because no doubt they had a big desire to do this as well, and they’re running at $700 million as we speak. This is California State, 20 campuses. The last time someone was tossing figures, if we wanted to do a modest overhaul of our financial systems it would cost at least $150 million. That’s the environment that we’re in. We’re talking about building needs, buildings falling apart, do I want the mother of all information systems at a cost of $150 million? And maybe the answer is yes, maybe the answer is that in the world we live in we have to spend $150 million on systems, and I assure you somebody is actually thinking about spending that on systems as we worry about our leaky roofs and all that. Why? Because of this desire for information just like that. It’s a little cracky and the information comes a little late but the information is there. All I can tell you is we’re committed to doing an all funds budget. You can ask the Chancellor what he does with the allocation of research funds from the capital budget; I don’t manage that process. I think you know that we publish on the operating side full expenditure data for every penny that the campuses spend. I give it to the faculty, I give it to the students before I give it to the faculty, and everybody knows what we spend in our dollars. / Professor Manassah – I’m not complaining about the operating budget, but you and I know that there is a lot of money elsewhere. / Vice Chancellor Malave – I don’t manage the capital budget. / Professor Manassah – But you’re also the controller of this University. / Vice Chancellor Malave – I’m working on that too.

Professor Kaplowitz (English, The John Jay College of Criminal Justice) – We commend you on the transparency, the all funds budget, all that you stand for. / Vice Chancellor Malave – Are you going to talk about John Jay? / Professor Kaplowitz – No, I’m going to talk about the senior college allocation model, in which John Jay has an interest. This is a complicated budget picture, as you articulated it so well. We all understand that to varying extents, but before all this happened you were very much involved and committed to developing a more equitable, clearly transparent senior allocation model that would address such issues as some of the senior colleges having far greater reliance on adjunct faculty than some of our community colleges. / Vice Chancellor Malave – Right. / Professor Kaplowitz – The irony is that some of our senior colleges have a far greater reliance on adjunct faculty than some of our community colleges. So I’d like to ask if you’re still committed to revising the senior allocation model, which is a political hot potato but is something that we must do as a University. / Vice Chancellor Malave – The answer is yes, we are still committed to doing it, but more than that we will do something in 2004 that actually begins implementing the senior college allocation model. What that will look like I’m not certain yet because we’re putting the final touches. As a matter of fact, we have next week a meeting to put the final touch on this issue and then lay it out for final review. But we’re committed to moving in that direction, and this is part of the issue of whether or not you’re either frozen by your circumstances and you can’t do anything and you decide to just engage in paralysis for a little while and forget about the things that matter, whether it’s doctoral tuition remission, whether it’s the senior college allocation model, whether it’s an information system that costs $150 million. We at the end of the day have to continue to move the University forward and make progress. It’s difficult and it’s tortuous and it slows down a little bit but we’re committed not to lose sight of those things that are important so that we can remember those things that we need to remember, which is my cousin ten years from now looking to go to John Jay, and I hope John Jay is there.

Chair: Thank you. It’s so marvelous that you will take this time to spend with us and answer all of our questions. I have also to thank him for one other thing: the food. Ernesto has come several times and we’ve had no coffee because we’re too poor, so Ernesto said, "I’ll provide the coffee," and a little cheese and a few veggies. I thank him. It’s made for much nicer meetings. We’re much nicer with food.

We have to move to elections.

Sally Mettler (LaGuardia Community College) – Nice to be here and we’ve all been very forbearing. The Vice Chancellor was so forbearing in answering all our questions. I’m going to just quickly remind you of what we’re about. We’re electing the Executive Committee, the members at large. We have five nominees and we have five positions open but, although we have received statements from nominees, we are open at this meeting for nominations from the floor. Let me tell you who our nominees are up to the present time. I think you’ve received this in your packets.

Stefan Baumrin (Philosophy, The Graduate School and University Center)

Sandi Cooper (History, College of Staten Island)

Anne Friedman (Developmental Skills, Borough of Manhattan Community College)

Eva Harris Hastick (Social and Behavioral Sciences, Medgar Evers College)

Manfred Phillip (Chemistry, Lehman College)

You have received their statements. You will have a chance to hear from them in person and I’ll present them to you, but for now at this meeting we have the possibility of accepting nominations from the floor in addition to the five that we have. So let me call for nominations. [Silence.] Nominations are hereby closed. That means that we ask the secretary to cast the unanimous ballot for our five candidates.

Chair: I want to say I’m very pleased with the election of the Executive Committee and I look forward to working with them.

Let’s move on with the agenda, which is the Resolution on Information and Technological Literacy. Phil, you’re going to present it.

Professor Pecorino (Queensborough Community College) – Of course when you’ve been working on something like this you think it’s self explanatory, so if there is anyone who disagrees with me, ask me a question. The Information and Technological Literacy Resolution has got several appendices to it and basically what it’s saying is we’d like the University in the midst of its review of our Gen Ed programs to consider a series of recommendations: One from the Council of Chief Librarians, one from its own Committee Task Force on Educational Technology, and the third is from The National Association of College and Research Libraries. What it says is that we ought to ensure that when folks are graduating they know how to deal with information in the new world of electronic transfer of information. Somehow that ought to be woven into the curriculum at the University so that we don’t graduate people who are technologically illiterate, information processing illiterate. But we’re not being specific on how it should be done. They could just make it part of the review that’s now being conducted, and we attach the three documents that give whatever guidance they think that they might need and ask them to report back in years from now on what they have done.

Syd Lefkoe (non-senator, speaking with unanimous consent) – I’ll be very brief. On part of the Faculty Senate Committee on Disabilities Issues, I’d like to suggest an additional "be it resolved" in the resolution to include that faculty and students be given the opportunity to understand and to learn about the issues related to compatibility and access for people with disabilities in order to accomplish all these goals in the various resolutions.

[Unidentified] – Would you accept "fully comply with the Federal laws requiring this"?

Syd Lefkoe – I sure would.

Professor Baumrin (Philosophy, The Graduate School and University Center) – The Chair of the committee needs to accept this and accept the Executive Committee being the draftsman rather than the committee.

Professor Pecorino (Queensborough Community College) – In fact at our meeting today that came up. I’ve been fighting with my campus for over two year for ADA compliance with the new technological learning facilities and we were thinking of contacting this other committee of the Senate because we would like it to come out in the resolution that they’re not doing what they ought to do to ensure that people with special needs are not removed from the flow with their fellow classmates and that when you construct any kind of learning experiences and curriculum you should ensure that all people who want access should get access. So I accept it as a friendly amendment. I’ll allow the Executive to reword it and I do this not speaking for myself but because I know my committee is sympathetic with that; we’re going to work on something along those lines next year.

Chair: We had one other thing but maybe people feel it’s too late to have a discussion of the School of Professional Studies and we should do it online. We could do that.

Professor Cooper (History, College of Staten Island)– People interested in discussing the School of Professional Studies should check on their campuses with the administrations to see what their view is in terms of the conflict between this proposal and Continuing Education. If we’re going to have a rational discussion about this at least you better be directed in the right direction and not waste your time. The concept paper struck some of us as something that wouldn’t pass the CPE but the implications of it are fairly serious for a whole set of other existing things that campuses do.