Draft: Subject to Senate Approval

THE TWO HUNDRED NINTY-THIRD PLENARY SESSION

OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

February 25, 2003

The meeting was called to order by UFS Chair O’Malley at 6:40 p.m. in Room 9204/5 at the Graduate School and University Center. 67 voting members were present:

Governance Leaders present: Baumrin (GSUC), Cooper (CSI), Fridman (KCC), Friedheim (BMCC), Kaplowitz (John Jay), Levine (CSI), Rodriguez (Hunter), Savage (Queens), Sohmer (CCNY), and Tobey (Brooklyn). Guests Chancellor Goldstein, Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Mirrer, Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs Schaffer, Acting Vice Chancellor for Budget and Finance Malave, and Professor Paoli (Hunter.) Executive Director Phipps, Administrative Assistant Pasela, and Secretary Blanchard were present. 

I. Approval of the Agenda: The agenda was adopted as distributed.

II. Approval of the Minutes: The Minutes were approved as distributed.

III. Reports: (recorded in Reports & Deliberations)

A. Chair.

B. The Chancellor.

C. Acting Vice Chancellor for Budget Ernesto Malave.

D. Professor Dennis Paoli (Hunter) Update/ Q&A on the CUNY Proficiency Exam.

E. Representatives to Board Committee (written)

IV. Old Business:

A. Resolution on Student Academic Integrity: This item was held over for the March Plenary.

There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 8:55 P.M.

Respectfully submitted,

Bill Phipps

Executive Director

Chair: Tonight’s agenda -- the Chancellor will come at 6:45 and then Interim Vice Chancellor for Budget and Finance Ernesto Malave will be here. Then we’ll have a short presentation on the college proficiency exam. Sharona Levy just called to say she has a fever, but Dennis Paoli from Hunter should be here to talk about the CPE. So that’s our agenda. Let me just mention a few things that we’re up to. One is we are forming the Cluster Hiring Committee, chaired very ably by Leslie Jacobson. We will work with the Office of Academic Affairs to get the best possible clusters and to get the faculty inserted more in the process, at least faculty governance. Also we are now embarked in doing a faculty satisfaction survey. We are just starting to work on this. In fact, Dean Savage just handed me the National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty. So far it’s Karen Kaplowitz, Dean, Al Levine, and Ken Sherrill, but that’s only an initial committee to get categories together and start conceptualizing this. David Crook in the Central Administration has agreed to help us put this together. It will go out as a faculty satisfaction survey and will be part of the performance indicator measures of the presidents.

Yes, I have talked to the union about this; yes, I will be careful to stay away from collective bargaining issues. Lenore Beaky just told me that there is a film that the union is going to show in their series "Labor Goes to the Movies" on a survey that went wrong and was used to hurt the employees. We will be very careful about this survey. The film is called "Human Resources," a French film.

Our conference will be on Friday, April 11^th. I should be able to put out tomorrow or the next day where it’s going to be, either at John Jay or the Hunter School of Social Work April 11^th. It’s called The Integrated University or maybe The Integrating University and the Status of the Faculty. The concern is as things get more centralized and directed from 80^th Street what is the role of faculty governance and how can we make sure that faculty have a part in all of these initiatives. There is a letter on the back table from the Chancellor to Karen and me about seven initiatives he would like us to get involved in. You should take a look at it. One of the initiatives is the faculty survey that we suggested to him. Don’t forget lobbying, March 11^th . We’ve got a small group and if anyone wants to join us…but then we will be doing lobbying days each month. I suspect we’ll go through July, maybe August, lobbying once a month until this budget is passed. We’ve just put together our legislative demands and would appreciate your help. Also we plan to do local lobbying with our local legislators in NYC. Now Kathryn Richardson, do you want to say something about PSC/CUNY Grants?

Kathryn Richardson: It’s that time of the year again and this year we’re looking for people in art history and visual arts, comparative literature, languages, computer science, education, health and human services, health sciences, psychology, and physiological psychology and sociology. So if you would please distribute the fliers on your campus, remind people that you think that would be good for the position to apply, and send us their curriculum vitae. Thank you.

Chair: Also I want to mention the newsletter. Lenore Beaky has miraculously done another newsletter. It should be in your mailbox this week. If it’s not, call the office.

As you know, I was quoted in the NY Times this morning on the case of the Chancellor’s granting promotion and tenure to Brooklyn College’s Prof. Johnson. I spent a good part of the day on Professor Johnson at Brooklyn College. Vice Chancellor Schaffer is now here and the Chancellor should be here shortly. We could start the discussion about this now, but what I think makes sense, although I certainly will be guided by the body, is to wait for a resolution from Brooklyn College’s governance. After spending the day writing resolutions on this, it now makes sense to me that it should come from Brooklyn College and that the facts should be accurate. Then maybe the UFS should sign on. But I do think it makes sense to ask some questions of the Chancellor and of Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs Rick Schaffer.

Chancellor: It’s good to be here. I want to talk about the most important issues that I am very much involved in, and I go back to the 11^th of February when I testified in front of Assembly Ways and Means and Senate Finance, the joint budget committee of the Legislature. I followed Bob King, the Chancellor of SUNY, who was giving a very different message than I ultimately conveyed which went something like this: if you look at our budget problem, which is a major problem, we haven’t seen a problem of this magnitude in several decades. The problem from an arithmetic point of view is very easy to describe. The operating budget has been challenged by taking the overall FTEs that this University has, which is a little over 100,000 FTEs, multiplied by 1,200, and that’s the cut that we have. And it was from that that people started to talk about a $1,200 tuition increase. And when Chancellor King was questioned in his testimony he basically said that they could handle this revenue expectation that SUNY had by raising tuition $1,200. When the calculation was first made a $1,400 tuition increase was discussed. And the Chancellor took a lot of very heated questions from the members of that joint committee and also talked a little about TAP, which is an ancillary problem to the actual cut in the operations budget because it could have a joint effect on the most vulnerable student body in that they may not be able to put together a financial package to continue school, and that would then cause a further rippling effect because there will be an out migration of students and that would affect our revenue. So there would be this compounding effect. So the Tuition Assistance Program not only is about students placed in harm’s way but it also has a very real effect on revenue. When I testified I said the following things, and I went through this in some detail last night, and then I’ll just come to the finale: I said that we really need to look at a number of things, that you don’t impose a tuition increase of some consequence without really doing your best efforts to take a very close look at how you operate the University and find ways to save money and also to generate revenue. Prior to that, a month or so before, I stood before this body and I said retrenchment is off the table, and I just want to underscore that again, retrenchment is out of our lexicon, it is not going to be an option that we are going to exercise, and even though we have this very severe revenue problem and its mirror image if you will, the operating budget problem – it’s not quite a mirror image, there is some refraction in that reflection – that we are going to continue to hire faculty. So that is how I parameterized the discussion: there is not going to be retrenchment, we are going to continue to hire full time faculty, and we have been somewhat indefatigable in that message with our presidents: "we want you to continue to hire faculty to the degree that you can." Obviously you’re not going to compromise who you bring in just by hiring faculty but every effort should be made to either maintain the level, if not grow it. So from that standpoint I said the following thing at these joint meetings: We have a hiring freeze but the hiring freeze excuses instructional staff that teach in the classroom, and we have a few other categories that are very closely aligned to that. One is also a development staff because if we’re going to generate revenue we actually have to have some development staff at certain places on the campus. That’s the first thing. Second thing we are moving as aggressively and as forcefully as we can to develop savings through a complex of approaches, savings through efficiencies that we can squeeze out of the system and also the way of administering the University I believe has to change. That is much more of a long term process but in the short run there are certain things that we could do that we have already done and we will continue to do, but the major changes will be somewhat prospectively because certain things have to be put into the system to allow us to do that. Third is that I need to be totally candid and that we will have a tuition increase. We have not had a tuition increase in eight years and I’ve just used the very simple example that you can’t have an organization that continues to have expenses going up and no revenue to compensate for those expenses. If you take that to its logical conclusion you have an organization that leads to insolvency. So if you depend on revenue through tuition, and State aid is either constant or going down, then tuition is going to have to be increased. But unlike the SUNY position my position was that while we acknowledge that tuition will have to be increased we must look at a comprehensive schedule of tuition, and that means looking in our graduate programs at differential tuition where legally allowed and at tuition changes in professional programs and then net out of this to an undergraduate change in tuition, always being focused, for me at least, and this is a very personal belief that I have, that we must be sensitive, not exclusively but very highly weighted in our sensitivity, to the most vulnerable among our students; that to me it is a terrible policy that a public university could promulgate that would result in students who are able and hungry to get a education to be prevented from that all on the basis of financial considerations, and I just think that’s wrong. So, whatever we do, and we will have to do something, we need to be focused on that as a utility that we can’t lose sight of. Fourth and fifth, or fifth and sixth, we need to do things that will maximize the potential for students to stay and study on our campuses. For that indicator we must make sure that our students understand the full array of financial aid opportunities, that it’s not just PELL and it’s not just TAP. There are many scholarships, sometimes that go for the wanting on our campuses, and there are lots of other approaches that we could take on our campuses that can provide the equivalent of financial aid. We are now having seminars across the boroughs. We’re going to give these seminars in Spanish, in Russian, in Cantonese, obviously in English. We laugh but it’s important that students really understand this. We also have not an insignificant cohort of students that don’t declare their financial characteristics because they are fearful of institutions in general, their parents are fearful, and we have to be sensitive to that as well. And lastly, we need a very concerted effort not only to customize the financial aid but to do it in a way that students will say "you know, I never thought of that before and I had no realization that this was available, I’m going to use this as an opportunity." Lastly, about jobs, we’re going to make an all out effort to inform our students about the ability to work on our campuses or pretty close to our campuses so that if they do have to work it doesn’t interrupt, or it’s not as disruptive as it could be, for people having to take part time status or just drop out and get a job. Those are the broad parameters. Using those broad parameters the Chairman and I discussed an idea that I had about setting up an ad hoc committee, which we announced last night at the Board meeting, which is a joint ad hoc committee, the Trustees and the Central Administration, that will do all of the due diligence that we need to do in terms of discovering the areas that have opportunities to do all of the things that I just mentioned in those broad categories to consult widely with this body, with the University Senate, with the Business Leadership Council, with the PSC, with all of the necessary constituencies to take this broad parameterization of how this problem will be looked at and find ways of expanding that, refine it, provide ideas that perhaps we haven’t had and start putting numbers on each of these areas. At the same time that all of this is going on, the political aspects have to be amplified, and that is we have to, at the end of this process, get some moderation in the revenue target that we have and its companion on the operating side and we’ve got to get some moderation on TAP. The thing we want to avoid is what we have done in the past in this University, and that is come up with a list: we want this restored, we want this restored, we want this restored. And what we typically have done in this University is we go up to Albany and everybody is very polite and we all sit in these meetings and we bang on doors, at least a lot of you do and our presidents and so forth, and we present them "this is our list." And one year it was yellow, one year it was blue, in one year it was pink. That is to me not a good strategy because people will take off that list the easy things to do and then we’re going to be left still with the major problems. We have a big problem and it requires big kind of thinking not this stiff compartmentalization of "let’s restore $1 million for full time faculty." People say "yeah, let’s do that, great," and we’re still left with an $82 million hole in our operating budget. That’s not the way that we have to unfold this, and I want to encourage you to work with the administration to really get that kind of message across because we can be nickel and dimed here and then still have a major problem at the end of the day. What we hope to accomplish is to get these numbers moderated down to a level that is the best that we could do and we’re not going to be able to implement anything, at least on tuition, unless there is a budget. There is a State law that precludes this University or SUNY to say we’re going to charge a different tuition unless there is a State Budget. Nightmare scenario, I hate to end with a nightmare scenario, but let me give you a nightmare scenario: the budget deliberations go on and on and on and we actually get into the next academic year and there is no budget. It’s happened, and we have these budget extenders. Now in the past that kind of an approach has advantaged the executive because the executive budget always has some incremental improvement in State aid. It may be marginal but you spend more money in the next year than you did in the current year. That to us could be a real nightmare because we know that at some point there is going to be a budget adopted and that budget is going to reflect a deep hole. It may not be $112 or $113 million, but at some point we’re going to have to fill that hole and that’s when we could have a real problem because we then have exercised most of our degrees of freedom in attacking this problem and we’re sort of out of ammunition. So we’ve got to think about all of these things carefully as we unravel some of the problems that we have in this budget and then come forward with the kind of strategy that I’m reflecting on. So that’s what we’re thinking. I asked Joe Lhota to chair this. Benno and I are going to be ex officio on the committee. We’ll certainly be there, but this body (the UFS) really needs to be very attentive to working with this committee. This committee is nothing more than a committee that will forward recommendations towards standing committees. I feel very strongly about this, that the action at some point needs to be in Fiscal Affairs with the adequate governance bodies associated with Fiscal Affairs, Academic Affairs, Faculty Staff and Administration, whatever the appropriate committee is that some of these recommendations will go to. We have to keep these committees inviolate. We can’t mess with the sanctity of that kind of structure. I just don’t think it’s good to have a committee that all of a sudden has this power to make recommendations to the Board directly without having the appropriate governance bodies that will include students and certainly faculty and others. So that is the approach that we outlined last night. The first meeting is in process of being scheduled. There is a lot of work that’s already been going on quietly for the last month. There has been an awful lot of work with our presidents about where they see elasticity, where there is some demand relative to this elasticity and prices on graduate level and professional programs, and we’re going to have to look at non-residential students versus residential students, but after all of this for me the focus is making sure that nobody is denied an opportunity to study on our campuses because of financial considerations. That to me is the bottom line and that’s the ideal point that we’re going towards and that’s what we hope to accomplish. I’m going to stop here because that to me is the major message and then I’m going to have to leave.

Professor Bell (Educational Services, Brooklyn College) – I’ve been asked to represent the Chairs of Brooklyn College. This afternoon most of the Chairs caucused and the group present unanimously agreed that I would ask the following question: How can your recommendation and the decision of the Board to grant full professor and therefore tenure to a member of the Brooklyn College faculty contrary to the votes of all of the Faculty Committee and the recommendation of our president be constituted as anything short of undermining and imperiling the shared governance of the promotion / Chancellor Goldstein - …(tape turned over) last night to the Board. The Board unanimously affirmed the recommendation to confer tenure and promotion to Robert David Johnson, and I certainly would not have done that unless I thought very strongly about it. I’m not going to comment on all of the processes that led to my decision because it is a confidential thing and I was very careful last night when I made that. I will just say that obviously there were very compelling reasons based upon the brief that I saw and that I had asked Rick Schaffer, our General Counsel, to look into it and based upon recommendations from Counsel we engaged in a process that was the equivalent of a select committee of faculty, and I appointed three very distinguished members of the faculty of City University, truly women and men of great stature and they came forward with a unanimous recommendation, I affirmed that and it’s done. I’m not going to say anything more about it. You can all stand up and make statements and that’s fine, that’s your prerogative, but I’m not going to go into any more detail other than to say that in looking at the record, for me, and this was on the record, it was so compelling that that was the decision I made. / Professor Bell – But I wasn’t asking about your decision, if you heard the question. What I really want to know is how can we continue to participate in the promotion and tenure process, which is now beginning at Brooklyn College for a new tenure class and a new set of promotions, given these circumstances. / Chancellor Goldstein – Because it happens all the time that people make a recommendation and the recommendation is just not embraced and that will continue to happen throughout this University and that’s no different here than any other plans. The Chancellor makes recommendations based upon recommendations that come from the college and the Chancellor is making a recommendation here that is contrary to the recommendation that came from the college. It happens regularly where we sent things back that a campus president or others do and we will continue to do it. That is the job of the Central Administration to make judgments and ultimately is the Board that either affirms that recommendation or denies it. This is no different.

Professor Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) – Same issue. You claim in this New York Times citation that while it is rare it sometimes occurs. I can’t remember one since 1967. My first question is going to be give me another case since "sometimes occurs" suggests a historical pattern of some sort. Secondly, to follow up on the question raised before, in my understanding of the way the process works, an individual who’s rejected has the opportunity to make a union appeal, not an appeal directly to the Chancellor. There is a process I’ve sat on, I can’t remember how many committees, listening to colleagues, even on that third level, in which recommendations were made back to the president. There is a process, it takes a couple of years, it doesn’t happen in a blink of the eye as far as I can tell, and I know this decision was recently made. Therefore it leads those of us who are naturally historians and suspicious …/ Chancellor Goldstein – To suspect what the real underlying issue…that political…/ Professor Cooper - …because we thought when Badillo, left this stuff will stop. This hasn’t stopped. / Chancellor Goldstein – There is nothing that I could say that will stop you from feeling some conspiracy here. I can only tell you that my decision was based totally on merits.

Professor Friedman (Developmental Skills, Borough of Manhattan Community College) – I’ll let you off the hook for two minutes with a question about tuition and budget. I have a question about tuition but I just want to make sure before I ask it that I heard you correctly. I think I heard you say that there will be a tuition increase. You didn’t say you support one, you don’t support one, the Board will approve one. / Chancellor Goldstein – Yes, right. / Professor Friedman – OK, so in other words this sense of inevitability. You also very admirably are speaking about how conscientious we must be to make sure that our poor students can continue their studies. I assume that your office or Vice Chancellor Malave’s office had made predictions as to how such a tuition increase as we have been hearing about will impact on future enrollment and I would like to see those projections particularly for the community colleges but for all of the colleges in terms of what you anticipate is going to happen in terms of us losing students. Because there is no question in my mind, it’s inevitable that we’re going to lose students, as you seem to feel it’s inevitable that there is going to be a tuition increase. So can we see those projections? / Chancellor Goldstein – Let me respond exactly as I responded when that same question was asked to me. I would be very hesitant to make projections in this kind of an environment because it’s a very dynamic environment. If we were in a stable environment I would say it would be pretty easy to use some historical data and to make a projection. I honestly, and I’m not trying to duck this, I know how to do these things analytically, but I think it would be almost a specious exercise to do this in this environment that we’re in. Because of the nature of the economy that we’re in, it’s not clear to me how students would be making judgments about whether they should still stay in the job market at a job well below what they really want to do or whether they should be going to school. Those kinds of judgments are going to be very individual kinds of judgments. The impending war with Iraq is another very big uncertainty and when you have an unstable population it’s almost an empty exercise to try to make those projections. The knee jerk reaction would be if it cost you more to do something there are going to be less people that are going to exercise that option. That may not be the case here because the options in the employment market are so fragile and so weak. So I don’t know what the effect is going to be. I honestly don’t know what the effect is going to be and I wouldn’t even hazard to guess until we got to a little less volatility in the markets that we’re seeing right now. / Professor Friedman – So you’re supporting a tuition increase without asking your office to make any projections, I just want to be clear. / Chancellor Goldstein – I’m not saying I’m supporting. I don’t think any of us want to see tuition increases. I am being realistic. I think we look quite foolish, quite frankly, to say "we’re not going to have a tuition increase." I think it’s really a very foolish response in this environment. We haven’t had a tuition increase in eight years, we are almost alone out in the university communities, and we must find ways to generate revenue. We’re going to try to get this cut down but we’re still going to be left with a big hole, and the only way that that hole can really be filled, other than marginally, is with revenue through tuition. That’s just the way it is. / Professor Friedman – Thank you.

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – I’m a department chair at Lehman College and from that perspective the idea of having a review panel on an appointment that apparently, correct me if I’m wrong, did not include any department chairs, is problematic because the perspective of a chair is different for one reason: chairs have to see to it that departments are cohesive entities that can supply student advisement in an environment where the University doesn’t pay for it. We have to be dependent on the voluntary activities of our faculty and the chairs as a cooperative activity of our faculty and chair. It has to be cooperative and unforced. And in a department even if there is one person who is disruptive in consulting to the other members, it’s a real problem. Now that should not be the major issue in appointing tenure…/ Chancellor Goldstein – I would hope not. / Professor Philipp - …but it is an issue in the delivery of services to our students and I’m surprised that several Trustees said it shouldn’t be an issue at all. So [I wonder if you could comment on that?] / Chancellor Goldstein – No, I think I commented already. Thank you.

Professor Wallach (Political Science, Hunter College and The Graduate School and University Center) – One question about current tuition increases and second about future tuition increases. The one about current ones has to do with the stance that you take as a Chancellor. I understand that tuition increases are inevitable but do you see it inappropriate for you to complain about the fact that the budget deficit is being closed on the backs of our students. / Chancellor Goldstein – Of course, I think our biggest complaint here is that for decades this University has been disadvantaged by not getting sufficient State aid, and I mean decades. So of course that is the major complaint and that’s the thing that we’re always fighting towards to try and rectify. We haven’t seen it probably in four administrations. / Professor Wallach – OK, I think that if would be great. I’m sure at least the students will love it if you made a point to say that it’s really unfortunate that State is balancing its budget on the backs of the students. / Chancellor Goldstein – I will say it here. I think it’s really unfortunate that the State is doing it. / Professor Wallach – Secondly, some have proposed that tuition be correlated to cost of living increases, and I don’t know if you’ve taken a stand about that but it seems to me that it doesn’t complement your dedication to maintaining affordability first. / Chancellor Goldstein – I’d like to talk to you more about that. I have gone out in public and said that I really believe that the Universities, CUNY and SUNY together, ought to look at coming up with some kind of, I’ll use the common phrase that people use, tuition indexing, which is really a two step process where you decide on a certain basket of economic indicators and then, once you’ve come up with that number, to make a determination about how that number is split between State aid and revenue. That to me is the hard part here because it is at that second stage where the State through the Legislature and/or the Governor together have to make a commitment that whatever that number is they’re going to make that commitment in State aid. Once you could do that then you can moderate tuition prospectively. It seems a little crazy to me to have a flat line and then a big spike, and that spike could be very disruptive. You talk about large variance; you can’t get larger variance than have a zero and then a big spike like that. I would much rather see a predictable but very small adjustment between State aid and revenue that is generated by tuition and other means that will be manageable and predictable for families and students that are studying rather than the total unpredictability of a State finding itself in a recession and then taking it out on the backs of students with a very large tuition increase. I just think that’s wrong and I think it’s bad economic policy. So I’m in favor of looking at that and seeing if we could suggest to the leaderships, both at the Legislature and at the Executive, a different approach. It has worked fairly well in certain states, other states have not done well and it’s usually at that second stage where things fall apart, where the Governor or the Legislature will say "we’re just not going to do our part, sorry." And then once you have that and that covenant is broken the system just doesn’t work. / Professor Wallach – Because it seems to me it is at odds with your earlier complaint about basic State aid for the University if you’re going to say that the one thing you can count on is tuition increases. You can’t count on pay hikes for the faculty, you can’t count on pay hikes for the University, but you can count on tuition increases. If there is one thing we should try to regularize it is that. / Chancellor Goldstein – In a tuition indexing scheme, you have to have two parties to this transaction and one party is the State agreeing to put State aid on the table. If one party reneges the thing is just not going to work.

Professor Tobey (Physical Education, Brooklyn College) – I’m Charles Tobey, Brooklyn College, and I’m the Faculty Council Chair and I’d like to express a feeling from a demoralized faculty at Brooklyn College. Many hours went into deliberations on this candidate that we talked about tonight. There were reviews of his record by the Chair, there were discussions, there were not easy decisions but they were made and they were made as you know for the negative side of the reappointment and the tenure promotion of K.C. Johnson. Then what comes from the Chancellor’s office is a statement in the paper that he read a book and interviewed K.C. Johnson, that he appointed three distinguished faculty members and they changed the Brooklyn College decision and decided to reappoint with tenure promotion. Now what I’m afraid of is an erosion of free speech and academic freedom in a situation such as this because if this small group of appointed faculty and the Chancellor can reappoint someone, award him tenure and full professorship they can also take away an appointment if they didn’t like what he said. / Chancellor Goldstein – Let me just interrupt because my time is out and we’re going over the same stuff. It happens exactly that way for the grievance process. If we had gone through a grievance process, it would extend it two or three years, there would have been a select committee formed, it would have been through an agreement. We had a legal agreement that we followed and that’s what the result was.

Professor Fridman (English, Kingsborough Community College) – You’ve spoken on this occasion and on a number of occasions about the maintenance of the number of faculty lines, maintenance of operations, and it seems to me that that may not be happening in the English Department at Kingsborough where we’ve lost over the last two semesters three lines and we’ve been told very clearly that one of them can be replaced. Am I correct that that would seem not to be in line…? / Chancellor Goldstein – I think the president has a prerogative here that when lines are made available they can allocate those lines where they see fit. That’s what presidents do and that may be the case at Kingsborough. / Professor Fridman – So the number refers to the college at large. / Chancellor Goldstein – Yes.

Professor Friedheim (Borough of Manhattan Community College) – I want to ask a question about tuition, in fact I want to ask two questions about tuition. One, this is a rhetorical question, are we still a public University when under the Pataki plan 51.5% of our funding will come from tuition and not from the public treasuries? Second question, less rhetorical, you talked about differential tuition over the past couple of weeks and most recently tonight. / Chancellor Goldstein – Yes. / Professor Friedheim – Does that mean differential revenue? If one college charges higher tuition than another college who gets the revenues? / Chancellor Goldstein – Let me tell you what differential tuition means and what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that Hunter College can charge a different tuition than say Queens College. That is something that I would oppose, number one, and number two it is not permitted by State law. Differential tuition largely is about graduate programs that are unique to a given campus, and that’s why we were able to do that for the MBA program at Baruch College, which we did last year. It was the only campus in the system that had that MBA program and therefore because it is a program unique to a campus, and yes it is a graduate program, there is an opportunity to have a differential tuition for that program relative to the other programs. The other thing that I talk about with differential tuition is not only pushing that, because we do have programs like the MBA program that are unique to particular campuses, but I would like to see ultimately that whatever change in tuition there is has got to be greater spread between two year institutions and four year institutions. And that’s something that we have to be very mindful of. The two year institutions are very different in terms of their pricing structure than four year institutions and I think if we were to have the same tuition at a two year institution instead of four year, we don’t have it right now, but if we were to close that gap much more than it is now then I think that’s wrong. So when we look at two year institutions versus four year institutions I think we have to look at them in very different ways. / Professor Friedheim – Who controls the revenues, the particular institutions, the central University, both? / Chancellor Goldstein – Ernesto can go into that but what we give is a revenue target, a revenue budget to a campus, and if the campus exceeds that revenue there is a sharing of that excess revenue. Part of it goes into an account with the University and if we exceed all of that the State takes that revenue, because we’re given an overall revenue target for the University and unless we have some agreement that we can take some of that and keep it we’re going to lose that revenue. So that’s the answer.

Professor Matthews (Math, Hunter College) – I was glad to hear that you are concerned about the students who are eager and qualified, that they shouldn’t be prevented because of financial reasons. I was wondering if this committee you’re setting up is going to look into honors colleges and programs like that that are very expensive and, from just anecdotal information, I’ve been hearing that maybe some students come for that for like a year before they transfer some place else. That’s not the kind of thing that we want. We want students who will stick with the system. / Chancellor Goldstein – Let me just say outside of the Honors College essentially honors programs are dollars that have external support. The Honors College itself has garnered a tremendous amount of external support. We’ve raised about $11 million so far and we’re going to be raising a lot more money. My view is that programs have different cost structures and it is, forgetting about honors programs, if you look at nursing programs versus political science programs versus chemistry or engineering or business, they all have very different cost structures. And you have to make a decision as a university what you’re willing to pay in order to have those particular programs. But for the large measure honors, and I’ll put that in the umbrella, are dominated by a lot of external money that is raised to support that and I think that’s a good thing. / Professor Matthews - But they do have small classes and they do have…/ Chancellor Goldstein – I don’t know what the size of the classes are, I’m not that familiar with that, but I would imagine that probably is the case. / Professor Matthews – If that could be monitored I’d appreciate it.

Jeanne Galvin (Library, Kingsborough Community College) – I have a question about the early retirement incentive. Could I ask why librarians and counselors are not being replaced? At my college my department just lost three out of nine. / Chancellor Goldstein – I thought librarians are being… / Jeanne Galvin – My Provost told us "we don’t have to replace you, you’re not teaching faculty." / Chancellor Goldstein – I think that the guidance that we gave librarians and counselors were included as faculty. Where are you? / Jeanne Galvin – Kingsborough. / Chancellor Goldstein – We’ll look into that. Maybe you’re talking about the hiring freeze? / Jeanne Galvin – No, faculty. Two full professors, one associate professor left. / Chancellor Goldstein – Well, librarians are faculty. I’ll look into it.

Barbara Moore (Student Personnel, Queens College) – I guess I have a somewhat related question. You said there was some development positions on which there wouldn’t be a hiring freeze. What kinds of positions are those? / Chancellor Goldstein – Those that generate money. If there are development persons that don’t generate money I’m not really interested in those people. If you’re a development person, you better raise money!

Professor Benenson (Mechanical Engineering, City College) – You mentioned before that your concern was that the Governor’s proposal on TAP might reduce revenues by removing students. / Chancellor Goldstein – Possibly. / Professor Benenson – Have you considered the possibility that a tuition increase will have exactly the same effect? / Chancellor Goldstein – Yes. / Professor Benenson – And that ultimately what could happen is that a tuition increase means less money, less enrolment, bigger budget cut, more tuition increase, less money. / Chancellor Goldstein – I understand that but let me just ask all of you a rhetorical question. We have a $50 million problem. What are you going to do? Suppose you are the Chancellor, you have a $50 million problem, do you want to have retrenchment, do you want to get rid of a quarter of your faculty? You tell me what you want to do. / Professor Benenson – Are you asking me? / Chancellor Goldstein – Eliminate the administration, OK, that’s a good one. / Professor Benenson – One thing would be to make the case in Albany that the Governor’s act could destroy the University. I mean, don’t you think that’s true? / Chancellor Goldstein – I think that this University has not gotten nearly the kind of revenue that it should have had for decades, and that is unfortunately the reality up to this point. I hope that prospectively with all of the good work in this room and elsewhere in the University we can start convincing for the first time. We’ve gotten a lot of off balance sheet stuff that has come into this University and SUNY and that is welcome but it really doesn’t help our core business. All of you are right, we have not been treated well, our voices should be clear about the need for additional State aid, a lot more State aid, but at the end of the day if we don’t get that State aid, and that’s when a tuition increase can only be implemented, that’s when a budget is approved, when we get a budget that is signed and sealed, the Assembly signs off on it, the Senate signs off on it, we have a huge hole in the budget. We then have to make a decision how that hole is going to be filled, and I am just saying to all of you whatever that number is it’s going to be a big number. And for me to stand in front of you and say that one way that’s we’re going to close that is by not having a tuition increase I think is being disingenuous, it’s being naïve and it’s just not going to happen. It’s not the message I want to give you. I’m just giving it to you as a pragmatist.

Professor Richardson (Nursing, New York City College of Technology) – I just wanted to ask you about the leadership of the UCRA now that the position of the University Dean for Research is vacated. / Chancellor Goldstein –What is the UCRA? / Professor Richardson – The University Committee for Research Awards. / Chancellor Goldstein – That’s an important program. We will continue to support it. We’ll just find a different way to do it.

Barbara Weinstein (Speech, The Graduate School & University Center) – Before, you posed a rhetorical question "What would we do?" How about that not being a rhetorical question and maybe is there a mechanism for us to give input? / Chancellor Goldstein – Yes, the whole point of setting up this joint committee on budget and management alternatives is really to convey your best thinking. You talked about the administration. One of the things that we are doing is reducing administrative positions, executive positions at the central administration. We’ve already done three and we’re going to be doing more. We’re going to ask administrators that have faculty rank to teach. I’m going to teach. You will work with the ad hoc committee in a collegial way so that we can get things done. Thank you.

Chair: The meeting that the Chancellor referred to was the Faculty Governance Leaders last Friday, not a meeting of the John Jay Faculty Council, just so people have that clear.

Our next speaker is the Interim Vice Chancellor for Budget and Finance Ernesto Malave.

Vice Chancellor Ernesto Malave: There were materials that were provided that many of you perhaps picked up on your way in, three things: the analysis that was prepared by the University Budget Office, the State and City Budgets, testimony that I provided on the history of tuition at CUNY before the New York City Council Committee on Higher Ed, and I just came here with this one pager, yellow. It’s not asking for money, it’s simply describing in one page the key elements of the budget. And I know that you’ve had an opportunity to go through some of it. I asked Karen before I came over what would be best and she told me to try to be as thorough as I could be on the budget and try to assume that there may be some questions about some underlying pieces of it that I know very well but that perhaps some members need to get a better grasp of. I, particularly this year, feel very strongly that we have to really understand the budget. In most times most people don’t understand the budget in part because it’s really complex. They like to think that they understand the budget but they really don’t when you press them on exactly what the numbers are. It is very important at a time when there are a lot of budget reductions, there’s talk of a tuition increase, there is a lot of anxiety out in the student population and the faculty population about what it means, that we absolutely need to be very clear about what the budget is and not try to suggest scenarios that are simply not realistic. I will, in part as the Chancellor did, and as I think I did the last time I was here, try to talk about the budget in realistic terms. I’ve been around for twenty years at this University; many of you have been around for a long time as well. We have a real budget challenge before us and at the end of the day we’re going to be confronted with very limited options. Everybody in this room pretty much knows how Albany works. This State can’t figure out how to finance the needs of elementary education. It doesn’t know how to do that. It’s been unable to do that. Elementary education and the people who represent elementary education are probably the most powerful political forces in this State and they have not been able to figure out how to get the political leadership in the State to properly address education needs. So let’s understand one thing very clearly: most politicians care a lot more about 5 and 6 year olds than they do about college students. Let’s just get that out of the way. And if they can’t figure out how to meet the needs of teenagers and people who are highly vulnerable in the society, let’s not just think that they are going to figure out how to meet the needs of college students, not in this State, not in the way this State organizes higher ed, not with the private sector lobby we have in higher ed in the State of New York. So when we talk about why are we contemplating tuition increases, that’s because we’re not oblivious to the reality, we know what’s going to happen. It happened before and it will happen again and it’s happening now. We go through a very aggressive lobbying campaign, I hope you get as much money restored to the budget, but at the end there is going to be hole in it. And we resolved very early on, and I talked about this thing in November, that we’re not going to do what we did in 1995 when we went to Albany and said "if you don’t put back $100 million in our budget we’re going to fire 1,000 full time faculty." We don’t even want to go through the motions of saying that because just going through the motions of saying that is a highly disruptive activity. So we’re not doing that. So the Chancellor goes to Albany and you read the testimony and he talks about how we need to get clear relief to make sure that the students who are most vulnerable get the tuition assistance that they need, that the SEEK Program of financial aid, which are the most vulnerable of our vulnerable students get that money restored - it was flat out, up front with the SEEK restoration - and how we need to work with the Legislature to figure out how to generate improvements in aid, to community colleges, and in the overall budget. That’s what we want to do. It’s our task at the administration with a subgroup many of which are here today, the Budget Advisory Committee of the Faculty Senate, to make sure that I and my office and the advice that I give the Chancellor is the best possible thinking that comes from the University and that also comes from folks like you. I don’t want to be part of an enterprise that’s talking about how do I figure out how to lay off 500 full time faculty. We want no part of that process, and I don’t think any one of you do either.

Let me just go over the basic elements of the budget. As the Chancellor said, the budget is $1.118 billion. These are senior college budgets and that’s a budget that’s an actual increase in our appropriation of $31.1 million. By the way, that’s a new thing as well. In the past whenever there was a major hole punched in the budget and there was a proposed revenue increase it was offsetting, so even if at the end of the day they will tell you to raise revenue but you’re not going to get any additional appropriation authority to meet any of your continuing obligations. This budget seeks to do that because the cut is $82 million but the increase in revenue that we’re being authorized to generate is almost $113 million. But that’s a 3% increase in our budget, and if we were to get a budget provided that level of resources we would be able to actually administer a University in FY 2004 that we could not grow the University in the way we want to but certainly meet our cost. However, that budget contains a couple of elements that are not attractive. The biggest problem with that budget, even within that, is the SEEK reduction of $7.3 million in financial aid, the million dollar decrease in full time faculty funding, and something that was new and is included in a revision, the initial analysis in our budget did not include the reductions in childcare, and that was because when we look at the budget, and you know we do these things on a one day turnaround, we saw the state aid level for child care remain constant. However, in this past year one of the devices that the Legislature decided to use is that they cut our budget in various areas of State aid and replaced that aid with Federal day care funds or childcare funds that were financed in the Department of Families Assistance. So we have revenue coming in this year that is not in our base budget that is supporting childcare centers. That revenue was taken out as well in the Executive Budget because they view that as a Legislative add-on. So there is pressure in childcare that we’re going to have to address. It’s simply revenue that came from another source and when they issued an analysis it wasn’t picked up, but trust me there is a $1.4 million proposed reduction in childcare, $880,000 at the senior colleges.

What the Chancellor said earlier in the budget message, for the third year in a row the Governor recommends the Universities, CUNY and SUNY, to consider pricing differentials for graduate and professional programs. The Legislature rejected that two years in a row, we really don’t know what they’re going to do this year, and for the first time there is language in there, and I can talk about this a little bit again, about incremental pricing adjustments, i.e. tuition indexing. And just to reiterate something that the Chancellor said, when we talk about the question of indexing we talk about indexing funding, not merely the tuition. The Budget Office did an analysis of tuition at CUNY versus some of our peers and we saw that everybody had minor increases on a year to year basis and CUNY and SUNY, except that SUNY had really aggressive fees, were pretty flat and then we would have our 20-30% hikes. We speak of tuition indexing if public support is also indexed to a basket of economic indicators so that we can see not just State support remaining flat and that the only increases in revenue that are used to support increase cost is tuition but that both tuition and State support be indexed as something that’s predictable and understandable, and that’s what we speak of when we speak of tuition, because I already read somewhere a very passionate statement that had it all wrong about what tuition indexing was. And this is what I mean about getting the facts and getting it straight, because there is nothing worse than being in a large group getting people all rowled up with bad information. So be very careful. But none of this is new because the Chancellor’s testimony had referred to a total aid, not just tuition, and his speech before the institute also spoke of public support. So let’s be very clear and be careful with the rhetoric, particularly, and I know as a former student leader at CUNY, and on Sunday I’ll be addressing the University Student Senate, students don’t have the benefit that you’ve had of years of observing University officials and reading budgets. So for you it’s easy. As a former student leader I pretended that I understood it completely because you had to do that to strike fear in the hearts of administrators, but at the end of the day we really didn’t know it either. So it’s very important that we’re clear with our students and we’re clear with the information, so I’m going to spend as much time as I can with student leaders to make sure that they understand it. Just like for example, I’ll get to community colleges in a moment, nobody’s recommending a tuition increase at the community colleges. Nobody. I imagine there are thousands of community college students today who think that their tuition may indeed go up $1,200 because they read it in the paper, no one makes the fine distinction between senior and community colleges, but no one is recommending a tuition increase and if they were to, they can recommend it all they want, it’s up to the City Council and the Mayor to authorize a budget that actually captures the tuition. Just like this increase of $112.8 million, we could at CUNY say we want to increase tuition all we want, but if the Legislature doesn’t authorize us to generate $504 million in revenues we couldn’t spend it. So the City Council, could you imagine for a moment that City Council Committee on Higher Education, after having completely restored all the aid that they did last year or this year for the community colleges, contemplating anything remotely along the lines of what is being contemplated on the senior college side. They may at the end say "with all the increased enrollment at the community college we need the full time faculty" and since Mayor Bloomberg isn’t going to make any increases, he didn’t cut our budget bless his soul but his not going to increase it, that we may need to do some modest increases and then we have to deal with sort of the problem that we have, which is already a significant differential between senior and communities, and what happens when that differential spreads.

Let me go to the community colleges and yet another correction to the initial analysis. This budget analysis reflects a $17.3 million reduction in community colleges. A lot of, in fact all of the original analyzes used the figure of $23.5 million but it also parenthetically indicated that one of the other pieces was that they had made an incomplete enrollment number. At the end of the day, the State Budget Division recognized that the enrollment number was wrong. So now you see that this $17.3 million, and you don’t see all the details here, $19.2 million is related to the $345 reduction. You don’t see this number in the yellow page. That is offset by a $3.9 million increase in aid to community colleges for enrollment purposes. That together nets out to the figures that we have there. For those of you who are at the CLAC meeting, I know some of you are here today, you’ll recall that I mentioned that at the CLAC meeting as well. So the situation of the community colleges is a significant one. It’s still $17.3 with a 13% reduction in State support and it’s something that we’re very concerned about.

TAP is the other big story. They’re trying to generate $300 million in savings with this TAP restructuring. The Legislature rejected it last year. This is going to be interesting. The Chancellor did not say when he went to Albany, he went after Chancellor King from the State University of New York, who not only said he really didn’t have a problem with $1,200 tuition increase and after all their Trustees had voted to authorize a request for a $1,400 and so far as he was concerned that he was right in line with them, but he also said that they didn’t have any objections to the tuition assistance proposal, and thus for the first time we have a piece of the three sectors of higher ed in New York, CUNY, SUNY, and the private sector, not united on a very important legislative strategy. One of the reasons I think we were successful last year is that all three sectors were arguing against the TAP restructuring. Now Abe Lackman from CICU, the private sector, very aggressively came out of the box in opposition, and we have all kinds of problems with it as well, but it doesn’t help that when I went up there to speak to the folks on the Senate side they were saying "what’s really the problem here, why don’t they just borrow funds," and we had to spend a lot of time arguing about the difference between our student population and the SUNY student population and how that’s really not a viable option for CUNY. And that’s going to make the job very difficult. So not think that because the Legislature rejected TAP before out of hand this thing is dead on arrival. It is not dead on arrival, the budget problems in Albany are as real as it can get. Every time I speak to folks in the Budget Division I can hear in their voices their level of anxiety about the budgets that they are trying to talk to me about, and what we’re going to set up and how we’re going to set it up. The level of "well, you know, we’ll see" is pretty high. So I don’t really expect anything to happen except a worsening budget situation in the State of New York, and that situation isn’t really going to get better in FY 2004. I haven’t seen anything that suggests that the 2005 executive budget is going to be a really rosy budget, everything is going to turn around, so don’t for a moment think that this budget challenge that we have is a challenge that we have today and it’s going to go away after this budget is done. It will probably continue for at least another 18-24 months and we’ll probably be staring at a comparable budget pressure in FY 2003. I don’t mean to be doom and gloom, I just want to let you know what I’m hearing.

That’s where we are. You’ve read the materials that I’ve had on enrollment. There is this question about enrollment. It’s another one of those things that we have to be very careful about. In the testimony that I provided to the City Council I did a little chart that showed the tuition increases of the early 1990’s, we had three in a row, and every year enrollment increased. Every single year after a tuition increase enrollment went up. Imagine that. And the reason I say imagine that is because of course everybody assumes that enrollment goes down when you increase tuition. Enrollment did go down in 1995 after there was a tuition increase, which is steep but not quite that much steeper than the ones in the early 1990’s and there was also a decrease in financial aid that may have contributed to it, or there was just a really robust economy that contributed to the enrollment loss. Nobody really knows. It could have been in the early 1990’s when enrollment went up three years in a row because we had a really bad economy, so it didn’t really matter what the tuition was. And of course this year we have 11,000 new students in this University over last year. How did that happen? Yes, we’re in the mist of an advertising blitz but when you go up 11,000 students in one year there are lots of forces that are shaping that, not the least of which to mention is who’s graduating from high school, what the demographics are. I know Dean Savage is here and he probably knows that enrollment is also related to graduation rates. So there are many forces. So when the Chancellor said "I don’t know" he doesn’t know. And I can probably speculate that it would probably go up because the economy has tanked and people will say "what does it matter." But I’ll let you know now it will probably go down no matter what happens because I can’t imagine how you could sustain the kind of growth we’ve sustained in the current year. So if we go from 208,000 where we are right now, to 200,600 and lose 2,000 what are we going to say, "it was because of a tuition increase?" I will predict right now that it will go down because how on earth do you generate that rate of growth. So be very careful because it’s probably going to go down no matter what and it will all be blamed on some tuition increase. We just need to be very careful about that.

I’m going to stop there because I think that’s a quick review and then we could just open it up.

Professor London (Political Science, Brooklyn College) – Ernesto, you’ve always done a wonderful job in explaining the budget and you’ve been very forthcoming with budget analyses and I can tell you that our colleagues in SUNY would love to have someone as forthright as you so they could make good arguments and advocate for students as we are able to here. I do want to disagree with one aspect of your presentation, and that has to do with the doom and gloom scenario. It is true, I completely agree, it’s absolutely true that the situation is extraordinarily serious but I want people to think back a couple of years about how we talked about the City situation. Now the City situation could be much better but I do remember hearing people talking about the dire situation that was going to happen in the city one or two years out with the budget situation and we have a much better situation in the city of course because of the efforts of both the Chancellery and also of the faculty and the PSC. We changed the situation in the city. We did it through endorsement policy, we did it by arguing our case very effectively and we made a difference. That’s a historical fact; it’s something for us to remember. And now we’re going to work on the State, and I think that there is a lot that will happen between now and when this budget finally comes in to change the overall situation. I want anyone here to know that there are going to be two events that will take place this spring that I hope everyone in this room will participate in and will become the foundation for making the kind of change that we made at the City level. One is March 26, CUNY Day. That will take place on every campus, so you’ll be getting more information about that. The second is May 3^rd and it’s going to be a massive march on Albany that’s going to be organized with the backing of NYCE, the Conference Board of Education and also the New York State Higher Education Conference Board. This is going to be a rally in which we are anticipating 50-100,000 people coming to Albany, something that will be a historic event, and the message will be very clear that public education, K through post grad, has to be funded and the revenue that we’ll need to fund that will not come from other areas but we’re going to have to raise money. We need to reset the agenda in this state. We don’t have a fiscal crisis, we have a revenue crisis, and the way to raise revenue is not from our students, which is very regressive excise tax. The way to raise money is from the wealthy to have a surcharge on incomes of over $100,000 a year, to have a stock transfer tax, and also commuter tax and other important ways to raise revenue. So much of the discussion that we’ve heard today from the Chancellor and from Ernesto assumes that there is going to be no other way to deal with this situation. I just came back from Albany today, I spent a whole day lobbying on Higher Ed Lobby Day. I just want to say that there are an awful lot of people who were up there today and I think that if we are up there in the thousands on May 3^rd we will certainly see a different budget scenario here. / Vice Chancellor Malave – I would just say that were Mayor Bloomberg in the Governor’s mansion and we wouldn’t be in the situation that we’re in. I don’t anticipate an 18.5% increases in taxes in the State of New York this year, which is by the way why we didn’t have it cut in community colleges (for all you property owners).

Professor Bell (Educational Services, Brooklyn College) – I have two questions about opportunity programs as a major part of your statement here. The first one is I was up in Albany a week ago and I heard Lackman who replaced Jim Ross, as you know, speaking about opportunity programs and their view on TAP and they were making a very clear case that they had the neediest and the poorest students at the privates and that CUNY didn’t have such a population, and it seems to me the Legislature were eating it up. And if we don’t get a very clear message as to who we serve, not only in opportunity programs but in our other programs with income levels and demographics of our students, I think we’re doing ourselves a real disservice. I also wonder how much of a liaison we’re trying to make, since SUNY has rejected it, with CICU this year, and perhaps should we be teaming with it. The second part of the question is with the cut projected for SEEK financial aid, but the services remaining why have we frozen in this year’s budget the support services for our students in terms of tutoring and counseling and other things that we need this year? / Vice Chancellor Malave – When you say froze…/ Professor Bell – Froze, we’re not allowed to appoint anyone. It seems to me it’s not fair not to provide our students with those services. / Vice Chancellor Malave – Are you referring to the hiring freeze? / Professor Bell – Yes. / Vice Chancellor Malave – I’ll respond. Admittedly, the declaration of a freeze was a very blunt instrument. We had a meeting last week Friday in which we resolved that academic support services, such as all tutors and all academic support personnel will be exempted from the freeze. The message will be out very shortly. There will be a letter going out from Vice Chancellor Brenda Malone indicating what are the exceptions to the freeze. There was absolutely no intent to do that, so I would not worry about it at all. / Professor Bell – I am most grateful, as are my students. / Vice Chancellor Malave – The other thing I would add is this question of CICU. One of the charts that I had in the testimony today that I prepared, because I often wondered why people pay what they pay at private colleges to not go to some of our CUNY schools. And I grew up in the Bronx and I’m sure Monroe College does good, fine work, but there are 4,000 student at Monroe College paying $7,500 a year for the privilege of going to Monroe College and there are many students like that in the City of New York who pay four times the rate that CUNY charges to go to private colleges. So one the private colleges do what they do to attract the students and that’s good for them but at the end of the day those students at Monroe, those students at some of the other campuses that are private colleges in New York don’t look any different, they are students, but they choose to go there, they choose to pay three or four times as much. I don’t know the data that Lackman from the independent colleges provided but it wouldn’t shock me that the students who aren’t part of the select perhaps the Ivy’s that will cost you $30,000 to go into, that many of those students are just like our student and just as poor as our students, just as needy as our students, but they have figured out a way to attract them. So I would not just simply declare his data poor data, inaccurate data. / Professor Bell – I’m not declaring his data poor data but, having worked with the SED and being head of opportunity programs for the State, I know that the SED data shows that our students are needier than theirs and I would certainly want the numbers out there that we’ve got needy students. / Vice Chancellor Malave – Of course. And the Chancellor has made it very clear that as far as we’re concerned, and it’s our challenge to figure out, no matter what they do with TAP, a way that our neediest students are not prohibited from attending school. But let’s be very clear, there are plenty of needy students that don’t go to CUNY and pay twice to three or four times as much as they do at CUNY. / Professor Bell – Thank you.

Professor Cooper (History, College of Staten Island and The Graduate School and University Center) – You may not be able to, and I appreciate it, predict employment decline but tell me how paranoiac I am if I imagine that an enrollment decline is really going to hit the senior colleges, especially the students who are not expecting to pay an increase in tuition…(tape turned over) …put a number figure on this but it seems to me that it’s not an unimaginable scenario. / Vice Chancellor Malave – No, it’s the scenario that every day I call the conundrum that I face. Having a pricing structure at the senior colleges that far away since we don’t have to capacity in our community colleges to absorb many more students. And frankly, and this is no secret, there was I believe, and you will correct me, this one piece of data I’m not certain of, whether or not there was a different pricing at the lower division at the senior colleges when tuition was imposed for the first time. That is something that the people toss around. Maybe part of how you address that issue so you don’t have a full shift is having a different rate for undergraduate lower division at the senior colleges that’s closer to the community college rate. Maybe that’s one of the ways of defending because what we don’t want to do is really raise tuition at the community colleges, which is already the highest in the country. It’s a real problem for us. We don’t know how we’re going to get out of it but it’s a real problem.

Professor Dreyer (New York City College of Technology) – I don’t even know where to start because there is not one thing I’ve heard tonight that calls out any hope for our institution… (tape turned over)… We meet and exceed our enrollments and in the last thirteen years it’s been more than a 30% drop in the FTEs that we get. We supply money to the college, we get less and less of the pie every year, yet the Chancellor stood there and said " if you don’t support how can you have revenues." We’re not being supported, our college is not being supported fairly, and I need to know if anyone is even looking at that. I think John Jay has a similar…/ Vice Chancellor Malave – Actually you’re very comparable to Hunter College in your funding, just so you know what company you have. We had a meeting at the Administrative Council this morning at Hunter College, and the one thing that I convened, because I have two committees, I have a City College Allocation Model Committee, that I told them that I wanted them to reconvene because what I wanted to make sure that we did was not to lose the momentum that we began in overhauling the senior college allocation model to address the equity issues that you alluded to in this very difficult environment. We have to do both, we have to continue the progress that we have made to address the issues that you’ve identified, of which we’ve long been aware, and I’m committed but I know it’s hard because it’s a very difficult issue for CUNY, but I’m committed to overhauling the senior college allocation model to address those equity issues in a fair and reasonable way in the midst of this difficult environment that we have. We’re committed to doing that. That’s all I can continue to pledge.

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – In your yellow budget sheet that you handed out I noticed that the category of Federal support is missing, and I’m wondering if a category is simply not there if it then becomes neglected in terms of efforts to increase the funding. And the Federal support I’m thinking of is student stipends that are paid out of Federal sources. Would it be more straight forward to include that as a separate budget support category. That’s part one of the question. Part two, in the same category, there are student support programs, like Minority Access to Research Careers, where Feds pay 100% of the student tuition. We have low tuition. At a private college, say Columbia, they pay Columbia about $25,000, they pay us about one tenth of the amount. This happens at all public universities. Is there some concerted effort to make this a little more equitable? It’s a lot of money because we’re talking potentially about $20,000 each student in revenue. / Vice Chancellor Malave – First of all I don’t think in budget summary documents we want to make the material needlessly complex when right now, when CUNY over the past 25 years for as long as I can remember CUNY did not do an all funds budget presentation. So certainly it’s not now the time since our budget structure is not an all funds budget structure to introduce that in the basic document for people to understand the basic number, which represents 99% of all of our funding. So that’s why it’s not in there. It may indeed be a value once we do an all funds budgeting system, and I hope to be able to do an all funds budgeting system to have it there. On the other side, I don’t know whether you’re suggesting whether we test how elastic our pricing should be at out graduate programs, figure out if Federal reimbursement will change? / Professor Philipp – These are undergraduates. / Vice Chancellor Malave – OK, I really don’t want to test it that far. / Professor Philipp – I’m not advocating that but on the other hand one could ask that they pay us what they pay the privates without raising our tuition. / Vice Chancellor Malave – I was trying to frame the question so I could zero in on how to answer it. I thought that’s what you were saying, that we should really negotiate with the Feds to try to do that. If there are any suggestions you have or any evidence that any other public institution has succeeded in doing that, in terms of whether your California or Texas and you only have a $3,000 rate of reimbursement at Berkley, whether or not they pay Berkeley a different rate or do they pay Berkley a different rate? / Professor Philipp – I can suggest a lot of other institution who’d be interested. / Vice Chancellor Malave – I just want to know whether or not the Federal Government entertains those things, because if they do it’s terrific, then I’ll be knocking on their door, but if they don’t entertain it because nobody else in the country has that option then I don’t really think it’s probably…I’m just asking if you have any information to help me with.

Professor Levine (Engineering Science and Physics, College of Staten Island) – Thank you again. This is an excellent presentation. I have two very quick technical questions. In the 2002-2003 adopted budget does the tuition revenue include the $8.7 million in higher education funding? / Vice Chancellor Malave – That’s correct. / Professor Levine – So the actual increase that we’re expecting to get from tuition is not $112.8 but that’s plus another $8.7. / Vice Chancellor Malave – That’s right. The way they did the math, and is a very crude method, they took our FTEs and multiplied by 1,200 to generate $121.4 million. / Professor Levine – So in other words the actual amount that they put in here for tuition increase is $120 and change. / Vice Chancellor Malave – That’s correct. / Professor Levine – That’s clarification number one. Clarification number two. I remember this year in 2002 and 2003 you were very good at getting the State to close a hole in the fringe benefit accounts. / Vice Chancellor Malave – $25 million. / Professor Levine – $25 million, and thank you very much again for that. Is that included in the 2002-2003 adopted budget. So there too the change is not a decrease of $81.7 but that plus the $25. / Vice Chancellor Malave – The $25 covers two fiscal years. / Professor Levine – But in other words again the change in the State aid is greater than the $81.7. / Vice Chancellor Malave – No, because the fringe benefit number combines both State aid and tuition in terms of our need. We did get, what the Chancellor called an off balance sheet…/ Professor Levine – I’m trying to bring those off balance sheet back onto the balance sheet. / Vice Chancellor Malave – The fact of the matter is the way to look at it, because I do refer to a $28.9 million increase in fringe benefits in the analysis, at the end of the day the $31 million increase in our budget will basically be a flat line budget to meet our costs going forward because they have addressed a structural shortfall in our fringe benefit. / Professor Levine – Thanks you, that’s what I was getting at. So then there is no positive, it’s not that we will have 3% more next year than we have this year, we’ll have basically the same. / Vice Chancellor Malave – That’s correct. / Professor Levine – Thank you.

Professor Pecorino (Queensborough Community College) – I’m Phil Pecorino. / Vice Chancellor Malave – You’re the one! I was reading your note before I got here. / Professor Pecorino – You’re the one that’s lived up to the positive reports that I’ve had of your manner and presentation, so I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful also for your word of being careful, and I want to return that little bit of assistance to you. I wrote against unilateral indexing, putting it all on the back of our students. And here comes my caution. I’ve hardly in 32 years ever seen the State agree to something it fulfilled over the years. So if we enter into an agreement, and the Chancellor hinted at this, we have to be fairly certain the Government is going to keep up his half. So if it’s an agreement make it a little stronger than the agreements we had with the native peoples of this land. / Vice Chancellor Malave – I’m sure we’ll index our tuition to their support for us.

Professor Manassah (Electrical Engineering, City College) – Can I speak to the Chair please? Looking at these number that our able Ernesto has provided us it looks like we’re coming to the point where the State is getting less than 60%, I’m talking about the University as a whole. There is a question with respect to governance. If we are not being viciously supported by the State, should it continue being that it is the Governor and the Mayor who appoint the whole Board of Trustees. I think it is something which is worthwhile looking in terms of the legality of that. When they have that power what does it require in terms of support and when it’s not the full support then what does that require in terms of governance. I don’t know, maybe Stefan knows. / Chair – There is a bill, I saw it coming through, with the NYSUT information and there is a bill that was supported by Sullivan, and I believe Staviski on the other side, that says that anyone who is going to service as Trustee cannot be in the pay of the appointing person. Isn’t that what you meant? No? I wasn’t listening then. / [Unidentified] – What would be required is changing the New York State Education Law, which mandates the way the Trustees are appointed. So your point is a very important political point, but the reality is that the law would have to be changed. / Chair – But there is no reason why we couldn’t do it through the legislation. / Professor Cooper – One of the reasons that several legislators two years ago urged us to be a little low key about this business of rewriting the 1976 State Ed Law, which reorganized everything, it that there was a fear that CUNY’s peculiar tenure would also be up for review. The tenure arrangements that CUNY faculty have are better than SUNY, I’ve forgotten why. They’re statutory as opposed to contractual. The result was the fear that if we opened up that whole process we would end up with a tenure arrangement that was more like the SUNY one, not that apparently our arrangements are respected very much.

Chair: We still have one more presentation. Sharona Levy is ill and can’t be here, but Dennis Paoli has very patiently been sitting in the back. Dennis Paoli is from Hunter and what he’s going to talk about is the College Proficiency Exam. Now there are copies of the exam in the back. I did this because there was a little conversation on the Listserv that was started by Dean Savage in terms of concern about what was going on, that there were so many people not passing at Queens College, and it turned out that they had not appeared for the exam. But you understand that this exam must be passed in order to graduate from a community college or to advance to the junior year in a senior college and thereby hangs the tale that Dennis will fill in, and there will be questions and answers. Please stay, the presentation won’t be that long.

Dennis Paoli: Hi, thanks for having me. I’ll try to make this as efficient as possible. In the back you’ll find an information booklet. This is the booklet given to every student who takes the CPE. It has within it a copy of a sample CPE, actually it was one of the pilots, the test itself with sample responses, with the criteria specific score sheets for both parts of the exam, which I’ll try to quickly go over, and CUNY policies in relation to the exam, which I will also try to quickly go over. This is not nearly as powerful dynamic or sexy, if you will, an issue as the governance and budgetary issues that have been discussed here tonight. However, let me hit you with my best Fox News headlines so you appreciate actually the seriousness of this issue. David Crook at 80^th Street anticipates that in the fall, 60,000 CUNY students will take this exam. There is no projectible pass rate. This semester it is likely, it’s not a done deal at all, but it is likely that the first students will be dismissed from the University because of their inability to pass this exam after having taken it three or four times. So this is a very serious issue for our students, it is an imminent issue for many of our students, and it is my dubious pleasure but my important duty to help fill you in on any information you need about this exam. I’m going to quickly go through parts of the booklet just so you know were the information can be found. Also I was going to put my e-mail address up on the board. You’re welcome to e-mail me any questions you have and if you don’t think of a question tonight, if you look at the materials and have a question, you’re welcome to e-mail me. I’m dpaoli@hunter.cuny.edu. And I will patiently and hopefully helpfully answer your questions.

Let me read a little bit from this just to fill you in. The CUNY Proficiency Examination - this is a CUNY exam; it’s developed at CUNY, it’s given at CUNY, it is only a CUNY exam – was developed in response to a 1997 Board of Trustees resolution. This was started in the Board of Trustees. It is required of students who are completing an associate degree program in the community colleges but it is a graduation requirement for all CUNY schools. You must pass the CPE to be conferred a degree by CUNY, so it is a graduation issue also for students at the senior colleges. The CPE tests students’ ability to understand and think critically, and I think it’s important to look at that. A lot of people think of the CPE as a writing exam. It is not significantly more of a writing exam than it is a reading exam. As a matter of fact it’s coming to be seen as more of a reading exam and it definitely was designed to be a critical thinking exam. It has two parts for two tasks. The first task is a three-hour exam, a significant time for an extemporaneous exam. The first part is analytical reading and writing where students are given what’s called the long reading, which they just started receiving yesterday. Registration for the CPE, I think it’s the same for all the schools and it started yesterday when students register for the exam. They are advised by letter by the University and by their home college that they are required to take the exam. When they receive this letter they usually are totally confused, if they receive the letter, but they are required to register at the testing office at their home college. At the time they are given this information booklet, some more information packets about interventions and preparation help at their schools and they’re given a long reading. In this case today given out was a ten-page reading from an analytic monthly article. It’s usually on a social or historical issue. You’ll see the sample long reading in the information booklet is by Howard Gardner and it’s on learning issues. They then have several weeks to read, depending on when they register, they have two to three weeks to read the long reading, study it, they go into the exam and receive an exam booklet in which there is a short reading of about a page. They are asked to essentially write, - with very specific charges within the assignment in relation to a specific topic which may not be the main topic addressed in either of the readings, it may be a subtopic within those readings,- to summarize the relevant information from the long reading, to essentially write a compare and contrast essay in relation to the long reading and the short reading, bring to bear their own knowledge and experience in relation to the issue, write an argumentative, organized, well written essay that includes information taken from and incorporated into their essay from the two texts. That’s task one. It’s got to be a 300-600 word essay I think. After two hours task one is taken away and they are given task two. Task two is analyzing and integrating materials from graphs and texts or charts and tables. They are given at the exam extemporaneously a short reading of about a half a page and then two pieces of visually represented data: a chart and a table, a table and a graph, a graph and a chart. They are asked to again address a common issue to both the visual representations and to the reading and to write a response, not an essay but a response that addresses whether the visually represented data supports or does not support or in some other way addresses the issue from the reading. That’s essentially the CPE. Who’s required to take it? It’s really complicated now but all the complications are about to go out the window because starting in the fall everybody has to take it. Starting in the fall everybody who registers at CUNY, whether they come in as a freshman or as a transfer student unless they come in with a degree from another school, will be required to take the CPE after they have achieved 45 credits, between 45 and 60 credits. It is suggested to students in the semester in which they attempt 45 credits that they take the exam. They can choose at that point but they must take it after they have achieved 45 credits. It was designed as a mid-career assessment for students in a four-year sequence, whether that sequence is two years at a community college articulating to a senior college or within the senior college. Transfer students who transfer in with 45+ credits must take it in their first semester, and that includes, as a side bar, a problematic student population of foreign transfers.

Let me refer you then to page four and how the CPE is scored. It used to be scored by normed CUNY faculty, I see a couple of readers in the room, and it was very interesting to be among the scorers; I was a tabulator at several of the scorings. I think, if I may, those faculty who scored the exams became believers that it was a good exam and learned a great deal about the student population from reading them. They are not scored by ACT, the testing service from Iowa that designed the ACT exam. I was at the ESL council last week and it just struck me that the ACT designed the test for placement, which is scored by CUNY faculty, and the CUNY proficiency exam which was designed by CUNY faculty is scored by ACT. I don’t know what that means. It might be the CUNY way.

What happens if you don’t pass the CPE? Lots of schools are wrestling with this now. Schools are talking about putting stops on registration, instituting significant advising components. Students’ needs must be addressed if they have not passed the CPE the first time so they can pass it one of the next two times. They get to take it three times. If they fail three times they have to appeal and depending on your appeals committee, it can be a very rigorous appeal to take a fourth time, but no one who fails it four times will graduate, will get a CUNY degree. As of right now you don’t want to appeal. You can leave the college and come back but one, it hasn’t happened yet, we don’t know what will happen, and policy seems to be leaning towards no, that’s it. I’d be glad to open it up to questions. Let me say a couple of things first. Faculty were consulted about this as if went from the 1997 date on and I have several documents that I was sent as a staff and faculty member including a survey that was sent out to Provosts in 1999 to distribute among faculty to assure that we were testing what the faculty thought were the important learning achievements that the students should have attained by 45 credits, by graduation from the community colleges and by articulation into a major in the four year schools. Faculty and the committee that developed, designed and piloted this test was made up entirely of CUNY faculty, some of the best faculty I know at CUNY from all the schools and especially led by Bonne August at Kingsborough and Marc Ward at Lehman, really excellent faculty. They were very serious about making this test as fair a test as possible but also so it could serve students to let them know what they are expected to know by the University and by the accumulated faculty in the University at this point.

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – Two part question. The first part is, and you should take this with a degree of facetiousness, the list of students who fail, I’m thinking of the Chancellor’s call for revenue enhancements, will we be selling that list to the lower tier private colleges. / Dennis Paoli – That’s not actually a joke. It’s quite clear that private schools, like Pace for example, are advertising a focus on students who are either afraid of the test and don’t want to take it, don’t want to enroll at a University that gives them this kind of test or perhaps fail the test. They are a target population. / Professor Philipp – Second question is you said the people who already have a degree coming in do not have to take the test. / Dennis Paoli – Baccalaureate degree. If they have an associate degree from a CUNY college they must pass the test.

Professor Levine (Engineering Science and Physics, College of Staten Island) – I’m concerned about these transfer students from overseas universities, in areas such as engineering and computer science, many of whom are spectacularly good, some of whom for example speak Chinese and have not passed the CUNY reading and writing test even though they’re ready for upper division work. / Dennis Paoli – I believe now they do have to take and pass the ACT before they’re given the CPE, but this can go on forever and then there are… ( tape turned over)) / Professor Levine - …semester even though they’re transferring in with more than 60 credits. This is an important clarification. / Dennis Paoli – I think on page 2 it addresses that. I haven’t read through the booklet in a little while, but it says "Can the CPE be substituted for CUNY ACT basic skills test. As stated above students new and transferred who are enrolled in CUNY before Fall 1999," this is one of those grandfathering clauses, "including part-time and non-degree are not currently subject to CPE requirements. However students in the category who’ve been successful in passing the CUNY ACT basic skills test in reading and writing may elect to take the CPE instead. New transfer students who went to CUNY in the Fall 2000 and thereafter must pass the CUNY ACT basic skills test in reading and writing unless exempted to qualify to take the CPE and new students non-transfer who went to CUNY in the Fall of 1999 and therefore must pass the CUNY ACT basic skills test in reading and writing unless exempted to qualify to take the CPE. You also have to have a 2.0 GPE to take the CPE." To tell you the truth there was double jeopardy there for about a year until they worked that out. / Professor Levine – But nobody took the test during that year, so it was fine. / Dennis Paoli – No, they took the test.

Chair O’Malley – Have you seen the data from October? / Dennis Paoli – Don’t you have it? Somebody told me you got it. No, I have not. / Chair O’Malley – I have asked of them today to get it and it has not appeared. Why are they so afraid to show us the data? Is it because we didn’t grade it? What do you know about this data? I know this anecdotal evidence and I will get it. / Dennis Paoli – We have not seen what the real effect of this test would be on the population until next year, until we see, until the students are aware of the exam, until the faculty in entirely aware of the exam, until the grandfather clauses are out. The primary problem with the first three administrations of the exam, and I can speak for Hunter College and this was true at a number of other colleges, certainly not all of them, was forfeiture. Students did not show up for the exam. They either did not get the letters that were sent and were not informed, they chose to ignore those letters hoping the test would go away, or they were in some kind of deep denial. There also were cases where they were misadvised at the schools, which was taken very seriously by 80^th Street. So pass rates that were published early on, and you may have seen the first administration of the test, there was an article in the which showed very good pass rates and we were proud at Hunter because we had something in the 94% pass rate, that was the pass rate for students who have actually taken the exam. And we were indeed delighted and I think CUNY was delighted that if you take the exam you’re probably going to pass. You have something like an 85-95% ‘chance’ to pass the test. It turned out in subsequent semesters that people who took it for the second time passed at about the same rate, so you really had a declining population that you had to worry about, although you were going to end up with some students in serious jeopardy, which is the point at which we’re now. It’s my understanding that there is still a very serious compliance problem. There were sixty some students at Hunter College who have failed three times because they have never showed up three times. I don’t mean to say this isn’t a serious problem, but they are required to take the test in a few weeks. The test is March 12 to 16. Also it’s the case that I think that now that more students have taken it the pass rate is going down. And it’s something like we’re no longer first at Hunter, I think Baruch is first, and we’re down to somewhere in the low 80%. That’s still pretty good, but think about if 20% of 60,000 students fail the test. We expect most of them on several tries to pass, but that becomes a lot of interventions and therefore there’s about to be instituted at all your schools a major movement about advising students simply about this test. At the community colleges where there are early majors that’s going to fall on some of those major advisors. It should fall on faculty advisors also and departments at the four-year schools, but there has to be indeed a larger advising component just to deal with this issue. Plus the people who designed this test are adamant in saying it’s a curricular test, it was developed from the curriculum, it is supposed to fit, they say, seamlessly into the curriculum and test, and you should not have to teach to the test because this should test to the taught. I’m under the CUNY-wide CPE Test Prep Committee. They are almost all writing center and learning center coordinators like myself; this is falling on them. It was hoped, and you can still see it in the literature here and in other materials, that students could be advised to take writing intensive courses in a specific discipline, perhaps in their majors, to help them. Therefore it is partly on departments to develop such courses and perhaps be convinced to develop such courses that focus to some degree on assignments like the CPE. I don’t know where we’re going here. No one knows right now, but I can tell you it’s falling seriously on writing centers and on learning centers across CUNY and it’s at the extent that having enough tutorial staff is going to be a serious concern at every school.

Professor Savage (Sociology, Queens College) – I also, after having looked carefully at the test, think it’s an excellent test and I think the people who developed it have done an excellent job. But I do also have that sense of a potential impending train wreck in some cases and I suppose since it’s a high stakes test, it’s been imposed on us, we are not going to be able to fight shy of it in the short run, but if it has a really major impact on enrollment I bet they will find a way somehow. The PR cost on that would be incredible however and so it’s not going to happen in the short run. And so I think really what the faculty need to do is what is happening on a number of campuses, they need to go ahead and accept the fact that we’ve got to deal with this test and all the faculty need to do whatever they can to tell the student that they have to take it, to tell the people what the test is about, to go ahead and build into the curriculum if it’s not already there how to read tables and graphs. For example, as a sociologist, that’s what we’re doing in my department. And you know, looking at this test, this is the kind of test that college students should be able to pass. There may be some cases if you’re coming from a foreign country or if you have dyslexia or some other things like that, but by and large, as much as I hate high stakes tests, kids should be able to do this. So I think probably the best thing we can do for our students is to go ahead and get behind them and help them out a little bit. / Dennis Paoli – We do have pretty good success at passing students even after one or two failures. There is really pretty good success. They do well on the test. You should know, again anecdotally, that they believe that the last administration of the test was harder than previous administrations of the test and they’ve adjusted the passing score. So the score is adjustable. And one of the things that may happen in the future, as opposed to the test going away, is the score being adjusted. And you should also know that one of the short term issues in relation to the exam is they’re looking for, because just administering tests to 60,000 students is an inordinate job and they can see cost problems, potential exemptions for up to 10% of the students. There is no idea yet, there is no plan to have an exemption, there is no idea what that exemption would be. I’m also Hunter’s coordinator for writing across the curriculum. That committee will meet on Friday. We have been addressed by Louise Mirrer before to ask us what we thought, and we have tried to take that off the table. That’s not our issue. We are trying to disconnect writing across the curriculum as far as possible from the CPE. It isn’t but it is. / [Unidentified] – I don’t understand, why shouldn’t the GPA achievement be an exemption? / Dennis Paoli – You know I would say that too if I hadn’t look at the records of some of the people who failed a couple of times. Some of them have pretty good GPAs. One of the reasons I haven’t seen the score report at our school is that it went first to institutional research and they’re analyzing the data. And they asked me what I wanted to see in the data and I asked for major and I asked for how they did in English 120. More than anything, let me just appeal to you as faculty across CUNY to inform your students about this test and to be informed yourselves. Most students will pass it if they take it. Most students should feel confident going in, most students should apply themselves and take it seriously, and then we can focus our efforts on the students who need our help.

Professor Fridman (Kingsborough Community College) – I wonder what are experiences are thus far with the special services population, whether we’ve been thinking through the issue of special services in relation to this exam and if we’ve been thinking about the potential law suits. / Dennis Paoli – CUNY is convinced that other exams like this exist across the country in other systems and they have held up very much like this, and one of the issues taken into account in designing the test was that very issue, accountability and the potential law suits. And CUNY is convinced that this test like test in other systems will hold up. The issue of students with special needs is addressed in the booklet. Any accommodations that they already get for any of their other tests are made. As a reader I’ve read tests that were typed and written by the students, taken on computers etc.