Chancellor Goldstein attended with Executive Vice Chancellor Selma Botman, Vice Chancellor Rick Schaffer, Vice Chancellor Ernesto Malave, and Executive Assistant Barbara Cura. Attending as guest was Syd Lefkoe.

REPORTS AND DELIBERATIONS OF
THE THREE HUNDRED AND NINTH PLENARY SESSION

OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

February 1, 2005

III. Reports:
A. Chair O’Malley: Welcome back. You have in front of you the agenda. Do I have a motion to approve the agenda? Seconds? Any additions? All in favor? All right.

We should start with the Chancellor who will speak to us tonight. Today he gave quite a speech at the Harvard Club announcing four initiatives, which I’m sure he will speak to us about. Chancellor Goldstein.

B. Chancellor Goldstein: What a fine looking crowd. It’s good to see you all, I hope you had a good break, and I assume classes have begun on all of the campuses, is that true? I guess I should know that. I’m going to be brief because Ernesto Malave, our Vice Chancellor for Budget and Finance has been asked to go through the recommendations that the Governor has made with respect to the Operating and the Capital Budgets for the University. The budget is not that complex, but for those of you who are not used to reading these budget documents and how the Governor, or this Governor in particular, has fashioned the recommendations, I think it’s good for you to hear it.

We have some problems, as we were expected to have, in the Operating Budget. It has several components. One is that there continues to be a structural deficit in the operating budget that we have; this is a carryover for the last two years that has not been remedied, and there has to be some remedy here; so that’s a part of this and that represents a continuing obligation in the low 20s, maybe $25 million. In addition, there is a revenue expectation of about $37.3 million, and there are issues of SEEK financial aid and a whole bunch of other things that aggregate up to about $9 million when you take all these pieces together, and at the end we’re looking at about a $70 million problem. One of the things I want to make very clear, because this is a little subtle, and of course it’s very much tied up in the politics of how one talks about revenue -- the press and SUNY in particular and the executive branch and perhaps members of the Legislature take the $37.3 million, which is what I believe the number is, and equate it to the $250 tuition increase. Now that is just a convenient way of saying if you have to raise $37.3 million is the only way you raise revenue is by tuition; that’s an old story, but it’s a story that continues to permeate the thinking in Albany. If you have a deficiency in your revenue budget, $37.3 million, that means a tuition increase of $250, which is really nothing more than a multiplication of $250 times the number of undergraduate FTEs that you have. Let me say at the start: for me that’s a non-starter. I don’t think this way. We have a revenue problem, and the way that we’re going to deal with the revenue problem is first and foremost to get our story across in the most lucid, clear way to get restorations. So this is the opening salvo that we have and we’re going to work very mightily with the Legislature to get money returned to the University so that we don’t have to raise revenue by $37.3 million. Other ways to raise revenue are to continue with this whole process that we started three years ago on efficiencies and how we run the University, and we will continue to do that. A third way that you raise revenue is by changing your enrollment and the mix of enrollment, and that generates revenue. And a fourth way is to levy a charge on students through tuition. My point, which I’ve spoken to over and over again, is invariant over time, and that is for a public university to do any kind of action that will result in our most vulnerable students being prohibited from enrolling because of financial exigency I think is wrong. I think it’s blatantly wrong. I mean this was the whole thrust, if you will, behind the Morrill Act that was passed in mid 19^th century establishing land grant colleges around the United States. Private universities were for the privileged, people who would be able to afford the tuition, and that was a revolutionary force, and we can’t lose sight of those very founding principles. Unfortunately, there has been a pattern now and it’s been going on for a good dozen years, maybe fifteen years, where there has been a regression away from supporting operations by state and local government and passing the obligation onto students. So when I hear about a deficiency I don’t think about tuition; that to me is the last step along the way. There’s a whole series of other steps, and even when we talk about tuition there’s lots of ways of raising tuition. The very last way that you want to raise tuition is by charging the most vulnerable students that we have in the University; that to me is where you draw the line in the sand. So that’s going to be my opening gambit. I will promise you, even though we are facing a $70 million problem, we’re not going to deal with it by changing or pulling back from any of the important momentums that we have started here in the University, like faculties that we’ve hired across the campuses. We’re just not going to do that; there’s not going to be anything that’s in my mind going to upset the basic status quo if not momentum that we have created and we’re just going to do it, and we’ll find a way to do it.

Here are the problems that I see ahead, and I want to talk briefly about that and say a little about the Operating Budget. Susan mentioned a speech I gave. The speech will be on the website either tonight or tomorrow morning and you can just access it and see it. I don’t really think I have to go over that. SUNY has come out with a tuition proposal, remarkably before the Governor even came out with an Operating Budget. I’ve never heard of that before; it’s a real strange thing. The reason they did this is because Bob King and the SUNY Board are pushing a tuition-indexing scheme. I have some thoughts about indexing and I’ve spoken about them to this body and actually I spoke to Bob King about this three years ago when I was giving some talks in Oxford and Bob was an observer, before being appointed. I’m going to be faced, and I’m going to be out there alone, with a system, our sister system, that has come out of the box before the Governor has even reflected on the operations of the University with a $500-600 tuition increase, that I’m told, and this has been verified, that the Faculty Senate, the Union, and the students through their governance leaders all applaud. Before the Governor came out with their budget, the Presidents, the UUP, which is the bargaining unit for SUNY, the Faculty Senate, and Student Senate all said, "this sounds like a reasonable thing." You can verify this. When Bob King told me about this I really was astounded. You know if you play poker, you don’t start showing your cards and throwing in your cards, you effect strategies and you try to maximize your position. So I’m going to be faced with an independent sector, CICU, and I’m going to be faced with SUNY that’s going to testify, that’s going to have very different approaches to this problem than I’m going to have, and I’ve laid out for you what our approach is. I should mention very quickly what the SUNY proposal is on tuition indexing. It’s an interesting idea and I can see why some people would embrace it, but you have to look below the hood to see its ramifications, and look at it very carefully. The proposal is an agreement that the University has with the State of New York, and it goes something like this: we the state of New York agree in this fiscal year to pick up the incremental mandatory costs for next fiscal year for you, State University of New York. What are mandatory costs? They’re largely costs of collective bargaining and energy costs and a few other ancillary things, but the mass, the overall mass of our mandatory costs are really in those two areas. If the State of New York agrees in a fiscal year to put up the mandatory costs then the University is permitted to levy a tuition, and let’s just talk about undergraduates for a minute, no higher than its ceiling determined by a basket of economic indicators, in this case the Higher Education Index, which is a basket of indicators that indicate how much incremental cost you have from one fiscal year to another. It may be 3%, it may be 4.4%, whatever the number is, the University is allowed to effect a tuition increase up to that ceiling. In return the students that start in that year are guaranteed that over the next three years going forward their tuition will not change. In effect it says that if you graduate in four years your tuition will jump up whatever the Higher Education says you can go up for that first year but not the next three years. You’re held constant. Now go to the next year, what happens again? The State says we’re going to pick up your mandatory costs again, new collective bargaining costs, new energy costs, a few other ancillary costs. The Higher Education Index is cranked up again and the University says it can raise tuition up to this level, and for that new group of students that come in that second year they’re guaranteed over four years to have a constant tuition. If on the other hand the State says we can’t afford to pay the mandatory costs -- this is a typical, very simple game theory, sort of a zero sum game theory-- all bets are off. The covenant that was struck with the students from the year before is now gone, and they don’t have those three extra years. The upside in something like this is that if there is a tuition increase levied it doesn’t go to support mandatory costs, it really goes to investing in the University. It also has some predictability because the Higher Education Index is not going to have very large spikes. It’s going to go up and down but it’s not going to be all over the place, so there is some predictability in terms of what it is that you pay. But the real downside here is that the State University can be double dipping because the Higher Education Index is largely mandatory costs, so if you get the mandatory costs paid and then you levy a tuition cost, it sounds to me like you have twice the Higher Education Index, so there’s that problem with it and a host of other things. I’m going to be confronted with that. Obviously the independent sector loves to see tuition going up in CUNY and SUNY. This is a gift for them because, taken it to its logical conclusion, the more tuition is increased the more competitive a private university is because they can certainly discount their tuition as long as they cover their expenditures. I would ask this body to work with us, the PSC to work with us, all constituencies, because we are facing about $70 million; this is real hard dollars that we have to deal with. Ernesto will go through it in detail. He knows this much better than anybody in this room and he has all of the components to it.

Very quickly, on the capital side we have the best Capital Budget that the University has ever had but it is still woefully inadequate, and there’s a lot of legal clarification that I have asked Rick Schaffer to help clarify with respect to how the Legislature now has its degree of freedom compromised a bit because of a recent court ruling. But putting that aside, we have a little under $1.5 billion that we expect to expand. The dominant amount of money obviously is in our senior colleges. That’s a fair amount of money but when you look at our needs across the University it is still woefully lacking. If you look at the theme that would characterize this Capital Budget that the Board approved, which is what the administration came forward with, it is characterized not exclusively but mostly by investment in science. We’re going to build either new science facilities or rehabilitate existing science facilities at Brooklyn College, City College, Queens College, Lehman College, and Hunter College, and we’re going to expand without equipment an instrumentation over $400 million in the next 4-5 years, and we are going to build a comprehensive research center that will be housed on the City College campus because that’s where we have land, but it’s not a City College building. It’s a building of the University and we’re going to work out how faculty and graduate students across the University will utilize that building for very sophisticated, high-end kinds of work, emulating what major universities around the United States have done in order to contain costs. When I was constructing the Capital Budget that I presented to the Board it obviously was with the advice and counsel of lots of constituencies, and just about every President, not every but many of the Presidents, wanted science facilities. If we had said yes, which would have been a pipe dream, the Capital Budget not only would have been depleted in its entirety but would have been well in excess of what we ultimately received. Our real needs in our capital program--and it’s not Pollyannaish, it’s something that we could really document--it’s several billions of dollars to be spent over the next several years. We presented a recommendation to the Board that was approved at around the $2.7 billion. That was a pared down request, and we have this from the State and we’ll see what the Legislature does. The real problem that we have in our Capital Budget is the community colleges, and I talked at length to you about that. The good news is that the Governor and the Mayor have each put in $20 million to rebuild a new Fiterman Hall, and I can open up my shirt and show you the scars that all of us have had battling that, but we got that done. Fiterman is going to be rebuilt. It’s being designed by a very prominent architectural firm, and we have a good part of the money now; we still have a little extra to do but the Mayor and the Governor came through on this one. Where we have a serious problem, and it’s been a recurring problem since the Giuliani administration, is virtually no money of any consequence for the community colleges. Some money for Medgar Evers comes through the community college capital program--Medgar Evers is a senior college but for purposes of financing its capital program it’s treated just like a community college. So the State has put up the money, the City has agreed to match, but there’s nothing left for any of the other community colleges. We were successful in getting the State Legislature to put in $108 million. At the last go-around the Governor vetoed it, but it wasn’t clear that the Mayor was going to put in their match. There’s real interest now because I think on a number of our campuses we have some very serious problems that must be addressed in the community college area. So our efforts are going to be largely on the operating side for our senior colleges, efforts largely on the capital side for our community colleges, and hopefully at the end of this session we’ll be in a better position than we are today. But I don’t want you to leave here feeling that with this problem that we have we’re in jeopardy or starting to dismantle much of the edifice that we worked so hard to create. We will manage this, we will find a way to manage this, and I look forward to working with you.

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – In your presentation I was struck by how often you mentioned that you were out there alone in terms of dealing with the State because of course I think the implication is SUNY has gone its own way. You’ve mentioned before the possible utility of organizing our huge body of alumni in the state and if that were the case you would no longer be out there alone. My question to you is, are there legal restrictions that prevent the University administration from using the alumni body in a political sense and if so would that have to be the province of the Union? / Chancellor Goldstein – We use our alumni all the time. When I say "alone" that was perhaps a little too extensive; I meant with respect to the other sectors. / I understood. / Chancellor Goldstein – I mean it would be very powerful if there were a rich communality that existed with CUNY, SUNY, and CICU. Then we would have an enormous political force. But if the Legislature is hearing different things from SUNY than they’re hearing from CUNY, that’s not good.

Professor Petratos (College of Staten Island) –Couple of months ago from this lectern, this is a quote, "the University has suffered severe setbacks and we’re giving the best contract ever. I would like to emulate the UUP contract." What happened? The UUP contract called for 16%, you are offering us 1.5% over four years, nothing for the welfare fund, and you expect to attract people here. The only reason that people come to this University is still, you know, the attachment to New York City. / Chair O’Malley – Let the Chancellor Goldstein answer. This is governance. / Professor Petratos – No, it has to do with us. / Chair O’Malley – I know. This is a governance body and this is a Union question. / Professor Petratos – It’s a faculty question. / Chancellor Goldstein – Let me respond very quickly. / Chair O’Malley – Thank you for answering it. / Chancellor Goldstein – We are, and that’s the collective bargaining. At the end of it I hope that we get a great contract for the faculty and we’re working very hard. One of the things you need to understand is that we are not masters of our own house with respect to a monetary package. The Union and I think most of you understand that we’re constrained. I would love to be able to be unconstrained and unshackled, but we are basically given some parameters; until we get to that we’re going to work towards trying to get the best contract we can. It’s in our interest, it’s in all of our interest, and I’m hopeful we will. I’m hopeful at the end of the process people will be happier. / Professor Petratos – And I hope you live up to this quote of two months ago. That was yours. / Chancellor Goldstein –We’ll try to do the best we can.

Professor Bell (Educational Services, Brooklyn College) – A colleague of mine from Albany called me today and said there was an extraordinary meeting taking place today between the Governor, Sheldon Silver, and Bruno / Chancellor Goldstein – The Governor meets with the leadership and others on a regular basis. Because it’s in front of the press you’re saying? / Professor Bell – Yes. / Chancellor Goldstein – Maybe it means something, I don’t know. / Professor Bell – The other questions is the Ways and Means Committee is meeting on Tuesday and I’m sure you’re going to go up and testify. / Chancellor Goldstein – I will be there. / Professor Bell – Is it significant that CICU is organizing that day as CICU Day? Should we be up there too? I hear they’re taking over the world with HEOP and that they’re bringing up thousands of students on Tuesday. / Chancellor Goldstein – We do that every year as well; we take over the world. I would not put more credence into it. These are all distractions. We know where the big event is and hopefully we’ll get to that. / Professor Bell – Thank you.

Professor Crain (Psychology, City College) – I’d really like to comment on the poor students and the missions of the public institutions. This business about giving bonuses for graduation rates will hurt the poorer students who can’t afford to go in four years. / Chancellor Goldstein – This is this PACT? / Professor Crain – Yes. I have another concern that a few years ago the issue came up about the appointment of Chairs instead of elected Chairs, which the faculty like to elect because they’re responsive to the faculty, it’s in the interest of faculty; now I understand that one of the bargaining points is to get Chairs out of our faculty bargaining unit and make them responsive to administration, and it would in effect undermine the democratic election of Chairs on the campuses. / Chancellor Goldstein – It’s part of our platform and it wouldn’t be part of our platform unless I favored it. Right now we ask our Presidents to go through an evaluative process. I believe that Chairs really have two roles: they are representing the faculty because they are elected by the faculty but they are also carrying out management policies. I am always in favor of Chairs that have responsibility to the overall administration, and it works very well at a number of very leading institutions. So whether we’re prevailing I don’t know, but certainly if it’s in the bargaining it has to have my okay or else it wouldn’t be there. / Professor Crain – I hope you fail. / Chancellor Goldstein – Well, I have in the past.

Professor Barker (Medgar Evers College) – I’m a member of the Status of the Faculty Committee of this body. Many faculty in the University, not just those sitting here tonight, have looked forward to the survey of the faculty that has been scheduled to go out. I understand that you may not like the survey. Would you qualify your position tonight about the survey, and secondly, if I may ask, if this survey is approved by scholars whose business is survey will you go along with the survey and allow us to participate in the evaluation of the administration? / Chancellor Goldstein – I have some issues because, like some of you, I was in that business for a while, and from a scholarly standpoint I know that stuff. I have some issues with the survey but I don’t think that’s the real important issue. I think given we are in collective bargaining that that is an inappropriate intrusion, and I’m hoping that we will get that survey out very, very soon, and this is on legal advice and I think it makes some sense. So in answer to your question, I’m very favorably disposed to doing the survey. I was a mover of it; I had some technical issues with the language in which the survey was designed; I don’t know if those technical issues were addressed or not because I haven’t been involved in it, but I think the more central issue is when it will be out; I would imagine the next couple of months. / Professor Barker – For years we don’t have evaluations because we’re in collective bargaining for three years at a time? / Chancellor Goldstein – There are some real legal issues here. / Chair O’Malley – I want to say the survey has been sent to David Rinskoff, Juan Battle, and Deborah Coates for their input, just to see what they think about it, and I should have those results. And Juan Battle too is Hunter and Deborah Coates, City.

Professor Levine (Engineering Science and Physics, College of Staten Island) – While you didn’t mention it, many of us do read CUNY e-news. / Chancellor Goldstein – E-news? / Professor Levine – The website that you sent to us that we’re supposed to read. / Chancellor Goldstein – I’m an old fashioned guy; I like to write with a fountain pen. / Professor Levine – All right, but we do read it, and you sent us a message entitled "More on the Tenure Clock." And I was very pleased to see certain things in it, in particular I was very pleased to see the discussion about early tenure including the current Bylaws that state a number of reasons, including "when for a very substantial reason the college will be well served by such early granted tenure." The second category is intended to cover a wide range of possible situations. One example of this would be the situation of faculty who have taught at another college, and I would add or who have done research at major research institutions. You continued "and begun to establish a substantial record of scholarship before coming to one of our colleges," and I applaud that. Then I read the next sentence: "In the event we are successful in extending the current tenure clock from five to seven years I expect that this ground for early tenure consideration may become increasingly applicable." Now I would suggest that if we are successful in recruiting the top faculty, this ground for early tenure consideration may become increasingly applicable and it should not depend on the length of the maximum probation period for, say, brand new PhDs. / Chancellor Goldstein – I’m with you on that. But my opinion on this and my views have been invariant over time. I think it is ridiculous to have a tenure clock that is as short as it is. I find it remarkable that very good productivity could be developed, especially in certain areas. You’re a scientist--if you’re new to this University and you need to get start-up money and to get your lab going and to start all your experiments and collect your data, and if you want to get your stuff into good journals the turnover time is 18-24 months, how conceivably could your best work be known to peers to make a good evaluation? So for me extending the tenure clock is a very faculty-friendly and supportive approach to allowing faculty to do their best work. I think that there are faculty who should be given early tenure and we ought to do it intelligently now and in the future. The notion, for example, and I don’t want to get on this soap box again, that a Sandi Cooper new to the City University with a fresh PhD spends two years here and then has an invitation to spend six months or a year at Stanford University with some eminent historians, then comes back to the University and has to start a tenure clock over, I think is ludicrous. The purpose of my memo was to create some shaking of the trees with the Presidents to say this is what the Board of Trustees has said through their Bylaws, and I want to take them seriously. / Professor Levine – It’s perfect and I completely agree with everything you just said. / Chancellor Goldstein – So let me get out of here. / Professor Levine – But the words here say "in the event we are successful in extending the tenure clock" It doesn’t say let us do it now for those candidates who really deserve it. / Chancellor Goldstein – But the intent is the same there. The reason for that is to say look, if there are people with a seven year tenure clock that should be considered and granted tenure after five years, let’s not impede that. / Professor Levine – What about people with a five year tenure clock who should be granted tenure after three years. / Chancellor Goldstein – I would find, if they are fresh PhDs…/ Professor Levine – No, I didn’t say. / Chancellor Goldstein – That’s fine. I have no problem if the faculty in an institution look at the body of work and say this person should have tenure immediately. Look, there are young Wunderkinds that all of us have heard about. There was a, you would know this, George, the guy that works in Fourier analysis at the University of Chicago. He was granted tenure immediately. The faculty looked at his work and said this guy’s work is as good as that of the best people we have here, if you’re going to base it mainly on scholarship. So I think the time is rather artificial. What I’m concerned about is on the other end. People need more time and for them to compromise their work, to write in a B journal when they could be writing in an A journal, I think is not doing the best that we can for faculty. So for me that’s what’s really driving it.

Professor Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) – I wasn’t at Stanford; it was some other place. You know this is an issue I don’t understand because years and years ago in the 60s when we started up some of the new colleges we did this. We didn’t wait for five years even when it was introduced. If we had somebody who was given a Guggenheim and a this and a that and had been there for two or three years and had come in with something, they came up for early tenure. I don’t understand why this is an issue. If the faculty have started to behave as if they’ve got rigor mortis then maybe they should be given exercise classes. / Chancellor Goldstein – My issue was not on that end--it’s on the other end. I want to give people more time. / Professor Cooper – I am saying I don’t know why there’s an issue on the first end. There wasn’t in the past.

Chair O’Malley – Thank you so much.

A couple of things before Vice Chancellor Malave starts. I would like to get approval of the minutes with two corrections, one from Syd Lefkoe and one from the Senator from Brooklyn. And both of those had been registered with you? Good. Could I have a motion to approve the minutes? OK.

In the back there is a Chair’s Report. This is on one side and on the other side the Chair’s Activities. I’ve done it in writing, so I don’t have to bore you all, but I would just like to point to number one, which is a whole debate; it’s the Spring UFS Conference at The Graduate School, Friday, April 22: What happened to the public in public higher education? It is cosponsored with the CUNY Academy. Number two is the Albany weekend, the Caucus weekend of Black and Puerto Rican legislators, and I wanted Martha and maybe Eda to say something to that. We gave you the program and if anyone would like to go let us know and we will help you pay for it, some of you. Martha has a sick child at home, which is why I’m changing the agenda.

Professor Bell (Educational Services, Brooklyn College) – Thank you, Susan. The Caucus weekend is Presidents’ Weekend, February 19, and some of us will be going to Albany to lobby and to begin the process. As Chancellor Goldstein said, the process this year, because of the court ruling on how the budget can be negotiated between the Governor and the Legislature, has changed the game, and it’s my feeling that we’re going to have to do a lot more to affect the budget since the Assembly and the Senate can no longer pass their own versions of the budget bills, nor we think pass a supplemental budget after the process closed. So we need to work very carefully on all sides of the House but particularly get to the Governor’s Office and get to the Republicans-- our friends in the Assembly can’t be our only means. We’re speaking to those that are already on our side; we’ve got to expand our purview. What I’d like people to do is to get to me or to Bill or to Susan and say whether you’re willing to participate in lobbying, in helping with this effort, and whether you have any connections or know anyone that we can talk to. I am particularly concerned that we get to the Governor’s Assistant and the people that deal with the big donors who are proposing these draconian cuts in TAP, in SEEK, in all of the things that affect the University, and I’m interested in those that can reach out to various Republican legislators. For example LaValle is the Senator for the Hamptons. Many of our faculty have summer homes and other connections in Suffolk County where he is. So I’m asking that we try to use all of our resources and not play business as usual this time; that this not be an effort of three or four faculty members but all of us from all the campuses. Is there anyone on your campus? Can you help? Let’s see where we are. Thank you.

Chair O’Malley – Thank you very much. Eda, do you want to add anything?

Professor Hastick (Social and Behavioral Sciences, Medgar Evers College) – I’d just like to ask Martha to tell the faculty about the orientation process. Usually we have packages on lobbying days. We don’t have to go up there cold, not having the facts.

Chair O’Malley – March 15 is our lobby day.

Professor Bell (Educational Services, Brooklyn College) – It’s hard to start lobbying. You cannot picture what you’re going to do initially if you’ve never done it, but those of us who have done it, and many have done it many times, will teach you how to do it. There are materials in a package. We pair you up with other people so that people can model the strategy for you. It is very important. Nine years ago I had never done this. Now I’m making fifteen trips up there each year, which is a ridiculous number, but we’ve been successful. It took the Governor zeroing out SEEK to wake us up that if the Legislature doesn’t know we’re there they’re not going to continue to fund us, and I think they need to hear the voices of all the faculty, not just a few of us. I think this is the most serious year we’ve had since nine or ten years ago when Governor Pataki came in because the game has been changed on us and we have to work much more seriously. So I hope you’ll go home and you’ll think about it and respond back to the Senate Office saying you’re willing to do something or you know somebody who you’re connected to, and that is important.

Chair O’Malley – On this Chair’s Report there’s a whole list of things. You should take a look at it and e-mail me or call me if you have any questions. I think that’s the best way rather than going over it right now because we need to hear from the Vice Chancellor Ernesto Malave who will tell us all about the new TAP, the new PACT, the holes, the good news, the bad news.

Vice Chancellor Malave – Thank you, Susan, and good evening everyone. Professor Friedheim, good to see you again. It’s always good to come to class. If you don’t know, I was in American history with professor William Friedheim at Borough of Manhattan Community College. / Chair O’Malley – What did you get? / Vice Chancellor Malave – I aced it. Anyway, I know the Chancellor did some of the broad strokes on the budget. We provided an analysis that I’m going to go over in some detail so you can get a little bit of a better understanding. I’m not going to spend too much time on everything because I know the Chancellor has already talked about a couple of things, but it’s an interesting budget. Let me begin with the senior colleges and let me first take you to--I think you’ve all seen a copy of the University’s Budget Request--the blue book that I gave out. For those who had an opportunity to read that you would have noticed that it was a significant Budget Request of about $130 million including $61.5 million for mandatory cost increases for the senior colleges. It’s hard to look at a budget that increases your funding by $88.4 million and not cheer at that. How could $88.4 million be bad news? And it’s because they did something with collective bargaining that I’ll go over that sort of masked what they in fact did to our budget. The senior colleges received an overall appropriation from the Executive of $1.334 billion, an increase of $88.4. That $88.4 is the overall funding for the senior colleges and is made up of two pieces: $59.7 million in State Aid and $28.6 million, the net of the increase in tuition and other revenue. That’s the $88.4 million. Now it’s a little tricky and I’ll try not to make it too complicated, but the $28.6 million is a net figure--it is a combination of $37.3 million in tuition revenue expected to be raised with an across-the-board increase of $250, offset and reduced by $8.7 million in other revenue that we now get from the Higher Education Services Corporation for the administration of student financial aid. So just in case you’re looking at those numbers and you see our revenue budget requirement go up by $28.6 million, so why is the tuition revenue $37.3 million, then that’s the answer. On page 3, if you’re following the report, it’s just those two numbers that I’ve mentioned. Now $88.4 sounds like a lot of money, and on page 4 it appears even better. You see the $88.4 million reflects increases of $119.4 million offset by decreases of $31 million. So now we have a budget that on the positive side calculates increases of $119 million made up of several major components--$45.3 million is for financing of mandatory cost increases in the following way: roughly $28.7 million for fringe benefits, a significant amount, of $11.5 million for the college-based mandatory cost increases for increments and OTPS inflation-- we have some energy that’s funded in there, and nothing else. Remember that figure I said earlier of $61.5 million that we have requested for mandatory cost increases and we have $45.7, not $61.5, so you can see it already shorts in that category. What is very difficult to fight about this budget is they did something unique this year. They calculated that we would need $73.3 million for collective bargaining costs in fiscal ’06. That is, if we were to enter into an agreement that was something like what state employees received, that would cost $73 million on an ongoing basis, so, like the city administration, they parked that money; they took it out of labor reserve and put it in the CUNY budget anticipating that in the ’06 fiscal year we would enter into a collective bargaining agreement and that would be the cost. They haven’t done that before. In the past, whenever we had finally entered into an agreement, there would be a separate appropriation that would be entitled the Pay Bill, and they would cover those costs. Now in effect what you have is a budget, if you look at it carefully, that increases-- remember that figure-- State Aid by $59.7 million, and is funding mandatory costs for $45.3 and collective bargaining costs of $73.3; that’s almost $130 million, the funding with an increase in State Aid of only $60 million. The rest of it is being funded, first, with the $28.6 million in tuition revenue and, secondly, by two decreases: one, $22.2 million in a reduction in operating support. Let me just step back a moment and take you back to the current year budget. You’ll recall that the Legislature added $33.3 million to the CUNY appropriation at the end of the year, and this year they added a number of other things on the capital side and aid for the community colleges. The Governor vetoed the capital appropriation, and vetoed the restoration for the community colleges. He let stand the $33.3 million appropriation for CUNY but he only allowed CUNY to spend $11.1 million of it and he "held back $22.2 million." So in our budget, in our appropriation, we have a line item for $22 million that we’re currently not spending. In fact we’re raiding our reserves just to get by this year while having to not replace employees that we can’t sustain going forward. In ’06 budget that line item, $22.2 million, is gone. That is in part being used to finance the $119 million which includes, as I indicated, $73.3 for collective bargaining. So that’s one cut. The other significant cut is the proposed elimination of the financial aid component of the SEEK program. The SEEK program, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, is roughly $14 million; half of it goes for supplemental instructional activity on the campuses, the other half goes roughly in the form of $600 per student, mostly for the purchase of books and other important needs that they have; the Governor is proposing elimination of that. So that’s the $31 million that’s being used to finance the $119.4 millionfor a net increase of $88.4 million.

In addition to the overall senior college budget, there are thing called Article VII bills. Article VII bills are that provision in the Constitution that enables the Governor to introduce along with the budget, legislation implementing the budget. In this case we have an Article VII bill that covers both CUNY and SUNY. The Chancellor referred to some of the SUNY components when he talked about the SUNY tuition guarantee and tuition indexing and the like, but in that there are two provisions that apply to CUNY. The first is eliminating the current prohibition against charging differential tuition for undergraduate programs across campuses and also to enable adoption of tuition changes in the absence a State Budget. That is commonly referred to as the Fink Amendment for the late Stanley Fink. One year there was a time in which the Legislature was going about the business of legislating and negotiating a budget, and I think it was the SUNY Trustees who decided to enact a tuition increase sometime in May; the Legislature went ballistic and inserted a provision that says that in until such time as the Legislature is done with the business of deciding what the overall funding level is, the university system should not be enacting tuition change. That became known as the Fink Amendment. They are recommending the elimination of that, in part because, as many of you know, they can’t figure out how to get a budget done on time, and that’s part of the motivation. Let me mention the small budget increase. I think the Chancellor referred to the one gubernatorial initiative in this budget, the PACT program to accelerate on time completion. It’s an $800,000 increase in our budget based on the formula of $50 for every new full-time student coming in. I don’t know what $800,000 is supposed to actually accomplish but anyway, it’s $800,000. That’s one of the other increases in the budget.

On page 5, for those who don’t want to follow the text, you can just look at the numbers that I just went over. For the community colleges the State Budget is fairly stable. There are no cuts recommended in base aid, unlike last year at this time when we were staring at $115 FTE reduction in the base aid amount. This is very stable. It’s more than stable; they actually increased the appropriation anticipating that we’re going to generate some additional enrollment. It’s probably a little two aggressive at this point given our enrollment patterns at the community colleges, but nevertheless if the enrollment were to arrive, we already have an appropriation that acknowledges that level and provides additional aid of $3.2 million. Like the senior colleges, there’s a half of million for the PACT program at the community colleges, increased support for Borough of Manhattan Community College rental. For those from BMCC who recognize the rental property at 75 Park Place, there are a number of different floors that are coming on line; as those floors come on line, there’s additional aid to cover the cost of the program. The College Discovery program, which is the community college equivalent of the SEEK program, is also slated to be slashed by 50%. As you can see, $363,000 is not 6.9 million or anything like that. The State of New York has very little obligation in financing the College Discovery program; that’s largely financed with City funds and tuition dollars; they only provide under $800,000, so they just took half of that so they can be consistent with the senior colleges recommending the financial aid elimination. If in the extremely unlikely event that the Legislature does not restore the aid to the senior college component…tape turned over…restores with $6.9 million the Senior College Financial Aid Program.

Speaking of financial aid, on page 7, the Governor, for now the third year in a row, proposes to restructure the TAP program by basically splitting the award in two pieces, a base amount to be awarded at the time of registration and the so-called performance award to be granted at the end or whenever the student graduates. This is not new--it’s not based on four years, it’s indefinite--but it’s a rehatching of a proposal that the Governor has come forth and provided in the past. The one thing about this that you have to be careful, however, it does not affect any existing student in the system, so no doubt the calculus in Albany is with all the CUNY and SUNY and private schools—that’s a million students. If none of them are going to get excited about the TAP restructuring, then maybe they’ll sneak it in very quietly, and that’s sort of the danger of this proposal, that there are no students that are currently affected, only their brothers and sisters and cousins, children. But it is something that we’re watching very carefully. In addition to that, which generates savings of about $142 million, they’re also trying to generate savings by restructuring and tightening the eligibility for maintaining TAP. Right now you have to have a minimum amount of credit hours and a minimum GPA in order to keep TAP in your early semesters. They’re tightening it up in the front end, raising the standards, and we have more details we’ll be able to provide-- we haven’t completed the analysis yet-- but for example at the senior colleges you have to have at least 6 hours earned and a 1.1 GPA in the first semester in order to continue the eligibility; that goes to 9 credits and 1.5 GPA, and in the third semester it jumps from 9 to 15. So it targets the students at the weakest end, so it’s largely something that will affect mostly the community college students, mostly in remediation. So that’s the group that’s targeted there. We’ll know exactly what it is on a college by college basis so we can all understand the implications and advise the various constituencies.

On page 8, and this is what the Chancellor referred to as the budget challenge for the University I have to say it’s a minimum budget challenge. For those of you who want to go back and read the Budget Request, we had requested $54 million for programmatic improvements, the implementation and the expansion of the tuition remission program for doctoral students, upgrades of laboratory needs, and so on and so forth all of that was part of the necessary financing of the Master Plan; none of that is included in the $70.5 million budget challenge. When the Chancellor testifies in Albany next week, we’re going to be talking about, in addition to the base requirements, any additional programmatic improvements we’re seeking. But the bottom line, the first problem we have, is what’s going to happen with the tuition question, what is the Legislature going to do? Just to remind you, this is what the Legislature did before so you can understand exactly who you’re dealing with if you go up to Albany for the sixteenth time. Two years ago they gave the University, they proposed in the Executive, a $1,200 tuition increase; that was the Governor’s proposal. Their response was it’s got to be something under $1,000, but in order to do that, the way these numbers work, they had to find $30 million in order to make the numbers work. And what they decided to do, instead of increasing State support by $30 million in order to get to that number, they said why don’t you just charge the non-resident students an extra amount, target that $30 million to them, and that way the undergraduate resident students you can keep at around $950; that is what the Legislature did. And they got, you know, impassioned about it. Chancellor Goldstein charged us in the budget division saying $950 is too much and it was our job to come up with a schedule, and efficiencies, and a number of other things, to keep it at $800. They were recommending up to $5,000 increases for non-residents; we were able to keep it to no more than $2,000 instead of the $5,000 that they were recommending. So I’m not entirely sure how they’re going to respond to a proposal to increase tuition by $250 if that was their response the first time. And the other unique wrinkle here is that they’re recommending their tuition increase for SUNY for $500 and that SUNY has a tuition guarantee proposal because it’s indexed and a number of things, that has some legs. The Senate, your counterparts at SUNY are supporting it, the Union at SUNY is supporting it, and the students in SUNY are supporting it. So with that in mind we have a proposal for a tuition indexing and this tuition guarantee that on the State side is being supported by all the key constituencies in SUNY, so that’s going to put CUNY in a very, very difficult situation at the end of the day. And what they find attractive about it is that it’s a guarantee. What parent in New York isn’t going to like the idea of a guarantee in tuition; who’s going to say no to that? And on top of that say, instead of 30% increases after 5 or 6 years no more than 3% or 4% at max. And the other piece of it, as the Chancellor said, is that the State will commit to financing the mandatory costs and collective bargaining. The logic is, and the reason it has some legs, is because, assume you’re the Governor, you’re the Executive--all you have to do in order to guarantee that tuition that you promised is just to find mandatory costs, and if you don’t fulfill your end of the bargain there’s going to be a bigger tuition increase and the tuition guarantee is out the window. So the thinking is that this puts pressure on the Executive to follow up and provide the mandatory costs, otherwise they get blamed for the tuition guarantee going away. And I’m not sure how they’re going to respond to that but that’s part of what makes it attractive. What Governor is not going to cover mandatory costs now and get blamed for the tuition guarantee disappearing? So we will see how that plays out, but the fact that the students and the faculty and the Union are supporting the proposal, that’s part of the challenge-- not just that the Governor is included in there but that SUNY is already in line and that the Legislature, which responds to SUNY. The other challenge is the $6.9 million for the financial aid component of the SEEK program, and there’s an expectation that the Legislature will probably, in all likelihood, restore that program. Then that leaves us with this $26.3 million number, which is all those mandatory costs that weren’t funded, and full-time faculty commitments that have already been made. Executive Vice Chancellor Selma Botman has made commitments. We are already building the base budgets for ’06 and they are in there for full-time faculty; they cost about $4.5 million; when I add that to the previous amounts we’re looking at a $26.3 million challenge. Again, that’s the minimum challenge. That’s the State side.

There are a few pages for the community colleges on the City side. Let me just say before I move on, this is a preliminary budget from the City Administration. The City Administration is not required to issue an Executive Budget, something equivalent to the State Executive Budget, until the end of April or the first week of May. So that’s the lag between this document that the City just proposed and when the Mayor really proposes the Executive Budget, and that’s the reason why at the end of these three pages you’re not going to see the budget challenge for the community colleges. We’re focused mostly on the senior colleges right now and on the State side and we’ll have plenty of time to come back to the community college issue. Having said that, on page 10, the good news is that we have increased costs this year for energy and pensions, mandatory costs, and the City is coughing up the entire $1.8 million to finance it and they’re not requiring that we finance it ourselves. So they’re increasing out budget by $1.8 million; as you can see, it’s evenly divided between energy and pensions. That’s in the current year, and it’s not just a preliminary budget for the ’06 year but also an update to the financial plan for the ’05 year, so that $1.8 million refers to the current year budget. For next year, as you can see, all bets are off. There are two numbers: there’s a net decrease of $12.6 million in aid to community colleges, and that has two components--an increase for mandatory costs, BMCC building rentals, Health Insurance and Pensions of $4.8 million, and a set of decreases, the Safety Net program at the community colleges, the City Council championed to help students meet the burden of the tuition increase a number of years ago. The City Council has restored various PEG reductions; those things have now all resurrected themselves. If you’re wondering why is the Mayor doing all of this, because after all the Mayor’s budget was a really good news budget that had anticipated over $1 billion in revenues beyond that which they had anticipated just over four months ago, and the reason, just so you understand how this works, is, because the Mayor after all is quite supportive in many respects of all of these safety net programs and Vallone Scholarships and all those things. But the way the City Council and in many ways the budget works in Albany, if the Legislature developes a set of initiatives they finance it; the Mayor or the Governor don’t feel any obligation to continue carrying them forward. So if you develop a Vallone Scholarship program that’s a City Council program, good, pay for it! You have a Safety Net program, great, pay for it! And if every year you do this, same thing with the SEEK program or the TAP program, don’t cut it, great, pay for it! These are your initiatives; every year you come up with them, so every year you’re going to have to finance them. So they cut them from the budget, fully anticipating that during budget negotiations the City Council will come back with their list, have all these things on it, go back and forth and the Mayor will tweak them and all that, and at the end of the day, as has been the case every year for the past 7 years, the Vallone Program survives and thrives, it goes up, not down, and some of these other issues get taken care of. They don’t get taken care of by osmosis, we still have to work it, we still have to make sure that it happens, but what it does is prevent them from adding anything to the budget and that’s really what the Mayor gets out of putting their programs on the block.

On page 12, just in case you’re wondering what the $10 million training for long-term unemployed initiative is--because the budget is divided into two components, the community college piece and then other items that include the Vallone Scholarship, Centers and Institutes, Dominican Institute, Medgar Evers Immigration Center, Center for Puerto Rican Studies, those were all major increases last year. Again, those are City Council add-ons, those are their responsibilities and the Mayor fully expects them to take care of them if they still think they’re worthy items, and this is where you have to really do some lobbying. The Hunter Campus School, this is really big; this is an institution that’s been starved for the past 15 years. It suffers from being somewhat of an orphan; nobody quite owns or is the father of the Hunter Campus Schools; they don’t belong to the public system, they don’t really belong to CUNY or to the City of New York, so they’re sort of out there, and for many years they’ve received no increase in support other than the cost of contracts, that’s all they really received, and credit President Raab for finally getting the City administration to acknowledge some of the real needs there, so that’s about $350,000 coming. The City Council part in the CUNY budget, $10 million for an initiative involving the structural unemployed in the City of New York: this was based on a study by the Community Service Society, particularly Black male unemployment in New York. They had $10 million, they called me at 11 o’clock at night, I don’t know in what period of negotiation they were, but we need you to take this $10 million and I said, "OK, I’ll take it." It’s not really a program for CUNY, it’s a program for community based organizations; that money is not needed in ’06 or looks like it’s being eliminated in the cut to the CUNY budget; it’s really just a pass-through, so don’t worry too much about it, but I need to tie into the numbers that people see in the City Budget books, so that’s why I included the figures in there.

OK, that’s the budget story. I go to Albany tomorrow just to do some preliminary work before the Chancellor arrives on February 8 to offer testimony. There are a lot of other items that are being tossed around in terms of what priorities do we have. This report of an extraordinary event in Albany is interesting. I’m a Yonkers boy, so one of the things that I saw in the Westchester papers was a couple of days ago about some talk of an extraordinary moment. It’s so bad that they all finally have been put to shame and they’ll finally get a budget done, and so it’s conceivable that they’re actually going to get it together and do a budget. But there’s a long, long way. We effectively have 5 months to manage this process, that is get the challenge addressed, get the Legislature to understand our needs, work out whatever we have to work on at the end of the day. It’s not something that we get too happy about because this is a long, long process. Thank you very much.

Professor Levine (Engineering Science and Physics, College of Staten Island) –Please forgive me, but I’m really having problems with the arithmetic. Let me understand the $73.3 million for the cost of the prospective collective bargaining agreements. I know that I don’t know how to handle that because I don’t know how to do the fringe benefits but that’s roughly 11%, but we’ll worry about that later. I’m really interested in the following: what happens if, God forbid, there is no prospective collective bargaining agreement during this fiscal year, it could happen, in which case there will be $73.3 million deleted. It will be put in a different account. We won’t be given that money to spend. Is that correct? / Vice Chancellor Malave – I can assure you that that’s correct. / Professor Levine – Then let me ask my question. In that case it looks to me when I look at the numbers on page 3 that this proposal calls for State Aid minus the $73.3 million to actually go down by $16.6 million. So it looks as if a portion of out total budget provided by the State will, for the very first time, drop below 50%. Is that correct? / Vice Chancellor Malave – That’s one way of looking at it. Let me just back up for a moment on the collective bargaining. First of all it’s $73 million--that represents the projected ongoing costs. Like you said, if lightning strikes and there is an agreement for ’06 starting July 1 of ’05, that’s when it begins. If there is a contract, there’s a retroactive payment that has to be made that’s not part of this budget, it will come through a separate appropriation. But as you can tell from my report earlier on how the State held back $22.2 million, the way it works is the Legislature adopts a budget, the Controller certifies the budget, but the State Budget Division has reins on the spending, and so they make available what we can spend. So what they would do is they make an appropriation available less $73.3 million, so it’s in the overall appropriation but we can’t touch it. Ultimately when there’s an agreement the money then gets funneled into our system. But to your basic point about were it not for the collective bargaining component what would drive the State Aid you’re absolutely right, it would be zero. Right now the way to look at it is the State is financing two-thirds of the cost of collective bargaining with State Aid and the rest of it with tuition dollars, and if it wasn’t for the collective bargaining you would be looking at a net reduction in State support, and whatever we were going to get for mandatory costs, we would be eating it in the form of tuition. / Professor Levine – So we would have a net cut of $16.6 million. For those of you who go to Albany, and I will hope to be there too, please make that point loud and clear. / Chair O’Malley – Get us a contract. / Vice Chancellor Malave –I know the Chancellor had mentioned about the constraints and who does contracts and the like. The fact of the matter is that it is the State and the City of New York that determine what the economic packages are, not CUNY. Part of the complication at the City of New York is in the community colleges they cost it out for the community college employees. The cost associated with a 5% contract for the community colleges, we now have a budget proposal on the State side that is based on the SUNY 9.25%, and somewhere in the middle or on one extreme, that’s how it’s going to end. But that’s how it works. We don’t decide these things. Not the economic packages, anyway. / Chair O’Malley – Better than 1.5%.

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – I’m interested in the impact of this budget on our students, in particular the Governor’s apparent proposal to penalize students who don’t finish in four years. Is that a penalty? I’m thinking of many of our students who leave CUNY after 2 years in order to pursue professional schools in disciplines that CUNY doesn’t even offer who must leave if they’re going to pursue their dream and therefore never will finish in 4 years. Other students for personal reasons can’t do it because they have family obligations. Will they be penalized under the Governor’s proposal? / Vice Chancellor Malave – First of all, the word "penalized" for students who don’t finish, I’m not even sure you can say that. I just don’t know where you get that. / Professor Kaplowitz – It’s the colleges that will be penalized. / Professor Philipp – The Governor has been on this case. So how does this work? / Vice Chancellor Malave – All that the Governor has in his budget is a proposal to provide performance-based Bundy Aid. It’s a capitation aid. If you graduate in a four-year period, the State will provide you a bounty of $500 per FTE, per graduate. The college gets that, the institution gets that. No one is penalized for not graduating in four years. / Professor Philipp – Not even the TAP. / Vice Chancellor Malave – No, not even the TAP. The TAP award is simply you get 50% of it now and 50% when you graduate, and that could be 8 years. There’s no tie of TAP to a four-year…/ Professor Philipp – And if you never graduate because you left for a professional school that CUNY doesn’t offer, because some professional schools take students after two years of college, and in my department it’s a large proportion of my students. / Vice Chancellor Malave – People make choices all the time about where they want to study. / Chair O’Malley – But you could get TAP at the professional school. / Vice Chancellor Malave – I don’t think anyone is penalized here. I think people have incentives in front of them they can choose to exercise but it’s not the same thing as penalizing and I just wouldn’t use that word. They’re not being penalized. If I choose to graduate in 6 years because I have a job obligation and whatever nobody’s penalizing me in this budget. This budget doesn’t change any of that. I choose to graduate in 6 years, that’s my choice. / Professor Philipp – But then the students or the colleges don’t get these performance awards as it was pointed out to me on page 7. / Vice Chancellor Malave – $500 per graduate. This is not real money!

Syd Lefkoe (Queens College) – I’m sorry, I may be having the same problem Manfred is and I would be grateful if you explained it to me. As I see it, and I may be completely wrong, there are the two issues: there’s the one that really essentially encourages the University to select its students based on the students who will complete in four years because there’s a sizable bounty per head, which I think is wrong, but that’s another story. I know a lot of us who have been in the University for a long time came to the University and stayed out of a commitment to the non-traditional student, who many of us see the University would be encouraged and maybe even financially forced to back of on the commitment to them. / Vice Chancellor Malave – I think that’s a stretch to go from a program that offers incentives for students to graduate on time to the University picking and saying no to the vast majority of the student body at CUNY and in New York. It isn’t as though the people of the City of New York who choose to go to school and graduate and have the life challenges before them are going to somehow choose not to go to school anymore, and we’re not going to say you’re not welcome. What it will do in some way, because this is based on a program at Brooklyn College and at Fredonia, is in some respects push the systems to make the courses available to the students; and it asserts that one big reason students aren’t graduating on time is that we don’t have the right number of courses available. Our response is, students pay tuition and there should be a measure of State support to enable the University to have the resources to make those courses available to students if they have the ability to graduate on time. But I don’t think we’re going to have as a result of this and as a result of the fact that Brooklyn College may get another $25,000 if they change their graduation rate from 45% to 51% because they just figured out how to get a few more students to graduate on time, that that’s going to change any of the incentives in the system. I just don’t see it at all. / Syd Lefkoe –I have a problem also with the phraseology of on time. / Vice Chancellor Malave – We all do. I don’t think there’s any question about it. Let me just play the devil’s advocate for a moment. I think there are also those who argue that there’s a cost for not completing your degree as quickly as possible, if you want to say on time for 4 years, and there’s a cost to that and the system should be doing everything they possibly can to make it so that those students who can, get through the system on time, because there’s a cost for not completing a degree and moving on to graduate school and going on to work. There’s a real cost and sometimes we tend to perhaps put it aside over here and say the students have to work, they have to do that, they’re going to take 6 years, 7 years, but it’s also true that I think it’s in the larger interest, both social and economic, for students to complete their degree as quickly as possible and move on. All you have here are incentives that the Governor is tossing around, minor incentives, to encourage that. That’s all it is. / Professor Lefkoe – The other group Manfred was talking about, the student who loses money because he or she starts at CUNY and then has to leave and go to another school, say the student leaves and goes to another school out of state or goes to another school and is part-time and maybe doesn’t come up on the radar for the performance award for the remaining one half for the TAP, then that student again has lost, although that student is doing exactly what he or she planned to do and is going on in being successful.

Professor Brugnola (John Jay College) –I want to make one comment however about this encouragement to finish in four years. I have a student in my class who I spoke to today. She is not a student that I advise. She is taking seven classes this semester. She has a B- average; she’s taking seven classes because she wants to finish on time. That’s just a comment. On page 7 I am still at a loss to understand here if students are going to get half of their TAP award then they’re going to take out student loans then at the end of their program it they finish on time they’re going to get the other half which they will actually have paid for because somehow we’re going to be able to get the interest that the Feds would have gotten for the loan? This makes no sense to me at all. Could you unpack it a little bit, please? / Vice Chancellor Malave – This is simply a way of reducing the obligations of the State. They know what our attrition rates are, they know what our graduation rates are, they know if they construct a system that defers a payment to graduation, as opposed to upfront, and forces students to borrow that, knowing what the attrition rates are in the system, they save that money. This is just a cost saving proposal to the State of New York. That’s all it is. There are those who will actually make it work. If, in the incredibly unlikely event that this thing passes, they will enter, they’ll get half of their award, they will finance the rest of it through borrowing or whatever and they’ll get their nice little bounty at the end pursant to graduation so they can finance their graduate studies, but fundamentally, at the end of the day, there’s an effort by the State to save the dollars upfront knowing what the graduation rates are going to be, and they’ll factor in in the year 2012 exactly what they’re going to need to pay back the students. In the meantime they would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars annually. / Professor Brugnola – I can understand that but what I fail to understand is how the Legislature will be convinced that the...tape turned over… Vice Chancellor Malave –for students who have exhausted their eligibility on the federal side. / Professor Kaplowitz – Can I make a point of information? The University is not supporting the proposals. / Vice Chancellor Malave – Right. / Professor Kaplowitz – These are proposals by the Governor and we are going to make a best attempt to get the Legislature to not support this. The University does not support these proposals, the faculty doesn’t, the Chancellery doesn’t, even Ernesto, and he’s just explaining it, he’s not supporting it at all. / Professor Brugnola – Thank you, Ernesto.

Professor Crain (Psychology, City College) – The issue of the money sounds small. We were told about the PACT program that there’s a pot of money and that the privates will get some of that money. They obviously can out-compete us in terms of four year graduation rates taking those rich kids, so the distribution of money, however small, is moving away from us to them. We’ve been talking about this this evening, Barbara Moore and I were talking, about how we often advise students to slow down. Pedagogically there are issues that I think are worth bringing up here. Psychologically there’s a whole principle that spaced learning is better than mass learning especially our students who need time to move forward. So it’s an issue that has concerned us in many ways to protect the students’ ability to move at a reasonable pace and not have the money moved forward. It seems small because they’re starting with a small amount of money. / Vice Chancellor Malave – I understand perfectly what you’re saying. It goes back to 1981 when I was asked as a student leader the first time that the State came up with proposals for program pursuit requirements and I remember the Reporter from Channel 5 coming over to interview me at the time and of course he was equating fast with good. So I know the arguments, but having said all of that it doesn’t shock us that this Governor, this group year after year would come up with what they define to be performance-driven initiatives to complete graduation rates. And every year there’s a slightly different initiative. This is the latest version. This one, on the other hand, they can point to Brooklyn College as a model, which may actually generate some further interest. What should be valued is graduation and successful completion of your coursework whatever that is, and it’s our challenge to come up with alternative proposals that proffer that instead of the strict two or four years. Our President from Hostos says stop calling us two-year colleges, and we always made that mistake of calling them two-year colleges as opposed to community colleges. We need to come up with alternatives that say this is what you value, this is what’s important, and this is what you should know, and I look forward to that. But the fact of the matter is this one has developed some interest around it and we just need to package it in a way that’s consistent with our values. / Professor Crain – And that’s what we want you to do. This is a slighter thing, a ranking in US News and World Report also includes that four-year graduation, and so our college is nuts about it, City College. Our President and Provost get up and rail about it, how we have to improve our four-year graduation rate. It’s not a minor philosophical debate going on. Faculty try to defend the students going a little slower.

Professor Pecorino (Queensborough Community College) – Thank you for opposing it, so I guess we’re just discussing the many reasons why. This whole thing about performance; it’s been the lack of performance on the part of the State Legislature and the City in terms of funding public higher education that has led to the decrease in the support system needed by our students to have reasonable completion rates, however you measure that. So we might shift the discourse to whose performance is it anyway that accounts for this failure to move at a certain rate of speed. And as far as the $500 whatever you want to call it, well, 500 more lines to provide the courses that students need to graduate when they need them would probably be a better remedy for whatever lack of acceleration we have in our performance graduation rate than $500 per student who completes in whatever time. But as far as being penalized, I think what gets penalized here, if it’s not the individual student, is public higher education, because more of those bounty dollars are going to go to the private schools and to the public higher education institutions, and it just continues that pattern in another form. My question is, who thought this up and what was the real thinking behind this? Is it a crass indifference to the actual social-economic order of the students in higher education? What is it that’s behind that, because it can’t be anything that has any modicum of knowledge of actually what’s going on amongst our student bodies? So what’s behind it? / Chair O’Malley – CICU. / Vice Chancellor Malave – I can’t get into the heads of the Governor’s Office. Year after year when I say that this is consistent with their approach over the years, whether it’s TAP, performance base, they’re fixated with this concept of performance and they use a standard measure that is used around the country, whether it’s four years or six years. The fact of the matter is, whether we like it or not, it’s in the US News and World Report, it’s in the rankings, it’s not as though it doesn’t exist, this four year measure. It’s out there and so people get measured by it. And for those who are interested in advancing performance, you’re not going to pick the position in the middle, you’re going to pick the four year rate, and this Governor wants to be viewed as advancing that completion and pushing the system along. That’s where it comes from, and it’s just simply that they had to do something and I guess at the end of the day it was time to do something; they did the TAP year after year and now it was time to cook up a new program and they looked to Brooklyn College to find it which of course will make this thing particularly interesting. It is based on a program that’s pushed at one of our schools and at Fredonia, where I think it’s called Fredonia Fall because I think their fall students at Fredonia have signed up. But there are 150 students at Brooklyn College as a matter of fact, it’s called the TOCA Program and I don’t know what it stands for, and apparently they have 150 students and apparently 75 of them completed a four-year degree, and they entered into agreements that the students say they’re going to meet their end of the obligation. Apparently half have made it or will have made it in four years and that’s roughly a 50% graduation rate in contrast to the 45% graduation rate for students who are not participating, so maybe there’s something to be said. If nothing else it sort of focuses on the need to make the courses available when the students need them on time, especially if you walk through the halls of schools on Friday it’s like those students don’t study on Friday, but that’s part of the challenge of getting students to graduate; CUNY, as managers, making it a student friendly environment as opposed to only taking that course at 2 o’clock on what day and not when the students need it, and I think if we work on that we’ll probably find a few more students will actually complete their degrees when they would like to complete their degrees, as opposed to when whoever’s doing the registration grid would like to put the courses up. But maybe it would be permit and things like that that actually would encourage courses from around the system so that if a course isn’t available here they can take the course somewhere else via permit, and that in and of itself would allow students to complete their degree whenever they think it’s appropriate for them, not whenever us managers and faculty want to teach.

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – Does the Governor think that people when they graduate do not graduate in four years if they’re failing their courses en route, that they’re taking a full load en route and just failing courses and therefore taking longer, or does he fail to realize that people are just taking a smaller load to make it manageable to meet their family demands and therefore take longer? / Vice Chancellor Malave – I think they recognize all those things and more. You don’t have to not acknowledge all of those factors to proffer an initiative that advances those things that you value. That’s what they value, what they define to be graduation rates in two and four years, and they’re going to come up with something that advances that. That doesn’t mean that all those other things are irrelevant, not true, but they want to encourage students and the systems to get on with it. There could be some belief that the systems need some jarring and that the students need some incentives that say you meet your end of the bargain, and clearly it’s a response to the traditional student body, but that’s what they are targeting as their constituencies. / Professor Philipp – The second question is is there any recognition of the role that CUNY plays in graduation rates of the privates, and what I mean is that many students in classes that are expensive to run, small laboratory sessions, we’re increasingly seeing students on permit from private colleges. I’m a department Chair and I see that because I have to approve each and every one of them because SIMS does not know that they’ve had the prerequisites, so they all have to come to me personally. Now we are therefore helping our private competition. It’s all my fault, I could deny them the permission. I’m in a position to do that, but I don’t do that. And so we’re helping our private competitors maintain good graduation rates and at the same time the students are saving some money. It seems to me that they’re being encouraged to come because the numbers are significant and increasing and they know where to go, and either it’s word of mouth at the other private colleges; these are sometimes the prestigious ones, Columbia etc., not just the Monroes of the world. And so there should be I think some recognition of our value to systems to the Columbias of the world. / Vice Chancellor Malave – We should receive some more data on that other than the anecdotal. / Professor Philipp – That’s what I’m saying, we need the data. All I know is my own department and there it’s a significant factor.

Chair O’Malley – I think it’s about time to go home. I have to say this -- research is essential to the life of the University. We do need people signing up for the PSC CUNY Awards, the chairing, these different disciplines; I’ll put it out on the listserv. And do take a look at this because it has stuff on restructuring faculty development and so on. See you next month.