MINUTES OF THE THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTEENTH PLENARY SESSION

OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

January 31, 2006

The meeting was called to order by UFS Chair O’Malley at 6:10 p.m. in Room 9205/6/7 at the Graduate School and University Center. 88 voting members of 116 were present.

Baruch: Present – Hill, Martell, Pollard, and Vora. Absent – Freedman, Myers, and Smith. Vacancies – 2. BMCC: Present – Friedman, Martin, Rani, and Roy. Absent – Agwu, Belknap, and Price. Bronx CC: Present –Skinner, and Ismail. Absent -- Alozie, Asimakopoulos, and Durante. Brooklyn: Present – Bell, Jacobson, Morawski, Rodman, Shapiro, and Tobey. Absent – Antoniello, Bloomfield, Cunningham, Viscusi, and Wills. CCNY: Present – Crain, Daglish, Khalil, Lascar, and Sank. Absent – Habib and Leonard. Vacancies – 2. CSI: Present – Cooper, Farkouh, Klibaner, Levine, Petratos, Yousef. CUNY Law School: Present – McArdle. Absent – Andrews. Vacancies – 1. Graduate School: Present – Baumrin, Orenstein, and Alternate Burke. Absent – King, Lerner, and Nolan. Vacancy – 1. Hostos CC: Present – August, Czarnocha, and Falcon. Vacancies - 2. Hunter: Present – Doyle, Finder, Kaye, and Matthews. Absent – Friedman, Guzzetta, Krishnamachari, McCormick, Sherrill, and Wimberly. Vacancies – 1. John Jay: Present – Brugnola, Crossman, Kaplowitz, Kubic, and Soto-Fernandez. Absent – Caldwell, and Romero. Kingsborough CC: Present – Barnhart, Farrell, Galvin, Hume, O’Malley, and Ruoff. LaGuardia CC: Present – Beaky, Davidson, Lerman, Mettler, Rushing, Shean, and Alternate Forrester. Lehman: Present – Aronowitz, Jervis, Kolb, Mineka, Philipp, and Wilder. Absent – Montero. Medgar Evers: Present – Daly, Hastick and Stewart. Absent – Simmons NYCCT: Present – Cermele, Hounion, Karthikeyan and Alternates Bakewicz, and Matloff. Absent – Dreyer, Horelick, and Richardson. Queens: Present – Bird, Casco, Gonzalez, Moore, Savage, and Zevin. Absent – Brody, Habib, and Tse. Vacancies – 2. Queensborough CC: Present – Barbanel, Jacobowitz, Pecorino, and Alternates Burleson and Dahbany-Miraglia. Absent – Hest and Weiss. Vacancies – 1. York: Present -- Divale, Frank, Lewis, Rosenthal and Alternate Brugna.

Chancellor Goldstein, Vice Chancellor Malave, Vice Chancellor Schaffer, and Executive Assistant Cura attended. Syd Lefkoe (Queens) attended.

Governance Leaders present: Anderson (BMCC), Baumrin (GSUC), Burke (GSUC), Cooper (CSI), Kaplowitz (John Jay), Levine (CSI), Martell (Baruch), Mettler (LaGuardia), Pecorino (QCC), Savage (Queens), and Tronto (Hunter). Parliamentarian Andrea McArdle, Executive Director Phipps, Administrative Assistant Pasela, and Secretary Blanchard were also present.

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

II. Approval of the Minutes of December, 2005: The Minutes were adopted as proposed.

[The order of business was modified. It is recorded as stated on the agenda for consistency.]

III. Old Business:

A. Letter of Intent for new BA/BA Degree in Communication and Culture: Professor Barnhart, Chair of the UFS Academic Policy Committee proposed a resolution to reject the Letter of Intent. The following resolution was adopted 66-2-4. Full account of the debate may be read in the Reports and Deliberations Section.

Resolution on the Proposed Online BA in Communication and Culture

Whereas, the Bylaws of the City University of New York, the Charter of the University Faculty Senate, and the recent decision by the Court of Appeals of the State of New York in the Perez case, recognize the governance function of the University Faculty Senate to authorize and oversee university-wide academic programs, and

Whereas, the Central Administration of CUNY on its own initiative and without UFS approval plans to present to the Board of Trustees for approval in February an online baccalaureate in "Communication and Culture" for degree completers based on general education and elective courses taught in the CUNY colleges to be administered through the School of Professional Studies -- an entity created to provide professional education in individual courses and credit certificates, and

Whereas, during the debate when the School of Professional Studies was being created, the Chancellor assured the UFS that no undergraduate degrees would be offered by the proposed School, and

Whereas, no appropriate curricular process or committee for undergraduate education exists in the School of Professional Studies,

Therefore, Be It Resolved, that the University Faculty Senate rejects the Letter of Intent for the online Baccalaureate in Communication and Culture.

IV. Reports: (Recorded in Reports & Deliberations)
A. Chair.
B. Chancellor Goldstein.

C. Vice Chancellor Rick Schaffer on the Perez decision.

D. Vice Chancellor for Budge Ernesto Malave on the NY State Budget.
E. Representatives to Board of Trustee Committees (written)

V. New Business: A quorum was no longer present and the meeting was adjourned at 8:45 p.m.

Respectfully submitted,

Bill Phipps
Executive Director

REPORTS AND DELIBERATIONS OF

THE THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTEENTH PLENARY

SESSION OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

January 31, 2006

III. Reports:

A. Chair, Susan O’Malley: I thought the way we would start is that Michael Barnhart, chair of the Academic Policy Committee would read the resolution. Now it has been amended in committee in two places. He will indicate the changes, then we will have discussion, and we will see what happens.

Professor Michael Barnhart (History, Philosophy & Political Science, Kingsborough Community College) - Now, the resolution that now has been jointly sponsored by the Executive Committee and the Academic Policy Committee reads more or less as it’s in your packets. You want me to read the whole thing? / Chair O’Malley – I think so and indicate the changes. / Professor Barnhart – All right, I’ll indicate the changes as I go along. The changes are not that extensive. [see resolution printed in the Minute section, page 2.] / Chair O’Malley – I have a second. I could preface discussion by saying that the School of Professional Studies governing board did meet last Wednesday, and it voted to approve the proposal. I voted against it as other people voted for it. It will go through CAPR next week, and it will go through the board in February. Also, what we tried to do in the Academic Policy Committee was to have the resolution address process rather than substance because the Committee felt it would like to look at the degree in more depth and write a report. But because of the pressure of time, this resolution was done by the Executive Committee. It also follows the FGL resolution saying that any central academic proposal must be approved or overseen by the University Faculty Senate.

Professor William Divale (Social Sciences Department, York College) – Up to the point here where it said that the Chancellor had assured the UFS that no undergraduate degrees would be offered…The Vice Chancellor told me that the writing here says that there would be no degree that is currently offered at another CUNY college. Is that the case? / Chair O’Malley – In order to get the UFS to agree he stated that there would be no undergraduate degrees given, only masters degrees and perhaps a PhD. I do have that in writing and at the governing board we have discussed that. The answer is that this is now, and that was then. That’s the Chancellor’s answer. Thank you.

Professor Anne Friedman (Developmental Skills, BMCC) – I support this resolution as amended from the Academic Policy Committee and I will just add to re-emphasize what Susan just said. I was at some of those discussions of the School of Professional Studies when the Board committee on Faculty Staff and Administration was discussing, it and Louise Mirrer was there at the time, the Chancellor was there at the time, and I think that hindsight is 20-20 but obviously we had a verbal pledge from the Chancellor that the School of Professional Studies would not offer undergraduate degrees but we did not get that in writing in the resolution at the time. That was a mistake but that’s all in the past. I would support this and I think that I would be very pleased to see this come forth. It’s neat, it’s clean, and let’s do it. / Chair O’Malley – Again, if people want to speak against this resolution, that is fine too. We want a full discussion. Why don’t you come up?

Professor Dennis Bakewicz (Physical and Biological Sciences, NYCCT) – I’m just wondering with all the information about the degree that we received, did we get anything of a budgetary nature on it? Are they willing to tell us how much this will cost in terms of expenditure for students and how that would compare not with traditional degrees but with other degrees of the same kind that are being offered elsewhere? / Chair O’Malley – I think the budget is extremely sketchy. It is in the final proposal. I will show it to you right now and give it back to me after you peruse it. I did ask the governing board how they got these figures, but I am amazed at how sketchy this budget is. Take a look and then get back to me before the evening is out. / Professor Bakewicz – Just a follow-up. Do they have anything of a comparative nature or is this kind of degree too new? Is there kind of a national benchmark in terms of expenditure for students to which we can compare? / Chair O’Malley – They did not do that. [Reading from the budget] All right, faculty. Expenditures 2006-07. New resources - $441,392. This will go up in 2010-11 to $2,016,379. That is expenditures for faculty, new resources. Equipment, new resources $11,752 for ‘06-07. And then there is the category called “Other” – $1,569,796. Now “other” means new resources…none of this makes sense. Give it to Al and then to Dennis. And maybe they could take a look at it.

Professor Sandi Cooper (History Department, College of Staten Island) – On the matter of the proposal for the degree, both its content and procedure - in every other case when a degree is proposed on any campus, it’s my understanding because I went through this, that it is circulated to interested parties on every other campus before the letter of intent is drawn up in order to demonstrate, to discover overlap and similar problems. As far as I can tell, nothing of that was done by them. The Executive Committee, Chair circulated this proposal to some chair people and a few of us in colleges where majors are given. And the responses I have read (and we have to get permission to circulate) indicate two things: One, considerable overlap in some cases, and second, considerable underachievement intellectually. That is, that the degree proposed does not match standards for the similar degrees in a number of other institutions. This would be enough. This would have been enough to kill, for example, the Masters in History that I shepherded about five years ago on my campus. It would have absolutely been the kiss of death. But in this case, it seems to be “I am the resurrection” and it doesn’t matter. There is something very curious about the unique special treatment in this case. / Chair O’Malley – The responses I have are from Tim Gura at Brooklyn College, from Rick Maxwell at Queens College, and Professor Miller from College of Staten Island. I thought I had sent them out. Maybe I did just to a small group. I certainly sent them out to the governing board and they were quite concerned with these. What happens is that the Office of Academic Affairs sends a letter or intent to all the Provosts and they are supposed to then get back and say if there is overlap. What is curious is that they rarely do. They rarely respond. We had got two responses, one from Brooklyn College and one from John Jay. No one else has responded. But then the time is not yet up.

Professor William Divale (Social Sciences Department, York College) – I am opposed to this resolution. I’ve been involved in the online degree right from the beginning. I’m on the advisory committee that dealt with the application part. I think academically this degree is sound, and it was only faculty that were involved in the development of the courses and some of the syllabi I think this is fine. I agree with most of you that this thing was rammed down our throats, but I think that was done to get it done. We really need, CUNY needs, to have an online degree program. And if that doesn’t have the time, it’s because of that. And I don’t like the idea of it being in the School of Professional Studies. The Grad Center were first offered this and they didn’t want it for the CUNY Baccalaureate program. And the other thing is that while this thing was rammed down our throats by the administration not in terms of content but in terms of getting it done, the administration of it is going to have to fall to full-time faculty because administrators cannot teach. They cannot maintain a degree and they’ve been told ninety times that this cannot be done with adjuncts. So I think the governance committee is going to have a curriculum committee. All the governance committees of the degree program that are at local colleges are going to have to be created here and that of CUNY faculty and full-time faculty. So we’re going to get this thing back under our control, and it can be changed but we really should not miss this opportunity to get an online degree program. We are so behind on that. / Chair O’Malley – I’m going to have the discussion for five more minutes, and then we have a quorum and then we vote it up or down.

Professor Michael Barnhart (History, Philosophy & Political Science, Kingsborough Community College) – I wanted to respond to Bill. I also wanted to point something out. He helped me a great deal in this actually but the first thing I would like to say is that expediency is a poor excuse for ramming this down our throats, and I also would like to point out that this resolution speaks to the issue of procedure and specifically not that the full-time faculty are involved in any in this but whether the governance body of the University Faculty Senate is adequately consulted, adequately involved in the decision-making process. What the resolution is saying is that we have not been and that is the major fault that we find in it as per this resolution. What we wanted to do with this was to separate what we thought were importantly different issues - one being the issue of how university-wide things get approved in this university and the manner in which that it is done such that it bypasses any kind of shared governance. And the second issues was, the more narrow, more pedagogical issue of the actual program itself and we wanted to withhold our fire on that until we had given it due consideration. So I think this is very important to keep in mind as we vote on this resolution. It’s not necessarily that it’s online education. It’s not necessarily even about this proposal. It’s about the way things are done and particularly the way this was done.

Professor Alfred Levine (Engineering Science and Physics, College of Staten Island) – I’m Chair of the Budget Advisory committee of the UFS. This budget is incomprehensible. The most that I can understand is that in the year 2006-07, state money would be used, the $71,197. That’s about the only hard number I can get out of this. I do want to point out that on June 4, 2003, as well as on other occasions, the Chancellor stated that the School of Professional Studies and I’m going to quote, “I would define this operating unit as off balance-sheet or off-budget. It needs to be self-sustaining.” This was the commitment in describing the School of Professional Studies. This document however states, “The University is prepared to provide the necessary start-up capital to support the development of the virtual campus. It is anticipated that within three years the program will be financed primarily through tuition revenue.” It no longer contains the pledge that it shall be self-sufficient. Furthermore, with respect to the budget, in my view the most difficult part in estimating the budget is the cost of maintaining the site, the computer site twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In this proposed budget, there is no estimate of the cost of maintaining that site. If there is, I can’t find it. That number could be very, very high.

Professor Waldaba Stewart (Social and Behavioral Sciences, Medgar Evers College) – I bring to you a report of a meeting of the Faculty Senate of Medgar Evers College, where we discussed at length this online degree proposal and the potential future impact on Medgar Evers College. When we look at the purported target population for this online degree, this is exactly the population we are seeking to attract using very innovative techniques right now. At Medgar Evers, there are professors that are completely online right now. There are professors experimenting with what we call the “hybrid” approach to online degrees all for the same agenda. They are talking about having a seven-day program so that we can reach all of those who for whatever reason are not able to come under normal circumstances. Therefore, because of this we have unanimously voted against this online degree initiative and we urge this body to do likewise. Thank you. / Chair O’Malley – I think degrees belong at the colleges. Are you willing to call the question? Seconds. All in favor? The question has been called.. Okay, we need to read the resolution again? You have seen the changes that Michael indicated. Let’s try it this way, how many people are voting against the resolution? Raise your hands. Okay two. But then also abstentions. How many abstain? Four? We’ll do the computations and let you know. It has to be an absolute majority, right?

Because we have such a long agenda, I think we should invite the Chancellor come in and get going. I present to you Chancellor Goldstein. Take it away.

B. Chancellor Goldstein: Did any of you see Saul Kripke talk last week? Here it is, you represent the faculty but you don’t come in to see Saul Kripke, one of the greatest philosophers that ever walked this earth? Well, I told a story there which I’m not sure is apocryphal enough. When I did speak to Saul about it, he indicated in his words, that it is all meshugeh. I don’t know if that translates well. You have a full agenda so I am going to get through my remarks very briefly. I’m not going to spend much of any time on the budget because Ernesto Malave is going to be here and he will take you through it. Rick Schaffer is going to talk about the Perez decision, so let me just fill in some blanks. The Governor has recommended a budget. I would say in general, this is probably the strongest position that the university has had in my experience getting out of the gate. We still have some problems on a data level, which I think with our legislative agenda should have a high likelihood of being remediated and given us the kind of level of support that we need. We start with a real substantial increase in our budget, which is rare for the university. We typically start at a position of great weakness relative to the resources that are provided for the year before. So I’ll let Ernesto go through that. I did testify yesterday. I was at the Mayor’s State of the City and in both cases, CUNY was well positioned and held in some high esteem. So I’m hoping at the end of this process that we will have the kinds of resources that will allow us to fully support that part of the master plan that the Compact was developed to largely serve as the vehicle for delivering those dollars. We will see. But at this particular point, I feel a great sense of optimism. It’s going to be a very busy spring. Let me not jump that far ahead. We have three presidential reviews that obviously I will be very much involved in – at BMCC with President Perez, at Hunter College with President Raab, and CCNY with Professor Williams. So that starts to take place this weekend – Gregory Williams. And then that will proceed. We have a number of positions that we will be seeking to fill through advertisements and search committees – the Dean of the Honors College – we have an interim in that position right now. We will be searching for someone to head up the Black Male Initiative. We have a panel of distinguished visitors who will help us make some recommendations with respect to doctoral education in the sciences, which I have some very strong feelings about and have shared those ideas with you. I want to attract the best doctoral students that we can to this university and give them a competitive financial package that often serves as the determinant in whether we can get the kind of people that we want and to empower our campuses with degree-granting authority, where so much of the work takes place in the sciences, where most of the lab work takes place. The consortial model is obviously the model that we will stand on. That is the genius of, I would characterize, the way we do doctoral education. Empowering campuses, creating financial incentives by understanding how we allocate students and accept students, I think, will be critically important as we go forward. I did spend part of the day today at the Structural Biology Center and if for those of you are scientists (I am looking around the room) and if you have an interest in science, this to me is the model that higher education is following today in the United States today and CUNY has been right at the forefront in developing that model. Our extraordinarily sophisticated equipment and professors and graduate students come from the Rockefeller University, Columbia, NYU, Yeshiva University, CUNY, Stony Brook and other campuses of the State University of New York – if you have a great facility and great people working together, students are going to come, faculty are going to come together. Some of the faculty that I met today really are just so deeply impressive women and men and for those of you who haven’t seen it, I can arrange it if you’d like to, through the Executive Director and the President, for some visits because it really is eye-opening and it gives you a sense of what can be done if you start thinking a little more collaboratively and if you start breaking boundaries, rigid boundaries that separate institutions. It’s an old model that we are really trying to work on here at the university, and it would just change the culture of how people relate to their own institutions that enable you to do the kind of work that we are just very capable of. So, I‘m going to stop here. I have a dozen other items that I can talk about but I know that you love the inquisition. And I enjoy it as well. Of course, I do.

Professor Lawrence Rushing (Social Science Department, LaGuardia Community College) – Dean Shepherd was here in December to discuss the journalism school and there is a drastic under-representation of minorities in journalism in United States, as you probably know. They make up 31% of the population but they make up 13% of journalists in the United States. It’s because of that reason the American Society of Newspaper Editors have as their goal that the number of minority journalists will equal the proportion of the population by 2025. As it’s going now, they say, they are not going to meet that goal. So, what I would like to ask you is if you will endorse making increasing the amount of minority journalists in the United States a major goal? That’s number one, and number two is if you will endorse the goal of the American Society of Newspaper Editors to achieve parity in the United States as a goal for the journalism school? / Chancellor Goldstein – I always restrict or avoid an answer that would pin me into a particular number or a particular value. Let me just answer your question very directly by saying when I conceived this school, the Graduate School of Journalism, it was one of three operating units that I wanted to do when I came here. This is the third. It was conceived with the understanding that there are segments of our population, largely people of color, who have not been represented in graduate schools of journalism for one major reason. There are no scholarships that are typically given for graduate work in journalism and the tuition is prohibitively high. When I recruited Dean Shepard to be the Dean, I asked him to do two things. One was to aim high and if he was really not prepared to develop a really distinguished school of journalism, I was not interested in his appointment. And number two; we have to deal with people of color who are (and I agree with you, Professor Rushing) well under-represented in newsrooms, as editors, as writers, as reporters and Steve is very much on target. When we received a $4 million dollar from the Sulzberger family in honor of Punch Sulzberger by his three sisters, we and Columbia University were both given $4 million. They gave $8 million and the money was largely for scholarships, and Steve is going to try and use those dollars to encourage people who typically have not had access to schools of journalism largely because of price and not having familiarity. So I am with you. I think it’s important to try to break this mold and in the advisory group that we put together are very distinguished journalists like David Weston, like Michael Winkler, who heads the Bloomberg organization. David Weston is head of ABC News. People like those have said to me directly; “Help us attract people of color because we just don’t have them in the numbers that we want in our newsrooms and elsewhere.” And hopefully, our school will be a vehicle to help to move them along. / Chair O’Malley – I would like to also say Glenn Lewis is on the Admissions Committee, and we will go after him to make sure that there are enough people of color.

Professor Beth Rosenthal (Social Sciences Department, York College and The Graduate Center) – I am at CUNY since ’94 and it was always my understanding along with that of my colleagues that all the senior colleges have the same workload. And I’ve recently come to learn that that is not the case. There are only some of us who have that workload, four-three, and others have a lower workload. Could you address that? It doesn’t seem like very much equity in having differential workloads for different schools. / Chancellor Goldstein – The workload is determined by the collective bargaining agreement that the university has with the PSC. It stipulates a workload for senior colleges and it stipulates a workload for community colleges and then we have this layer in between, comprehensive colleges that give those baccalaureate and associate degrees where the workload is somewhat higher. The reason why workloads vary is not so much that they deviate from the contract, but that there are certain colleges that have the capacity to release faculty more than others, in part because of the financial base that they are perched upon. In addition, there are campuses that have the ability to attract more dollars and sponsored programs, and faculty use those dollars to release themselves. Other than that, the workload is comparable and presidents release people administratively for other kinds of things and it depends on what the resources are and what the needs are of individual campuses. / Professor Rosenthal – But let me just follow up with – at York, there’s a four-three and that is what we all have. I’ve also, by the way, learned that reassigned time for chair varies by campus too, and that’s news to most of us. But let me leave that aside for a moment. In a school like York, where it is more difficult to get external funding partly because of the workload, to leave a workload in place further jeopardizes people’s ability to get that funding and we’re just further in an inequitable position, and so I’m just bringing that out maybe for your consideration to think of ways to make it more equitable. / Chancellor Goldstein – The best way is to have a university better funded than we are so that we can reduce workload across the system and hopefully all of us will live to see that happen some day, and it’s a good thing to aspire to. But it’s not a perfect system, and I don’t like to strong-arm presidents to behave in a particular way. We hire leaders to make judgments about how they distribute resources and if a president or their designee makes a determination based upon the needs of the campus to release people for reasons they themselves know, and I am not aware of, they have to be given that kind of discretion. So I wish it were better but perhaps at some point if we get more resources, we can get that workload down.

Professor Stefan Baumrin (Philosophy Department, GSUC) - I have detected a level of nervousness university-wide, particularly in senior colleges, on the question of retention of laboratory science in several senior colleges in view of the possibility of some movement toward reorganization of the way laboratory sciences are structured. Now, I would like because of my own background as a failed chemist, I would like some assurance that the laboratory baccalaureate programs will be preserved robustly at the senior colleges. / Chancellor Goldstein – Let me answer that very directly. They have to be preserved at all the colleges. We can’t expect to have baccalaureate institutions granting degrees in sciences without adequate laboratories to do that. So, I cannot imagine how anybody would infer from what we’ve been looking at that that would be the end result.

Professor Manfred Philipp (Chemistry Department, Lehman College) – I was interested in your presentation in terms of what I didn’t hear. So I thought I’d ask about it – the capital campaign. How’s it going? How is the funding going? The University depends on a cash flow. OTPS is essential for Chemistry departments to function and my department’s been cut by half recently. So it’s an important question? How’s the money situation? / Chancellor Goldstein – The campaign is going splendidly. In fact, I probably will announce a higher target than we have. Our target now is $1.2 billion. It’ll probably be raised to $1.4 billion. We’ve raised about $700 million so far since it was announced 15-16 months ago. So, I think it’s going really well and some campuses better than others obviously because of the nature of those campuses.

Professor Philip Pecorino (Social Sciences Department, Queensborough Community College) - You’ve said you are optimistic about the Compact. The specific question deals with this. You’ve said many times that if all parties in the Compact had not agreed to the terms that you have proposed, there wasn’t a Compact. / Chancellor Goldstein - Not as the way we conceived the Compact. / Professor Philip Pecorino - We have a tuition request, modest as it may be. If the legislature (this is an election year) decides not to support a tuition increase and supports financing the tuition increase by operating aid, I’m not going to object to that obviously. The whole point was to create self-leveraging points. / Professor Philip Pecorino - So do you plan to return to the math classroom soon? / Chancellor Goldstein – I would like to return, yes, I will. Do you want me to teach at Queensborough? / Professor Philip Pecorino – Yes, the opportunity would be great if it came to our door.

Professor Orlanda Brugnola (Art Department, John Jay College) – I am trying to piece together the answer that you gave earlier about teaching loads. At John Jay, we have a three-four teaching load and we have been chronically under-funded and if I understood what you said correctly, it was that it is basically the president’s discretion to decide upon how to use the monies available to arrange for release time, etc. But if you are chronically under-funded, the money available to any given president at the college is going to be smaller and therefore less flexible. Do I understand you? / Chancellor Goldstein – I love the phrase “chronically under-funded.” Everybody feels like they are chronically under-funded. The truth of the matter is that when some of the newer institutions - and you’ve heard me say this over and over again and I’ll say it over and again – it’s a very tough thing for me to deal with because there is no obvious solution. You can only do it incrementally and do it over time unless you create great instability into the system. When the newer campuses like John Jay got their charter as independent units within the City University system, they were never given the base operating aid that they should have been given. There wasn’t a minimal level of operating support, and it’s not only true of John Jay. It’s true of a number of other campuses, the older campuses…the campuses that were existent as baccalaureate and masters level institutions. The old ones were much better funded. You see this with a number of full-time faculty, you see this in other aspects of the operating budget. What we’ve tried to do and actually, I tried to do years ago when I was president of Baruch College, was to provide an opportunity for base-level equity and that’s a tough thing to do. We are now in the process of reforming and this is about the second year of reforming the senior allocation model to try to deal with this historical inequity. It’s going to take while for us to get there but we will get there. I can’t say it’s going to be there in two or three years but we are making good progress and there are some big inequities built into the system and I’ll be the first to admit it. But I would say that all of us are chronically under-funded and once you accept that premise, it’s very hard to start pulling resources from one particular institution and give it to another because we are a closed system. It’s not like we have permeable boundaries where money is just flowing in. It’s not the case. We have a budget that has to be allocated and to start pulling money out of bases and give it to another campus is going to be very difficult. That’s why for me the campaign for the university is critically important. It’s important because this university has historically only looked at one funding stream and we have woken up too late, much too late, relative to all other state universities of any stature that I’m familiar with. And we’re trying to develop new funding streams that will deal with some areas of inequity and I think that John Jay with Jeremy Travis as president (I think he is going to turn out to be a very distinguished president) understands that he has to position this institution and find ways to make it even more distinguished and attract dollars. And I think that he will. But it’s going to be tough to do it only on operating side through the tax-levy budget. Long answer. Thank you very much.

Chair O’Malley - Thank you so much. Next in the line-up is General Counsel Frederick Schaffer, who is going to speak on Perez.

C. Vice Chancellor Frederick Schaffer – I think most of you have seen the memo that I did on the Perez decision, really a more general memo on the Open Meetings Law. But in case you haven’t seen it, I have about 40 copies that I’ve just given Susan. I think the best thing to do is to be brief and to then take your questions. A brief thumbnail sketch of the Open Meetings Law: Under the Open Meetings Law, the public has a right to attend any meeting of the public body. Anytime the quorum of a body gathers to discuss, this meeting must be held in public, subject to the right to convene an executive session under certain limited circumstances. In addition, there must be prior notice of the meeting. The business of the meeting must be recorded and written in minutes and a record must be maintained of the final vote of each member of the public body on all matters on which a vote is formally taken. These requirements not only apply to the public body itself but to the various committees and sub-committees of that body. Most of it is pretty familiar to you. You’ve seen it operate, for example, at the level of the Board of Trustees of CUNY and its committees. The Perez decision addressed the question whether the Hostos Community College Senate (at some colleges, it is called the Council) - and its Executive Committee were subject to the Open Meetings Law.

Prior to the Perez decision, the New York Court of Appeals, which for idiosyncratic reasons is the highest court of New York, had not ever ruled that a body that was part or primarily advisory was subject to the Open Meetings Law. The New York Court of Appeals, in language that is not entirely clear, rejected that kind of clear cut dichotomy between something that is an advisory body and something that is a final decision-making body. It said early in the decision that certainly not all advisory bodies that issue recommendations to state agencies are performing governmental functions for purposes of compliance of the Open Meetings Law. Well, that certainly suggests that some advisory bodies are subject to the Open Meetings Law and some are not. Instead it went on to say that the court must undertake an analysis that centers on the authority under which the entity was created, the power distribution and the sharing model under which it exists, the nature of its rule, the power it possesses and under which it purports to act, and a realistic appraisal of its functional relationship to the affected parties and constituencies. And it went on to look at all of those things at the Hostos Community College Senate based upon its governance plan and by-laws and education law and concluded that the Senate was subject to the Open Meetings Law. This is what the court said, “Key to our conclusion in this case is the record evidence of the college senate (which includes this executive committee) has been charged with a number of responsibilities delegated by the legislature to the CUNY board and that the senate functions as a proxy for the faculty councils authorized by the CUNY bylaws. The senate is to recommend policy on all college matters to the board. The Senate is exclusively imbued with the power to formulate new policy recommendations and review existing policies, forwarding those recommendations to the Board of Trustees in areas as far-reaching as college admissions, degree requirements, curriculum design, budget and finance. It is represented on all committees established by the college president or deans. It is to review proposals for and recommend the creation of new academic units and programs of study. It must be consulted prior to any additions or alterations to the college’s divisions and it is the only body that can initiate changes to the college governance charter.” In that regard, there is not really a strong difference between the Hostos Community College Senate and others, but each governance plan is slightly different. And then it went on to say, “Under CUNY’s comprehensive university governance scheme, the college senate is the sole legislative body on campus authorized to send proposals to the CUNY Board of Trustees and although the policy proposals must be first be approved and forwarded by the college president, they overwhelmingly are.” And that’s really the end of the quote’s analysis. So the court basically said, Look, whether you call it advisory or determinant-- in some ways or some areas it’s one and some areas, it’s the other--the college senate works for us like the primary legislative body on the campus and we think that’s sufficient to make it a public body and therefore, subject to the Open Meetings Law. And so, the result that all of our primary legislative bodies, if you will, at the campuses, whether they are called faculty senates or faculty councils or college senates or college councils, are all now determined to being subject to the Open Meetings Law and for the most part, I think they will adjust fairly quickly to the change, get used to sending out the notice in advance and publicizing it. Taking of the minutes is something you all did anyway. The one wrinkle in all of this that may cause some difficulty, though I think there are ways to deal with it, is the quorum requirement because a meeting within the definition of the Open Meetings Law is a meeting at which a quorum is present. The Open Meetings Law itself doesn’t define what a quorum is but elsewhere in the law, there is a definition of a quorum as being a majority of all of the members of the body. And it goes on to say that an action must be taken by the majority of all the members. Not the majority of all members present which is what most bylaws of most organizations say. Usually if you got a quorum, you’re home free and then it’s a majority vote of those present, but under the New York state law, a majority is now a majority of the entire body, and I know in certain cases it is not always easy to get a quorum under that definition and in other cases, even if you have a quorum, it means that a few negative votes may well prevent a resolution from passing. So the governance leaders at your campuses will figure out ways to try to handle this. One way to make it a little bit easier to get a quorum, which I think is consistent with the Open Meetings Law, is to amend your governance plans so that you have alternate members so that if someone is not present, you can put an alternate in. That increases the numerator but doesn’t increase the denominator and so by definition makes it easier to get a quorum. The other wrinkle, which I think will be pretty much new in all cases, is that under the Freedom of Information Law, it is required that public bodies record the votes, final votes of its members. I think, for the most part, as I look at minutes from the various college senates and faculty senates, you would record the vote as 36-19 but not how each individual voted. Being subject to the Open Meetings Law means that the vote of each individual must be recorded. One can debate whether this is a good or a bad thing. One might argue that in an academic setting where some people are tenured and some people are not tenured, maybe this isn’t such a great idea. But the court was not willing to recognize any distinction between university-based public bodies and other public bodies, so the requirement of recording the vote applies across the board. Logistically, this gets a little complicated. How do you do it? There are ways to ease the burden technologically. Some people have been talking about investing in clickers so people can record their vote quickly. Another way to do it is that a lot of the times, the issues are not controversial and you can call for unanimous consent. You can bundle a couple of non-controversial items together for unanimous consent. It enables you to move through the meeting a little bit more quickly. Then finally, the question has been raised – what about the minutes? Do they have to record each individual’s vote? The answer is technically no. You do have to have the minutes and you do have record the vote but it doesn’t actually have to be in the minutes as long as there is a record of the votes and it is made available upon request. I think in many cases people will decide, let us just put it in the minutes and be done with it because one requirement is in the Open Meetings law and the other requirement is in Freedom of Information Law and the two of them don’t seem to talk to each other very clearly in this regard. We do need to record the vote but they don’t have to be in the minutes. So that’s my kind of basic summary of where the law is now, and I’ll be happy to take any of the questions.

Professor Terrence Martell (Weissman Center for International Business, Baruch College) – We appreciate the excellent summary of the law that relates to the Open Meetings Law and Freedom of Information Act. My question is a little bit different. You’ve read Perez. I’ve read Perez. I’m not a lawyer, you are. In light of that decision, has your view of the role of the University Faculty Senate vis-à-vis the governance of the university as a whole changed? And if so, how? – Vice Chancellor Schaffer – Let me just check that when you say University Faculty Senate, you mean faculty senates in general or this senate? This faculty senate? Ah, okay because most people have been asking me a question about the campus bodies. Of course, I am here at the University Faculty Senate, so not surprising. So let me answer the question in general and then I’ll circle back to the University Faculty Senate. This is a case in which the court was given a document or a series of documents of a governance plan, bylaws and a law and was asked to characterize the power that those documents contain or delegate to the Hostos Community College Faculty Senate to characterize them for purposes of applying this statute of Open Meetings Law, and that’s what the court did and that’s all that the court did. There is nothing the court said in describing the powers of the Hostos Community College Faculty Senate that was inaccurate. It said that this is what is provided. Now from that, how do you decide whether the Open Meetings Law applies? So my reading of it is that this is a case involving the application of the Open Meetings Law. Period. It doesn’t change the powers of the Hostos Community College Faculty Senate in any way. It simply tries to characterize them in a way that answers a particular question relating to the Open Meetings Law – doesn’t augment them, doesn’t diminish them. They are what they are, under the governance plan, the board of trustees bylaws and the education law. So I guess my answer as per Hostos Community College Faculty Senate and the other college senates and councils is it doesn’t change anything other than saying that the Open Meetings Law applies. My answer to the University Faculty Senate would be the same, that the powers are what they are, in your case, merely provided in the CUNY bylaws and they remain. Whatever that document says, that’s what the powers are. Now that’s not to say that it’s always clear because none of those documents answer every question, but I don’t think that this decision changes the landscape of governance within CUNY in any way. I don’t think the court addressed that issue and I don’t think it intended to address that issue, and so we are where we always were, whatever that may be. / Professor Martell - Just to follow up. It seems as if the powers were drawn not from the CUNY Board of Trustees but rather through the Board of Trustees from the State Education Department. Vice Chancellor Schaffer – I think what you’re saying here is that the CUNY Board of Trustees has certain powers under State Education Law. It had chosen to delegate some authority that it gets from the State Education Law through the bylaws and the governance plan to these campuses-based senates and councils.

Professor Alfred Levine (Engineering Science and Physics, College of Staten Island) – I would like to follow up on the last question. The University Faculty Senate has in the past exerted oversight and judgment about CUNY-wide degrees. For example, the CUNY BA. I would assume that based on past history, the University Faculty Senate is the sole legislative body authorized to judge and approve CUNY-wide degrees. / Vice-Chancellor Schaffer – Does someone have the bylaws here? So 8.13 says what it says. It says here, “There shall be a University Faculty Senate responsible subject to the board for the formulation of policy relating to the academic status, role, rights and freedom to the faculty, university-level educational and instructional matters and research and scholarly activities of a university-wide import.” It goes on to say, “The powers and duties of the University Faculty Senate, which shall not extend to areas or interests which fall exclusively in the domain of the faculty councils of the constituent units of the university.” That’s what it says. / Professor Levine – I agree.

Professor Vasilios Petratos (Political Science, Economics & Philosophy Department, College of Staten Island) –Now, the issue has to do between the senates and also the so-called P & B committees. We’re told once, we’re told about ten thousand times, that the faculty senate and the faculty councils of the local colleges are purely advisory. The Presidents and the Chancellor have all the power. We’re told repeatedly, “you’re only advisory, you’re not a legislature.” It doesn’t matter what we pass, how often we pass it, what majority we pass it with, we are only advisory. Following that, then how is the P & B to be treated? We don’t make any great decisions about personnel. We simply tell a president or a vice-president or provost what we think and then they, very often, turn their back, reverse the decisions, make their own decisions and so and so forth. Are you waiting for a lawsuit that will open up the P’s & B’s as well? As far as I’m concerned, there should be perfect transparency. People should vote for one another in an open fashion. The Supreme Court of the United States votes and their names are listed. Are you waiting for another lawsuit to do that? / Vice Chancellor Schaffer - I think the premise with which you started the question is incorrect. I don’t there is a clear dichotomy between the advisory and the non-advisory bodies. As I tried to explicate the decision, I said that it’s precisely what the court did not do; that the court recognized that there were a variety of factors that needed to be looked at and rejected the argument that there was a clear dividing line between the advisory and non-advisory bodies and began by noting that some advisory bodies might still be subject to the Open Meetings Law. The reason in my memos I indicated that the P & B’s were not subject to the Open Meetings Law as I read this decision… / Professor Petratos – This is your interpretation? / Vice Chancellor Schaffer - This is my view of it absolutely. / Professor Petratos – In fact, it’s not an interpretation. It’s a personal view. Correct? / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – I don’t know what the difference is between my interpretation and my personal view. / Professor Petratos - It means you’re interpreting somebody else’s as opposed to stating your own. / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – Yeah, but it’s what lawyers do. I read a decision. I try to understand what does this mean, what are its implications. As I read it, there was a variety of factors that brought the court to the conclusion that the college senate was a public body and therefore subject to the Open Meetings Law. I read the entire set of factors to you but I would characterize it as saying that the college senate is the highest and sole legislative body on the campus. And whether you view in the court’s opinion, whether you view its function as solely advisory or not, it’s the highest body on campus and therefore it felt that it deserved to be considered a public body and therefore subject to the Open Meetings Law. By the way, that means that the committees under the governance plan (all the college councils and senates and various committees) and those committees like the Executive Committee at the Hostos Community College are also subject to the Open Meetings Law. I think the P & B’s are a different matter. I don’t think the court will find them to be so. Now that’s a prediction on my part. But I believe it’s a correct reading of the decision. I also think that that reading is supported by strong policy considerations and I believe that your view may be not the majority view among the faculty. I think the idea that the P & B’s – remember, we’re not just talking about the college-wide P & B because you’re going to go right down to the department levels quite quickly. It’s not all that clear to me either that the faculties are of a uniform view that it’s a good thing to have transparency on the votes of personnel matters on P & B’s. There has been a long tradition embodied in CUNY policy of the confidentiality of P & B deliberation. I understand it’s not always strictly adhered to but the principle and goal is still one that, I think, most people value so that you can have the kind of open deliberation among people without their comments and without their ultimate votes being made public. And I think that it is a very important safeguard in the operation of P & B’s. On behalf of the university, I will resist efforts to apply Open Meetings Law to P & B’s until some court tells me otherwise.

Professor Manfred Philipp (Chemistry Department, Lehman College) – You advise the Chancellor on legal issues. Now I’m wondering how you will plan on giving the Chancellor advice on the science doctoral program restructuring? Will the program fall under the jurisdiction and fall under the purview, in your view, of the graduate council or since he is doing this on a university-wide level, does it fall under the authority (I think the word authority is correct) of the University Faculty Senate? / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – Well, let me correct you when you say that I advise the Chancellor. I am counsel to the university and to the Board of Trustees. I don’t have an individual client. I have an institutional client. / Professor Philipp – So, how do you advise the university? / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – And the answer to that question is that I do not know the facts well enough to give you a response today. But I am sure I will study them very carefully before I give them anything. I obviously am ducking the question. I won’t deny it but I am legitimately ducking it because this is an area about which I know very little. But you will inform me no doubt. / Professor Philipp – And you will inform us of your thoughts on this matter at some future point because the visitors are coming, we understand, in February. This is a matter of acute interest and it has not been brought to the graduate council. I am member of the council, and it has not been brought to the UFS in terms of a deliberative process although we have some representatives. / Vice Chancellor Schaffer –Because I’m standing here and am very bad at taking notes, I would suggest you send me a little reminder email about this. / Professor Philipp – I will do that.

Professor Gail August (English – Language and Cognition, Hostos Community College) – Back to the Perez decision. As some of you know the Perez decision has ground the Hostos Senate to a complete halt. Sixteen members who wanted to show their power voted against everything and nothing has passed and at this point. It would be really advisable to redo, perhaps, the membership in a way that non-tenured members were out of the faculty senate and perhaps as you suggest, alternates. But will this have to go back to the faculty senate to be approved because I do not think it will possibly be approved under the new Perez decision. / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – Well, I think the Perez decision is an occasion for all of the governance bodies to reconsider their governance plans in whatever ways that they think is appropriate in order to avoid the kinds of stalemates that you are describing. And I understand what you are saying that when governance plans need to be changed there may be opposition relating to its amendment that makes the amendment seemingly impossible. And there have been in my short tenure at CUNY, at least two other occasions that I am aware of, and I think one of them may have involved Hostos, where presidents have brought to the board of trustees, amendments to the governance plans admitting forthrightly that they could not go through the procedure just in governance plan. I think in both cases you just could never get enough people to vote in the referendum and nevertheless the amendments to the governance plan were considered and passed by the board of trustees and in my view, they have the power to do that. So my recommendation would be that you do the best you can to make the amendments to the governance plan that you think are appropriate and if you’re faced with a complete block that makes it impossible, you indicate support of the majority of the faculty senate and authorize the president to bring it to the board of trustees notwithstanding the inability to comply with the letter of amendment provision of your governance plan. I believe the board of trustees has the authority to then act. / Professor August – It’s unfortunate for the president to be making such decisions. / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – But the cases I’m talking about, the president did the representing of the majority of the faculty. Look, we operate under a constitution in this country that arose under the same circumstances. We had the Articles of Confederation, which required unanimous vote to any change. Nevertheless, we held the constitutional convention and started a new constitution. Sometimes you just have to seize the opportunity.

Professor Sandi Cooper (History Department, College of Staten Island) – For about twenty years, one way or another, I had something to do with committees of the board of trustees, often as a voting member, till about four years ago, so my information is not up to date. In those years, many times I was the only person present or one other trustee was there and an idea was still forwarded to the board based on some theoretical notion of telephone consultation or maybe a ouija board. Also, sometimes things showed up on the agenda, which just materialized out of nowhere and had never gone to a committee. Does this Perez decision hold to the practices of the trustees in any considerable way? / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – No, I don’t believe so but I’ll speak to the specifics in a minute. The board of trustees operates under State Education law, which really doesn’t speak to the specifics of procedure and then under its own bylaws. The Open Meetings Law has always applied to the board of trustees. There was never a question about that so Perez doesn’t add anything new and so I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. But in terms of the procedures – how matters get placed on the agendas, who has the power to do that, things of that nature – the board of trustees like other boards of university, non-for-profit or corporate entities operate under its own bylaws. I can’t speak to your experience. My experience has been that when there is a quorum, the committees act by vote. When there is not a quorum, they proceed to have a discussion and usually indicate what the sense of that meeting is at that time, but they don’t hold a vote because they are without an authority to vote. But then the matter gets passed on to the board for action notwithstanding that and that’s consistent with the bylaws of the CUNY Board of Trustees, which permit matters to come to the full board by several different routes and committee vote is only one of them. So in my experience, matters have come to the board through processes that are legal and consistent with the CUNY bylaws. I can’t speak for what may have happened in the past but the Perez decision does not change what the bylaws provide as to the procedures the board of trustees must follow. / Professor Cooper - So therefore, it is possible if this group blocked a quorum and passed an item, it could present it at the next meeting for a final vote and that would carry? / Vice President Schaffer – Unless it’s a matter of life and death or other great time urgency, if we can’t get it done in a meeting in January, we’ll bring it back to a meeting in February and see if we can get a quorum then. But if there is a matter that requires some urgency and you try once, twice, three times, whatever it may be and you can’t seem to get a quorum, then you move it on to the next stage. A number of presidents have asked me this question, “Suppose my faculty at three straight meetings can’t get a quorum but there is a clear sense that the people are in favor, what shall I do?” And my advice is, under those circumstances, you have the power at that point to bring it to the board of trustees. If they are prepared to take it, you indicate what has happened and that you don’t have a clear vote in the faculty senate but that there were several meetings held and that the sense of the meetings was whatever it was, and the board has the power under those circumstances to act. If you got a new program that you all want to get implemented, month after month goes by and you don’t seem to really get a quorum at your faculty senate or your college council, then my advice is you bring it to the board anyway and the board will act. That was actually challenged early in my tenure as General Counsel and the court held that the board of trustees has the inherent power to act under those circumstances.

Professor Joan Tronto (Chair of the Senate, Hunter College) – I have some very specific questions for you. We have a large senate of 202 people. Suppose we take a vote and the vote is 100 to 0. It fails. The question at hand is not whether or not it fails but it has not received a minimum. It hasn’t achieved a majority. That means we can raise is again. Yes? That’s one question. / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – Well, you can always raise it again. Even if it’s soundly defeated, you can raise it again. / Professor Tronto – The second thing is about the interpretation of Section 41 of the General Construction Law … / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – For those of you who are wondering, the ‘construction’ in that statute does not mean making buildings, it means constructing laws. Took me a long time. I was like why is this in the General Construction Law? / Professor Tronto – It’s talking about the public duty performed or exercised by the public body and if I read it correctly, intra camera rules do not need the majority. For example, tomorrow we’ll vote two election committee chairs. I interpret that to mean the majority of the 102 people, if you have a quorum, then a majority, not a majority to act is the requirement of the State law. / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – I’d have to look at that more carefully, Professor Tronto. You make it sound reasonable. Why don’t you send me the citation? Let me look at it and we can have more learned conversation.

Professor William Crain (Psychology Department, City College) – I don’t think there is any way except through some semantics that you could conceive of P & B as advisory. You give advice to somebody and they make a decision. That decision can be, in a sense, overturned and then there is an appeal process or it can be appealed but their decision-making carries tremendously significant weight. People’s careers and lives depend on these decisions that the P & B’s make. They are given tenure, they are promoted, and they are fired. And I understand that some faculty prefer to have those often private but that creates all kinds of suspicions, grievances, rumors…I think one can make an argument that those should be open. Now as I understand it, you could argue that they are a public body like the board of trustees holding executive sessions on personnel matters, but then they have to come out in public and state how they voted. / Vice Chancellor Schaffer - I will leave to you all to debate among yourselves whether you think the votes of people on the P & B’s should be public or not. Obviously, I understand your arguments about transparency. On the other hand, you have untenured members who sit on P & B’s. They worry that next time around if they vote against someone he or she will return the favor. But that’s for you to debate. As a legal matter, as I said, I don’t think the touchstone of this issue is whether you call them advisory or not. In a sense, P & B’s are advisory, especially if you start at the departmental level and you work your way up to several levels. At the end of the day, whether you call it an appeal or whether you call it a decision, the president has to make a determination to advance the appointment to the board of trustees. And at the end of the day, the board of trustees has to make the appointment and we have had (within my memory but before I got here) cases where the board of trustees has denied tenure to someone who got positive votes all the way through the process. I would argue that it is an advisory function but as I said I don’t think that’s the touchstone of the analysis. I think when you weigh of all the factors in the Perez decision, it’s really uniquely applicable to college senates or faculty senates because of the wide range of their powers, because of the legislative nature of their function. Whether it’s final or advisory, there is something quite obviously legislative about it and I think those were the defining and determining factors in Perez. I think P & B’s which are set up specifically to deal with hiring decisions, promotion decisions, are very different sorts of entities and are not public bodies in the same sense that college senates are. This isn’t geometry and there is obviously an element of interpretation but it seems to me pretty clear that P & B’s are a different sort of animal from college councils. / Professor Crain - What you mean then is they are legislative, not decision-making… / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – Yeah, that’s right. I mean if somebody said everything is a decision whether you call it advisory or not, as I said, I don’t think this is the touchstone. I view the college faculty senates in a class by themselves because of the breadth of the areas in which they can make decisions or make recommendations, whatever you choose to call it. I view the P & B’s as much more narrowly focused and not public bodies in that sense. / Chair O’Malley – I do want to cut off this discussion in five minutes because we have Ernesto Malave here and he is scheduled to go on at 7.45 pm. So we can go a few minutes over but I would like if things could be wrapped up pretty soon.

Professor Philip Pecorino (Social Sciences Department, Queensborough Community College) – You are counsel to the board of trustees and can quickly clarify something. The board of trustees says to you, "We've delegated some of our authority to local governance bodies. They may recommend to us policies, degree programs and candidates for graduates." But tell us how many such units do we have out there now? How many times have we authorized the creation of units with local governance plans with local governance bodies that have faculty and student and administrators represented in those bodies? In particular, is the Graduate School and University Center one of those bodies or is it now separate from the graduate school of the university or are they one, and are the School of Professional Studies and now the School of Journalism separate units or are they really in one unit called the University Center with other units somehow folded in there? So you see where this is heading. In which case what the board has done, as recognized in Perez and which you have repeated several times, is to delegate some authority to the local governance body so that it is the local governance body that sends the recommendation to the BOT and if the local governance body is just one thing called the Graduate School and University Center with a Graduate Council, then that body of that unit should be sending the recommendations as with the online BA program. You don't have to respond to that. / Vice Chancellor Schaffer - I won't at this time.

Professor Julian Aronowitz (Math and Computer Science Department, Lehman College) – Some times people are hired and I notice some were called equivalent – master’s equivalent, doctoral equivalent. Just one question – so who’s considered equivalent? / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – Means they don’t have that degree. / Professor Aronowitz – Should they still get the pay of someone who has that degree? / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – This really is a question you should direct at Vice Chancellor Malone, but as I understand, we have requirements for this. If for that I may take a more self-interested example, my JD degree apparently comes under our rule as equivalent of a PhD. Thank heavens, I never had to write a dissertation. / Unidentified speaker – The bar? / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – Yeah, I got that so I’m okay. So by local rule, they have established equivalence. I don’t know what all of them are. If you don’t have the equivalent, then it’s a situation of a waiver.

Professor Waldaba Stewart (Social and Behavioral Sciences, Medgar Evers College) – I have a question I don’t want you to answer. I’m glad that all our elections are held with secret ballots and I’m glad that you have not discussed that subject. So therefore, I assume that it is perfectly all right for us to continue holding elections with secret ballot. / Vice Chancellor Shaffer -- It depends what you mean by a secret ballot. The law says that the votes of every individual member must be recorded. But it doesn’t say if it has to be roll call or by a show of hands. So if you change the word ‘secret’ for a moment to ‘closed’ ballot or a less emotionally charged word, you can conduct the vote by closed ballot. They have to be signed because the voters have to be identified. In consistence with the Open Meetings Law and the Freedom Information Act, you can have a closed ballot at the end of which each person’s vote is recorded, but the person doesn’t have to say ‘yea’ or raise a hand or stand up in front of all of his or her colleagues while casting the vote. That is permissible. / Chair O’Malley – Thank you so much for all the questions. Now Ernesto Malave, our Vice Chancellor will tell us about the budget.

D. Vice Chancellor Malave – Good evening, everyone. It’s nice to be back. I take it you want to talk about the Governor’s Executive Budget. Did the Chancellor talk about it at all? Unidentified speakers – No. He said you were going to. / Vice Chancellor Malave – Okay, then you all have a copy of the Budget Request. I am not going to spend a lot of time talking about the Compact. I take you are all fairly familiar with the elements and the self-leveraging and shared responsibilities. Let me talk about why we first did what we did, and I think you know that as well. The Chancellor wanted to change the conversation, and we basically got tired of the annual drama of preparing Budget Requests and getting very polite responses and no additional resources, and we tried to come up with a way to entice the state to put some real money on the table by arguing that if you come up with 70% of what we need, we’ll figure out a way to get the other 30% by a combination of fund-raising, enrollment growth, small-tuition increases, and program restructuring. So what did the Governor do? I’ll just go over the numbers very briefly. For the senior colleges, we had initially requested $92.8 million for mandatory cost increases for fringe benefits and energy, inflation and the cost of increments. The rest of it was to fund the investment program. This Budget Request, unlike the Budget Requests for the past 15 years, actually included individual college investment programs and some of you participated in the development of those plans. That was the initial $92.8 million, but this year we had increases on the cost of energy. We had a need for $14 million in the current year. The state gave us the $14 million this year, so we did not have to impose any budget reductions. But they also folded that $14 million into the base budget for next year. So, in effect, that required us to adjust our budget request from $92 million to $82 million. The executive budget recommendation for CUNY was for an increase of $68.8 million. $16.1 million was in direct state support. The other $45.7 million was in revenues associated with the recommended $300 tuition increase. Actually, we have to say that the Governor has not called for a tuition increase, and you will find nowhere except in CUNY and SUNY budget analysis the $300 recommendation for tuition. That is how they arrived at the $45.7 million. So that’s $68.1 million against the $82 million that we requested, leaving us with a budget gap of roughly $20 million. But outside of the budget gap, we begin the budget with an almost $20 million increase in programmatic support. Regardless of funding source for a moment – the tuition – the overall funding increases by $20 million in program support. So if nothing else happens, the worst-case scenario is that we begin the year with a budget increase of $20 million for the senior colleges. In a way, we are almost halfway toward financing all the items contained in investment programs. So that’s not a bad start. I know I said the gap is $20 million. It’s actually $20.7 million. What the Governor did in addition was create a contingency lump sum of $57 million dollars for potential increases in energy costs for next year. We basically have $13.5 million dollars in that pot; SUNY has the rest of it. They are pretty big compared to CUNY. And so out of the $20 million, $2.4 million is dedicated to energy and so now we know we have this contingency fund for energy costs, so now we’re already spending that. So our real gap is $18.3 million. That’s the difference between contingency funding and Budget Request. So we have a gap of $18.3 million, but we also have this recommended tuition increase of $300. We are not in favor of an increase of $300, and the Chancellor made it very very clear that we’ll only support a $130 increase in tuition, if and only if those resources were applied to investment programs and that none of it will go to funding what we deem to be the mandatory cost increases. So for the state to be able to be true to this Budget Request and to be true to our commitment that no tuition would go for anything other than investment programs, they will have to give us another $17.4 million to reduce that number from $45.7 million to $28.3 million, which was the only requirement we had in our Budget Request. So for $35.7 million, the university begins and can fund an entire Budget Request and be able to begin July 1^st in allocating $48 million additional resources to the senior colleges. Now that is where we start. Last year, you remember the $70 million budget challenge we had. We needed $70 million last year just to stay even and we didn’t get it. We got $37.4 million because the Governor then recommended a $250 undergraduate tuition increase and left us with a gap we had to increase graduate tuition and you know the rest is history. But at the end of the day, the Legislature found a way to provide us with $37.4 million. And there was no 2 or 3 billion dollar surplus in the state last year. We can argue that it was a fairly tight budget situation. So if the state does today what it did a year ago, we completely fund the senior college Budget Request and all the investment programs. It actually has a surplus; it’s real money and an election year, and the Governor’s running for president. No presidential candidate wants negative stories with problems about the budget back home, and almost all the key constituencies are solved. There are no cuts in the operating program in this budget. That year, we were talking about a 50% cut in SEEK, cuts in childcare, cuts in the C-STEP program, various cuts where you have to spend a few months trying to get back your wallet and then be very thankful for that. So none of that is true today, and we begin in a position where can actually make some adjustments. I’ll come back to the senior college and tuition issue in about a minute.

Let me move on to community colleges. In addition to what we did for the senior colleges, the Governor recommended a $100 increase per FTE in the community colleges that translates to $6 and a half million increase in aid. Also in other years, we’re either arguing for restoration or basically asking for increase Governor will give us a flat budget. Now we begin this budget for community colleges with a $6 and half million increase. That’s pretty good, and I think that if Allan Dobrin and others were here, they would tell you that when they went to Albany to speak to various staff members, nobody was giving us any negative sense that they wouldn’t be able to cover that. In fact, they may be interested in not only taking care of that but wiping out the entire tuition issue completely. We’re not walking around with a T on my forehead and insisting on a tuition increase. If the state is able to establish because they have a very, very good budget year that they will fund the Compact and we will not need the tuition increase, I am okay for that. We’re not in favor of them eliminating the tuition increase and then not funding the Compact. Do one or the other, but don’t leave us in a situation where we’re still struggling even though it’s not a bad start with $20 million for senior colleges. We all know how much we need to gain back in terms of funding for this university, so I’m not prepared to settle for half of the budget request. And the Chancellor went to Albany the other day and had a very good reception from the Legislature. The other news in the budget is…I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the C-STEP program, the Science and Technology Entry Program. That program doubled in size. It went from $9 and half million to $18 million. Those are programs that we have at a number of our campuses. The budget contained negative views in the financial aid side, but not as bad as last year when they were making real reductions across the board, offering two-thirds of the award and the other third when you graduate. Last year, the Legislature had to buy back the TAP program by coming up with $300 million. Right now, the recommended cuts are about a $189 million in the TAP program. The so-called two-thirds proposal is out of the window. However, there are a number of things we are concerned about. Half of the cuts in TAP are associated with what the state is trying to do -- what I think is a real problem -- targeting the proprietary colleges and institutions in New York that do a terribly good job at wasting lives and money by basically cheating people out of many opportunities. You may be familiar with the Interboro abuses. That’s only starting to surface with all the abuses going on there. But half of the cuts in TAP are associated with those issues – there were two proposals they were particularly concerned about. One, a requirement that colleges pre-finance upfront the TAP awards for GED recipients, and those programs that are associated with the determination called the ability-to-benefit which is if you don’t have a high school diploma but you pass this federally-approved examination, then you can then benefit from college. A lot of the students in proprietary colleges enter in that fashion. We consider a GED a high school equivalent, and I think they did that in part because they did not want to be viewed as merely targeting the proprietary colleges. Another problem is that they want to change the definition of full-time from 12 to 15 for the purposes of receiving financial aid, arguing that if you want to study for 12, that’s fine, but then you’re only going to get 80% of the award which would amount to a 20% reduction in support for students who work and thus study for twelve credits. The good news is, and we are trying to verify this, that we are picking up that the Governor will be withdrawing that proposal during the 30-day amendment process. I think someone weighed in and said it was illegal to do that in terms of definition of full-time students for federal purposes. So that’s maybe a good thing. Maybe because they were estimating that they would generate about $80-90 million dollars in savings in that. / Chair O’Malley – From students. / Vice Chancellor Malave – Yes, that’s true but if they withdraw it, they may be looking for dollars elsewhere in higher education and because they argue that we will still have the budget, we still have a higher ed target and higher ed has to pay for it. We may not be terribly happy if they decide to do that, but we’ll find out. Enrollment is also another key part. We need to continue to stabilize our enrollment and in some cases, to increase it. So there you have it. We are going to make a very aggressive push to fund the Compact. I am in uncharted territory here with the prospect of allocating $46 million in July. We’ve never done that. But I think more importantly, the individual proposals in these requests that call for at least 200 full-time faculty, a slew of support services for students in library and not just that, some initiatives on the maintenance and operations side as well. We actually have the prospect of beginning this year in a way that I could never have imagined. I think so far, so good. The Mayor issued the preliminary budget today. Outside of the normal eliminations of everything that the City Council adds, like the Vallone scholarships, there are no additional cuts and the Mayor simply will require the City Council to put back that money. But there are no new reductions of any kind.

Professor Alfred Levine (Engineering Science and Physics, College of Staten Island) – Just wanted to say that you are doing an excellent job and am confident that you will fight for the $17.4 million shortfall in tuition so that the Compact is preserved. Now the Compact was a multi-year compact and it was one of the Governor’s proposals that struck me very much. The Executive Budget would authorize tuition levels above those driven by the annual inflation index in the event that state support for the senior colleges is reduced from the prior year or is not sufficient to fund mandatory costs. This sounds to me like a rejection of the whole philosophy of the Compact. I hope we will fight hard not just to get the $35 million but to eliminate this offensive worry. / Vice Chancellor Malave – I concur completely, but I think that if they had introduced a Budget without that provision, they would happily, in fact, fund the Compact in the Executive Budget. Remember that the Compact is with the state, not with the Governor’s office, and we received very positive responses from the Executive on the Compact. And I am convinced they would love to see the Compact get fulfilled. But for those political scientists who cannot forget Aaron Wildavsky’s book on the politics of the budgetary process, it is clear that if they wouldn’t have done it and said that we are not going to mind the tuition increase as a part of it, the Legislature would have wiped out the tuition for little sums of money and the Compact would have not been a compact anymore but would have simply been an increase of state aid. So I don’t think it’s a serious proposal. No one supports it but it was necessary from their perspective of getting Legislature to come into partnership with the Executive and not merely give the Executive responsibility for funding the Compact.

Professor Manfred Philipp (Chemistry Department, Lehman College) – A few moments ago, we heard the Chancellor say you wanted to increase doctoral student support in sciences to competitive levels. That is important for the research effort and also for teaching on the undergraduate campuses because we are short on faculty and it’s also part of the training. How do you think the Chancellor intends to fund that increase in support? / Vice Chancellor Malave – One of the things I take great pride in is the fact that without any new money we have been able to enhance our support for doctoral education. I think I can figure out how to begin a process of enhancing fellowships and tuition remission for doctoral students with additional the $46 million, or we can find a way within that to enhance the support. If the Compact works, and let’s say we have $45 million this year, for next year it will be an additional $45 million and we can construct as part of the Budget Request the needs for specific enhancement. What we did this time was we gave 80% of the resources we allocated to the colleges for them to decide how they wanted to spend it. Lehman could decide. So it’s two levels. One is the university-wide level, and there is also the college level. Most of these resources go into the campuses and students, and the faculty and administrators are in the Compact together in crafting the investment plan. So, there are a number of ways to do this thing. I don’t need to tell colleges how to spend their money. If they want to spend money on this certain thing, they are certainly welcome to and we will develop next year’s Budget Request. Whatever initiatives come out of this doctoral research group, I suspect it’s going to come up with a major call for significant increases, and we’ll have to figure out how to do that. / Professor Philipp - So you think it’s potentially possible without cutting the number of students? / Vice Chancellor Malave – I don’t know. There are a lot of discussions going on, as you know, about what the right size is, what happens if we don’t have the additional resources. It’s just that it is not my role at this point to prescribe the methodology. I think we need to wait for the report. I think we need to look at the budgets. I think we need to tell them what our values are, what our priorities are, and sometimes make difficult decisions including reducing the enrollment.

Professor Lenore Beaky (English Department, LaGuardia Community College) - For the last two years, there have been CUNY Collaborative Research Awards specifically to the community colleges, and we’ve been asking whether these will be available for the upcoming year. We’ve been asking Dean Gillian Small, whom I understand now is going to be leaving the university and she hasn’t been able to determine that. Do you know anything about whether these awards will be continued? And if you don’t know now, when do you think we’ll be able to get an answer? / Vice Chancellor Malave – The half a million dollars that we provide for those research awards came from the Community College Investment Program money. Given that we have a situation that we have increase of support to community colleges, I can’t imagine not doing it again. My response to the Gillian Smalls of the world who want to spend the money before we have it, is that first let’s find out what is in the Executive Budget. I couldn’t make a commitment on funding something that I didn’t know I had. Now we have an Executive Budget that increases in aid to community colleges. We have a preliminary budget that keeps community college funding flat, so now I can confidently say that I won’t be making any adjustments and we should have no difficulty funding. / Professor Beaky -I have to say that those awards mean very much to the community colleges. / Vice Chancellor Malave – Absolutely.

Professor Martha Bell (SEEK Department, Brooklyn College) – I am glad to hear the good news about SEEK. I was glad to read it in the budget though people on my campus have been reading some of the things incorrectly. So I want to clarify on the TAP front and the financial aid front. The language in the Governor’s budget said that the 12 credits refer to all students except students under such and such an article in the State Education Act which is the enabling legislation for SEEK college governance and HEOP, and it reinforces the pursuit and progress over five years because our kids still get five years of TAP. So they are exempt from…am I correct? / Vice Chancellor Malave – Yes, you are correct. It’s on record SEEK colleges are not subject to that provision. / Professor Bell – Thank you.

Professor William Crain (Psychology Department, City College) – I understand your position is kind of neutral on tuition a increase. / Vice Chancellor Malave – I am not neutral on tuition increase. We have a Budget Request that recommended a tuition increase. / Professor Crain - So you are pro-tuition increase. / Vice Chancellor Malave – We are pro the increase that’s reflected in here if and only if its applied for the investment programs that’s called for in the Compact. But I am also saying that if the Legislature, funds the Compact with no tuition, then I am okay with that too. / Professor Crain - That’s what I mean by neutral. / Vice Chancellor Malave – No, no, no. / Professor Crain - It’s a victory for me that you are okay with it. I just want to put it on record that I am amazed this whole body is not outraged that we are not fighting a tuition increase. I am just amazed that we are accepting it in this passive way. The budget is supposed to reflect our values and priorities, and our historic mission has been to offer low or free tuition. We’re trying to return to that, and I’m just upset that we are abandoning that mission every year.

Professor Julian Aronowitz (Math and Computer Science Department, Lehman College) – An organization called the Committee for Public Higher Education did various studies and they kept on finding that every time tuition goes up in our public school system, whether it’s the city or state, that more money was spent collecting the funds than it was worth. Every dollar that was collected one time they said, two dollars was spent, one time even five dollars was spent. I don’t know if anyone has been keeping tabs on how much it’s costing just to collect. Second, how much new money is coming in as opposed to just recycled tax money alone. There was only one study ever done and that was a study in the cost of tuition in 1979, which was really low at the time. And we acknowledge it’s not as low, as we know. Right now, we’ve estimated that the cost of administering financial aid in the university is approximately $9.5 million when you calculate the various infrastructures that we have in place. I remember even before tuition was imposed on the university, I’d like to remind everyone that tuition was free only for full-time matriculated resident students. If you were a graduate student you always paid tuition and if you were non-matric, you always paid tuition. The general service today would be worth $400, and in those days there was no financial aid to help you pay for the general service fee. The fact of the matter is today CUNY continues to be free for roughly 30,000 individuals, and it hasn’t changed with the full funding of the TAP program. In fact, it is easier in some respects to finance your education than it was in 1965 for many of those programs. The other thing I’ll also say is that it is not about tuition, tuition, tuition, tuition. The compact is that the recommended tuition increase would be a 1.6%, and that’s why those numbers are not scary numbers to everybody. Roughly almost all students with income of less that $55,000 have no increase. 95% of them will have no increase at all because it will be funded through TAP. You can see that, in effect, that’s how TAP dollars will be used to support the operating budget. And so it’s not about just tuition, tuition, tuition. It’s about trying to figure out a way to get the state to give us something they’ve never done before. They’ve never given us anything. Right now, we’re getting the prospect of them funding 70% of our costs and if they do it every year, the trend line is going in that direction and the students understand. It was a Compact with the students as well in terms of getting them involved in the development of initiatives on campus, which is why students went to Albany and to City Hall to support the Compact because it’s not supporting tuition increases. It’s supporting tuition increases only under a highly constrained environment that says it goes back to them to improve the value of their degree. / No one has updated the study to find out, but I know what it costs roughly to administer financial aid, which is about $9.5 million, and that includes fringe benefits, and we collect $770 million in tuition.

Chair O’Malley - Just two things. In many ways, I think the Compact is quite a clever way of going after money. However, these are figures from George Chin yesterday when I was testifying in Albany. Of our 220,000 students, 70,000 get TAP and others do not. And so the tuition increases do affect our students. So I think it’s important to recognize that TAP does not fill all the gaps. But my question is about the $5 million for the Empire program. I was curious about the guidelines, how it might be used, is it still in the budget, and is it additional money? / Vice Chancellor Malave – What Susan is talking about is of the $61.8 million, $42.9 million is for mandatory costs. There is an item for $13.9 million for operating systems and there is this thing for $5 million for the Empire initiative. As they described it to us, this was the Governor’s way of lining out in the budget $5 million for the programmatic enhancements that are embedded in the master plan. The entire state request for the programmatic components was $8.9 million. That was their way of saying, “Here’s our $5 million of the $8.9 million in state aid. Let the legislature come up with the rest of it.” The guidelines are the Budget Request. At the end of the day, they will recall that the $82.5 million…this is what it is going to fund. They can have as many line items as they want. And I can easily associate that $5 million with the $5 million request for full-time faculty and label it such. But remember, it is the colleges that can determine whether they want the faculty, faculty support, student services. It would be part of the pot that then goes to the campuses and fund everything that’s contained in here. / Chair O’Malley – Thank you.

Professor Leslie Jacobson (Health and Nutrition Sciences, Brooklyn College) – Given the state of the budget as you described it, what we are getting from Albany and the fact that there is a surplus, how soon do you think we are going to have a contract? And I know this is unlikely in February. / Vice Chancellor Malave – I happen to think that we’re on the endgame on the contract. A conceptual framework was reached, and they are never going to reach the conceptual framework unless we are close to the end, and there are still long ways for the city until the ultimate masters sign off on it. But it tells me nonetheless, unless we are all crazy, it should be done soon. But you never know. / Chair O’Malley – Someone should ask a retirement question. Oh, you just did. / Vice Chancellor Malave – As I understand, there is no proposal yet on the retirement front. That does not mean there won’t be but there isn’t one yet. The reason I say this is that CUNY and SUNY are in very different places when it comes to positions. What I mean is that state government has it own…they are entirely self-funded through general fund dollars. When 50% of our revenues come from tuition, the idea is I’ll try to tell you who you can hire, not hire. We generally are respectful of language. We know that the language exists. The last retirement incentive program had the same language. That didn’t stop us from replacing all the faculty that retired and we told them again, “If we do this, we’ll try to on the administrative side”…and definitely did the last time. But we told them that there would be a 100% replacement on the faculty.

Professor Roberta Klibaner (Computer Science Department, College of Staten Island) - I don’t see a reasonable cost in here for ERP. It’s going to cost the university millions of dollars. / Vice Chancellor Malave - First of all, a lot of it has already been funded in the capital budget where we have, I think $40-50 million set aside for ERP. There is some money associated with the operating cost. But they are not going to be reflected in ’07 fiscal year. You are going to see in future Budget Requests, greater requirements for funding on the operating side for costs associated with the ERP. And as you know how long this has taken, I suspect that the ’08 Budget Request will contain a lot more information on cost of the ERP, which is the Enterprise Resource Planning. It’s the overhaul of the administrative systems of the university, and it’s going to cost as you said tens and tens of millions of dollars. But we have to do it. We have to do it.

Chair O’Malley – Thank you. You want a report on the vote. 72 were present, 4 abstained, 2 opposed, and 66 are yes. A quorum is 65. Therefore the resolution passed. Now how about a motion to adjourn? Okay, see you next month.