THE TWO HUNDRED THIRTY-THIRD PLENARY SESSION

January 29, 2002

III. Reports:

a. Chancellor Goldstein: Good evening. I’m not going to give a big opening statement tonight. We have Vice-Chancellor Brabham, who is here to discuss the budget with you. I will have just a couple of minor things to share with you, and I’d be interested to devote most of the time that I’ve scheduled for this to answer your questions.

Let me just begin by saying that, as I mentioned to the Board last night, January becomes budget season, certainly for the state and the city of New York. I was up in Albany with Benno Schmidt on the 9th to hear the governor give his State of the State address. He did say something nice about CUNY and SUNY, which was refreshing. We did spend some time with the governor. We did spend time with the leadership in both houses of the legislature, and it was a very upbeat and genuine sense of "Let’s all work together." Following that State of the State address, the governor released his executive budget, which I believe is on the 22nd. There’s really very little to go into because there’s not much in this budget that’s different from last year. The only two major things are that the District Council 37 contract was fully funded in the executive budget, which was something that we despaired about before, but we were delighted to see that that commitment was made. Also there is a provision for the TAP program which is unsettling and perplexing, but I suspect that at the end of the process there’ll be some righting of that—essentially the TAP program has been bifurcated, where students will get two-thirds of their eligible award during the first eight semesters that they are entitled to a TAP award and they would get the remaining money that they were due at the end of their time in a baccalaureate program, presumably with a baccalaureate degree: if they graduate, they will get the degree. Other than that, there’s really not much more to say, other than that the bare bones budget was transmitted from last year to this year. You’ve been briefed by me on two separate occasions. Maybe I’m going into this in more detail than I should, but we were able to find the necessary patches to keep the senior colleges out of harm’s way through the liquidation of the CUCF Fund [CUNY Construction Fund], and through the capitalization of project staff, we tried to show some relief in the operating budget. I expect to be able to use those techniques again this year, but when you transport a budget that has holes in it, as this budget had this year, to next year, you have a sustainable sense of deficiency budgets, and that of course is the unsettling thing here. There is a tendency too much in state and local government to use these one-patch deals, and people feel good about it when it’s done, but you have to have a memory to understand that this will come back and bite you at a most inauspicious time, and that may indeed happen to us, as well, and that’s why we have to be very vigilant.

I know a few of you were at the Board meeting last night. I spent a fair amount of time—more so than I typically take—in the Report to the Board, on, if you will, a vision for the outer years of City University, by taking a very serious look at how business is conducted at the City University of New York. Oh, and I’ve said this to you on at least two occasions, and I will not stop because it is so fundamental to the way that I view the world, that we have to concentrate on our core business here at the City University of New York, that we have to invest in the City University of New York, and quite frankly, we’re not getting that investment, nor have we gotten that investment for a very long time, and this goes across Democratic or Republican administrations. It is one of the great tragedies, I think, in New York State, and quite frankly, in the Northeast region, that public higher education does not have the kind of presence with respect to the acquisition of resources that we see in other sectors of the United States—certainly in the Midwest, the Far West, the South, when you look at how state universities have been funded and you look at how the Northeast has been funded, there are stark realities. And even in the Northeast now, there are certain universities that have done extraordinarily well, and we’re just not seeing that kind of investment. What do you learn from that? Well, you learn that you have to continue to be vigilant and you have to work as hard as you can to convey your message in a way that will lead to some actionable change. Certainly all of us have to do that, but I think even as fundamental as that, we have to start thinking in different ways than we’ve thought before in the City University. My opening salvo was just that last night. In about fifteen minutes, I just sort of outlined some broad strokes that I have been thinking about for about two years now. Most of my time, as I’ve said, has been working on some of the fundamental academic issues along with Executive Vice-Chancellor Mirrer, and there’s so much more to do, but I think I have to start devoting some of my time to real management issues about how this university is administered, and how, through a careful analysis, and if you will, a restructuring of much of how we do our business at City University, we will be able to redeploy dollars to our core business, which, for me, again, is about the academic life that our students experience on our campuses, the degree to which we put the best teachers in our classrooms, and large numbers of full-time faculty in our classrooms; it is the degree to which learning really goes on, learning is assessed, that academic supports are there for our students, that faculty are really given the kinds of opportunities that they deserve and need in order to do their best work, and to really expand what I refer to as the frontiers of knowledge through their basic and applied research, and we just don’t do enough of that, and we haven’t done enough of that in a very long time at this university, and its vitality is, I believe, highly compromised by our inability to deploy those kinds of dollars at the level that we need. I’ve laid out sort of a vision of how I think we ought to proceed. I also laid out much more than I have in a public setting before about the responsibility that I see that our presidents have, primarily, in raising funds for their campuses.

Every other state university that I am familiar with, the strong state universities, start at the beginning of the fiscal year with a sense of "Where are our revenues coming from?" They just don’t depend, as we have at City University for our entire history, on "What is the State giving us?" and "What is the City giving us?" and that’s it; we don’t do anything else. No longer can we behave that way, because we’re just going to be a diminished university, and we must spend much more time in raising the profile of our campuses and raising money through a variety of mechanisms. I am now working with our presidents. We started in a serious way—I mentioned this to you, I guess, the last time or perhaps the time before—at our retreat, which we now have yearly, a two-day retreat. We spent a good half of that retreat on fund-raising, the very fundamentals of raising money. This has not been within the culture of this university since its founding, and that has to change. We saw in some of our campuses real change in the early and mid-nineties. Some campuses raised what I would call real money. We’re starting to see certain campuses now developing fund boards and attracting rain-makers on those fund boards, but we have to do a lot more. The next step in this is we’re convening a group of presidents that I feel need to work not only with the Chancellery, but with consultants that we will be bringing in that will, at the end of that process, insure that at all of our campuses there is what I call a minimally sufficient set of activities that are backed up by a backbone or foundation to support simple things like knowing where your alumni are, how you get to these alumni, how you do annual campaigns, how you do phone campaigns, how you do deferred giving, sort of the more boutique kind of transactions that you need to do in order to start attracting assets that could be liquidated and developed into cash for use on the campuses, and then ultimately, the thing that I aspire to is for a Campaign for CUNY. That’s what I said last night, and I said to Benno that I think that he’s—you know, you look at the great private universities and there’s always leadership on a Board to drive a capital campaign, and Benno and I have been talking about this for about a year, and we’re going to do it, but I want to make sure that all of our campuses first have the necessary tools in order to move forward.

So those are some of the things that I mentioned to the Board last night, and I think people were attentive, and they understand that this university has to start thinking in ways that are different than we have before, because quite frankly we’re not going anywhere unless we do, and I certainly don’t want to preside over an organization that has a real paralysis because of the inability of a history of this institution not to get the kind of resources that it’s going to need to do the things it needs to do. And that’s the reason that I proposed the budget message as I did, that the Board approved in November, of saying that we’re going to show that next year that part of the money that we need to support the Master Plan, which I had absolutely never believed—certainly after September 11th for sure, but even before September 11th when we certainly knew we were going into a recession and we saw outer year deficits—that we would get anywhere near the amount of money that we would need to support the Master Plan, that this was the time that we had to show we’re going to start behaving in a different manner and start supporting the Master Plan. We will be coming next month with a series of revenue enhancements and some efficiencies that I believe will take us about forty percent towards an even watered-down level of support that we need next year for the enactment of the Master Plan, and we will do it. I have no doubt that we will do it, but that’s the opening condition in about a four-stage process that I envision about real managerial changes that we will enact at this university, the focus always being on saving resources and deploying those resources back to the academic life. We must hire more full-time faculty. We must equip our laboratories better than they are equipped. We must have better have academic support services for our students. We must be more competitive in our faculty hiring. These are just such fundamental things that any university really has to do in order for it to move ahead. So those are some of the things, and this due diligence, as our consultation proceeds and there’s greater clarity and greater structure to some of this thinking, I will certainly lay this out and seek this body as a full partner, as I need, because you know, you are the life of this institution.

One last thing—yesterday I was privileged to be at the New York Historical Society, and by the way, if you haven’t seen the 9/11 exhibit, it is chilling, and it’s something that everybody in this room has to see. It is an extraordinary photography exhibit of some very prominent photographers who were right at Ground Zero on the morning of September 11th and a couple of days thereafter. It is something that is deeply moving and important for all of us to see. But the reason I was there was not for the 9/11 exhibit; it was to introduce the second set of seminars that our Honors College students were privileged to participate in. The theme is "The Peopling of New York." It’s about immigration and migration. When you’re around our faculty, the ones who are doing such extraordinary and interesting and important work, you just really feel so good about being associated with this great institution, and how they connected with these students was wonderful. We have well over a thousand more applicants this year than we did last year for the second year of the CUNY Honors College. We expect to have about 3200 applicants. At the end of the day, we probably will not be able to accept more than ten percent of them, maybe one out of ten students. But it’s transforming this institution. I travel a lot around this city and outside of the city, and it’s remarkable how people look at this institution as a symbol, if you will, of the transformation, and, if you will, the conversation and values of this university, bringing back the kind of stature that we’ve always known that we were capable of attracting. I’m sure all of you know many of the students who are participating, and you feel as good about them as I do. I’m going to stop now, and I’m only going to be able to take a few questions. So please come to the microphone, identify yourself, and I’ll try to handle as many as I can.

Professor Bell, Brooklyn: One of the earliest things that was centralized at CUNY, it seems to me, was the main-frame system for the university, and it’s not working, or it’s working very poorly. And it works worst at registration, and even when we want to present our best face to the university’s students and incoming students, every time SIMS crashes and students have to wait hours to get their programs and to register, I think we’ve put another nail in the coffin with those students. We’ve just gone through another registration period, or we’re still in it. Every time in the past three weeks that it seems to me more than three computers were up at Brooklyn College, we crashed, and the message we get from 57th Street is that there’s not enough storage. Now I have no idea what that means. Chancellor Goldstein: Well I do, and there’s plenty of storage. I’m sure that’s not the right answer. Professor Bell: Well, that was the email message we got back from 57th Street. Chancellor Goldstein: Sherry Brabham is here. Can she respond to that after I leave? That is under her portfolio. I think she can respond to that intelligently—I know she can respond to it intelligently. So if you can wait with that question, Martha, I’ll take some other people. Professor Bell: I’ll be delighted.

Professor Cooper, CSI: I wondered if you’d comment on the proposal to reduce TAP by a third until the student performs to graduation level, and whether or not you think this has any political life to it, and whether we should worry about it or let the state legislature kill it. Chancellor Goldstein: I think we need to worry about everything that is puzzling and doesn’t make much sense to us. My sense is that there has been such strong reaction to this—this would hurt CUNY more than it would hurt many other institutions, certainly more than it would hurt SUNY and more than it would hurt the private institutions—that I quite frankly think it’s going to be altered in a dramatic way. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like, but I don’t believe it’s going to look the way it is right now.

Professor Philipp, Lehman: I congratulate you on your statement regarding fund-raising. There was a committee formed in the Board of the Trustees for this purpose. Does the committee have a specific charge? Chancellor Goldstein: There hasn’t been a committee formed yet, Manfred. I said in my statement that I thought Benno should chair the committee. He agreed—then he said to me, "Well, I’ll chair it, but you’ll do the work," and that’s fine. Benno and I need to have some more conversations about it, but this Spring we will go public with it, and we just need a little time to frame it out. I don’t want to create an expectation here that is not realizable. The truth is, we have a small handful of campuses at the City University today—and it’s a very small handful, Manfred, I think you would agree—that are capable of really mounting a capital campaign the way that I understand a capital campaign. So the first stage is really to do our work to get all of these campuses up to a certain level. That should happen by the end of the Spring. We’re going to move quickly to bolster up those campuses that are really very, very far away from doing very basic work in this area, and then I think we’re going to be in a position to think about a case for a Campaign for the City University of New York. You have to be very careful when you do this in a system so that there is no way that you compromise what’s happening on the individual campuses, so it’s a delicate thing, but we’ll get it done. Certainly by the Fall, I think, we’re going to be in a position to announce the committee.

Professor Herz, BMCC: I acknowledge that you are very interested in having full-time faculty at the college, but I’d like to tell you what’s happening in my department, which is the Science Department, and I’m sure I speak for many other departments, not only in my college, but others. Right now we have three faculty positions open which have been open since before Fall 2001. We have not been given anybody, not even a substitute full-timer to fill these positions. Today, we have three sections of physics that are not covered and one section of biology which was just opened up today which is not covered. We also have a CLT who should have been given a full-time, regular position, having gone through the search, but our administration, for whatever reason, has not given us this person as a full-timer, but still as a substitute. So my question is: the problem of hiring or getting a full-time substitute—does that lie in our college’s administration or does it come from your central office? Chancellor Goldstein: I think if you have any vacancies that have been created at your particular college and the dollars have not been taken away from those vacancies and redeployed elsewhere on the campus, it is really a local decision by the president, who has the final authority with respect to resource allocation. I can’t comment—it’s not that I don’t want to comment—I don’t know enough about the issue that you are bringing to my attention to know where the problem resides, but there’s no action taken centrally that would force a president to reallocate resources one way or another if the dollars were still there on the campus. Professor Herz: Okay, there is a central hiring freeze for additional positions—is that correct? Chancellor Goldstein: We allocated whatever positions we did have, and especially with the community colleges because we were going to have a substantial hit, but we were able to work it out with OMB and the mayor to minimize the impact on that. My directives to the presidents were, "Whatever you do, do smartly," because next year, meaning the year that starts in July of 2002, I think is going to be a very difficult year on the city side. So, in preparation for what I think is going to be a difficult year, while we’re not forcing the campus to behave in a certain way, we really said, "Think carefully about what it is that you’re doing, so that if you have to take certain actions after July 2002, that doesn’t serve as an impedance in minimizing your degrees of freedom in managing the institution." So every campus is dealing with this in a different way. Professor Herz: Okay, so this is a local issue. Chancellor Goldstein: I would think it is much more of a local issue.

Professor Sank, City: This is about the Borough of Manhattan Community College. We have received at City College mixed messages about the future with BMCC. We all sympathize, of course, with the terrible losses they suffered on 9/11, including the Fiterman Hall loss. We initially heard that their students there, which are estimated at 800-1000 or more, were to be shared by all the units, but then we discovered that they’re all going to be housed at City College. We were told that they were going to be in trailers, up to thirty trailers. Now we learn that they are going to have to share our rooms, that we are going to have to share rooms in our main buildings with them. The question I have is—we’ve heard various rumors, and one of them is that BMCC students were going to be housed permanently at City College. So, I’d like to ask you, what is the true story? Are they permanently housed here at City College, or are they going to be moved? Or when will they be moved? Chancellor Goldstein: If I were on the City College campus, I would really be delighted about having BMCC students nearby, who want to transfer into CCNY after they finish their work at BMCC. So for me, I’d think this is a wonderful opportunity to potentially recruit more students to CCNY. As for time, they are at that swing space until a permanent structure is constructed or refurbished. That has always been the intention of using trailers on the City College campus for BMCC. Professor Sank: Will the permanent structures be at City College? Chancellor Goldstein: What permanent structure? Professor Sank: You say the trailers are only temporary structures. Chancellor Goldstein: I would imagine that when Fiterman Hall is either refurbished or rebuilt, or monies have been provided to build a facility in the vicinity of BMCC that would house the students that have left, that those students would return to BMCC, but that’s going to take a while, so I think you should feel good about it, rather than to lament about it. Professor Sank: Our physical plant is really in great need of help, and to have a thousand more students—this affects the cafeteria, the library, elevators, escalators that don’t work... Chancellor Goldstein: Well look, at one time City College had a lot more students than they have right now, so there’s certainly capacity there. That’s an argument I can’t fully accept.

Professor Coleman, York: My question really is about the ESL population. I have statistics here: In 1994, the senior colleges had 8,200 registered ESL students. In the Spring of 2001, there are 1,800 students. We want to know how did we lose the ESL students, and it’s not due to the new policy; they just are not coming. They’re not getting the information or they’re not being allotted; something is happening. Al the departments have shrunk, and this a resource that is very, very important to the university. Perhaps Vice-Chancellor Mirrer will address this. I know she had lots of meetings about this, even designating ESL students with a special code, but something is happening where they’re just not coming. Chancellor Goldstein: Well, I think one of the things that’s a determinant in part here is that a policy that was promulgated in 1995, we believe needed to be reviewed, and we did review that policy, and we believe that that policy did not serve the ESL population in a helpful way. Dr. Mirrer has recommended to the Board, and the Board has agreed to change much of what that policy resulted in, so I think that we will see a change as a result of that. Whether that will be sufficient, I just don’t know, but we certainly want to insure that our ESL population continues to be robust. I mean this is a university that probably knows more about dealing with an ESL population than any other university that I can think of. Hopefully some of the changes that have been put in place by Dr. Mirrer will result in an uptick again.

Professor Wallach, Hunter: I have a question about your understanding and promotion of the core mission of the university, at least with respect to the senior colleges, and what you’re doing about it at sort of an external level, and how we’re dealing with it internally among ourselves. Externally, I notice that for example that you wrote this brief thank-you letter to the governor. I wonder what you’re doing to make clear to the governor’s men and women and to the governor himself about the radical inadequacy of the budget for this university. Second, it has to do with the internal understanding of the core mission of the university. It’s not clear to me what that is in terms of how we’re going to promote a capital campaign. It’s not clear that that’s coming through, because in terms of what the university is promoting right now, it’s not at least promoting the liberal arts, as far as I can see. It’s promoting a business-oriented education and applied science, and it’s leaving aside the core mission of the university, at least the senior colleges, as liberal arts institutions, and insofar as it’s addressing that, it seems to me that it’s coming through mostly through the Honors College and that sort of trickle-down stuff, a highly disproportionate use of resources for a very small number of students, and most of the students are being left behind. We’re told at Hunter, when we come up with ideas for new programs, that there’s no money for them, but there’s money for the Honors College; there’s money for photonics; and there’s money for all these other things. What there isn’t money for is new stuff with respect to the core mission of the university. So I wondered how you understand this as you’re putting forth this message. Chancellor Goldstein: Let me say that’s a terrific question. It’s a complex question, and I just can’t answer it in a few words. Let me take the first part of your question. Yes, the response that I gave about the budget was somewhat artful. Now, you may not think it’s artful, but I have to deal with people in Albany, and we showed that we could do things quite significantly this year where the odds-makers were against us. Had we not had a cooperative spirit with DOB and the governor’s office, I think our senior colleges would have been in grave jeopardy this year. It was because of that good will that we have created, that we were able to take a lousy situation and make it a little less lousy. It goes back to the very basic thing that I started with here. This is a very poorly funded university. It’s been very poorly funded for a long time, and nobody seems to be able to get levels of government in this city and state to pay the kind of attention either to SUNY or CUNY, and that is a great tragedy. We have to constantly be vigilant, and we have to do a lot more, and perhaps do things better than we’ve done before, and we’re learning and we’re going to try to do the best we can. I am just not optimistic, quite frankly— and it’s not about throwing in the towel—this is a long history that’s very complex in this state about public higher education, and the avenue that we’ve never tapped, I think has great potential here, and that’s why I’m sort of taking this approach that we are now, at the same time pounding every door and trying to get consideration for more money. Now it’s a very difficult time, a very, very difficult time. I think we’ll be okay on the senior college side, but I’m really deeply concerned about the community colleges. We’ll know when Mayor Bloomberg comes out with his budget. With respect to the core mission, the core mission for me is about basic liberal learning. There is tension, and Hunter is a great example. There has always been great tension at Hunter between those who are in professional programs and those who are in the arts and sciences, and that’s a natural tension that we see at a very large, comprehensive place like Hunter, and we see it extrapolated up to the university. I don’t think that our statements about the university are more highly skewed to professional programs at all. Yes, photonics. Photonics is an area that we have great strength in and great opportunities to accrue distinction, and I think it’s proper that we try to do good things in photonics. We have a Center of Excellence in photonics, and that brings in a lot of money each year. We train a lot of students, and it brings great distinction. But at the same time, we have flagship programs in the arts and humanities—foreign languages is a flagship area that we are spending a lot of resources to promote. Other areas in the humanities—arts in general is another area where we’re spending time, so I would say that it’s unfair to say that our public pronouncements favor more professional-based programs than the arts and sciences. One of the things that we are going to have to do in a Campaign for CUNY is that each of the campuses where the action is really going to take place, that’s where the true articulation of the case for that campus will have to be made, and it will have to be made artfully because you’re talking to very different publics. Then, from each of those campuses that will have some of this tension, as you go up among campuses, those tensions get greater, so there’s where we really have to think this through, but I would argue the point that professionalism is something that we spend more time talking about than very basic foundations of liberal learning, which I very strongly at my core believe we really should be about.

Professor Vozick, BMCC and York : The idea that you’re presenting of re-envisioning the future for funding at CUNY, even re-envisioning CUNY in a certain way, is, I think, encouraging, and I want to draw your attention to and ask you to think about the role of contingent or adjunct faculty in the future CUNY that you’re imagining and trying to work to create. I’m interested in your immediate response, but I’m really interested in your further thought. I’d like to point out three things. One is that some of the contingent adjunct faculty are among the better teachers at CUNY, but currently there isn’t any mechanism to identify them or recognize them or draw strength from the excellent work that they’re doing. That’s my first thought. The second thought is that there are contingent faculty who are capable of drawing research funds to this institution, who are capable and interested in doing research work, but under the current rules of CUNY, a part-time faculty member is not entitled to be a principal investigator and therefore really not able to bring their skills and personal resources—personal capital—to bear on strengthening the university. I’d like for you to look into that and think about that. The third thing is that many of the contingent faculty, adjunct faculty, are members of and strongly connected with immigrant communities around the city. Some of these immigrant communities have been very successful communities and may want to return some largesse to the university that has benefitted them and their children and helped them make the immigrant transition, the classical role of CUNY that I hope you continue to stand for and that represents our uniqueness, our great strength in the country and in the world. Some adjuncts can play a very important role in, I believe, even the fund-raising side. But I believe that the current structure, to the best of my understanding just doesn’t have any level of recognition of this, doesn’t have any institutional structure that reports to you that is looking at this, and there is almost no way for people in this area who might be a big help to CUNY as individuals or as a group to really lend their strength to building the institution. So I’d like to ask you to think about these things seriously. Chancellor Goldstein: I would just say very quickly that I would like to find ways of engaging adjunct faculty more into the life of the institution, of this university. We’re thinking—as we go through collective bargaining in particular—we’re thinking about how to do that and do it in a way that we think is appropriate and that we can afford. I would say with respect to your second point—you get a grant, and I’ll find a way for you to manage it at CUNY. Professor Vozick: Thank you personally, but there are hundreds of people, and they don’t know that. Chancellor Goldstein: Let them know that—you give it to me and as the Chair of the Research Foundation, I’ll make that happen. Professor Vozick: Please publicize that in a general way. Chancellor Goldstein: I don’t know of any prohibition on that at all. Professor Vozick: There is indeed.

Professor Bohigian, John Jay: Chancellor Goldstein, I compliment you on your statement to the faculty and also to the Board on going back to the core mission of the university. But does the public know that? Does the student body know that? In the January 13th newspaper, the New York Times, the only ad that I could find that’s CUNY was the Honors College. If we had taken the entire page and used part of it to indicate the specialties at the individual colleges, I think that would transmit the core message that you’re talking about to the public, because right now the public is just getting this message, and I don’t think that that’s the entire message. Chancellor Goldstein: I wish I could see that from here-what are you pointing at? Oh, the Honors College; yes, that’s a nice ad, I like that ad. Professor Bohigian: But my point is that it’s inadequate to your very statement of the core mission. How about saying, "Baruch—Business, John Jay—Criminal Justice and Public Management"? Chancellor Goldstein: You’re bringing up an important point, but I’m taking it in a different way. One of the areas in which we believe we can save a fair amount of money in this university is managing the way that we communicate in the press about announcements of positions that are open, this kind of thing, and we’re going to do that, but I think your point is well-taken. This was specifically for CUNY Honors College, and that was the message, and there are other messages that are done that are very focused and specific as well, but in general I think we need to be able to coordinate this in a better way.

Professor Hastick, Medgar Evers: The January 7th Facilities Planning and Management Minutes refers to monies that were allocated to Medgar Evers College and in parentheses it says "(which is treated in the capital budget as a community college)." Would you kindly just explain why Medgar Evers, which needs so much—and we do appreciate all the efforts that have been made on our behalf and we are seeing signs of progress—but why do we continue to be treated in the capital budget as a community college? Chancellor Goldstein: It’s for the following reason: in the founding legislation that changed the status of Medgar Evers from a two-year granting institution to a baccalaureate institution, the language read that as relates to capital appropriations that Medgar Evers will continue to be considered a community college with respect to funding. That has been a problem over the years of the Giuliani administration because for every dollar that the state provided in capital money for Medgar Evers that had to be matched dollar-for-dollar by the City of New York, the City of New York didn’t put up any money, so while we had at least fifty cents on the dollar, we were never able to spend that fifty cents because of the way the legislation was written. We’re trying to get that changed. But I believe, and I’ve made this commitment over and over again, that Medgar Evers will be built. It is a disgrace I believe, and I’ve said it over and over again, that Medgar Evers has the deplorable facilities that it does. When we look at what we did at Baruch; when we look at what we’re doing at Brooklyn College; when we look at what we’re doing around the system; for Medgar to have the kind of sub-par facilities for the students, I think it’s disgraceful, and that has to be changed. I must tell you that from the capital standpoint, it’s my highest priority, and we’re going to try to get that done this year if we can.

b. Chair Sohmer: Okay, there are several announcements and then just a reminiscence of last night. In the back you will all find this notice which calls for the Research Committee applications both for the people who are going to ask for grants as well as for the selectors. Would you please pay attention to it, and it’s not just for Senators, so would you please pass it around? We will mail it around, but if you know anybody who would like to participate in these fields that you have listed here, or at least solicit from them, it would be good. This Friday there is a conference at the Hunter School of Social Work, "The Academic World after September 11th." The speakers are Benno Schmidt, Mary Burgan, and various other folks, who will be talking about both the budget and academic freedom. This Thursday night at 80th Street there is the annual Manhattan Borough Hearing, which is at five o’clock. You have to have contacted by 4:30 this afternoon if you intend to speak. We did it on the email, but I thought I would just mention it again. Last night, if you notice in the material in your folder, there was an item on the agenda which involved awarding a contract to the Dean of Architecture to work for the City University on an RFP basis. The contract happens to be one of the smaller ones; it’s about $1,000,000. Professor Manassah explained at great length at least the sense of impropriety of such a thing. The Board was vastly indifferent. The Counsel to the Board declared that Manassah was wrong. We had a legal opinion which we mailed to the Counsel, who said the legal opinion wasn’t very good, but since it was pro bono, how could I argue? The Board considered the resolution yesterday, and after contacting one of the Trustees, an interesting development occurred. The Trustee recommended that were we to do this for a dean, then there is no reason in the world why it should not be done for all the faculty, and therefore the Board changed its policy last night and has a statement that if the university advertises for anything, then faculty are eligible to apply, which until last night was not the fact. So there is sometimes a silver lining, I suppose. This is within the boundaries of the multiple-position law, but it was until last night that an engineer was ineligible to apply for an RFP or a psychologist to apply for writing a test like the ACT or something of that sort. You already have a question? Professor Baumrin: Leaving aside the names of all of the people besides yours, one of the problems that I have espied in this thing is that if you don’t announce the RFPs in a prominent place, no one is going to bid on them, so given the opinion that you are reporting, it seems that we ought to put their tootsies to the fire and have them report prominently, on Senate Forum or someplace like that so we actually have a chance. Chair Sohmer: Well, the statement made at the Board was that the RFPs must be well-advertised. Whether that is something that is easily monitored or not, I’m not sure. "Well-advertised" could be in The Chief or some other place that is not terribly often read by electrical engineers. Professor Baumrin: Yes, but my experience has been that if you have access to the Board’s informational dispersal system, then you can disperse further. Chair Sohmer: Yes, we will do that. Deliberately short because we have another guest, are there any other questions before our other guest speaks?

IV. Guest speakers

a. Sherry Brabham, University Vice-Chancellor for Budget, Finance, and Administrative Computing:

It’s good to be here this evening to see old friends and some new friends as well. I was invited to speak this evening a little bit about what the news was with the State budget, but let me address a couple of items before I do that. First let me see if I can respond to Professor Bell’s question, and I will also say one thing about where RFPs generally are advertised. State law requires that RFPs be advertised in the State Contract Reporter. It’s a document where all people who do business with the State, all State agencies, have to advertise that they are putting out to bid. Most vendors know that that is a place that they go to look. The other thing that is available is if you are a firm that has a specialty in a particular area, say in auditing, for instance, or as an engineer or something like that, you may send your name to the university and you’ll be put on a list, so that any time that there is an RFP in a particular area of expertise, then you should get a copy. But if you’re interested, then the place where everything has to be advertised is the State Contract Reporter. Moving to the maybe stickier question, which is the question about SIMS—I had some time to think about this, Professor Bell, and I will try to respond in a way that is not too overly defensive. The Student Information Management System is actually what the acronym stands for, SIMS. As you know, it is a system that first began to be implemented at the university in the mid-’80s, and it was implemented actually as an adoption of a system that had been used at Hunter College. And the decision to use SIMS and to try to adjust it so it could be used more widely across the university was really more a financial decision than anything else. There just were not the resources to go out to the marketplace and bring in a brand-new system, which as you know costs millions and millions of dollars sometimes. Plus, it’s like there was something in-house that was working that was developed by CUNY people. Hunter was happy with it, and so it seemed appropriate to try to use that at other places. Over the years, SIMS has evolved from this home-grown system, and various campuses have added things to it. You know Brooklyn has done very well with their interface of the front end in terms of their salary system. Professor Bell: I’m not complaining about SIMS; I like SIMS. I want it to work. But it’s crashing. Vice-Chancellor Brabham: Oh good. Then I’ll skip right to the next portion of my discussion, which is why do things go down? Why do systems crash? As you know, there are lots of reasons that they do. I’ll cut right to the chase. I did not know Brooklyn College last week was having a lot of problems with SIMS. I am not aware of that. I do know I had a discussion this afternoon about a couple of things that happened. I know that, I believe on Friday, the system was taken down purposely for a period of time because there was some work on the security end that needed to be done at the university, and there was a message that went out to the campuses that things would be off-line. I think the goal was twenty minutes. I’m not sure that it was just twenty minutes, to install some new security, and actually I heard this afternoon that as a consequence of that we have a better capacity to monitor who’s trying to get into the system. We had 130 attempts at hacking into our system over the weekend, so you can see some of the complications of security. But one of the things I will tell you—the other thing I know about taking the system down—is that the university tries to run 24/7, because we are now doing web registration as well as voice registration for SIMS. What our goal will be for the future is for maintenance issues to only take the system down for a period of time between 3 AM and 6 AM. All maintenance will be done at that particular point in time. Those are the things I know about officially. Any other problems, if you will tell me about them, I will have somebody give you some information. Professor Bell: I’m not talking about when you purposely take it down. I am talking about when 17 colleges are on because they’re doing registration, and it’s over capacity and the system crashes. Vice-Chancellor Brabham: There should be plenty of cycles for running SIMs, so there must be something else going on. Professor Bell: I’m telling you that Brooklyn can’t get past it. Our computer center says they called other campuses having the same problem. I reported it to Mr. Dobrin two executive meetings ago. I reported it through Bernie and Bill Phipps, who also reported it back to Mr. Dobrin. It’s been going on for about a year. It went on in Fall registration. I reported it. Now it’s gone on in Spring. It’s just registration. It’s intolerable for the students. When one freshman takes from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon, it’s just intolerable. Vice-Chancellor Brabham: And you think it’s the system, not your telephone registration, not your other interfaces? Professor Bell: I’m not on telephone registration because freshmen are registered first with a counselor, with a computer in front of us. There’s telephone registration elsewhere on campus. That’s not the issue. That started in November. That doesn’t crash. Vice-Chancellor Brabham: It’s not that your lines are maxed out or anything like that. It’s actually SIMS. Well, I’ll see what I can find out. After talking about this at length this afternoon, I thought I knew all the answers, but obviously I don’t.

Moving on to the budget, which I hopefully know a little bit more about, as the Chancellor mentioned before, there is not a great deal of news that came out of the state budget when it was released in mid-January. I think all of you have a copy of the preliminary review and the document you received that was done by the university budget office. You may have seen it in other incarnations on your campuses earlier. The big news is that there was a straight-line budget. The university received exactly the same amount of money for FY 2003 from the executive that we had in FY 2002. There are a couple of things that are sort of qualified when we talk about a "bare-bones budget," so I’d like to do that for just a moment, the straight-line budget. The first thing is that the straight-line is the bare-bones budget, if you remember, that the legislature approved at the end of the summer last year. So straight-line is not straight-line in terms of what the executive recommended or even what we had two years ago. It is what was the bare-bones budget that was adopted by the legislature, with one exception, which is that the state gave us the ability to include in our base $20 million for the DC-37 contract settlement. That’s the cost on the senior college side. OTPS inflation and other things have not been addressed in this budget, nor have some of the items that were taken out last year with the legislation of the bare-bones budget. Those things are not addressed in the budget. A couple of other things about the straight-line budget—the maintenance-of- effort language that is in the language attached to the budget bill, which is one of the things that has kept us from being subject to such severe reductions on the city side in terms of aid to community colleges—the maintenance-of-effort language is in the budget, so that is in many ways good news for the university. The other thing that I would just mention is that they say it is continued at the $2,250 per FTE, which is straight-line, but you may remember that last year the governor made a big deal about having continued what the legislature had adopted two years ago. When you talk about the budget these days, you have to have at least two or three years’ worth of history before you actually know what you’re comparing, because the "apples" are at least a couple of years old, if you want to compare to apples. The other thing that I did want to add about the straight-line budget at the university is that as the Chancellor mentioned, this year because the bare-bones budget that the legislature approved was such a difficult budget for the university, there were some basic and fundamental things that had not been funded in that budget, and as a matter of fact, for the first time in my memory, the legislative budget was actually worse than the executive budget. Usually, the Vice-Chancellor for Budget comes to these meetings and says, "Oh, by the way, don’t despair, because we still have a legislative process, and things are going to get better," and I hope and we still believe that that may be the case this year, but the history last year was different. Even though the budget did change, the legislative process was different.

Let me move on to some other issues in the budget. First of all, the Tuition Assistance Program. A thing that I had wanted to tell you about was why we did a little better with this budget than the bare-bones budget indicated we did. We did work with the Division of the Budget and with folks in Albany who gave us permission to do some things that we’ve been actually asking to do in the budget for a few years. The first one is what the Chancellor describes as integrating the operating and the capital budget. Almost every other state agency and many of the city agencies have had the capacity for years and years to pay for the cost of staff employed by the agency who work on capital programs through the capital budget, rather than the operating budget. The university has always paid for people who work on capital programs—building new facilities at all of your campuses—we’ve always paid for it through the operating budget. We were able to work with DOB and with the Governor’s office to convince them that we should also be able to move the cost of employees at the university in the Office of Facilities Management onto the capital budget. The value of that was about $3.5 million, which gave us the capacity to address some of the new needs, new building- opening needs, at Baruch College. So even though the bare-bones budget was bad news, we were able, through some good work with staff and DOB, to make it a little better than it had been before. One of the other things that we have been talking to them about is using the interest earnings that are in the City University Construction Fund for the university. Historically, both the state and the city have seen those interest earnings as theirs, and they have used them to actually reduce debt service obligations of the city or the state, but we believe that they will let us, this year, maybe make use of those dollars for the university, so we’re very hopeful about that. So the bare-bones budget was not as bleak for the university on the senior college side as it possibly could have been, so that is something when we talk about straight-line that we need to remember that we will continue. The capital items are actually recurring items, so they will continue year after year. Returning to the executive budget as it was proposed, as the Chancellor said, probably the thing that has gotten the biggest play has been the changes in TAP. I think he described them to you. They’re fairly simple. One-third of TAP will be an incentive, rather than actual financial aid that will be available to students while they’re in college. It will be an incentive for them to graduate and will be available to them at the point of graduation. This is a dramatic change, but I think we’re all hopeful—there has been a tremendous outcry in response to this recommendation of the governor—I think we’re all hopeful that that is something that will be changed. One of the things I should mention to you, however, is the value of that is $155 million, and so if we agree that TAP is going to be changed, basically higher education will already receive about $155 million for that to be put back into the budget, so it is a big cost item. In terms of other financial aid issues, APS was continued at the same level, as was part-time TAP at CUNY, and the other thing that was good news was that the governor provided $10 million for the World Trade Center Memorial Scholarship Program. You may remember that this program was introduced in November. Both the SUNY Board and the CUNY Board approved resolutions to begin to implement that at the university. The scholarships will be available to the families of victims and the families of people who were significantly injured during the events of September 11th.

The SUNY budget is from all reports pretty much the same thing, a straight-line budget. SUNY is in a different place in terms of their contract settlements than we are, and so in their budget is the last year of their contract settlement, and then some smaller contract settlements were included in their budget. The other couple of things that are in the budget are that at the Department of Labor there’s $2.5 million targeted for the university to work with small businesses to encourage training or economic development, small businesses; there’s a similar amount for SUNY—a comparable amount—it’s $7.5 million because of the size of SUNY, so that is something new. NYSTAR and the CAT programs have been continued at the same levels that they’ve been funded. All of this is in the document that you have received. We are expecting, although we have not seen final language, a couple of Article Seven bills. One is a deficiency budget bill, and in that deficiency budget bill will be the funding for the DC-37 contract for the current year. Deficiency budget bills are bills that basically, if there’s a current problem—an FY 2002 problem—they will correct the problem, so the funding will be made available in that, and there will also be language in a deficiency bill for education, labor, and family assistance that will deal with the TAP changes. We have not seen that language as well. There is draft language, and I think it has been circulated a bit, on early retirement. My understanding in reading that very briefly is SUNY and CUNY are both included in the early retirement language; however, they are included among the agencies for which no replacements will be allowed. It is pretty much the position of the university that that is not a satisfactory bill for us, that we have to be able to replace, certainly, faculty, so as in the past, the university has had the option of opting out of those bills, and we’ll probably do so with that kind of language in the bill. I think that that is basically the high points of the budget, and I’ve taken a simple budget and talked forever about it.

Chair Sohmer: Could I interrupt for a moment? We have a visitor. In the back is a new council member and head of the Higher Education Committee, Charles Barron. Do you want to come up and say a few words?

b. Councilman Charles Barron: I’ve never been one at loss for words. First, I’m honored to be here. I’m honored to be head of the Higher Education Committee. I plan on fighting like they’ve never seen a fight before. I think it’s time for us to get respect. Unidentified: We are your army. Councilman Barron: Well c’mon with me. Look, I hope you’re not just talking that, because I’m serious. The Giuliani years of embarrassing us or trying to strong-arm us, those days are over. We are set. Speaker Miller is very, very supportive of a lot of the positions I have. He said I have an open door to his office. No matter how militant or radical they say I am, he still likes me, so we want to make sure that CUNY gets the respect that it deserves. And we’re talking respect as a concrete thing, like money. We don’t need those accolades; we all know how much you love us. The Bible said, "Where a person’s heart is, so lies his treasure." So we want to know where the treasure’s at. You deserve a decent contract; you deserve it for the work that you’ve done. And we should fight for that. And I don’t know if you’re with me or against this one, but we need to go back to open enrollment and free tuition. They don’t want to talk about that, but we’re going to have hearings on that, to see if it’s "fiscally responsible." We’ll find out if you’re giving a couple of billions of dollars out in grants and you’re collecting a couple of billions in tuition—we’ll just squash ’em both. Keep your grants, and keep the tuition, and make it open to everybody. We must do something about the students who are immigrants. Paying twice as much is ridiculous; it doesn’t make any sense. They should be given a fair shake. How women are treated in CUNY we’re very concerned about. They have very special concerns—women students need to be protected and respected for the things that they have to do. We definitely are going to look at this whole question of remediation. Plus, Mayor Bloomberg went to CUNY and became a billionaire, so what I’m trying to do—one of my first hearings that we’re going to have, we’re going to meet on the 5th. We’re going to have an organizing committee meeting on the 5th and make sure we get our agenda together. I’m going to be talking to you and to students, to the administration. We want Bloomberg to come and testify before the committee and say how great CUNY is because he was a CUNY student and became a billionaire and ran for mayor. So he became a billionaire mayor. Indistinct comment for the floor. Oh, don’t you talk about my mayor like that. He said he bought the mayoralty. I slipped—I get confused and I get nervous, and sometimes I say things like, "He bought the mayoralty." He said that. Unidentified: I said that. Okay. But if you can be a CUNY student, if you can go from CUNY to a billionaire to a mayor, something has to be right about the CUNY system, if you can do that. To have him testify before us would be great. He did that during open enrollment, so most of the great people who are so successful—Colin Powell, so many Nobel laureates—we have a proud history. Charles Barron—I graduated from Hunter. My wife Inez is a principal, graduated from Hunter. We are a CUNY family. My son is at Medgar Evers in the Environmental Science program, so we are a CUNY family, and we plan on fighting for CUNY. I tell you one thing—I don’t know what all the results will be—I know they’re crying about budget cuts. I got some suggestions for that, too.

We shouldn’t allow them to sensitize us to cuts so soon. We didn’t even sit down and talk yet, and the mayor is talking about cutting his staff twenty percent to sensitize you to thinking about cuts. The little $5 million he saved by cutting his little staff—500 people on the staff, cuts about 100, they average about $50,000—it’d be $5 million. We have a $3.6 billion budget gap, and we’re taking $5 million out because he cut his staff. That’s just to sensitize you to cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, instead of other creative ways of closing that gap. And when we talk to them, we’re going to talk about the $49 billion that goes to the federal government, and in return, New York gets back $41 billion. Well, if Giuliani and them are so great, Man of the Year, Mr. Mayor, you should’ve told the federal government, "We can only give you $47 billion this time, because we need $2 billion to close this gap," or better yet, "Give us back $43 billion." Where were the negotiating skills with the federal government? The state and the city refused—didn’t even take—$1.4 billion worth of TANF money because they didn’t want to put in the 25 cents that they needed to match it, so that money is threatened to go back to the federal government, and that can be used for more things than anybody can imagine. There’s a whole host of ways to close this. And this is the one they don’t want to hear, but I’m going to say it anyway. We need to go to the state—if you make $350,000 or more, you should pay a little more taxes to help us get on out of this thing here. Hmm—didn’t get no "Amens" there. Well, that’s all right. You don’t want to talk tax hikes, because they already told you anybody that talks about raising taxes, it’s a no-no in this town, so we can’t talk about tax raising. Isn’t it ridiculous we can’t talk about raising any taxes, but we want to cut taxes, cut revenue, cut revenue at a time when you’re trying to balance a $3-4 billion budget gap? The rich had a party under Giuliani, and they should pay for it. Giuliani averaged a $2.7 billion surplus in all his years, and now he walks out of here, Man of the Year, leaves us with—matter of fact, they were talking about a $2.8 billion budget gap before 9/11. Afterward it went up a little bit, but they already were talking about $2.8 billion, so you can’t blame everything on 9/11. And isn’t it interesting how on September 10th, they had no money for anything, no more money, "We’re broke." September 12th, they had billions of dollars for the airlines—where did that come from? Unidentified: Social Security fund. Councilman Barron: No! They had billions of dollars to rebuild Lower Manhattan, and it should be rebuilt, but where did that come from? How come you can find all these billions on September 12th, and they didn’t exist on September 10th? Finally, we need a charter change. Every other legislative body—Congressional, the Congress determines the budget estimate, the revenue estimate; the State Assembly determines the revenue estimate; in New York City, the mayor determines that. He tells us how much money there is available, and no matter how many budget marks he comes in with, every year some money is found somewhere because he never told us how much money was truly available. We must get to the bottom line here. Before we talk cuts, we must talk other creative ways of closing this budget gap so that the quality of life for people in our neighborhoods, for people in CUNY, for our youth, for our seniors, is not sacrificed because somebody wants to stick rigidly to some economic philosophy instead of being fiscally flexible. Now let’s get this thing done. God bless you and thank you so much.

Chair Sohmer: By acclamation.... Sherry, you’re on. It may be a little bit tough to follow, but....

[Vice-Chancellor Brabham resumes taking questions]

Professor Speidel, Queens: A softball for you—what is the practical significance of the $5 million cut in CUTRA [City University Tuition Revenue Account] and the $5 million increase in the stabilization fund? Vice-Chancellor Brabham: I’m quite impressed that you even know about that. The CUTRA Account, as I think you probably do know, is an account that allows the university, if we overcollect revenue in any given year, to roll it forward. Professor Speidel: That revenue has what kinds of restrictions on it? Vice-Chancellor Brabham: None. It stays at the colleges; it can be used at the colleges. It has the same restrictions that any other tax-levy dollars have. It’s just like tax-levy money. The stabilization account, however, is money, that, if a college underspends its budget by any amount in a given year, you know, at the end of the year, OTPS or something doesn’t come in or whatever it is—money is left over. That allows individual colleges at the university to roll tax-levy dollars forward into the next year, and the same case—there are no restrictions on those dollars; they’re just like tax-levy dollars. So effectively, there’s no practical impact.

Professor London, Brooklyn: This actually follows on Councilman Barron’s rousing talk. In the last round, we just saw that the City Council really stood up for CUNY, and in the mayor’s budget put in $5 million for full-time lines, new full-time lines for the community colleges. I don’t know that that’s generally understood throughout the university, but it’s there, so I think we’d like to hear a progress report. How many of those lines have been distributed, and what are the plans for allocating the rest? Vice-Chancellor Brabham: The $5 million that the Council provided in city money was actually a change from state money to city money. When the mayor had initially said that he was funding the university an initial $5 million for full-time faculty and an additional $5 million for College Now!, $5.5 million for College Now!, he had said that the state was going to fund it. He thought there were state resources, so in the City Council, we were afraid we were going to have this major hole in our budget because the state was not coming forward with that money after the bare-bones budget, and as Steve pointed out, the City Council did put that money back into our budget, so that was not a cut to the university as a consequence of the state not providing the money. When we allocated the budget in the summer, those dollars were allocated to colleges, and so all the dollars were sent out to colleges. We thought that it was smart to send it out there—it makes it harder to take it back than if you’re just holding it, waiting to see what the political action is going to be—so those dollars were allocated. The other thing that happened, though, in the middle of the year, as you know, is that the city, unlike the state, did not fund the DC-37 agreement, and on the community college side, that was a $4.7 million problem. There was also a reduction on the community college budget of about $4.7 million. That was the total. Many of those deductions were taken in central accounts, like the Vallone Scholarship, so the impact to the colleges was not that great. It was about $1.5 million in terms of actual cuts from what was initially allocated, but the colleges are absorbing the collective bargaining agreements for DC-37, so this is one of the things we will look very carefully at—my sense is that various colleges are struggling in different ways. We gave them the maintenance effort target to try to account for those new full-time lines, but also the community colleges are struggling with collective bargaining. People are in different kinds of places, but we will monitor that. We will report back to the Budget Advisory Committee in terms of where colleges are in hiring the faculty. Professor London: Just a follow-up. I know it’s a complicated situation, and we talked about the cuts that were taken. It’s also important to know that those cuts were taken on the increased budget that was adopted in June. So what that means in comparison to last year’s budget is in fact there are no cuts in the community college; so even though people have talked about cuts one year to the next, it’s not the case. Vice-Chancellor Brabham: City support is actually up from year to year, and state support, except for the full-time faculty the state provided and CD and child-care. Professor London: So I think that in terms of the various community colleges, it would be helpful again—well, they’re absorbing some cuts—these were from the projections, or this is from the adopted budget over the summer. So it would still be helpful, I think, to have a report on how those lines were allocated and what stage the campuses are in. Vice-Chancellor Brabham: Yes, we will do that. I’m wanting to look at the exact numbers. The FY 2002 budget as adopted was $365 million; the final modification took it down to $361 million because of the loss in some state money. City money actually had gone up from the adopted, $7 million, but state money went down $2.9 million and tuition is down about $1.5 million. So the change is about $3 million up.

Professor Hastick, Medgar Evers: I share Professor Bell’s sentiments about SIMS. Frequent breakdowns, long registration lines, eight to ten hours waiting to register are not uncommon. After that, "Verizon problems," where phones, my phone in particular, the home lines, it’s difficult to get any calls out; people can’t call in; they’re getting a busy signal; Verizon trucks are in front of Medgar Evers College, so clearly they’re working, or attempting to do something. I am wondering, however, whether the Verizon problems, again, are somehow connected to the question I raised earlier with the Chancellor about capital budgets, monies, and whether or not that total funding structure really affects our ability to have adequate resources, because again, it relates to capacities and having enough lines, and one side of the building works, but the other side may not, etc. It’s not a question as much as a statement that we certainly need to have that budget process revisited to see what needs to change, and tell us—we need to hear—because if not, we just have the frustration that there ought to be enough resources and "nobody is doing anything about it," which of course is not true. So we need to get the information so that we can share it with faculty. Vice-Chancellor Brabham: It may well be that this is a capital budget issue in terms of the lines because of course one of the reasons that a system would go down would be if the communication line was going in a bad way.

Professor Manassah, City: The Chancellor talked a lot about how to make the system more efficient. There was a lot of talk about they want to go out and get money from outside. It has been in the news recently about the irregularities of reporting and what have you. I believe one of the biggest problems that exists in CUNY at the college level is the lack of transparency in accounts. You get some of those little local dictators and you go to them and ask them, "How did you spend the money?" "Oh, it’s going to take four or five months for that to be computed." Then four or five months later they come and say, "Well, we spent $100,000 on ‘x’; we spent another $50,000 on ‘y’; another $20,000 on ‘z’; and $850,000 on miscellaneous." There is one thing probably that can help both the transparency and the governance. The amount of time it’s taking the college governance bodies to get to that information is tremendous. I think if you choose to, you can trump the whole game. You have all the data for all the colleges. I would suggest—and I know the way you actually have it—it’s double-indexed and all of that—I know a little bit of what I’m talking about. It is possible for you, at the end of each fiscal year, to have really a complete expenditure report about every college. I think you’ll be helping this university and this faculty a lot, and saving us a lot of those kind of "I have the information; I keep it so I have the power." You know, you start issuing it campus by campus, line by line, an item budget. I have taken a little time to study your system. I know how it can be done so that you will have the right columns and the right rows and what have you, and it will be consistent with the model that last year you got KP & G to come do for you. If every year in the month of August, so that would be two years after the closing of the fiscal year and one month before the first meetings of the governance body, if you would issue such an expenditure report for each campus, I think that way a lot of people would have their feet to the fire. They’re not going to tell any fairy tales; they’re not going to do any of those things. So please I’m asking you whether it will possible now for you to do so. Chair Sohmer: You probably mean an all-funds budget. Professor Manassah: All funds, absolutely. All sources. Vice-Chancellor Brabham: Well, one of the goals of the University Budget Office is to develop all-funds budgets for the colleges, but as you know, we have not done that historically, and the university has for the most part only done budgets for tax-levy resources, and colleges have had a lot of autonomy in terms of other resources, whether it’s in terms of their own enterprises or the Research Foundation or other places. That is one of our goals, is to develop all-funds budgets, but we’re not quite there yet. Professor Manassah: I’ll be quite satisfied if you can do it for the tax-levy budget in terms of line-by-line and department-by- department, so that we know; there is that model that last year your consultant developed. Always, people come and say, "Well, we’re spending a lot of money on instruction." I have a little surprise for you. I went through the arithmetic myself. I took the time; I went through the arithmetic. At least as far as my college is concerned, that’s not true. Most of the money is going in terms of the support structure, administrative support structure. So the answer is yes, that’s something that you will do? Vice-Chancellor Brabham: The answer is that within the constraints of the tax-levy budget and the information that we currently have, we can issue the reports. Most of the information that I see, though, is not department-by-department. It is major purpose and expense categories, like PS-regular and OTPS, and that is really the level that we deal with things at the university level, but we can certainly do that.

Professor Beaky, LaGuardia: I’ve been going through the very complex chronology of the budget negotiations since September 11th, and I think my questions have been answered, but I want to make sure that I am correct and that I understand correctly. On the senior college side, I know that the university went through some scenarios—1.5%, 2.75%, etc. But I think that thanks to this interest and the integration of business that there are now no state cuts to the senior colleges in the current budget. Vice-Chancellor Brabham: That is correct, yes. Professor Beaky: For the community colleges and the city, there was the 19.5 bill, the 15%, etc. Is it correct that where the community colleges now stand is what is described in the CUNY January 3rd budget analysis? Is that correct? Vice-Chancellor Brabham: Yes, that is correct.

Professor Crain, City: Just to make sure of my understanding. The CUNY Construction Fund has bothered me for many years. As I understand, our tuition goes into the construction fund. The interest made on that does not come back to CUNY, has never come back to CUNY. The city and the state just disperse that money for whatever they want, but it does not come back to CUNY; it never has. We’ve always thought—I’ve just never had the chance to really get on that, but I’ve always thought that was a real target of unfairness that we should have been addressing. Do you understand me on that? Vice-Chancellor Brabham: It’s a more mixed story than that, because in the early ’90s when we getting PEG targets from the city and budget cuts from the state, we did use CUCF interest earnings to make up those cuts, but it didn’t come in a proactive way to really enrich or strengthen the university in any way. The Construction Fund has a Board of Directors, and they’re members appointed, I guess, by the governor—there are people on it from DOB; Assembly Member Sullivan is on the Board, and there are times when they have used some of the interest earnings for particular capital projects, to supplement capital projects at the university, as well. So it has sometimes helped us, but this is the first time that it really has funded something that needed to be funded for us. Professor Crain: Fine, but you would agree that—just as a simple-minded person would say—"That’s our money," and we shouldn’t be begging for it or be happy that they give us a little bit for emergencies. The other is, in terms of maintenance of effort, my understanding is the state law specifies certain percentages—the contributions of the state, the city, and tuition that go into the operating budget of the community college, and the state law holds that no more than one-third can come from tuition, but that is waived year after year by the maintenance of effort clause in the state legislature. But both the maintenance of effort clause and the original state law are state laws, so that the city is not doing us any great favor by incorporating maintenance of effort—they have to put it in, whether they put it in the budget or not; that’s state law. Vice-Chancellor Brabham: The maintenance of effort law is renewed every year, so it is not in the budget; it is in the budget bill that comes from the state.

Professor O’Malley, Kingsboro: You said that the state budget allocated $20 million for the senior colleges in terms of DC-37 contract increases. What about the community colleges next year? Will they once again have to pay it out of their base budget? Vice-Chancellor Brabham: The issue of the city’s funding the community colleges’ collective bargaining is at the top of the list for the university in terms of dealing with the new administration and trying to really change a policy that was fairly new with the last administration in terms of supporting collective bargaining. We absolutely hope not. Because needless to say—I’m sure everybody in the room agrees with me—this is not, probably, our last contract, hopefully not next year. So the PSC dollars are significantly larger than the $4.5 million if we were to look at the same level of settlement, so that’s a really big issue for us at the community colleges if the city doesn’t fund it. It’s a real problem. So we’re really working on it.

Professor Baumrin, Graduate Center: Such cheer. We give you one softball after another, so here’s a softball. I understood from a previous discussion we had that we were actually down $42 million, but somehow that disappeared between the time we had the talk at the last meeting and now—and the second half of the question, because he’s not going to let me ask a second question—and we’re down 200 in teaching power, and it’s hard to put a rosy glow on that. Vice-Chancellor Brabham: I’m not sure where the $42 million comes in. I must have been out of the room when that number was bandied around. There are two things that we are concerned about. With a straight-line budget, our costs are going up, so a straight-line budget will never take care of what all those costs are. One of the things that we are trying to do right now is to get a stronger sense, better numbers in terms of what are the not-so-apparent costs that are in the senior college budget, things like the cost of increments that are not funded in this budget, things like OTPS inflation, things like other costs that haven’t been funded historically, whether it is labor costs or whatever they are. There are a whole bunch of things that are not funded in this budget. What that number is, I don’t think at the senior colleges it’s $40 million, but it is not going to be a small number. I think it’s probably going to be more in the neighborhood of $20 million. The other thing we have done—actually you folks should be getting a copy of it. If you haven’t gotten it already, maybe the Senate office will. We’ve done an analysis—we’ve done these for the last three years—that shows how the university funding has changed over a ten-year period of time, and there’s just no doubt that adjusted for inflation, funding at this university is significantly down. I don’t remember exactly what the numbers are in this most recent publication, and maybe that’s the $40 million. Adjusted for inflation, the numbers are significantly larger. Chair Sohmer: $41.9 million is the requested increase in state aid. Vice-Chancellor Brabham: So that was the number—from what we requested, we didn’t get $41.9 million.Professor Baumrin: May I remind you of what the second part of the question was? 200 lines disappeared. Whatever you use for a multiplier, that’s gone, too. Vice-Chancellor Brabham: From Fall 2000 to Fall 2001, we have gone down— Professor Baumrin: But we got the money, we got the money, right? And we spent it somewhere else, right? Because it’s not going to be in one of those funds rolling over there. Vice-Chancellor Brabham: I think that you all know that there are—and we looked at this individually, college by college in the Budget Advisory Committee—we talked about those numbers. Colleges have been under enormous financial pressure. I don’t believe that—there are colleges where the faculty numbers are up; there are colleges where the faculty numbers are down, and almost to the college, it is because of significant budget problems at those individual colleges. Professor Baumrin: Well, this is the sense. Once in a while, we walk into the door and we put on the university hat. Now my college is in trouble, right Fred? My college is in trouble—we lost 21 lines. Give ’em to Baruch. Give ’em to Evers. Give ’em to somebody. You ate the money! Vice-Chancellor Brabham: No. The money was allocated to the colleges. The dollars were allocated to the colleges, and because of other obligations at the campuses, the dollars were spent. Whether they were continuing positions, continuing lines—there are not dollars. Lehman College didn’t have a surplus last year, by any stretch of the imagination. More vice-presidents, more deans, that’s right.

Professor Moore, Queens: When do the new TAP rules begin? Vice-Chancellor Brabham: They will be in effect April 1st, but for the next academic year, if they were to be adopted—if the budget were to be adopted by April 1st. Professor Moore: So if they go into effect, it will be next year? Vice-Chancellor Brabham: Yes, next academic year, that’s correct. Thank you.

No new business was presented, and the meeting was adjourned.