Chair Cooper called the session to order at 6:30 p.m. in the Harold M. Proshansky Auditorium of the Graduate School and University Center. Present were Senators from the following campuses: Baruch: McCall, Otte, Pollard and Alternate Hill. BMCC: Resnick and Friedman. Bronx CC: Cummins, Galub, and Riley. Brooklyn: Bell, Hager, Jacobson, London, Shapiro, and Tobey. City: Connorton, DeJongh, Grossman, Pearson, Sank, Sohmer, and Weil. Graduate School: Baumrin, Rothman, and Alternate Kieser. Hostos CC: Vasillov and Alternate Cardona. Hunter: Matthews, Sherrill, Steinberg, Wonsek and Alternate Baxter. John Jay:Brugnola, Kaplowitz, Rodriguez and Alternate Davenport. Kingsborough CC: Goldfarb, Martinez, O'Malley, Richter, and Atlernate Staum. LaGuardia CC: Mettler, Reitano and Alternates Beaky and Boris. Lehman: Feinerman, Nathanson and Alternate Knobloch. Mt. Sinai: Levitan. NYCTC: Donoghue, Hounion, Norton, Walter, and Alternate Cermele. Queens: Brady, Kulkarni, Landazuri, and Seley. Queensborough CC: Barbanel, Dahbany-Miraglia, Gellman, Greenbaum, Marti, Mullin and Alternate Specht. Staten Island: Cooper, Levine, and Yousef. York College: Cooper. Professors Barsoum, Hastick, and MacLennan were excused. Newly-elected members Carins and Diamond attended. Faculty Governance Leaders present: Cooper (York), Friedman (BMCC), Hager (Brooklyn), Hampton (Hunter), Kaplowitz (John Jay), Kurzman (Hunter), Levine (Staten Island), Specht (QCC). Chancellor Reynolds gave a report and was accompanied by Vice Chancellor Diaz, Acting Vice Chancellor Martin, and Dean Hotzler. Commissioner Richard Mills was the guest speaker. The Parlimentarian was Alternate Staum. Executive Director Phipps and Administrative Assistant Pasela were present.

b. Chancellor: I'm pleased to see you all here tonight. I am going to be brief as Commissioner Mills, my colleague, is already here tonight. I'm pleased he is speaking in front of this body. I was trying to convince him to join system chiefs and other corresponding educators from other states at a meeting over the summer. The focus was on K-12 initiatives.

We have moving your way a slightly revised handout, not terribly revised. Also from Vice Chancellor Rothbard, a preliminary analysis of the Assembly budget bill 1305A. It does of course carry pretty good news for us. I say pretty good because I always get anxious that this becomes the end point negotiating position. We're very pleased though that the Assembly bill carries the full restoration of tuition assistance, and I would add also that Commissioner Mills was an advocate for restoration of tuition assistance which we appreciate very much. It carries base aid restoration - $57 million, and also that very important number that isn't very glamorous to anybody, but is terribly important to everybody here tonight, which is the $21 million for mandatory increases, without which we will all have very major budget cuts at each campus.

We are also pushing on the telecommunications network infrastructure, John Jay phase II site acquisition, and other major college priority projects. Accompanying this is a memo from Vice Chancellor Rothbard, which you can read it at your leisure. The Assembly budget bill was good news for us. I did meet with Speaker Silver about a week ago. Always a very good meeting with Speaker Silver who is very cognizant of CUNY and our needs and issues. He is very committed but he also urged me to make sure that we keep pressure up on legislators, that we keep CUNY at the top of the heap. As you are aware the argument over rent control is real. That is really hampering any efforts to reach budget accommodation. I won't ask if any members of this body live in rent control apartments; I really don't want to know. It is a very real issue for one million New Yorkers and I of course am sympathetic with it. I do hope that it can get resolved and that our own budget doesn't get held hostage.

The other thing that I did want to mention, I just got back in today from a National Association of System Heads meeting, which is the meeting at which I always learn the most, fastest, in any given year. We share with each other very honestly what's going on in our states. I won't go through the entire roster, but I did break some things down in categories, and I thought you might be interested. Some legislative activities that are going on out there, for example, one that I heard about from a couple of states including North Dakota, is that the legislature in North Dakota has gradually recognized that technology, paying for infrastructure and computers and so forth, doesn't save money. Now I was guilty of that. I remember about fifteen years ago I used to tell the legislature that if they would just buy us all of the computers and main frames we needed, we would save money. That was mistaken. We didn't save any money, we have just gotten into the information age as higher education should. A couple of legislators are now talking about and moving ahead on regulating technology and doing common protocols. That sent a little eerie tickle down my spine and I just mention it because it is a bit of the reaction of the large cost of moving our libraries and our campuses into the information age.

The Pennsylvania legislature is on a campaign now to have public tuition go up to match private tuition. That is a bit exceptional. In general, as we talked around the table, what was happening in many other states were tuition caps. Legislators are attempting to put caps on tuition. That also can be very harmful, though, if there are budget cuts and institutions have nowhere to go. The one that was the most encouraging in that respect was Colorado. They created a deal where in response to a pledge by university campuses, not to raise tuition. They actually brought down tuition a bit by putting more money into the university's budget if tuition would drop slightly. Those kinds of arrangements are kind of optimal. I would love to see a similar one here in New York. Colorado has actually done that.

Several other states, as I have just indicated, have moved into tuition caps, including Illinois. Nevada has a tuition cap of raising it only 1% a year as long as tuition remains low for the region. However, I cannot weep for Nevada -- they have a 25% higher education budget increase. They are awash in money from gambling. I do not know what moral significance we can derive from that. I'm at least glad that higher education is getting a 25% increase. They have about an 8% student increase over the last two years. Iowa is now being nervous. That is a state that has funded higher education moderately well over the years. They are now starting in to do an income tax cut of 10%. We could all tell them what happens when a state starts earnestly to do personal income tax cuts.

Nebraska -- this one kind of tickles me -- it is really kind of sweet. Nebraska, which has historically not had a huge population, has been doing very well economically lately. They have brought in a lot of plants and a fair amount of factories and so forth along the broad river basin there. They only have a 2-3% unemployment rate. They are actually advertising for people to move there. They are a little concerned because their legislators are starting to talk about tax reform. Mississippi, which once had a great governor -- I bet Dr. Mills remembers Governor Winter in Mississippi who did such major things -- Mississippi is not doing that well right now. They have eked out some very special funding for K-12. The special funding was vetoed by the governor on Friday of last week because there wasn't enough accountability in the package.

Just some sample faculty issues, and I'm not going to go through the whole roster. Arizona is having interesting times. Their legislature put forth a post-tenure review practice, and there is a new University of Arizona campus with no tenure for the faculty on that particular branch of the University of Arizona. Iowa has moved into a faculty work load corresponding with faculty portfolio issues that -- I have no idea -- I tried to kind of discern it from the individual talking about it. It is interesting, Dr. Cooper, something I may write about to see what is happening. They seem to feel fairly good about it, but one doesn't know. Colorado has codified post-tenure review in law at the legislative level. In Alaska one regent has proposed getting rid of tenure. So those are just some of the highlights from out there abroad in the rest of the United States. I would continue to give Georgia and Governor Miller, very high marks for what Governor Miller has achieved on behalf of higher education. Unfortunately he has only two more years as governor. He is going back, after he finishes his term of governor, to be a professor in a community college in Georgia. He is very dedicated to higher education.

The legislature tried to cut faculty and staff salaries. Governor Miller had recommended a major salary increase. But the governor's position was sustained and there have been major contributions to the capital budget there as well. It is a very good picture from Georgia. Louisiana is perking up with oil money once again, more of it flowing to higher education. So there are some happy moments around the states at this point. I will stop there, Madame Chair, and be glad to respond to any questions.

Professor Paul Kurzman [Governance Leader, Hunter College] - "Given the more favorable than perhaps expected scene in Albany, do you as Chancellor, as best you hear from the members of the Board of Trustees, expect that there could be any need this April or the next meeting in May, for a vote fiscal exigency?" / I so earnestly hope not. I do not see it at this point. But I pledge to you, I have worked very hard, all of us have worked very hard, people here, Dr. Cooper, everybody has worked very hard to persuade the legislature that we really do need substantial restoration. I'm guardedly optimistic about it at this point,. that we are going to get both tuition assistance and base budget and the $21 million. Now if we don't get the $21 million, we get on a knife's edge. I really worry about that. So we really need this last push, but I'm at this point optimistic.

Professor Sank (Anthropology, City College) - "On that very optimistic note that the state seems likely to restore much of the budget cuts that they were indicating in January. Would you encourage the colleges to restore programs that were cut in the 1995 retrenchment program? And subjectively, I'll speak of City College where the School of Nursing was terminated, the Physical Education Program was terminated, changing the School of Education to a program, theater and dance. All of these programs and schools were eliminated because of budgetary factors, because of financial factors, not because of education and academic factors. So would you be in favor of restoring these programs?"

/ We don't have the money to do it. When we took the worst budget cut two years ago, our base budgets dropped markedly. That was a real drop. We are working off of a lesser base budget now than we had before and barely surviving on that. When we talk about the handout sheet I just gave you, those restorations, including that $21 million dollars, still put us in the hole. We're not getting anything for inflation or any of the other costs. Anything our campuses do new, they have to cut a program, or cut something somewhere else to do it. We are not like Nevada with a real budget increase; we are not like Georgia with a real budget increase. In fact, if we get the base budget money back, the tuition assistance comes through for us, and that of course goes directly to students and we need it desperately. If we get the $21 million, there will still be cuts on each of campuses this Fall because everything costs more. There has been, what's the inflation rate this last year 3-4%? Every campus is going to be down 3-4% on just purchasing power. Your campus has the largest deficit of all; you have an $11.3 million gap in what your campus' base budget is and your tuition revenues, and your campus has very serious budgetary problems. It is not in balance. / Professor Sank - "Well, we feel that a great part of that was because of the type of retrenchment that we did. Ending the School of Nursing. At the conference was held last Friday by the University Faculty Senate, which was excellent, I learned from some members of the School of Nursing who are no longer at our college, that we essentially lost 800 students by eliminating the School. In the Physical Education Program we lost students by eliminating that, and I think that is why we have suffered in this very draconian way. I really feel that is part of the problem." / Chancellor Reynolds - Remember, those were campus based decisions of a way to deal with a budget cut. Different campuses made different decisions and those were the decisions made by CCNY at that particular time. Your campus has been running in a deficit mode for about six years now. The central office has been bailing CCNY, and I would add in all honesty, at the expense of other campuses, for five or six years now. There has been a serious deficit between programmatic offerings at CCNY and student enrollment, and the overall budgeting of that campus. I'm glad to spend more time on this, or Richard Rothbard will with you and CCNY faculty at some time. It is a complicated picture. You ought to take a close look at the whole thing..../ Professor Sank - "At the last meeting you said that you would come to the college or some delegate would come to the college to discuss it." / Chancellor Reynolds - But you have to invite us though. We haven't been invited. We will come if you invite us. / Professor Sank - "O.K."

Professor Kaplowitz (English, John Jay College) - "This is very good news that you are bringing to us, and we know that you work very effectively on our behalf. Not all of us have gotten the green sheets, so could you just tell us then in addition to the TAP restorations that there is anything about the restoration about rules of eligibility for TAP?" / Again, I use the word optimistic guardedly. What we are hearing on both the Senate and the Assembly is that the new recommended cut-off, which would only be four semesters of TAP at community colleges, will not go through. The recommendation and the Silver bill basically restores us to the way we were before. Again we are guardedly optimistic because of unanimity on the Senate side and the Assembly side. But we still have to work at it. Please everybody keep working. / Professor Kaplowitz - "On a very parochial note, is there any hope about the phase II for John Jay since you mentioned it?" / Chancellor Reynolds - Yes. That's in there and I am optimistic about that. I kind of think its time has come.

Commissioner Richard Mills - I recognize that the Senate is the heart of the University, and I am honored to be here. I come to you with that sense of respect and I also come with some very fundamental personal beliefs and some experiences. I fundamentally believe that former Labor Secretary Robert Reich was correct in The Work of Nations, when he said that the real wealth of the community is in the knowledge and skill of all people. It is the university, broadly stated, that adds to that wealth-building capacity. I see higher education not as a budget issue or a problem of some kind, but as an enormous strategic advantage. I don't feel that New York is treating it as a strategic advantage right now, and we need to help change that.

I come with some family history which is with me all of the time. You need to know it. My grandfather was a coal miner in Wales. He had a fifth grade education and came here to this city, to Ellis Island, and passed on through to the Midwest because he didn't want his children to be without an education. My father attended college during the Depression and after WWII, graduate school on the G.I. Bill. There are some years when I don't think he spent more than $35 on tuition. A lot of hitch hiking to do that. I attended college because my parents mortgaged the house, so all of the rest for me is payback. These are debts that I can't repay.

I also need to tell you that I coming to you with some expectations. My expectation is that this is a community of inquiry and that questions are respected and expected. And I have a question for you. I want to know how we can start talking about performance, about the result of higher education. I think there is a public policy perspective on this. People talk about the university, about its result, without understanding it. There is a dinner table conversation that takes place, people who are putting a spouse through college or themselves through college, or a child through college. They have a dinner table conversation. We need to listen in on that dinner table conversation. From an institutional perspective I think of the wonderful phrase about the self-regarding institution: "You have to be self-regarding in the best sense to thrive."

For all of these conversations there needs to be good data on results. If I were to try to imagine what that dinner table conversation would be about, I think it is about two things. It is about some of the things we just heard about, the cost of higher education, and it is about the quality of higher education. We are doing very little together to feed that conversation and make it productive. Who's at the dinner table for a CUNY student. I met one of you, it turns out we have a connection, we both went to Middlebury College. I was at Medgar Evers not to long ago, I guess it was only last week, and it didn't look like Middlebury College. At least not back then. You actually have some really wonderful data. I don't know if anyone reads it. I read it. It suggests that the students are older here. Forty-two percent of the people who are at Medgar Evers are between thirty and forty-four. I don't know if other people see that. They are foreign born. At City College it is almost 54% that are foreign born. I'm not sure that's known. The languages other than English, 64% of the people who go to Baruch speak a language other than English at home. I'm not sure people are aware of that.

There are students who are supporting children. Thirty five percent of them at Lehman have at least one child under the age of eighteen that they are trying to raise and get an education. This is a place where people are getting an education for the first time. At City College, 24% of the students have a mother who didn't go beyond the eighth grade. The students are working terribly hard. Eighteen percent of the students at Staten Island are working between 21-34 hrs. a week and trying to get an education. There are students who need a lot of remedial help. I see that, taken together, at the senior institutions, 50% in 1995 took some remedial math. The good news is that 85% say that it helped. That's a picture at the dinner table that I don't read about in the newspaper.

You are trying to do something quite unusual and I don't think people know it. Or maybe if they do know it, they are looking away from it. It could be that it is best in this environment where people are looking for reasons to complain about your performance, to not talk about these kinds of numbers and not talk about performance. There are probably many philosophical arguments that we could have about how you can't really measure results in higher education. It is far more complex. You can't have a report card on the university the way we could about the school system. I'm not so sure. There is quite a lot of scholarly effort going into this around the country, and there has been for more than a decade and a half. You have great data on the performance of this institution; it's not being projected. I would like for a few minutes to see if I could persuade you to join in an effort to try and change that.

Since this is an academic community, let's look at the literature first. If we were to try to talk about performance in a productive way in higher education, what seems to work? The literature says you need to integrate performance reports with other policy tools and make sure everybody knows what the purpose is: the purpose isn't to play gotcha. I think of an example in my own organization (thank you for what you said about the firm): We try very hard to connect our strategic plan to our performance measures, to our budget, to our legislative agenda. It's not very complicated. I work with 3,100 people, and that is our strategic plan. It is a pamphlet. It is not a big long document because I want every single person who works with me to have it and to have read it. Every quarter we have a public review of our performance, not of individuals, but of whole teams. There are six teams in the department of education. We are talking about, in public, our contributions to getting this done. When I go to sell the budget to the Governor or to the Legislature, this is the plan, and then the budget is the translation into dollars.

So far it seems to be working. The argument now is not about cutting education, but about how much more to add to it. It is because people are in an argument about how to improve results. Literature also says, you need to use indicators of performance to improve higher education, not to threaten it. Well, the newspapers of course use it, not only to threaten it, but to ridicule. But I think we can change that. Literature in this area says that you need to select indicators of performance as signals of progress toward important goals. The school system in this city needs lots of help, obviously. Taking the first level of Regents math has become almost as common as riding the subway. I am so incredibly in awe of their valor in doing that. They don't pass yet, not a lot of them, but 93% of the kids take the exam. Some of them take it two and three times, and their performance is going to go up.

Literature says if you are going to do something like this, develop a set of indicators on performance. You need to involve the higher education community, all of the stake holders. It is not just for the chancellors, not just for the trustees, for everyone, for the faculty, for everyone. Literature says that you have to be, if you are going to do this, sensitive to institutional mission. I have a standing engagement with Assemblyman Sullivan every two weeks. We always say some day we will just have a cup of coffee and say >hi' and that will be that. But it never works out that way. We have this ongoing argument every two weeks about issues of this kind.

He always warns me in various ways of the same thing. Recently he said you can't compare oranges and battleships. You can't put together performance data about wildly different institutions and make comparisons. Research universities and community colleges are not comparable, and it is wrong to pretend and do so. I pay attention to him. People have concerns about this. They say, if you start looking at institutional performance, the results are going to be used to cut budgets. The data will be used to distort institutional missions. In fact, the results will be used to ignore missions all together. All of that is potentially true.

Right now there is a big argument going around the country about how elementary and secondary education in this country is not working. About how the reading performance of our youngsters is dismal and we are not performing in math and the sciences, not to mention the arts and everything else that's important. And yet governor after governor talks about these data and then invests money. You don't see people quoting statistics in elementary and secondary education and then cutting. You see them using the data to drive change. You see the President of the United States, you see the Governor, you see the Mayor of the City. Everyone gets up, as Chancellor Cruz says, "This cannot stand. We cannot have reading at the level that it is." So people start investing in performance.

I can remember, fifteen years ago probably, a U.S. Secretary of Education, finally just got disgusted with elementary and secondary education. There was no comparative data among the states, so he put together a wall chart, and it was outrageous. It compared states on S.A.T. scores for example, and Iowa looked terrific with 5% of the kids taking the S.A.T., and New Jersey looked terrible with 65% taking the S.A.T., and no one could do the math and see that the more a state rose to the challenge, the lower the ranking. But he kept doing it and finally commissioners of education, my predecessors, got the message and said, "that's garbage, let's blow it away with good data." And they did.

The result has been a nationwide consensus on reform. A nationwide effort to invest in quality. It has gone on every year. I remember for about a decade we kept thinking this has got to be the end, but it doesn't seem to be coming to an end. People are bent on change. I think if we stopped talking about results, they are going to stop talking about the money. We have to start somewhere. As Assemblyman Sullivan and I have our conversation, we have finally agreed I can't say anything about graduation rates. He has helped me understand that -- that an institution with the profile I just described isn't going to graduate students in four years or six years, the way it happened a generation ago. But we have come to a point, I think, where we are starting to agree on a set of questions that we ought to be able to answer about an institution.

Questions about student learning, for example. Do the students gain appropriate knowledge and skill in the general education programs in this university or in this college? Are remedial services offered and do they work? You can answer those questions by the way. What are you hiding? About achievement of graduates. Do graduates pass professional and occupational exams? Do they enter the work force? How satisfied are employers with their skills? What percent pursue higher learning? How much debt do they have to accumulate because of their education? These are important questions. That question about occupational exams, the Board of Regents is very interested in. There are institutions here who are having great difficulty with graduates who are prepared to be teachers and they graduate, but they can't pass the state exams to be teachers. That's something that the faculty look at. Who are we letting in here to these professional programs, and what are we giving to them with the expectation that they will be able to teach the most diverse group of elementary and secondary school students to be found anywhere in the country.

We are talking about questions about student experiences. Are there rigorous academic and graduation requirements in this institution? What resources are devoted to education? Do students experience a diverse student body? That is something that people ought to see and ought to know. Institutional finances and productivity. I really like this question. What is the institution's mission as expressed in its allocation of resources? When I came to the Department of Education we had a big thick budget. I took the budget and I analyzed it from the point of view of what does this institution care about? Where is our money going? Then I analyzed the way the Board of Regents spent its time. I looked at the agenda for all of the meetings for the year. Where does the time go? Then I looked at the written statement of priority, and I found three separate lists of what is important and they didn't agree.

Now we have changed it all around so that the plan, the budget, and the results add up. We are after quality, and we are going to do whatever it takes to get it. This is very much at the beginning stage. I have talked with your colleagues in the SUNY faculty. I have talked with presidents of the independent institutions. I have talked with some trustees at SUNY, some of them. I have talked with proprietary college presidents and the independent college presidents. I'm willing to have quite a few other conversations. It just seems to me that we need to engage this question. There is a lot of data that people want to know and we are not projecting. The kinds of editorials -- in fact I saw a pile of them right out here as we came in -- it is a very incomplete picture of what these institutions are trying to do.

Professor Levine (Applied Sciences, College of Staten Island) - "I agree with every single thing you said, and we have been trying and we still can't get our message heard. Let me give you some specific examples. The Ph.D. program in physics at CUNY has four members elected to the National Academy of Sciences. I can't name another school in the United States with four members. We put out a press release on that, and nobody prints it. I'm at Staten Island. Our teachers, I think over 95% passed the liberal arts portion of the teaching exam. Yet I still hear how the teachers we train can't pass the exam. What do we have to do? Get 100%? We just had an outside review from the accreditation agency in engineering. It was spectacular, but nobody is willing to listen. Every single person in this room can tell you success stories where we send the information out to the newspaper and all they want to tell us is that 2.2% of our community college students graduate within two years. Help." / Well, I want to pick up on something that the Chancellor said about the letter campaign. In a different context, it takes a long time for a message to register. I once worked for a governor of New Jersey, Governor Tom Kean. He said, >you have to have the right message, and you have to keep throwing that message, and it is going to stick eventually, but you can't give up.' There are a lot of people who don't want to hear it, but you have a very powerful human story to tell. Keep telling it.

Professor Kaplowitz (English, John Jay College) - "Commissioner Mills, the issue of data being good data is of course something that we all agree with. Let me give you an example, if I may, of the kind of data that worries me and my colleagues. The graduation rates that are released by the New York State Department of Education is the percentage of graduates among those who are first-time, full-time college students. At a college such as the one I teach at, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, we have many people who work in law enforcement agencies, police officers, correction officers, fire fighters, F.B.I. agents and so forth. We give them, to varying degrees, credit for their studies at the academies. They are all therefore considered transfer students and are not first-time students. None of those students who graduate are included in our graduation records. So the graduation rates are extraordinarily misleading. This is the kind of dialogue that I assume you want to hear about those kinds of things. There is not even an asterisk, no footnote, no endnote, nothing. And it is unfair to the students, to the institution, to the University, and to those who are making policy decisions, to not know information such as that." / The Board of Regents, I think, feels the same way. Particularly the ones that come out of higher education, they know the nuances in the data and they want the data to be right. I want it to be right, and you want it to be right. I want to work with people who can help get it right. People will keep publishing things. Speech makers need the quote, they need to send some bright young thing to the loft, and they look up page 57 and pick the number up, particularly if it is too low, and it gets used. Once it is used it is permanent. / Professor Kaplowitz - "That's right, that is exactly our concern and that is exactly what gets on the editorial pages of the newspapers and gets quoted by politicians who want a sound bite, and that is what causes the cynicism and the problems. If you can turn that around, then we certainly will invite you back again to salute you." / Commissioner Mills - I must say in all honesty that I cannot do it alone. This has to be something that we do together. I don't want people to go away thinking that, >he gets it, these not so young people have challenges in their lives, and can't be held to high expectations.' That's not the message. One of the data points that I like to give to the legislature when I'm talking about the budget, is how incredibly high performing are those who go through the Liberty Partnership. And the people who go through the HEOP programs and how their performance and survival rate is far above national competition. So how dare you talk about cutting this. These are folks who need an incredible amount of support, they get it, and they perform.

Professor Bell (Educational Services, Brooklyn College) - "Yesterday I was up in Albany and one of the things that we have been campaigning with the legislature for, in addition to the CUNY priorities, is not to move HEOP and the other opportunity programs. I am the director of the SEEK program and president of the council of SEEK directors. One of my concerns is for the future of your division of higher education in the department and where do you see that division and where do you see our program stay? We hope in SED." / I am very grateful for effort up there; keep doing that. I am very hopeful, I am talking to a great many people, and I'm sharing with legislators what we have done to increase the performance, just of that organization as a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies can be productive and can be held up to standards. I don't think it is going to be moved, but I'm acting like it is going to be. / Professor Bell - "That area has had oversight as well, over SEEK as well as HEOP.. Do you see it maintaining that, which I hope they do, and do you see their staffing increasing to do such things and working with us?" / Commissioner Mills - I don't see staff increasing, certainly not in the short run. The Department of Education went through a very dramatic... you know the rest of the paragraph, and I don't see it coming back. There are things that we can do that you can't really do in your enterprise, but the access to technologies and to systems re-engineering, we are doing that as aggressively as anybody can just to redesign the work. It is still very much of a strain, but the place is getting better even with smaller staff.

Professor Rodriguez (SEEK, John Jay College) - "I don't know if this is a question or an observation. First of all, Commissioner Mills, you and I share many things, although one generation removed. Part of the reason I am here is because I went to Hunter College. My parents did not have a house to mortgage. I grew up in a housing project. For many poor people, it is really a time of little hope and I don't think that is being pessimistic. So when we sit and talk about results, we talk about how bases are measured. When are we going to start looking at the social crumbling that makes the first floor of this education system? It just seems that we are constantly looking at ways of patching up the wall, but don't look at the foundation that wall is built upon." / That's exactly right. I'm trying to put a lot of pressure, as the Regents are, on low performing schools in this city. We're watching their test scores and if they don't go up by a certain amount, unfortunate things will happen, and they are working very hard. But I also know that schools by themselves can't make it. I look at the Kids Count Data, you are generally familiar, most of you with those? It is about a dozen indicators of the well-being of children and families. In New York State, they have gone down from last year to this year. Most of those indicators can be managed upward. There are states in this country that have deliberately improved the condition of childhood. One indicator is low birth weight babies. You can change that very quickly -- it is about prenatal care, health care, information, education. And you can prevent a lot of problems later. New York is just learning, New York City and New York State, are just learning to knit together these relationships. This Thursday is our first ever teleconference, a prevention conference to connect education, health, mental health, and human services of many kinds. We don't even think about it this way yet. We are still trying to duke it out in a budgetary sense as if education and health care would be competitors. In a small community they have to be friends or it goes down. Unless you think that it is too sanguine. If you look at the Kids Count Data for Niagara Falls, they should be worse because they have taken such a hit economically, but they are actually better in the surrounding region. Because everyone works together, they get kids to school ready to learn. If the Boys' Club or the Girls' Club doesn't have a place to run the after-school program, the school says, >o.k., here is a room, do it here.' We've got to learn to behave that way in this city.

Professor Greenbaum (History, Queensborough Community College) - "You spoke about politicians using data in order to provide a reason for providing more funds. What I see is that depends upon their agenda, if their agenda is to cut the budget, in order to cut taxes, in order to give more money to those people who already have. Then they will only use that information that supports that agenda. We have a Belle Zeller here, I think you may be aware of it. You have these extraordinary scholars who do service to the community. There is a release every time a dinner is given. The Post and the News print nothing. The material you just quoted, I saw the survey, that will be released. If they can find anything negative in it, they will print it. They will print nothing positive. Those with a negative agenda will tell us that you can't throw money at education while they send their children to schools where they throw money at education. The money that does go into education ends up in administration. Between the 1970's and now, we have had almost a halving of faculty and an increase in administration. When I ran for the state Senate on Long Island back in the mid 1980's, I found out that almost all the money that was coming into the Long Island schools from the state, all the additional funds, were going into administration. This whole country is shifting its allocation of resources into administrators. This is on the factory level as well as it is on the education level. How do we reverse that agenda?" / Actually I do want to briefly take the part of the beleaguered superintendent out there from Long Island. Actually they have had a pretty tough time, too. They have been singled out in lots of different ways, their salaries are published separately, their salaries are capped. Almost every group I talk with feels that the whole burden is falling on them and we have got to break through that. It's all of us together. There isn't a quick light that is going to go on in the mind of the editor and people are not going to publish an apology and say, >we didn't mean it.' Although come to think of it, I can think of a newspaper that published an editorial back in November. In November the Regents and I put out a proposal on special education reform and the Gannet chain in White Plains just trashed it as a terrible idea. So my colleagues from another education association went to talk with them, then one of my colleagues went to talk with them, and then I went to talk with them. We just kept after them, they just kept listening and they kept looking at the data and then they published an editorial last week that said, >we were wrong.' / Professor Greenbaum - "I can't imagine the News or Post doing that." / Sometimes it happens. It is a long fight. Never give up.

Professor Schonfeld (City College) - "We've been audited by SED because of some low pass rates on the State Licensing Exam for teachers. I'd like to see the SED be an agent of change to help us improve things for our students. We'd like to turn out very capable teachers, more of them. I would also like to see more of a spirit of cooperation. I think we are seeing it with the auditors in SED, rather than a more conflictual situation. Could you comment on that." / Actually let me ask you to comment more on it because I am not aware. What is the conflictual behavior. What is it that we do that needs to change? / Professor Schonfeld - "I don't think so. I think there is the potential for conflict. I'd like to see the SED auditors as change agents. I think the faculty is moving to improve our students' position in regard to the licensing exams. I think too that one has to do that about their education as well and maybe even selection criteria. But I know there is the potential for some conflict in the future and I just wanted to ask you what is the spirit of the State's interest in us." / Commissioner Mills - That's good. I would be very upset to know if there was ever any discourtesy shown. / "No, never." / There is perhaps something built into the role of auditor that says we're not among friends here for this engagement. The idea is that we need to see the facts and they need to be presented in a cold way. First, negotiation it is not between the auditor and the audited. That said, we need to try very hard to project to you that we want the institution to thrive. We really do. We really need excellent teachers in the schools in this state and we need you.

Professor O'Malley (English, Kingsborough Community College) - "I hold in my hand one of the offensive Daily News editorials attacking the community colleges. So last week I got a call from a reporter from the Daily News. He wanted to know if he could drop by, and I said, >absolutely.' He came to the college, he went to Eva Richter's English class, he roamed around and talked to faculty and administrators, and he had a marvelous time. He said, and this is a man who had gone to a community college in California, >this is a wonderful institution, this is very exciting. The problem is of course not me, the problem is our editorial policy.' Now I don't know what to do. The Community College Caucus is now having a letter writing campaign to the newspapers. I've thought about attracting Pete Hamill and Michael Goodwin and driving them down to Kingsborough. I don't know what to do." / You did the right thing in the first instance in inviting the press in. I think there is a tendency to bring the visor down and keep people out. It can be extremely painful to keep people in, because they will write whatever they feel like writing. Keep inviting them.

Professor Friedman (Developmental Skills, Borough of Manhattan Community College) - "Commissioner Mills, maybe you can shed some light on this for me. CUNY has been around for a long time, City College for 150 years -- we were just at a centennial celebration. Many of our schools have been around for a long time, my own, 30 years. I haven't in the last 20 to 25 years heard such vitriolic comments in the press, from politicians, and so on, as I have heard in the last few months. Nor does it seem to be happening to such an extent in other parts of the country. I have friends and colleagues in other parts of the country. I know there are questions and comments and concerns and so forth. I was wondering what your thoughts are about why at this point in time and in this city in particular, not only is our data being ignored because obviously the data is there. We all go through Middle States reviews every ten years. We have plenty of data. The Chancellor says we have plenty of data. It is just that it is not just being published or being misrepresented. These vitriolic attacks in the press, why at this time and why in this city? What are your thoughts on the reasons for that?" / I haven't been here long enough to know why that's happened. I remember on my way to my first day on the job here in New York City, almost two years ago now. I was reading a thick stack of press accounts about my organization and they were profoundly negative, all of them. I though maybe I should have done a little more research before I came. Over the last year or so it has gotten better and I don't know why. The Regents are out there all the time, there are 16 people. I remember going down the elevator at the legislative office building. It was very crowded, the door opened at every stop, I looked down the hall and there was a Regent visible on every single floor. It was weird. It just takes endless communication, lots of people -- you can't put it all on the Chancellor. You have to send your letters, you have to make your phone calls, and more importantly you have to make the personal contact. Bring someone in to see, not once but five times. There is no magic in it. The politics, a lot of people were elected on cutting taxes, it is a serious thing, and you can't get in the way of that. They really do need to do it, but there is also another argument that can be presented, that this is our seed corn. We can't eat the seed corn and expect a plant next year. We have to keep investing in a high quality, intellectual capacity generating institution. It is a matter of helping people change the way they think about this. It is not an expense, it is an investment, and we've got to show that the investment pays off.

Professor A. Cooper (English, York College) - "Commissioner Mills, as the New York State Commissioner of Education you are not only our highest public official for education, but also our most highly placed advocate for sound education. We've been told in the last couple of days that this summer the Governor is likely to make new appointments to our Board of Trustees. How can you, if at all, influence the nature of the Governor's choices? That is to say, you in your office there in Albany, how can you be of help in helping to educate the Governor to the very positions that you have taken tonight?" / On the issue of appointments to Boards of Trustees, to be candid, probably not at all. It's a very carefully guarded prerogative to be able to appoint people. On the issue of working with the Governor in other ways on these ideas, there is very wide latitude. I talk with him frequently, I write to him frequently, he comes to visit the Regents and the Regents go to visit him. So there is a lot of conversation going on and we will take all of this up.

Professor McCall (English, Baruch College) - "When you were describing the conversation around the dinner table, I wrote in my notes, >guess who came to dinner' and then I changed it to >guess who came to school.' Because we really know who came to school: they are largely women and students of color. I really think this nationwide reform, part of it is really to eliminate some of the women and some of the students of color from the competition. I also think that another part of this subtext is technology. You mentioned nothing about technology. I really do think that reformers are beginning to feel that technology can do better what some of us human beings haven't been able to do too well, according to them. What are your thoughts on that?" / One does read occasionally of technology as a replacement. I don't see much of that. The trouble about the earlier comment though, if that is true, it is a mindless thing for us to not invest in the productive capacity of half of the population. I know there are people who think that way, but it's not healthy. / Professor McCall - "It isn't healthy, but that does seem to be the subtext and no one is confronting it head on and calling it what it is. It seems to me to be racism and sexism." / Commissioner McCall - I'm not ready to say that yet, but I am ready to say that it is dangerous not to invest in the capacity of everyone. If you look at the demographics, those of us who are in the majority culture will be the minority culture just when we are least productive. So we better be nice to a lot of folks who we didn't pay attention to before.

Professor Gallagher (English, Laguardia Community College) - "I'd like to bring the comments full circle and go back to our first speaker's commendation of what you said. I can agree with that also, but I think I have to put a much more pessimistic interpretation on it. It seems to me the more data, the better data we have, the more we inflame our enemies. Professor Lavin's book, the incredible research that goes into changing the odds here, seemed to open this whole new era of sniping at CUNY. Actually more than sniping, what Professor Friedman rightly called the >vitriolic reports' coming from the press. I think that maybe what we don't need is more data like we've got. No one is willing to listen to this. Perhaps the real question we need to ask is what it means to be an educated human being as we approach the new millennia. I don't see that question much debated. What makes me very pessimistic about the possibilities of debating that in any sort of viable public arena is the fact that many of our contemporary politicians seem -- I don't think they are ignorant -- but they are playing on ignorance, they are playing as if they were ignorant men. They are purposely ignoring the data. They are not acting like educated human beings. There is something in it for them, they play on the ignorance of the public for political self-interest, and until they are willing to enter into a debate I don't see how we are going to get anywhere." / I respect that comment, but I dissent from it. I have a different view. I do want to tell you how much I appreciate and respect how much you are all doing. You probably don't have that many people to come all this way to tell you that, but I wanted to. I don't want you to weaken. People really do depend on the results of your work. Thank you for making me feel so welcome tonight.

Professor McCall (English, Baruch College) - "I'm very pleased and proud to nominate Karen Kaplowitz of John Jay College.

Professor Richter (English, Kingsborough Community College) - "I am very honored to nominate my colleague Susan O'Malley for the position of at-large."

Professor Kaplowitz (English, John Jay College) - "It is my honor to nominate Cecelia McCall of Baruch College for the at-large position."

Professor Gallagher (English, LaGuardia Community College) - "I'm pleased to nominate Professor Anne Friedman of Borough of Manhattan Community College."

Professor Baumrin (Philosophy, The Graduate Center) - "I'm not pleased to nominate myself, but I will."

Professor Feinerman (Math & Computer Science, Lehman College) - "I'm pleased to nominate Martha Bell of Brooklyn College."

Chair Cooper - I've asked Judy Connorton who chairs the Library Committee of the Senate to come to the microphone.

Professor Connorton (Chair, Library Committee) - Thanks, Sandi. Sandi just came over to me and said that, >by the way, you are presenting two resolutions tonight, not one, since there are two resolveds. I am the chair of the Library Committee as Sandi mentioned, and I represent our ten members who are asking you tonight to pass these resolutions and in so doing to stand beside the Council of Chief Librarians, LACUNY (Library Association of the City of New York). You have with you your copies of the resolution. You have the testimony of the two leaders of those organizations who spoke at a hearing in mid-March before a meeting that Ed Sullivan conducted of the Assembly Higher Education Committee. Jane Davenport, who is a Senator and member of our committee, is the President of LACUNY, and Susan Newman is the head of the Council of Chief Librarians.

If you look again at the language, you can see that we are spending now only 27% of what we spent ten years ago. You all have gone to the library, you have sent your students who have come back and said there is nothing there, and they are not entirely wrong. Sometimes they cannot find what's there, but lots of times what should be there is not and it is a real problem. Electronic information is wonderful and we urge you to use it, but it does not substitute for the good old-fashioned book. We urge you to consider this tonight, to vote positively, and the next step is to move the first resolution. Before I do that, I am not going to read the whole resolution, but I wish to point out and apologize for this, there are two revisions. The third "whereas" if you look at it should read, "the dollar amount for library materials per senior college FTE in 1994-1995 was $57." The original language is incorrect. And then there is just one other typo in that grid of comparative figures, the second line from the bottom should read "SUNY two year colleges," not four year.

Chair Cooper - I don't believe it needs a second because the Executive Committee has endorsed it. Read the first resolve.

Professor Connorton (Chair, Library Committee) - "Therefore, be it resolved that the University Faculty Senate call for the restoration to the State Executive Budget of the Special Annual Allocation to CUNY of $3 million to support a university-wide book purchasing plan for the libraries."

Chair Cooper - Would you put a period after "libraries" and delete the word "and." Is there any discussion. Would you go to the microphone if there is. Are we ready for a vote. Is there any objection to a vote. All in favor of the resolution? Opposed? Abstained? It appears to be unanimous. Would you move the second one, please.

Professor Connorton - "Be it resolved that the University Faculty Senate call for a review by the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees of the policy of having CUNY libraries compete with other departments within each college for their funding, the review to include consideration of specific university allotments to each library."

Professor Sank (Anthropology, City College) - "I just wondered, shouldn't it be made stronger rather than give them the opportunity to review and then come up with their views of how the funding should be. Shouldn't we be more proactive and positive and say that we want to have...." / Professor Connorton - Are you suggesting that we simply say that the Senate call for specific.... / Professor Sank - "That there should be specific University allotments, that there should be an increase or something of that nature. Rather than...." / Professor Connorton - I guess we are considering the nature of how funds are allocated. We are not specifically asking for more money in this resolution. / Chair Cooper - This addressees the process by which money is allocated in the college. The competition between and amongst departments in the college. The problem with re-writing this on the floor is that I don't think we could reach a consensus between these two positions easily. We would probably have to take this back to review it. Do you want to have a follow-up on that? / Professor Sank - "Indicate that there should not be any competition. That the allocation should be independent, the allocation should be independent of the department allocations."

Professor Baumrin (Philosophy, The Graduate Center) - "Do you have any evidence that the individual colleges would have fared better if they were funded internally in competition with other departments rather than if they were funded centrally?" / Chair Cooper - Don't you mean it the other way around? / Professor Baumrin - "Would it do better individually within the college in competition with other allocations in the college than an allocation made by the central administration to the colleges on whatever basis they make them? I think I said it right?" / Professor Connorton - We are trying to make the opposite point. / Chair Cooper - She is making the opposite point. That's why I am challenging what you are saying. / Professor Connorton - The status now is that we do compete with other departments inside the college. We want that position to at least be reviewed... / Professor Baumrin - "There is a famous comedienne now deceased, Gilda Radner, who said appropriately....

[Speaker did not identify himself] - "I certainly support the first part that we just passed about allocating additional funds specifically earmarked to the library. The problem is that the OTPS allocations for all things, not just library books, but everything, has been cut and what CUNY Central has done, has allowed each campus to make use of "unfilled lines." To take money from OTPS that isn't needed because it is used for "unfilled lines," and use that for OTPS at the whims of the college process. I believe that this is not necessarily a good idea across the board, but I'm not sure what you are calling for here. The wording here is very vague. Should there be a specific university allocation for each OTPS category? Should there be a specific allocation just for the library? I understand the intent and I agree with the intent. The intent is that we need more books. But I'm not sure that this resolution moves us in that direction." / Professor Connorton - Well, we of course are focusing on monies for library materials. Are you speaking of other OTPS just on the campus in general? / [Unidentified Speaker] - "When you say that they are competing with other departments for funding. They are competing with other uses of OTPS given the fact that no college is currently given an OTPS allocation that can even allow the individual campus to function." / Professor Connorton - We simply feel that the library is a department perhaps unlike other departments in that it serves the entire campus community, because it provides books for each department, for its faculty, for the students of each department. We feel that in some cases the college administration has in fact held back funds from the library because that president has the discretion to do that if an emergency springs up somewhere else, the money may not be given to the library. It doesn't always come when we need it; it doesn't come on a regular basis. It may not come and then all of a sudden you will have to spend it quickly. This doesn't motivate or allow one to purchase as rationally as the library would like to. This is the reason why we feel that the library funding and purchasing of materials should be a more protected source of funding and not at the mercy of problems on the campus.

Professor Brady (Library, Queens College) - "I want to support that. We've seen this happen at Queens. Money was very tight and our former president admitted at Assembly that what she was doing was taking all available money to keep bodies in the classroom. Certainly I can understand why she might make that choice. But meanwhile the library and a lot of the other services have been totally neglected. It came to the point where it just couldn't go on anymore. President Kennedy then left and went to SUNY, where I don't think things were really much better. But the point is that it's an organizational thing. Where the money is allocated right now, it's between divisions of the college. We happen to be in the Arts division. I feel very comfortable. The point is that the library doesn't really belong in one division, because we support the curriculum across the board. There really is a point for having money ear marked. I would much prefer to see it go to the colleges than to stay at CUNY Central. I really feel strongly about that, because I think that things decided centrally, there may not be enough time for consultation, there are decisions made very quickly. In terms of putting money into some expensive electronic resources, that I would not necessarily think is the best way to spend the money. I would not spend the money that way at Queens College. I would like to see the money ear marked for the libraries, but going to the individual campuses."

Professor Davenport (Library, John Jay College) - "Just one response to what Anna [Brady] was saying. In order for this to be approved, the chief librarians have been debating ever since September about how it would be allocated to the individual colleges and that it would specifically be ear marked for books, so that Marsha Ra's office wouldn't be deciding either how much each college gets or how much would be spent. That's an individual campus thing that I think chief librarians are still arguing about. What I wanted to say was that one of the reasons that a specific amount used to be allocated to each library, was because it was in line with national standards for college libraries. That's how those numbers were arrived at. Since that specific allocation is no longer required, we've dropped way below national standards."

Professor Sank (Anthropology, City College) - "I guess I didn't read very much of this before we had the discussion. The question comes to mind now, do we want CUNY Central to hold the purse strings for the libraries. We know what they have been doing with all of the other monies that they have been getting into their hands. They have been downsizing and they cut. But I see your point about the competition within departments. Could you possibly have something like this that the University Faculty Senate would call for the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees to designate or assign specific university allotments to each library based on a percent of the total college budget. Would that help the situation? In other words, you are guaranteed, where it is .001% or something like that, that you have to come up with that kind of a figure, that you guarantee a certain basic amount that maybe should be based on what other systems do, like the Illinois State University system. How do they come up with their figure?" / Professor Connorton - Someone said that it is ambiguous -- that the language is vague. I think we actually purposely left it like that. Because we are asking a review of the way the library is funded for its purchase of materials, such review to include consideration of specific University allotments, not that that is what we are indeed asking for. But that would be one of the methods of financing that should be considered, not to eliminate other methods. It is simply a review, we are not at this point dictating in the resolution what that final outcome should be. / Professor Sank - ABut I really worry about your handing over this decision making to CUNY Central. They will do the same thing that you are worried about that the individual colleges are doing. You are worried, and I agree, that when an individual college has a budget cut then the president looks around and says where can we go. Then they go to the weakest area, and the libraries may be one of those areas. The CUNY Central will do the same thing.

Professor Kaplowitz (English, John Jay College) - "I'm also concerned. All of us were disturbed at the initiatives at 80th to centralize everything, including libraries. I think that it was a real breakthrough to have the colleges decide how to spend and allocate the money. If the colleges have made mistakes, I think that it is up to the faculty to be more vocal and to be more vigilant and more persuasive. I thought what Stefan [Baumrin] was asking was the right question, though it turned out that he was asking it for the wrong reason. I'm asking the reverse question of what Stefan was asking. Is there evidence that the colleges would have done better had it been centrally allocated than it has been since the colleges themselves have been able to make the decisions?" / Professor Davenport - There is a lot of evidence. It is very solid that up until 1987, which is the year I believe that the rule was changed about how libraries are funded. There were solid and steady and predictable library budgets that could be relied upon. Ever since then the budgets have been incredibly unstable. Not only have they plummeted, so that we are now spending 27% of what we did ten years ago, but very unstable so that the college presidents will allocate x number of dollars in the beginning of the year and then take back some and then on June 15th, say >I've got $50,000 I need spent in two weeks, can you do it?' We do it every year. It is not a way to run a library.

Chair Cooper - I am going to exercise the prerogative of the Chair. I'm beginning to get the impression that the issue is a bit too complicated for a rational vote to occur tonight. I don't mean to cut off discussion. I think we want to hear the rest of it, but maybe what we are going to have to end up proposing is that the Library Committee consider some of these discussion points and bring us a revised text to the Executive Committee.

Professor Shapiro (Mathematics, Brooklyn College) - "I think we are all, or almost all of us, united in trying to strengthen the libraries, and I question whether the right way to do that is to let the Chancellor and the Board decide what to do. At any rate, I would like to move to refer the issue, as Sandi suggested, back to the committee with the suggestion that they formulate a recommendation to the Board or the Chancellor for how libraries should be funded, or guidelines for that rather than turning the study over to them.

[Speaker did not identify himself] - "The first point that was made seems to me the right point. That is, the resolution as it stands is rather vaguer than it ought to be, and I think that it would be improved by discussion in the Library Committee."