UB Council endorses legislative agenda
The UB Council Monday unanimously endorsed UB’s legislative agenda of policy reforms that it says are needed to realize the full potential of UB 2020.
Council members passed a resolution, introduced by council member Pamela Davis Heilman, stating their “vigorous support” of four “solutions to enable UB 2020 to come to fruition.” The solutions, all of which have been endorsed by the SUNY Board of Trustees, are increased flexibility in spending and contract matters, access to market capital, ability to lease and purchase land or facilities, and a rational tuition strategy.
The resolution also urges New York State’s governmental leaders “to act swiftly and boldly to implement these reforms.”
President John B. Simpson noted that the state’s financial crisis has created an environment in Albany that may be conducive to implementing these no- or low-cost policy reforms.
“The chaos in Albany and the financial crisis allow me and all of us to push conversations that we couldn’t have a year ago and actually have people engage them,” Simpson said. “There’s ample opportunity for doing the kinds of things I’d like done in the near future.”
Council Chair Jeremy M. Jacobs agreed, pointing out that Gov. David Paterson has asked for proposals for “low-cost, high-impact measures to help move the state forward.”
“I hope we are part of that package,” he said.
Simpson said UB’s budget cut of $21 million amounts to 10 percent of the state budget used to operate the university and represents slightly more than half of the budget that pays the basic bills.
“It is nontrivial,” he said of the cut, noting that there are now 300 fewer jobs—and 300 fewer people—working at UB than in December 2007.
Because of the planning the university has been doing as part of the UB 2020 process, the university has been able to deal with the budget crisis in “as nondisruptive a fashion as possible” and it may appear to those on the outside that UB has not been greatly affected by the crisis, Simpson said.
“But UB is not the same,” he said. “This is not moving us in the direction of successfully implementing the plans called for in UB 2020. We need significant changes.”
UB officials will head to Albany on Feb. 23 for UB Day, the university’s annual lobbying effort, and will talk with elected officials about enacting “the kinds of changes needed for the university to move into the directions called for in UB 2020,” Simpson said.
Three of the four items in UB’s legislative agenda, he said, address how the university conducts business and uses its resources—business practices that are in effect “for virtually every major university with whom we compete for faculty, grants, resources and students.
“It’s, in a sense, asking for a level playing field,” he added.
The fourth item—a rational tuition policy—is needed because SUNY has no written policy about tuition, he said. The legislature traditionally increases tuition during times of financial difficulty, then allots less underlying funding for higher education. Increases come with no warning, so students cannot plan for them.
These tuition increases, Simpson said, are “nothing more than a tax on students” because the money paid for increased tuition goes into the state general fund, rather than to SUNY. Students are “paying more and getting less than what they did a year ago,” he added.
Robert Pape, the student representative to the council, said that rational tuition had been “on the radar” of student leaders long before the current financial crisis “as an issue of fairness to students.” He believes UB and SUNY have, in general, the full support of students for a rational tuition policy—meaning small, regular and predictable tuition increases.
Successfully enacting such a policy will require educating students, parents and state legislators, Pape says, noting that lawmakers do not want to endorse anything that looks like an increase.
“We need to show everyone that it’s not us raising tuition; it’s us organizing the raises in tuition that are already going to happen,” he said. “It’s us making them fair and it’s us making them predictable.”
Pape said students received an email explaining why tuition was increasing next semester—about three weeks before the increase goes into effect.
“If we can start explaining now, with that wave of interest, why we want rational tuition as a policy—why it makes sense—we even may be able to use it to calm some concerns,” he said.
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