Guydosh's Report on 
The SUNY University Faculty Senate
Winter 2002 Meeting

I recently attended the Winter plenary meeting of the University Faculty Senate in Binghamton to represent our Plattsburgh campus. The University Senate was created to represent the voice of SUNY Faculty state-wide. It is composed of faculty representatives from each of the State University campuses and is organized much as our own local Faculty Senate. 

Much of the business of the meeting centered around financial concerns. Vice-Chancellor Brian Stenson and others gave extensive reports on construction and organization of the SUNY budgets. But of course there was little specific news or information available, given the constant uncertainty of the political issues that effect the process. 

In a debate continuing from the previous meeting of the University Senate, the representatives considered various forms of resolutions concerning the urging of a rational funding policy, including a tuition policy. There was a surprising level of opposition to any resolution involving tuition, the opposition being based mainly on two issues. The first issue concerned the potential perception of faculty appearing to call for students to bear the burden of supporting faculty salary increases. The second concerned the need for the State to fulfill its own funding responsibilities rather than shifting the burden to students. In the end, after much argument and compromise, the University Senate resolved to call upon the Chancellor to work with various constituencies to achieve a "rational fiscal policy to include increased state support and to address such factors as enrollment growth and inflation to ensure the quality of public higher education in New York State." The full text is available on my website: http://faculty.plattsburgh.edu/ray.guydosh/ufs . 

Chancellor King reported to the University Senate on his view of the state of the System, mentioning that freshman growth rate is now twice that of the New York high school graduation rate, that SUNY's federal research support had grown several hundred percent, that twenty-four campus are raising over one billion in philanthropic funds with fifty percent already pledged, and that SUNY was working on initiatives related to its obligation to prepare students for a globally interdependent world. The Chancellor also said that he had indicated a need for $130 million more in this year's SUNY budget, although politically it was necessary to officially submit a flat budget. He said that he thought in the end SUNY might receive slightly more that the flat budget, but likely not much more. 

In response to questioning, Chancellor King suggested that it has been SUNY's institutional style to publicly complain about state support, but history suggested that in doing so, the major benefit was merely for the faculty and others to feel better personally, while potentially giving SUNY a bad quality image among potential students, parents, and other constituencies. He suggested that faculty have faith in the current administration and that, just because the faculty weren't reading about things in the newspapers, it didn't mean that something wasn't being done. (Those are not exact quotes but they are reasonably close paraphrases.) 

The University Senate President, Joe Hildredth, reported about a growing interest in the issue of transferability and predicted the possible development of an action plan in the future. He spoke about issues related to teacher education. He suggested that the future might hold a required evaluation of all undergraduate majors in one form or another. He mentioned the coming Faculty Opinion Survey, prepared by the Higher Education Research Institute, but containing twenty-one questions designed especially for SUNY. Some questions might be admittedly perceived as intrusive, but responses to all survey questions are not required of faculty. 

With respect to internal business, the University Senate adopted a report by an ad-hoc committee which had been set up to examine relations between the Senate and the various chairs of local campus faculty senates. Those relationships have at times been strained over the past several years as local faculty senate chairs have perceived a lack of responsiveness to various issues on the part of the University Senate. The faculty senate chairs who were present seemed satisfied at the report. 

As I have said in other reports to you, I appreciate your confidence in choosing me to represent the Plattsburgh campus as your representative to the University Senate. I would be pleased to provide you with more detail about any of the items in this report.