Score another victory for UUP! Score two! And we’re going for three! 

I want you to know your union works hard for you every day. And we get results. Just look at what we’ve accomplished over the last few months.

First, Gov. Spitzer’s budget for SUNY included the legislative add-ons from the previous years. With additional legislative add-ons, SUNY received an increase of about $160 million for the current fiscal year. This is certainly a major step in the right direction. We thank legislative leaders and the governor for their commitment to UUP and SUNY.

Second, UUP played the instrumental role in getting pension equity for our members. The Legislature passed the ORP pension equity bill and, better yet, the governor signed the bill into law. This means that thousands of UUPers will receive a raise in take-home pay of 3 percent over the next three years. It took several years, but UUPers now have pension equity! This was an amazing victory. Most states and private companies are attacking employee pensions. In the recent New York gubernatorial campaign, one candidate even proposed doing away with pensions for public employees. We were swimming against the current of popular ideology on this issue, but miraculously we won. Our thanks go to legislative leaders in both houses and to the governor.

Third, the Berger Commission tried to remove Upstate Medical University (UMU) from SUNY. To prevent this, UUP filed a lawsuit and supplemented our legal work with a series of meetings with leaders in the governor’s office. The plan to privatize UMU was one of the toughest challenges UUP faced during my tenure as president. I have to admit, for a while things looked grim, but our legal case and our ability to work with the governor’s people eventually worked. UMU and Crouse Hospital in Syracuse reached an affiliation agreement and it appears that UMU is safe again. This was another major victory for UUP and SUNY.

And we have even more reason to be optimistic about SUNY’s future. As part of his commitment to make New York’s system of higher education the best in the country, the governor created a Commission on Higher Education.

In his Executive Order establishing the commission, Gov. Spitzer asks the right questions, ranging from how well our elementary and secondary systems prepare students for college to how well our public universities are prepared to educate them.

I have the privilege of serving on the commission as the sole representative of the higher education labor movement. I view my job as keeping the commission focused on the issues important to SUNY and CUNY. When we talk about academic quality, for instance, I’m trying to move the discussion to include faculty/student ratios. We all know that faculty/student ratios are a problem at SUNY. Here are the numbers: the ratio of full-time faculty to students is about 22-1. When you compare this to the state-run statutory

colleges at Cornell — where the ratio is about 6-1 — you see the issue more clearly. Sadly, CUNY’s full-time faculty to student ratio is even worse. The good news is that the commission is providing a forum to discuss the faculty shortage at SUNY and to make the argument for more full-time positions.

The commission will deal with myriad other important issues, including capital needs, governance issues, financial aid and tuition. A few words on the tuition and financial aid issues are in order.

UUP does not take a position on tuition. Nevertheless, it is crystal clear that SUNY needs a predictable and consistent source of funding. The policy in place now of keeping tuition flat for years and then introducing large tuition hikes is harmful to students and the University. Yet, before we buy into any so-called rational tuition policy linking tuition to some consumer index, we need to make sure the state will not offset any tuition hikes by cutting state assistance. In the past, this practice has led students to pay more and get less.

Financial aid has the potential to create major issues for the state’s public universities. Historically, there is an inverse relationship between increases in TAP and aid to the public universities. In other words, the privates get the lion’s share of TAP increases, and SUNY and CUNY tend to pay for them by losing state aid.

In any case, we’re coming off a great summer for SUNY. With the support of the leaders of both houses and the governor, we hope to do even better in the future.

I thank you all for your good work in our mutual quest.