SUNY has more than 2.5 million alumni and more than 80 percent of them live in New York state. How we activate them to protect SUNY is the newest project Phil has asked me to oversee.

The UUP/Alumni Project is simple. We’re starting with UUP members who are SUNY alumni and asking them to talk to other alumni about the needs of the SUNY campuses where they went. Who better than our member/alumni to reach out and explain how the cuts to SUNY have changed life on campus, and not for the better?

As an alumnus of two SUNY campuses, Oswego and the University at Buffalo, I have been struck by how no one from either campus has asked me to fight for more SUNY funding. Calls come from the alumni association for contributions, but they never ask me to fight the cuts. This needs to change. If we could get 1 percent of alumni to write one letter, that would be 25,000 letters for our cause.

So how do we start? Each chapter vice presidents for academics is going to ask if you or a family member is a SUNY alum and, if so, which one. Please let them know who you are because we do not have this information. Once we have the names and e-mail addresses, we will send out more information on how you can help as an alumnus. We might ask you to send a letter to your alumni magazine, the student newspaper where you went to school, or the local newspaper. You may also be asked to send a letter to state legislators and the governor, not as an employee but as someone who is a successful SUNY graduate who does not want to see the system dismantled.

Sometimes we forget how much we know about SUNY and how little contact our former student colleagues have with our campuses. We all have busy lives and if no one mentions what is happening, it flies by at breakneck speed. So when we say that SUNY over the last 18 months has been cut by almost 25 percent of its operating budget, most people are surprised. Asking them to remember the quality education they received at SUNY—and then urging them to fight the cuts so others can get the same quality education—should be easy. But I know it will not be. That is why we are starting the UUP/Alumni Project.

If you would like to help, please talk with your chapter vice presidents for academics or e-mail me at ffloss@uupmail.org and I can get you started. Working together with the 2.5 million alumni of SUNY, we can protect our University and ensure that future students will have the quality education that many of us enjoyed when we attended SUNY.