Report to Urge Sweeping Change for SUNY System

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<p>Report to Urge Sweeping Change for SUNY System
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/15/nyregion/15educ.html?ref=education%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/15/nyregion/15educ.html?ref=education&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Call for Change in New York
Jobs</a>, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Call for Change in New York

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The report’s ambitious (and costly) recommendations reflect a growing unease from a wide range of public and private college officials in New York about rising competition not only from institutions in other states, but overseas as well. For New York in particular, a state whose public university system has long had less funding and more complexity than its peers, improving higher education is seen as the key to boosting the flagging local economy, which has seen cities upstate (like Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse) bleeding residents — especially younger ones considered vital to the financial health of a community...

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<p>After all, New York is the place to be ...</p>

<p>Follow-up to:
So How Do We Get to Berkeley? Spend Big on SUNY, Panel Says
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/nyregion/16suny.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/nyregion/16suny.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>Commentary from Fred LeBrun, a long-time columnist for the Albany Times-Union in today's newspaper:</p>

<p>After</a> 40 years, progress still lags on state education system -- Page 1 -- Times Union - Albany NY</p>

<p>I more or less share his pessimism. Politicians are in charge so any decisions will be political in nature. This argues against any of the university centers becoming a Berkeley East anytime soon, as well as many other needed reforms.</p>

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<p>I haven't read the LeBrun commentary as of yet, but I hope this story motivates the legislature to start paying attention to SUNY. For example, investment in SUNY could start a revival of some upstate communities. One great point in the article was that SUNY needs to begin to give priority to the research campuses, or designate a flagship, such as Buffalo, for example. The needs at the mega-campus at Buffalo are distinct from the needs of Plattsburgh.</p>

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<p>Yabbut, the folks who created and fed the UC system were politicians, too. What's different? Even in the nearly-paralyzed California government, they found the money to start a new campus of the UC a few years ago. Is New York actually worse than California? That would be depressing.</p>

<p>EDITED: I am a third-generation Californian, who lived there for 42 years before emigrating to the Soviet of Washington. So, this is not just a cheap shot at California's government from a foreigner.</p>

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<p>Putting a campus in charge of turning around a depressing depressed city is going to prove very difficult. Why should any top faculty person go to Buffalo or Bing. when they can work in Ann Arbor or Austin. It takes more than money and I doubt they even have the money. The campuses are considered by most to be ugly. They going to rebuild an entire campus? HYC is likely going to hit a financial downturn sooner than later and there goes the state budget. Poof.</p>

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<p>
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Why should any top faculty person go to Buffalo or Bing. when they can work in Ann Arbor or Austin.

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<p>I can't speak for Bing but for Buffalo they might decide to buy a beautiful 4 bedroom newly built home around $300,000 in a suburb like Clarence, with fine public schools, low crime, and cultural opportunity. I'm remembering a Business magazine ranking of "top-50-communities-to-raise-a-family." Two were suburban areas of Buffalo, several others were in NEbraska..remember that thread? </p>

<p>They might like to have an NFL team (Buffalo Bills) which Austin can't offer. If they want to fly anywhere for research or conferences, just drive over to the international airport 15 minutes away, no traffic (can Ann Arbor say that?). I've seen the Detroit airport, and frankly, it's no Buffalo International!! ;)</p>

<p>Subscribe to the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra at Kleinhans Hall, the Albright Knox Museum, take your family visitors to Niagara Falls and they are very excited and happy. For a weekend, fly to NYC cheaply non-stop. Or drive to Toronto, 2 hours door-to-door, downtown-to-downtown, even less if you're living suburban. Too far? Go to the Stratford theater festival, for Shaw or Shakespeare.</p>

<p>Who knows what motivates an individual faculty member? </p>

<p>But you're absolutely right it will take a lot of heavy lifting to improve the overall economic situation of the City of Buffalo, same as all the Rust Belt cities from Detroit to Cleveland and all around the Great Lakes. </p>

<p>UB has two campuses, one urban and the other suburban, with the undergrads living suburban. If a UB prof wants to live downtown, there's the Buffalo City Honors public h.s.; if suburban, live over near other top-ranked public districts. If private schools are desired, there's Nichols School...</p>

<p>Don't some professors also consider family lifetsyle? If so, Buffalo is fantastic.
I'm not in academia so I can't compare it for internal to their respective fields of study. But for raising a young family affordably with cultural resources, come to Buffalo.</p>

<p>EDIT: Frank Lloyd Wright homes. Forgot that part.</p>

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<p>"I am a third-generation Californian, who lived there for 42 years before emigrating to the Soviet of Washington" That's really good....</p>

<p>I am a third generation Washingtonian living in exile in the Spitzer/Silver/Bruno kingdom of New York. THEY make all the rules. Spitzer is from NYC, Silver is from Long Island and Bruno is from Troy. The money for ANYTHING only goes to their districts. They manage to find $$$ for RPI, the NanoCenter at Albany and, to some extent SUNYAlbany overall. I do not see either Bing or UB getting acknowledgement in the form of $$$.</p>

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<p>WashDad -- Yes, I believe New York's political situation is worse than California's. California has experienced some notable political crises, but it always seems to be able to pull itself back from the precipice. New York lives in a constant state of holding on by the toenails. Beware of any politician from New York State, regardless of party, who aspires to national office.</p>

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<p>what 2cakes said</p>

<p>hudsonvalley51, your posting caused me to recall when Albert Shankerman of the NYC teachers union loaned Mayor John Lindsay everybody's pensions to bail out the City of New York from bankruptcy. Well, it worked, didn't it?</p>

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<p>2cakes- Silver is from Manhattan. (lower East side)</p>

<p>New York has always been a very divided state. NYC- and the suburbs of Long Island and Westchester -- and then the rest of the upstate area.
One state Flagship will NEVER happen.<br>
A "workable" solution may be to designate Buffalo as the flagship university center and to designate a downstate college as the flagship Liberal arts college. I'd give the nod to the Westchester or Long Island campus of Purchase, Old Westbury or Farmingdale.
Then alot of additional money is shared equitably amongst the other campuses- but with Cortland getting more, as my kid goes there. </p>

<p>but the question will remain- by designating one or two campuses as flagships, are you making the other campuses less desireable and less academically competitive???<br>
I think I would rather see the different campuses "specialize" in different areas of study and let the students decide which campus meets their needs the best.
It seems to have worked with the Suny colleges. Though the curriculums are similar, many savvy NYr's know which SUNY college is better suited for their own kid. i.e. Purchase for performing Arts--Fredonia for music--Cortland for Phys Ed and Sports--Oswego for 7 year Physical therapist program etc.<br>
etc. etc.
we'll see how this report plays out. Any infusion of money into the SUNY system which allows for better programs and more professors, will be good for all New Yorkers.</p>

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<p>Barron, methinks you were harsh on Buffalo and a bit premature in your observation that a university could have no impact or make no improvement in a urban community such as Buffalo. No one expects a university to underwrite (spiritually or otherwise) the revival of decling city. However, I believe that Yale has put quite a bit of thought into the idea. I don't know if anything has gotten off the ground in New Haven. And before he became preoccupied with his flaws (heh heh) New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey proposed a huge development project in Camden that would be anchored by the Rutgers campus in that city. But of course, such things need money. Incidentally, I don't believe that any objective person would say that Buffalo dosen't have huge advantages over places like New Haven and Camden. In my opinion, Buffalo is not depressed per se, it's in decline.</p>

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<p>I think Barrons is right on. NY needs to stop trying to play politics with the SUNY's. Many are in god-awful, depressed, depressing, snowbelt communities. There is no reason to use the SUNY budget to try to throw a bone to these communities. It would be much better if at least most of the SUNYs were near transportation and in a community with some sign of activity. Buffalo and Albany aren't too bad compared with many other SUNY locations. I won't say that for Binghamton since I suffered through several years there. Even so there are worse SUNY locations.</p>

<p>I am all for turning the SUNY loose and letting them increase tuition as needed. There is only so much taxpayer money that should be pumped in. The tuition should go up by at least a factor of two at most SUNYs. That would solve the financial crisis and still leave the tuition at a reasonable level. Of course, those SUNYs in the depressed snowbelt towns would have some difficulty attracting students if they actually had to pay a reasonable cost to go there. Just as a point of comparison, on Long Island many parents spend about $6000/year to send each grade school kid to private church schools. Wouldn't you expect to pay at least that much for college tuition?</p>

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<p>I also assumed that the SUNY colleges were intentionally put in "god-awful" depressed snowbelt communities to keep the politicians happy and used as political leverage. I'm an Oswego grad, so tell me about it!<br>
But it's time for some to start doing a little research about our upstate regions. If you checked out the SUNY colleges, most started off as Normal Schools (teacher colleges) and were established in the period 1850- 1870.
That includes Oswego, Cortland, Oneonta and I believe just about every other upstate SUNY college. The SUNY system which was establised around 1948, must have thought it wise to incorporate the many established existing colleges throughout NYS. CUNY was already in existance, so it certainly was not a stretch to bring about a state university system using primarily our upstate colleges as we had Brooklyn- Hunter-CCNY-etc already established prior to 1948.</p>

<p>so I too may be harsh on the NYS legislators, but there is an historic reason why most of the SUNY colleges are located in rural snowbelt areas-<br>
In fact, most of upstate NY is rural and snowy.</p>

<p>My 4 years in Oswego has turned me into a hearty winter person-- so there are benefits to a SUNY education!!
I wouldn't fight a modest tuition increase either. We are extremely lucky in NY, that our tuition is so low.</p>

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<p>Okay. The two state issue really is alive and well. As a downstater I would vote for Stony Brook. Shirley Kenney has realy turned things around here and it is actually lovely now. Stony Brook is among the top 100 research universities in the world, and it's only 50 years old. Science and the arts are both vibrant, and SB just had two major acquisitions, the Southampton Campus of LIU and the Gyrodyne Property. SB also has a NYC satellite.</p>

<p>It's also not cold or snowy.</p>

<p>But I know all you upstaters feel differently, and I respect that.</p>

<p>BTW: The international community is also vibrant. I have been hosting international students for 20 years.</p>

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<p>SUNY - The 4 major universites don't have the sports of Michigan, UNC, Wisconsin or even Berkeley; Don't have the well known professional schools of Michigan and Berkeley. Don't have the magnificent campus of Univ of Virginia (or even Maryland, or Indiana.)</p>

<p>The campus buildings are almost uniformly unattractive...even the ones located in nice places..</p>

<p>The SUNY schools are a good deal, economically, for kids from NY. I wouldn't suggest them to anyone else who has a chance to go to one of the other major state universities I've listed on this post.</p>

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<p>Marny, might it make more sense to make the flagship LAC geneseo (upstate) and the flagship research school Stony Brook (downstate)? Seems like most of the best science is already coming from Stony Brook and Geneseo's getting more selective all the time.</p>

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<p>I think Spitzer's plan to enhance the faculty across the SUNY system is a great idea, but spending 3 billion dollars to fund a world class research is wrong, because NYS doomed itself to second class status 40 years ago when Rockefeller and company planned the University centers.</p>

<p>The biggest mistake is the Buffalo Amherst campus. Indeed, no amount of money can change the urban planning tragedy that resulted in the UB Amherst campus. At a time when Buffalo was already a depressed city, politics resulted in a huge campus not in downtown Buffalo, but isolated in a suburb -- an inconvenient bus ride (especially in challenging weather) from everywhere. The same thing happened when they built Rich Stadium out in the middle of nowhere. I happen to really really like Buffalo, and again, it is a tragedy that UB's Amherst campus location dooms it forever to second class status.</p>

<p>Had they built the campus (and Rich Stadium) downtown, it could easily have transformed Buffalo into one of the best and most unique college cities in the country. There was, and still is, so much architecturally stunning surplus real estate downtown that they could have created an urban campus that would have made NYU, GWU and BU look like housing projects. Not only that, UB would have dominated the entire downtown rather than just a neighborhood, as in the other cities mentioned.</p>

<p>I hate to even get started on what could have been, because it is so depressing when you see what they did instead. And now, 40 years after the fact, the politicians wonder why UB never evolved into a world class institution, and why the city of Buffalo has done nothing but rust for the past few decades.</p>

<p>The same could be probably be said to a lesser degree about the other university centers, but Buffalo was New York State's best, last opportunity to create something of national stature, at least in our lifetimes. You just can't unscramble that egg.</p>

<p>Incidentally, I have visited 4 SUNY college (as opposed to university) campuses in the past year. I don't know how many of the posters on this forum have actually visited the campuses lately, but I was surprised by how modern and well equipped they all are. Each one had at least a couple of unexpected new buildings, as well as a couple of recently well-renovated buildings. </p>

<p>Relative to private liberal arts colleges in New York State of similar size and competitiveness, and similar public liberal arts colleges everywhere, I do not have a clue what more a reasonable person could expect from a State school in terms of infrastructure. In fact, contrary to prevailing wisdom, I would argue that they should take some of the construction budget, and use that to hire more faculty.</p>

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<p>Stacy- I also think the Geneseo/ Stony Brook "flagship designation" could work too. Bottom line- an upstate and downstate school would have to be designated if there was any hope for a flagship school (or two) to work in NYS.</p>

<p>Sawdust- I definitely agree with your assessment of the Suny colleges.
I can't tell you how pleasantly surprised I was when we began touring Suny colleges for d #2. The campuses of Cortland, Oneonta, New Paltz were really extremely nice. There are new structures going up and the interior of the dorms are being updated and remodeled.
I never thought d # 2 would be attending a SUNY. She hated the cold and remoteness that the SUNY environment offered. In fact, we did not seriously tour the SUNY campuses until Sept/October of her senior year in HS.
We spent junior year touring alot of mid-atlantic publics -including George Mason, Temple, Towson, VCU and a bunch others. None of these other OOS schools excited her- so she went looking at the SUNY's with no preconceived ideas (which seems to be very prevalent on these boards).<br>
She liked the campuses- felt comfortable in the environment and I think was glad to know that she was only 45 minutes away from her HS and camp friends who go to school in the Binghamton/Ithaca/Syracuse region.<br>
And I know that kids do get together with there friends who also go to upstate schools. </p>

<p>She likes the rivalry between Cortland and Ithaca college (Cortica Jug) and can visit friends at Syracuse when she goes to the Carousel Mall.</p>

<p>There is a real "upstate" sense of community for our NY kids-
Even took our kids to the "Famous Roscoe Diner"- a landmark to all New Yorkers who made the trek from NYC to somewhere upstate along route 17.
SUNY is not for everyone- but it does a real good job for most New York college kids.</p>

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<p>marny1-where is Famous Roscoe Diner for when we go on the grand SUNY tour?</p>

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<p>Right on route 17 in Roscoe NY- don't blink or you can pass it by. Has college flags from 100's of NY schools as part of the decor.
Even saw a Roscoe Diner bumpersticker on a car on Long Island. My kids thought I was kidding about its popularity-
Roscoe is past the Catskill area on Route 17- (Liberty/Monticello etc) but about an hour before Binghamtom.
It's in a good location- just about the time you need a bathroom- or want a cup of coffee.
we did the "Grand circle tour" of NYS for d # 1 - driving via the southern tier Bing.- Ithaca- onto Buffalo- Rochester etc. It was a great way to see NYS- did Niagara Falls too! Also took the kids to see my alma mater-Oswego.
It was probably one of the best family vacations we had! Did it in August - so upstate was really beautiful!!</p>