March 5, 2015
Assemblywoman Deborah Glick
Chair, Assembly Higher Education Committee
Legislative Office Building
Albany, NY 12224
Dear Assemblywoman Glick:
We are writing to you in regard to the language in the Governor’s Executive Budget bills that instructs the
boards of trustees of the SUNY and CUNY systems to pass a resolution by December 31, 2015, “that students
enrolled in an academic program of the [state/ city] university of New York shall be required to participate in an
approved experiential or applied learning activity as a degree requirement.” Our respective bodies—the
University Faculty Senate and Faculty Council of Community Colleges of SUNY and the University Faculty Senate
of CUNY—have grave concerns over this and other language in the Executive proposal that would mandate this
graduation requirement. Our concerns are manifested in two ways: procedural and practical.
First, let’s address the procedural issue. Faculty hold our role—as having primary responsibility for the
development and implementation of curriculum—to be one of the most important of our obligations as
educators. Indeed, when our boards of trustees have imposed curricular requirements on our respective
institutions—such as the 1998 General Education requirement at SUNY or the more recent Pathways
requirement at CUNY—without proper faculty input and oversight, there has been great resistance. But even in
those cases, as problematic as they were from a faculty perspective, the initiation came from our boards, acting
in what they believed to be their fiduciary responsibility. The proposal in the Executive budget—whether in the
language that instructs the respective boards what they should do, or in the language elsewhere that directly
ties the curricular requirement to the budget—is, in our view, a significant intrusion into the faculty’s role and a
direct politicization of curricular requirements. The central role of the faculty in determining the curriculum is
one of the hallmarks of higher education in this country, part of what makes our system of higher education so
strong. The direct imposition of executive and legislative action into this arena is simply the wrong thing to do.
The practical difficulty with implementing such a requirement was the subject of interchanges between you and
the chancellors of SUNY and CUNY during the higher education budget hearings on February 10. The chancellors
pointed out some of the difficulties in implementing such a requirement. We won’t repeat them in detail here,
except to note that the bill would create a massive unfunded mandate that might leave fewer resources for our
core educational mission. The justification that the Governor has included with his Article VII language points to
internships and co-ops as being the kinds of experiential education opportunities that he would want the boards
to enact as a graduation requirement. As of 2014, SUNY had 459,550 matriculating students and CUNY had
269,000, while New York State had a total of 9,150,500 nonfarm jobs (as of December 2014), meaning that the
two systems would be required to create and supervise experiential learning opportunities equivalent to 8
percent of all the nonfarm jobs in the state. The task of identifying and supervising so many out-of-classroom
activities, whatever their nature, would be overwhelming, and more likely impossible if SUNY and CUNY were
required to find and oversee internships and/or co-ops for all of these students. Furthermore, such a
requirement may well be impossible for many students to complete, particularly those who need to work full
time in support of their education, and those with families. This requirement likely would lengthen the time to
completion for many students, which is contrary to the national and State efforts to shorten time to degree and
facilitate on-time graduation. We don’t see how such a graduation mandate can work. Suffice it to say,
however, that had faculty governance groups been engaged in considering such a proposal, we would have
evaluated the degree to which the notion is both academically desirable and financially feasible. Such an
exercise has been conducted on some of our campuses, and certainly in many of our individual schools, majors,
and courses. But it is at those levels that such a decision needs to be made, not mandated from outside the
campuses or departments.
Can this situation be resolved? From our perspective, the only way to handle this at this point is to remove the
language that calls for a mandated graduation requirement. We should note that faculty are generally in favor
of making opportunities for applied/experiential learning available to all students who wish to pursue them.
Such an approach encourages applied learning while retaining curricular decisions for graduation requirements
with the faculty.
The budget that the Governor has proposed is also insufficient in terms of funding for SUNY and CUNY to meet
our obligations to the people of the State of New York. The continued emphasis on increasing tuition without a
concomitant increase in State funding has shifted more and more of the burden onto already-overburdened
students, as you know. We have arrived at a point where increases in student tuition are barely sufficient, at the
System level, to meet obligated cost increases, which prevents our institutions from expanding opportunity and
using the new funds to offer new services, hire new faculty, etc. We are hopeful that the Legislature will see fit
to expand funding for SUNY and CUNY campuses beyond the levels proposed in the Executive Budget.
We thank you for your consideration of our concerns, and we hope that you will be willing to follow up with the
committee and the Speaker on these matters. We also would like to discuss these issues with you further and
will be reaching out to arrange meetings.
Sincerely,
Peter L.K. Knuepfer
President
SUNY University Faculty Senate
Pete.knuepfer@suny.edu
518-320-1366
Tina Good
President
Faculty Council of Community Colleges
tina.good@suny.edu
518-320-1651
Terrence F. Martell
President
CUNY University Faculty Senate
Terrence.Martell@baruch.cuny.edu
646-312-2075