ERIE COMMUNITY COLLEGE
INTERVIEW: Greg Gillis, Professor
INTERVIEWED BY: Benjamin Weaver
July 14, 2006
BW: This is Ben Weaver. Today's date is July 14, 2006. I am at Erie Community College,
interviewing Professor Greg Gillis who is a former student and current professor. Could you
please tell us how and when you first became associated with Erie Community College and how
long you have been associated with it?
GG: I came here in 1961 as a student. I graduated from high school in 1958 and went to the
University of Buffalo for engineering. I dropped out because I really wanted to race cars and be
an auto mechanic. I did that for a couple of years and then decided I should go back to school. I
came back in 1961 and enrolled in the construction technology program. I graduated in 1963.
My class may have been one of the very first classes to actually start and end on this campus. I
went from Erie County Technical Institute (as it was then known) to West Virginia University,
then on to Tri-State University and got my bachelor's in civil engineering and started working as
an engineer. I worked for Union Carbide Mining and Metals and started teaching as an adjunct
in night school in 1967 and became a full-time faculty member in 1969. When I went to school
here it was Erie County Technical Institute; when I came back, it was Erie Community College.
BW: Who were some of your colleagues or contemporaries with whom you worked at the
college and what do you remember best about their contributions?
GG: When I was teaching as an adjunct in the evening division, it was a totally separate division.
It was almost like two schools. The evening was run by a bunch of ex-military guys who ran a
very tight ship. I forget a lot of the names of the guys I worked with, but I know that I had to
turn in lesson plans for every course and the administrators actually read them. They came in
and they reviewed the classes; they would write up a full-page report on my teaching. Then I
started full-time in 1969. I was encouraged to come here by Joe Crustina who had been one of
my instructors. Joe told me that they needed full-time faculty and so I applied. The department
chair at that time was a guy named Harry Patton. When I came here in 1969, men had long
sideburns but the policy was that you weren't supposed to have long sideburns. So my first
faculty meeting, the department said, "No hair past the middle of the ear. So I had to shave my
sideburns. They used to make the students shave off their sideburns without any shaving cream
or anything.
BW: They made the students do that as well as the employees?
GG: Yes. They had a dress code, you know, the students couldn’t dress down and the faculty
always wore a shirt and tie. So it was kind of a different era from what we're looking at now.
The college became more of a community college because we were very strong in the technical
areas. When we got liberal arts, the liberal arts people were a lot more casual than the technical
people.
BW: That's when it changed?
GG: Yes, pretty much. More and more liberal arts people came in for general studies and it was
less and less technical and a lot of those rules were relaxed. Plus the times were changing.
BW: Sure. Did you get to know many members of the faculty and staff as a student? I'm sure
you did as a professor.
GG: Yes. As a student, some of the faculty members were still here when I came back to teach.
One of them was Joe Crustina who became a department chair. At the college we have
department heads and department chairs. Chairs are basically teachers who get a couple of
release hours to be chairs. We used to get paid for doing that but now we really don’t, we just
get a couple of release hours. But Harry Patton was the first guy that I worked with, and under,
as a chair, and then Joe Crustina and Oscar Smuckler were in there. Oscar Smuckler was an
attorney who also had a degree in civil engineering. Joe Crustina had degrees in civil
engineering and chemical engineering. I think one of the good things about the college was that
the faculty had a lot of practical knowledge. When I came back as a student I did very well so I
went on to get my bachelor's degree. When I came back to the area to teach, I had engineering
experience, and continued to do work on the side as a civil structural engineer. So the faculty
brought practical knowledge into the classroom. Our program split up. It started off as
construction technology, and then when I came back, we had a civil option for the second year.
We also had an architectural option. So we split off the architectural and made it an architectural
degree, which went to south campus. The civil engineering tech program stayed at north campus
with construction technology. Just within the past few years we've made the construction
technology program into a construction management engineering technology program. We can
use the word engineering because we are accredited; SUNY won't let you use the word
engineering unless you're accredited. So the program has grown and subsequently, split up. We
also have a building trades and a building management program at ECC city; the chair of that
department is one of my ex-students, Andy Sokol.
BW: Do you recall any town-gown problems, problems between the community and the school
or between the county and the school?
GG: The county holds the purse strings so that's always a problem. I think this is to a lesser
degree now than it used to be, but a lot of people used to get jobs at the college because of their
political affiliations to whoever was in power at the time. It still happens to a degree but I don’t
think as much as it used to. The problems that we have with the town right now are pretty big.
We have three main campuses. I'm the facilities chair for the facilities committee for all the
campuses. We have a vehicle tech program at a car dealership near the south campus. We now
have an alumni house near the south campus. We also do some outreach teaching in Grand
Island High School. We had done some community programs in some of the churches. So we're
teaching in a lot of different spaces. A few years ago we hired Resultant Consultants to oversee
a task force and help us conduct a study. They got a whole bunch of people from the college
community to participate, and put them into different groups. Of course, I volunteered for
facilities because I'm an engineer and facilities is what I'm interested in. Each group studied
different aspects of the college campuses. We got the feeling that we were being steered in a
certain direction, so when we were coming to a conclusion and we hadn’t hit on the base that the
facilitator from Resultant Consultants wanted, he said, "What if money was no object and you
could have a brand new, state-of-the-art, single campus?" I said, "Sure, providing we place that
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campus right next to the Galleria Mall." That was because the people of Pyramid who built that
Galleria Mall went through extensive studies to find out the most accessible spot in the county
for the population of the county. So I thought we should just go right there and save the expense
of finding the most accessible spot. Two weeks before our report came out, our County
Executive, Joel Giambra, announced to the media that he wanted a single campus downtown.
And I was sitting back thinking, 'We didn’t say that. We didn’t say we wanted a single campus
downtown.' The question posed was if money was no object, would we want one. My
suggestion was near the Galleria Mall. Downtown has myriad problems, specifically, parking is
one of them. The cost of doing it was estimated at one hundred sixty-eight million dollars.
BW: What year was this again?
GG: Um, you know at this point I'm starting to lose decades but it was less than ten years ago,
five or six years ago. Joel Giambra is in his second term so it was probably five or six years ago.
One of the reasons they wanted one campus location was because they wanted to sell the north
campus to a developer. They weren’t sure what they wanted to do with the south campus. The
president of the college, I think privately, maybe not so much publicly, was opposed to the idea
because he wanted a large sports program, which we have. We now have a very good sports
program. Our football team is up around number one or two every year and we have a football
field and everything on the south campus. The plan now is to move all of our sports programs to
the south campus. We're going to build dormitories. The first place it's going to happen is at the
south campus. I think this was the president's intention all along except that we always had to
deal with the county, which holds the purse strings for the college. We've been fighting for a
long time to get autonomy from the county and have the college do their own stuff. So the
college is now doing all of their own purchasing. All of the purchasing used to go through the
county so we had to deal with the county every time we wanted to buy something. We still get
money from the county, but we're doing our own payroll.
BW: Isn't that how it used to be though?
GG: No. Well, everything used to be tied directly to the county and that's why a lot of the
political appointments came through the county into the college. So we were really hamstrung
by the county but very slowly we're getting some freedom from that. We haven’t gotten a lot of
freedom though because the county still has the pocketbook.
BW: Do you recall when collective bargaining came to campus?
GG: No. When I started here in 1969 we had a thing called a faculty senate. The faculty senate
lasted for maybe a year or two when I was here and the faculty senate was supposed to be like a
shared governance body with the administration. Well, it never really worked. I want to say we
hired somewhere between forty and sixty instructors in 1969 and I'm one of three that are left.
But we had the faculty senate thing. I was an engineer and the faculty senate was comprised of
all of these, you know, people with doctorates and all that stuff who were very knowledgeable.
We'd end up spending hours talking about virtually nothing. Or a person on this side of the room
would say something and a person on that side of the room wouldn't exactly understand what
that person said so the faculty senate didn’t really didn’t work. I don’t know, you might have it
in the history somewhere when the Faculty Federation of Erie Community College, the FFECC
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was established. It may have started when I was here. It may have been here. I wasn’t involved
with it that much. I was raising a family. I basically had to work a second job in order to survive
because I started out at ten thousand a year, but I couldn’t survive on that, so I had to do
engineering work on the side in order to support my family.
BW: And as the head of the facilities committee, could you explain to us how the campus
worked to develop the buildings and how there became a need to expand and go to different parts
of the county?
GG: The place grew. The college started over on Elmwood as the New York Institute of
Technology. Then came the North Campus. And then I think they bought the post office
building or it was given to them and that was the City Campus. The need for the City Campus
arose because the inner city kids had a hard time getting to the North Campus. The bus service
wasn’t that great. They didn’t have a lot of buses running. When the college first opened up it
was a technical school. As it expanded and added more of liberal arts and general studies
courses, there was more demand, and then they decided there was a specific need for an
accessible spot in the city. So they opened the City Campus. And then I think the South
Campus followed shortly after. This is a large county. I think there are a couple of million
people. It's not like we're all concentrated though, we're all spread out all over the county so we
ended up with three campuses, one in the north, one in the south and one in the city.
BW: So the north one came first? And then the city and then the south?
GG: I think that's the sequence. Those two are so close that they might have opened south before
they got the city location, but I think the city was next and then the south.
BW: Do you know around what year this was?
GG: This place was built in the very early '60s. I think the construction of this building that
we're in, the administration building, was one of the first buildings. I think construction started
in 1959. So this place opened in, I think, 1961. I may have been part of the second class to start
and end here, not the first. The class of 1962 may have started taking classes here. The class of
1961 would have started on Elmwood and later came to this campus to graduate. Then after that,
they started opening the other campuses. All within, I would say, five or six years.
BW: So it was all in the '60s?
GG: The south campus may have been closer to 1970.
BW: Were there any problems with the construction or with the location of the campuses? Or
any opposition at all by the community?
GG: No. I think that this property was donated and I think there's a deed restriction where we
can't build anything in front of the library. But, this is valuable property and the county was
having some fiscal problems so they thought if they sold the North Campus off they could make
a lot of money, which really didn’t serve the needs of the students. We have competition in
Niagara County with Niagara Community College, which is a lot smaller than us but we have a
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lot of students in the north towns that, if we closed this campus, they'd go to Niagara Community
before they would go to the city campus.
BW: Do you know much about the college foundation or if it was active or when it became
active on campus?
GG: Just in the past few years.
BW: So it was fairly recent?
GG: We started an alumni association probably around 1969 or 1970. I was the second president
of the alumni association. I think the first was Peter Singachuck. We had an alumni director and
that's the first time that I think that the alumni were ever involved. The alumni foundation would
have cruises and different activities but it didn’t seem like they concentrated on actually raising
funds. The first person that I can recall who did that is the one that's now leaving us, Natalie
Harter, and she's only been here a few years. I think we constructed an alumni house, which
houses the alumni association and the foundation, near the South Campus.
BW: For you personally, either as a student or as a faculty member, what were some of the most
interesting or exciting times, situations or incidents that you recall?
GG: One of the big rewards of this job is having students tell me that I made a difference in their
lives. That, to me is really great. I've had so many success stories because I've been here a long
time and we do a really good job in our department. We've never really had discipline problems
in our department. The average age of our students is probably in the twenty-seven age range.
There are roughly two hundred students in the program. We get students right out of high school
plus we get a lot of people, men and women, who have been out working in the trades, working
in construction and they want to advance themselves. Some of them get hurt on projects and
some of them are just tired of doing it and they think, "Well, I'm making good money, but when
I'm in my 50's I don’t want to be doing all this manual stuff." I had a call from a guy just the
other day who's a tile setter and he's twenty-eight years old. He said, "I've got to go back to
school. I'm doing this stuff and I'm good at it but there are people who are above me making a
lot more money and I know they're not as smart as I am." I said, "Yes, because they have the
education and you don’t." So that's what we teach. We basically teach the management end of
it. And we're involved in the engineering stuff.
If you want some good reference stuff, we're doing a project with the University of Buffalo. In
fact, the people involved in the project are UB, Colorado State, Texas A&M, Cornell
Engineering, Rensselaer Polytech, and us. They have an earthquake table at UB and they're
investigating what affects an earthquake has on a wood structure. Almost all of the investigation
and engineering that has been done so far on earthquakes has been for concrete and steel. So all
of the skyscrapers that are built now in an earthquake zone have shock absorbers. The shock
absorbers are actually manufactured here in North Tonawanda and this company, Taylor
Devices, has done a lot of work with UB and they have designed these pads and things that they
build skyscrapers on so that they don’t come down if there is an earthquake. UB also did a lot of
stuff with bridges. You're probably too young to remember the earthquake they had in San
Francisco where the top level of a two-level skyway come down and crushed people on the
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bottom level. Because of those earthquakes, UB did a lot of investigation. UB now has two
earthquake tables. They can split them apart, they can build a mock-up of a bridge, and they can
simulate what happened during an earthquake. Because of the research they did, they've already
renovated thirty thousand bridges in California. So what we're doing now is for wood
construction, which involves homes and apartment buildings, mainly. And my thought is, “What
if we had an earthquake and nobody got killed?’ I mean, how great would that be if it was
because of something that we were involved with? Our involvement in the UB project, along
with the other engineering schools, is hooked up with a super computer and the investigation is
going worldwide. UB hosts this organization sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
They developed a world conference on earthquake design. So they hope that this project is
actually being watched by the entire world. Since we teach construction management, our role
in partnering with UB is to do some material takeoff. The aspect that we picked was drywall.
So we had our students do quantity takeoff. They are able to read blueprints. We read the
blueprints, did a material takeoff and determined how much drywall we needed, how many
screws, all of the materials we needed to do this job. Plus we figured out how many tools, how
many people we needed, how much time we needed to do it in. We then asked for volunteers to
actually do some of the labor. UB put on this fantastic presentation on educating art students on
earthquake design and how important this type of work is and what is going to be accomplished
with this project. In this project we're building an eighteen-hundred-square-foot, full-size, house
to California specs, and we're going to test it in different phases. We’re going to possibly go up
to a level 5 earthquake. Previously, they've only gone up to a level 2 because they were afraid of
losing the house. But we're not done. In fact, our portion of the work actually starts next week.
So we went to the session at UB. Our students took a day off from work; virtually all of my
students are working. They gave us some great information. Because we don’t teach trades, we
followed up with a session on how to actually do drywall. So we're going to teach them the
trades. They've already done the estimating and the project management end of it and next week
we actually start. We have thirty-three students who have volunteered for this. And they're all
working and making good money during the summer to pay for their education, and they're
taking this time off because they feel that this project is important. This is the first community
college that has ever been involved with a major university project like this. So we're thrilled,
and UB is thrilled.
BW: Now, when you were a student, do you recall any interesting or exciting times?
GG: My surveying instructor was Joe Crustina. A surveying party consists of about four people,
people that do taping, people that do instrument and hold the rods. This whole area across from
the school used to be vacant lots and Joe Crustina used to take us over there to do our surveying.
He didn’t know those lots but that's where we did our surveying. And Joe would hand out the
instruments and everything in the lab. Then we would go out and do the survey and we'd come
back and hand in our instruments with our notes. So one time two of the people in my party
were absent, and me and this other guy, Harry Hickey, were doing the work on our instruments,
and one of the guys in the group next to our’s, started a little grassfire behind the instrument
man. And he ran back to his party laughing so hard that he could hardly run. He was almost
falling down, he was laughing so hard. Well, in the meantime, the guy who was working the
instrument, had this fire behind him, and he turns around and he starts swearing at the guy that
set it, and he's trying to stomp it out. So then the fire kept getting bigger and bigger. Me and
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Harry are finishing up. Then the party that started the fire went over and they were trying to
stomp it out. And they've got eight guys trying to stomp out this fire and they're getting
nowhere. So they said, "Come and help us." I said, "You know what, I'm going to go call the
fire company." So me and Harry are walking back from the field, and as we're walking back, we
can see this big cloud of black smoke over the library. The fire engines were already on their
way. The instructor, Joe Crustina, had no knowledge of what was going on. So Joe walks in to
the room, and he says, "You guys smell wood burning?" And I said, "No." He said, "I smell
wood burning." I said, "Could it be grass?" Joe said, "Yeah, it could be grass." I said, "Oh, I set
the field on fire." That was Joe's first year of teaching. He had three classes, I think, of
surveying. So this happened during the first class. In his second class that week, a guy throws
the tripod with the instrument attached over his shoulder, but he didn’t have the instrument tied
on, so the instrument fell on the floor and broke. As a result, class three didn’t get to go out
because Joe was just too paranoid about what was going to happen.
Another story involves George Kopenauer, our drafting instructor. He was an architect and he
later became chair. In fact, he was one of the pioneers for the architectural department going to
south campus. He drove this car called the Go-Go mobile, which was almost the size of a
Cooper Mini now. The students actually wheeled the car into the hall and then in order to get it
into the lab they had to pick the car up and move it sideways and then they left the car in the lab.
George had a hell of a time getting it out of there. But nothing really bad happened.
BW: Have you had any experiences like that as a professor? Have your students done anything
like that to you?
GG: No. They're more mature than we were I guess. We used to have guys that used to take the
pens and pencils and stick them in the ceiling. But my students are great now. They don’t
misbehave.
BW: What do you think is the impact that Erie Community College has had on the community?
What are some of its biggest accomplishments?
GG: We had a study done; I think it was last year. We paid, I think, seventeen thousand dollars
for a company to find out exactly that. Did you get that brochure?
BW: No. I'll have to get that.
GG: A company came here from North Carolina that was a huge home builder. They wanted to
hire people to do project management. This company makes over four-hundred-thousand houses
per year; that's over one-thousand houses per day! How do you manage something like that?
You need a lot of managers out there. They came and they interviewed our students. Nobody
went back to North Carolina with them because everybody got jobs here. Another company that
came here to recruit was actually owned by one of my former students. He had three offices and
he came in and interviewed students and also couldn’t get anybody to go. I did have a couple of
students leave the area. Two years ago I had one go to Washington DC. I get calls from that
company saying they would like more like him. I get calls from Atlanta, Georgia; I can’t get
anybody to go down there. Remember, I have two hundred students in my program. I get calls
from Arnold Palmer's company in Orlando. I said, "How did you find out about me?" They
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said, "Word of mouth." It was a good life; they wanted two people to come down and just check
out golf courses. Wow! I couldn’t get anybody to even take a free ride down to Orlando for the
interview. I could go on and on. I've had a lot of calls. I had one guy who was part owner of
Keeler Construction. His company does six billion a year and he flew into town, hired two of
my students, started them with really good pay, and told them he would pay for their college
education if they wanted a bachelor's degree. They went back to Maryland with him. Other than
that, I can't remember too many students that actually left the area. So the impact of this college
on this area as far as my department goes is really big. I go out there all the time. They built a
million-dollar house at the home show. One of my students owns the company.
BW: So you educate the local students, they stay in the community, and they contribute to the
community, and that turns over the tax money for the community with their incomes?
GG: And that's in that report. Now, as far as mine goes, one of my former students does soil
investigations. He has either three or four offices across New York State with one hundred fifty
employees. Even though he has offices outside of the area, he has an office here. So he still
brings a lot of that money back to this area. One of my other students, this kid actually started
from nothing. He didn’t have any family in the business or anything. He went out and worked
for a contractor. In fact, the guy just got an honorary doctorate degree. Pat Casilio took him
under his wing and taught him a lot, and then this kid went out and he started a company with
Pat's son. Then, he went off on his own and now is building hotels all over New England. Like I
said, I've been here a long time and there are a lot of success stories.
BW: Sounds like it. Is there anything that you wish had been achieved by the college that has
not been?
GG: I think we can always do more. I think the college could do more, but I also think that the
department could do more. One of the things that I think has been our mission is to be a model
for other community colleges throughout the country. I have been working on a project for over
a year for doing exactly that for my department. I think that if we can set a good example, we
can be used as a model by other schools and they can follow suit. I started this over a year ago
when a Dr. Fahey, a professor from another school, came to me and said, "I came here to give
you some ideas of what we do, and I would like to have some of your ideas." And I said, "You
know what, I'm not going to give you my ideas because I want to do them first." His situation
was a little different, because his technical division was run almost like a separate school; they
had their own funding. At Erie, everything we buy has to be bought through the college. We
have a departmental budget, but it's not division-wide.
The community colleges can do more. They recently did a story on TV comparing male
graduates to female graduates from high school. They said that seventy-two percent of the
females graduate and only sixty-eight percent of the males graduate. I thought, 'Wait a minute,
that means that twenty-eight percent of the females and thirty-two percent of the males don’t
graduate from high school.' So we have a lot of people out there who don’t have a high school
education. They can come to ECC and get their GED. But what about getting a job? I mean,
you are then stuck in this thing where you're going to be working for minimum wage unless you
have an awful lot of self-drive. It's hard to get out of that without an advanced level of
education. We could do more. We could tie that GED to some of these courses that would
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actually provide them with work. Being in the construction industry, we held a construction
career day last year for the first time. The construction career day concept I think started in
Washington but I know it's state-wide. I think the first one was in Albany. The construction
industry is projecting this huge deficit of trade workers because the people in the trades are
getting older and the young people who aren't graduating from high school, they're not getting
into the trades, and the trades pay well. So we held a construction career day. This first event
attracted over six-hundred students. It was a two-day event. One day was city schools and the
other day was suburban schools. We generated a lot of interest from it, but we don’t teach trades
at the college. Trades are taught mainly at BOCES, but if you're out of high school, where do
you go to learn the trades? So I thought that we could do more. So I'm still working on this
project. There are so many jobs at so many different levels in the construction industry. We
could bring them all to the community college, and make links to other colleges so students
could go on to their additional degrees. We could also do professional training. In New York
State in the past few years they've required everybody with virtually any kind of license to get
additional credits. So a licensed engineer, a surveyor, an architect, anybody that's in any of our
categories, needs those additional credits. There's no reason why the community college can't do
it. New York State just passed a regulation stating that home inspectors now have to be licensed.
New York State doesn’t know what to do yet about getting these people licensed. So why can't
the community college provide that training? I think that would be a draw. So we could do the
training to get the licenses, we could do the additional training to get the credits after they have a
license, we could do trade training, we could provide courses on top of the degree. We give
them a degree in civil engineering, but in civil engineering students don’t get that much
estimating or project management training. We can give them an additional portion on top of it.
I'm throwing out a hundred ideas here and they're all in the works. But, getting the
administration to go along with it is not easy. They want to maintain what they have. Well, Bill
Mariani is good. I tell Bill about this, he says, "Yeah, go." But dragging everybody along with
me is not that easy. A lot of departments within the construction industry - heating, ventilating,
air conditioning – are part of the mechanical department and the mechanical department says,
"Well, this is what we've got. This is what we want to do. We’re not so sure we want to reach
out and bring all this other stuff in." We also have corporate training, which is headed by Terry
Kahn. Our president used to be the head of corporate training; now Terry Kahn has that job. So,
again, have we done enough? I think we've done a great job. Can we do more? I think there's
so much more we can do. But it's getting it done…
BW: What do you think have been the most difficult problems leading up to now with the
community college? Is it funding or…?
GG: Funding is always a problem. One of the things that I think that we're doing now is we're
partnering with industry and that was never done in the past. It was always, this is how much
money we get from the state, this is how much money we get from county, this is how much
money we get from the students, so this is what we can do. Period. Because of my facilities
involvement, we got drawn in to some new projects that seem to be working out pretty well.
When the New York Institute of Technology was closing down, they offered us their machines,
their building, and the cash they had in the bank to do their program, and I have to say that our
Technical Dean, Mark Hoover, has done a good job. The college has also formed a technical
alliance comprised of fifty-eight companies that come in and kick in a thousand bucks a piece, so
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that's over fifty-thousand dollars a year. So things like that, which are innovative really, come
from Bill Mariani. Mariani is a thinking person. He's always looking to form a partnership.
BW: Sure. What was it that attracted you initially as a student to come to school here? What set
it apart from the other schools in the area or the other community colleges?
GG: When I came to school here, this was Erie County Technical Institute. I was an auto
mechanic who decided he didn’t want to be an auto mechanic anymore. I love cars and
motorcycles. I have a dozen cars; I juggle motorcycles. I have the world's fastest motorcycle.
It's really nice as a hobby, but I didn’t like it as an occupation. So I decided I had to get into
something else and since I was interested in construction, Erie was the only game in town for
construction technology. It was either this or go back to engineering school, which I had
dropped out of already. And the funny part is that when I went back to school, I got my master's
degree and then I taught in a graduate school at UB - where I had dropped out when I was
eighteen. So when I give my talks to students I say, "Never give up. If you just keep going to
school, keep doing it, keep plugging away, you'll get there eventually."
BW: Right. Do you know much about the relationship between the college and SUNY Central
Administration in Albany or what the relationship has been like throughout the years?
GG: A couple of things I have to say about SUNY. I got on the Gen Ed committee for the
college because SUNY came out with Gen Ed requirements. I said, "Wait a minute. We have so
much to teach these people in the two-year period that we have them. I don’t want to take out
extra time for Gen Ed courses." We require one social science elective. The rest is math and
physics. To me math and physics are very important. English is also important, but as far as I
was concerned, if I had to give them one more social science course, that means I'd have to take
away a technical course. I didn’t want to do that. So I got on the Gen Ed committee. When the
first information came from SUNY about the Gen Ed requirements, I thought that they were
poorly written. The people at the colleges, everybody at every college around the state and some
of the people on the committee communicated with those people. And other community colleges
really didn’t understand what SUNY wanted. And they were interpreting it in different ways.
So we picked a path of how to interpret them, and my understanding was that the technologies
did not have to follow suit. So if you were going through liberal arts and you had to take three
different courses, that's fine. But to get your associate's in applied science, you did not have to
do it. What I did was, I went and I looked at the SUNY board and I saw that not one of those
people on that SUNY board was an engineer. They all had different degrees but not one of them
is in a technical field. My thought at the time was, 'Why don’t we have somebody in SUNY
who's an engineer sitting on the student board?' I think we need more technicians, more
engineers, more people who are going to make this country work. Manufacturing is going
somewhere else out of the country. First it moved from the industrial and unionized north to the
non-union south. Now it's going from the non-union south to Mexico, China, you name it.
That's where it's going. So I think that we have to concentrate on people with the technical skills
and the engineering ability in order to actually help the country. And I think that it would be
really important to have an engineer on that SUNY board.
BW: Do you know if the relationship between the college and SUNY Central has changed over
the years? Or has it stayed constant?
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GG: I don’t know what it used to be because I was never that involved. I was mainly working
two jobs to support my family and then, as I got more involved with the college, we did some
major changes in our construction program to make it construction management, engineering
tech, etc. I found out kind of the hard way, actually, about how the system works because I
contacted SUNY directly. Then I got slapped on the wrist by the administration because I'm not
supposed to do that. I'm supposed to contact the administrators and let the administrators talk to
SUNY.
BW: Well, those are all the questions that I have. Is there anything else that you would like to
add to this, or any other questions you think I might have missed?
GG: No.
BW: All right. Well, I appreciate your time. Thank you very much.
GG: OK, Ben. Take it easy.
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