It is sad to hear that John B. Simpson has decided to step down from his post as president of the State University of New York at Buffalo in mid-January, because he has done so much for this key local institution.

It is sadder still to reflect upon the dreams Simpson will leave unfulfilled because this erudite and reasonable man was never able to crack the insiders' network that runs state government, and runs it for its own ends and to justify its own high-spending budgets, rather than for the good of the people of New York.

Simpson is 63 years old, and will have been at the helm of UB for seven years when he decamps for his native California in the middle of the next Buffalo winter. His retirement now is not out of character for a person in his profession and completely reasonable for a man who still has family and other connections on the West Coast.

But, as Simpson himself alluded to in his announcement Monday, it is the political climate of New York, not its wind chill, that left the president feeling frozen.

Simpson's dream is called UB 2020. It is a plan to greatly increase not only the size of the university but also its ability to generate life -- academic, cultural and economic -- for a city that was in real need of such a dynamo.

He seemed to grasp that the best thing for a shrinking city such as ours would be a growing university that would not only prop up the local economy but also become an ever-larger percentage of the community. At some point in the not-so-distant future, the lines on the graph would cross and Buffalo could shed its off-putting reputation as a Rust Belt relic and gain labels that attract families, businesses, professionals and retirees: College town, research center.

Unfortunately, for Simpson and for Buffalo, the intersection of those lines likely will be pushed further into the future. The program still envisions the growth of the university on all three of its campuses, especially the biomedical branches on and near the downtown Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, and still has great promise in stimulating innovative businesses that will produce well-paying jobs. But unless State Sen. William T. Stachowski's "framework," now being negotiated, turns real, the plan may have to wait.

The development that seems to have been the final straw for Simpson's personal involvement in UB was the New York Legislature's refusal to grant the university, and the entire SUNY system, the independence it needs to reach its potential.

The official sticking point was the fact that the larger Public Higher Education Empowerment Act would have allowed the individual SUNY schools to set their own tuition rates. That, claimed the obstructionists, would lead to higher costs that would price a college education out of the reach of more low- and moderate-income New Yorkers.

Affordability is always a concern. But the legislative leadership's crocodile tears fooled no one. What stopped the empowering legislation was the fact that not only would the Legislature no longer have control over raising tuitions, it would no longer be able to grab that income away from classrooms and labs and pour it into feeble attempts to balance its own budgets. The folly of opposing rational, gradual tuition hikes while taking tuition money away from the universities speaks for its own brazen self.

The fact was, and remains, that allowing the SUNY schools to charge marginally higher tuitions, and allowing them to keep the money rather than have it siphoned off by Albany, would make the colleges and universities much better able to serve all their stakeholders -- students, faculty and community.

This is the minefield that Simpson or his successor has to negotiate, inevitably by way of persuading all-powerful Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver or reaching a realistic compromise like the pilot-program plan that was advanced but failed this time. Those who have the responsibility of filling the UB president's chair must keep that in the front of their minds as they seek a new president. That, and deciding what campus building should bear the name of John B. Simpson.