EDITORIALS
Albany should help UB
Assembly and Senate bills offset harm by allowing more campus flexibility
If the Buffalo area is to keep one of its best paths to prosperity open, New York State cannot both choke and leash the University at Buffalo. With budgetary diversions choking off the potential flow of tuition-increase money to what should be the state university system’s flagship institution, the Legislature at least should unleash more of the research university’s development potential.
That can be done by increasing campus management flexibility in ways that other states’ universities already enjoy. Otherwise, the critically important UB 2020 plan’s expansion and development goals could be pushed back to 2030, or beyond.
All campuses in that state system are dealing with the tuition- increase diversions Albany is using to bolster its recession- damaged revenues, but the two major SUNY research universities—Buffalo and Stony Brook—also are losing chunks of research grant money in ways that hamper development potential. UB President John Simpson is leading efforts to increase other campus revenue possibilities and save the UB 2020 plan, and the Legislature can and should pass similar Assembly and Senate bills—A2020 and S2020—to curtail over-regulation and add local flexibility.
The bills would allow the campus to raise tuition on its own under a “rational tuition policy,” allowing incremental, predictable and small increases—and letting students see the benefit of their money by having it funneled directly to UB instead of to state coffers.
The bills also allow the campus to negotiate with private developers who want to build projects on site, let university officials borrow money through bonds and allow the purchase of goods and services without multiple levels of state preapproval.
The governor’s proposed budget would severely limit the college’s ability to implement UB 2020, a plan to grow the university by 10,000 students and 2,500 staff by that year. The university should be given, at a minimum, the ability to determine its own fate.
Moreover, the state should curtail its practice of “sweeping” public university funds to close budget gaps. Individual campuses need the freedom to determine which budget lines to trim to meet state goals. State officials strongly disagree with that characterization, blaming instead SUNY trustees they say set campus-by-campus allocations, but the harm remains.
UB has delineated the negative impacts of the executive budget:
• An indirect cost recovery fund “tithe” that campus officials said is a punitive assessment on university reimbursements given for indirect costs for sponsored research. This diversion of funds to the state for support services paid for by the campuses would cost the campus approximately $2 million to $3 million.
• An increase in SUNY graduate school tuition by up to 21 percent, while reducing graduate school scholarships and minority graduate fellowships by 15 percent, at university centers that generate 70 percent of this tuition-increase revenue.
• State retention of 80 percent of professional program tuition increases is, university officials said, a departure from past practice in which campuses received 100 percent of the income to invest in these high-profile degree programs centered at research universities.
• The proposal to reduce SUNY state tax support, equal to $40 million held in SUNY campus Income Fund Reimbursable reserves—and in addition to the tithe and tuition offsets— is particularly damaging to research campuses such as UB.
• Reductions in university-wide programs are arbitrary and selectively injurious to research universities that would receive as much as 70 percent of funds in this category.
Against that harm, local campus management flexibility is not a complete answer. But it is a tool UB and others can use to explore relief and improvements in other ways. UB is poised to make a significant economic impact on the Western New York region through expansion and increased research; legislators are in a position to aid in that effort and make it happen sooner rather than later—or, worse, never —by passing these bills now.
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