In May 2007, the news looked great.
In January 2008, the news looked fine.
In April 2008, the news is looking quite poor indeed.
Less than a year after former Gov. Eliot Spitzer released his Commission on Higher Education Report advocating sweeping improvements throughout New York State's higher education systems, the soon-to-be-released 2008 New York State Budget appears to be destined to squash these reforms for the coming year.
While the final budget has yet to be passed by the state legislature, the SUNY system is all but guaranteed to receive a 5.85 percent cut in operating expenses for the 2008 fiscal year, Deputy Secretary of Education Manuel Rivera said Monday.
Spitzer's executive budget, released in January, informed SUNY leaders that they would be facing a 2.5 percent reduction in operating expenses but allowed for the implementation of several costly recommendations brought up in the commission's report. After Spitzer's resignation in early March on the heels of a scandal linking him to a prostitution ring, however, new Gov. David Paterson announced that significant budget cuts in departments across the state would be necessary to ensure a manageable financial plan for the coming year.
Part of these cuts include an additional 3.35 percent operating expenses drop for the SUNY and City University of New York
(CUNY) systems, a decrease that would translate into several hundred thousand dollars less in the operating budget of every SUNY and CUNY campus.
A target amount of $90 million is likely to be made available to offset some of this dramatic drop-off, but Rivera said state universities in New York will still suffer significant budget cuts even if this entire sum is allocated to the SUNY and CUNY systems.
The sum of these figures, Rivera said, points to a fiscally conservative year for state-funded systems of higher education.
"There will have to be some adaptations made, of course," Rivera said. "But this really isn't anything that new. Committees have been working on budget issues for quite some time now, and it was becoming obvious that the news wasn't what most of us wanted. With the national economy in a downturn, it's not that surprising that the state budget is going to be a tight one this year."
Still, for leaders at Plattsburgh State, news of the budget downturn seems to come as a rather nasty shock.
"I can't tell you right now what the budget is going to be," said PSUC Provost and Vice-President of Academic Affairs Robert Golden. "But I can tell you that all signs point to the state budget being much more negative than any of us originally anticipated. And if all the signs are correct and we do have a budget with these cuts to SUNY and CUNY, that will have a definite impact on the future of Plattsburgh State."
With 80 percent of PSUC's money already tied up in personnel expenses, Golden said, the effect of the budgetary decrease will be most directly felt in campus enrichment programs.
"We do not have luxuries on this campus," Golden explained. "Everything we do here has a definite and necessary purpose. But when this budget comes out, we may have to cut some of the enrichment endeavors we do now."
Efforts such as the free newspaper program, which provides free copies of The New York Times and the Press-Republican to students at the administrative cost of $10,000 per year, or the American Democracy Project, which frequently sponsors political lectures and forums on campus, may be on the chopping block once the new state budget is passed.
"Anything that enriches life on campus is important to the campus," Golden said. "But at the same time, these are programs that we could live without if we had to."
SUNY students could even experience a tuition increase for the first time since the fall of 2003, Golden said, an unwanted action that may become necessary if state aid remains minimal in next year's budget.
"I think we can work with this year's probable budget cuts," Golden said, "but another year like this one, and you may well see tuition become higher at SUNY schools. Nobody wants to do this, but if we can't get the state aid we need, SUNY may have no other choice."
PSUC President John Ettling declined to predict the outcome of the state budget for this year or next, but added that the SUNY system probably will not see the measures promoted by the Commission on Higher Education Report for some time to come.
"We're probably looking at a much tighter budget than we've had in the past couple of years," Ettling said. "For the last two years, the budget has been quite favorable to the SUNY system. But if we have a fiscally constrained budget to work with, we will manage just fine. We have before."
Tightening the budget, Ettling said, is not the fault of Paterson and his administration. While the new governor insisted on the sweeping budget cuts soon after assuming office, Ettling said the sudden changeover in the governor's mansion had nothing to do with the additional reductions in state aid for higher education.
"Governor Spitzer always said that he wanted to be remembered as 'The Education Governor', and he certainly was working in that direction," Ettling said. "But we have by no means lost a friend and gained an adversary through this change. Instead, I would say that we have lost an old friend and gained a new friend for improving higher education in this state."
Nor will the college suffer an unrepairable loss if these reductions are enacted in full, PSUC Vice President of Business Affairs John Homburger said. According to Homburger, PSUC has been preparing for a tighter financial plan since the executive budget was released in January. New budget cuts, he said, will simply require the college to add on to their existing plans.
"We've expected for a while that we would have to review and consolidate expenditures by prioritizing and cutting back," Homburger said. "But it is difficult to tell where those areas will be until we see the full financial impact imparted by the state budget process."
To prepare for the predicted declination of funds, Homburger said, all PSUC departments have been asked to submit flat budgets for 2008-09, forcing college administrators to make considerable alterations to plans originally geared for a predicted state aid increase of 3.4 percent.
"On the whole, we expect a very lean and conservative year ahead for us," Homburger said. "We've gone from an original target of a 3.4 percent increase to a decrease of several hundred thousand dollars, and that has an impact. Our goal in these times to be as transparent as possible and keep the campus as healthy and viable as possible."
While Homburger and countless other PSUC administrators focus on the immediate present, Golden is forced to be look at the predicted budget cuts with long-range vision. In his role at the head of PSUC's Strategic Planning Initiative, a campus-wide project of work and research to determine the college's long-term plans, Golden said he has given a great deal of thought to how a tighter budget will affect the spirit of the Strategic Plan. Often, he said, sizable budget cuts can result in a very conservative vision for an institution's future.
"In some ways, this budget may be an unfortunate reality check for us," Golden said. "We want the results of this Strategic Plan to be more than a flash in the pan. With a tighter budget, we really have to be disciplined enough to make sure we have enough funding before committing ourselves to starting something new."
Yet Golden strongly cautioned against PSUC taking the constraints of the 2008 state budget as a guarantee for tough times to come. Proceeding carefully, the veteran college administrator said, is good. Withdrawing into a shell of financial fear, he added, could lead to disaster.
"There's a temptation in a tight budget situation to hunker down and protect what you have, but we must not do that at Plattsburgh," Golden said. "That would be a serious mistake. When times are bad, you still need to plan for your future. We need to keep selectively moving forward to make sure this setback does not ruin the momentum we have been building here." He paused. "And hopefully, when the budget comes out next year, we can look back at this year's cuts as a thing of the past."
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