Spitzer May Hire 2,500 More Professors

Governor Spitzer's Commission on Higher Education is poised to recommend to the governor on Monday that the State and City Universities of New York hire between 2,000 and 2,500 additional full-time faculty by 2013.

As the state faces a $4.3 billion budget gap, the commission, appointed by Mr. Spitzer in May, is also expected to recommend spending billions of dollars to fix crumbling infrastructure at state schools and creating an "innovation fund" to subsidize scientific research it says would boost economic development and New York's status as a research capital.

The recommendations are a part of a preliminary report and are expected to influence the state budget Mr. Spitzer is slated to deliver in January.

After months of assessing the specific needs of all 64 SUNY campuses and 23 CUNY campuses, the commission's major finding is the lack of full-time faculty across the board, sources said.

CUNY, which has hired 1,000 new full-time faculty since 1999, is seeking to boost the percentage of full-time faculty to 70% from 50%. The commission is also expected to recommend that a large percentage of the new hires be "eminent scholars."

Full-time faculty are the highest cost element in higher education on the instructional side, education experts said. The hiring spree that the commission is recommending would cost more than $250 million annually, the director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Richard Vedder, said. "$250 million is a conservative estimate," Mr. Vedder said. "The average salary they will have to pay a full-time professor will be more than $75,000. Fringe benefits for academics run around 30%, and unionized schools like CUNY and SUNY have good fringes."

During an economic downturn, New York is one of the only states in the country seeking to expand its public university system, education experts said.

"There's been an increase of state support of higher education over the last few years after a big drought," the editor of Insidehighered.com, Doug Lederman, said. "People aren't expecting it to last. There aren't a ton of states now planning huge expansions of faculties to accommodate growth, but most places are trying to figure out ways to expand more cost-effectively with the use of technology."

The commission is recommending also that the entire public university system adopt a business plan known as the "Compact," which combines financial commitments from the city and the state with modest, regular tuition hikes, and is expected to increase private funding and help fund the hiring spree.

The number of full-time faculty at CUNY is about 6,100, down from 11,300 in 1975, when the university had 250,784 enrolled students, as compared to 225,962 in 2006.

SUNY currently employs 30,916 full-time professors, which account for about 48% of their faculty, and teach about 75% of credit hours, according to the university's Web site.

University officials said that investing significantly in higher education is critical to driving economic development across the state, but some education experts say they are skeptical about the need for more faculty.

"These blithe demands for ever more government funds and tuition hikes must be challenged in light of the prediction that student enrollment in the near future will decrease, faculty members are now getting paid more to teach fewer hours, and there are currently twice as many campus administrators as there were in the 1970s," a former SUNY trustee, Candace de Russy, said in an e-mail. Online education could also undercut the demands for new full-time faculty members, Ms. de Russy said.

The state currently contributes about $1.2 billion to CUNY's budget, and $3.36 billion to SUNY. The commission is slated to release its final recommendations in June, but university officials are putting more stock in the preliminary report, which can affect the state budget.
For Mr. Spitzer, investing in research to spur economic development is a longtime theme.

In a speech about growing strategic industries Mr. Spitzer delivered in March of 2006 as attorney general, he said New York needed to leverage the intellectual capital Upstate by creating a "New York State Innovation Fund," which would provide a dedicated funding stream for the "type of research that will lead to innovations with direct commercial application."

Mr. Spitzer said in 2006 that state support could help New York win more research dollars and attract private sector financing. The fund "should be large enough to catalyze the kind of research that can help strategic industries make dramatic progress," he said.