On Monday afternoon at Baruch College, the City University of New York board of trustees voted unanimously in favor of Chancellor Matthew Goldstein’s proposed Compact for Public Higher Education.The compact combines financial commitments from the city and state with increased private fund raising, more efficient management by CUNY college presidents, and a modest tuition increase. The new funds would be targeted for improvements in the sciences, teacher preparation, and attracting higher-quality students throughout the system.

The compact provides an innovative way out of CUNY’s chronic problems of underfunding. It will allow the university to leverage public monies. It encourages CUNY presidents to build more private sector partnerships. And it provides a predictable means of increasing and employing revenues. Because of the state’s Tuition Assistance Program, more than 90% of students with family incomes under $55,000 would see no increase in tuition payments.

In a perfect world, the state legislature would supply CUNY with sufficient funds to ensure free enrollment for all students, top-of-the-line educational facilities, and faculty salaries above the average for comparable institutions nationally. But we live in an imperfect world, and the compact represents a realistic appraisal of the political climate as it exists, not as we might dream it should be.

Such a mechanism is necessary to continue CUNY’s record of improving the education that its undergraduates receive. Since 1999, we have seen the positive effects of a variety of measures coming from the current board and administration. Remediation at senior colleges has ended. The CUNY Honors College has attracted students of Ivy League caliber. The junior-year assessment test has established a minimum standard for admission into the senior colleges.The chancellor’s bold plan for increasing community college faculty hiring in liberal arts disciplines promises to transform the academic environment at CUNY community colleges.

The compact, of course, must be accompanied by a continued emphasis on raising academic quality throughout CUNY. The institution can and should do more to foster a climate that encourages students to graduate in a timely fashion. Moreover, the board can and should exercise its oversight power to ensure that scholarly accomplishments, measured in terms of quality and quantity of publications, form a necessary prerequisite for promotion and tenure at all – rather than just most – senior colleges.

No one prefers to see a tuition increase of any sort. Yet, as has been the case on any recent proposal to improve quality at CUNY, this initiative has been greeted by cautions of calamitous consequences from certain quarters of the faculty. Barbara Bowen, the president of the Professional Staff Congress, CUNY’s faculty union, recently urged the board to reject the compact. Instead, she called for returning to “radical openness” – the failed policy of open admissions – and then demanding that the state Legislature dramatically increase funding for CUNY. It would be hard to envision a less realistic (or less wise) proposal.

Ms. Bowen claimed to speak on “behalf of the PSC’s 20,000 members.” But it seems un likely that her words carried significant weight beyond union headquarters. Indeed, it is embarrassing to see how often the dire predictions of Ms. Bowen and her followers have proved wrong.

Leaders of the PSC and its companion organization, the University Faculty Senate, once claimed that abolishing senior-college remediation would decrease the diversity of CUNY’s undergraduate population. It didn’t happen. They have previously asserted that establishing assessment benchmarks for entrance into senior colleges would disproportionately harm students of color. It didn’t happen. The UFS chairman, Susan O’Malley, considered the idea of hiring more qualified liberal arts professors at community colleges so pernicious that she wrote, “We must change this.” Fortunately,the editor of “Politics of Education: Essays from Radical Teacher” did not get her way.

In my opinion as a historian, the board correctly assessed the dire warnings against the compact through the lens of this uninterrupted record of past failed forecasts.The vote represented a choice between two radically different visions of CUNY’s future. Ms. Bowen, Ms. O’Malley, and their allies carp and complain while doing nothing to improve the institution’s quality. The chancellor’s plan, on the other hand, represents not only an avenue for continuing CUNY’s advances but also a model for other revenue-starved public universities to follow.It will work to the benefit of both CUNY and its students that the compact was approved.

Mr. Johnson is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.