Missing Pieces
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The last two meetings of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York were bad days for accountability to the students, citizens and taxpayers of New York State.
First, the trustees succumbed to the pressure of the campuses to water down and decentralize general education assessment, such that no meaningful comparisons between and among campuses may ever be made. Then, they also gave in to Chancellor Robert King’s request, once again, to raise SUNY’s tuition levels without first seriously exploring how to contain overall institutional costs.
The key encompassing issue, however, was the failure of the trustees at their June meeting to submit a master plan for SUNY for the period 2004 through 2008 – a critical strategic planning document that was due, by law, to be submitted to the governor and the Board of Regents by June 1 of this year. Amid chuckles at the chancellor’s dismissive remark to the effect that state authorities “probably won’t be coming to put us in jail,” board members did take note of my memorandum detailing that the system administration’s poorly written report did not address in any meaningful manner facilities planning, student enrollments, or the relationships between SUNY and other New York higher education institutions, let alone the sine qua non of capital and operating expenditure projections – all specifically required by Section 354 of Education Law and by then past due. Commissioner of Education Richard Mills won’t mind – “he has been indulgent with SUNY” – observed Provost Peter Salins, as though the commissioner has the power to suspend the law.
At the board’s most recent meeting on September 14, a second draft of a purported master plan was on the table, yet, amazingly, it still lacked most of the significant data and plans, including budgetary projections for 2004-2008, required by education law. Instead of respecting the spirit and the letter of the law, the chancellor presented what might be called “a plan to plan” and the trustees, save one, accepted the amateurish, self-congratulatory document – apparently pleased that the public will thereby learn very little concerning SUNY’s spiraling costs.
A primary goal of the master plan legislation is to provide, pursuant to full and open discussion, a comprehensive plan including capital and operating expenditure projections, i.e., a professional template, which serves as a guide for future action and against which future activities and outcomes might be tested and compared, and rational budgetary decisions made. Master plans become, therefore, tools of accountability as well as guides for action.
There is a pattern emerging whereby the state university glosses over the mandates of the Legislature as well as its own policies established by the Board of Trustees. Major steps forward often entail several steps backward. True accountability requires transparent external assessment of all operations, and such assessment of all operations must inform strategic planning. Perversely, however, the board’s recently approved, campus-controlled assessment plan and its incomplete, grossly inadequate master plan are intentionally designed to prevent system-wide performance comparability and accountability.
It is as if Enron’s management were to be allowed to dispense with the necessity of both engaging external auditors and submitting actual strategic plans to its board of directors. The public does not expect its comfortably compensated system administration to present it with an overdue, quickly drawn collage of primarily outdated documents instead of a true, clear, and cogent master plan that both the state university and the public deserve.
Education law binds SUNY to staggered four-year accountability cycles: progress reports in 2002, 2006, etc., and master plans in 2000, 2004, 2008, etc. SUNY submitted its 2000-2004 “master plan,” a progress report document, not in 2000, but in 2002, the year that education law requires a progress report. The failure to provide a genuine master plan means that SUNY has not done any serious strategic planning in a long time while it nonetheless keeps raising tuition to “cover the gap.” The apparent SUNY tactic is to conflate master plans into progress reports in the hope that state government and the taxpayer won’t notice the difference. The recent nationally released state higher education report cards (cf. measuringup.highereducation.org) have noticed and given the state a failing grade on affordability. Will state government and the taxpayer see the handwriting on the wall?
Does anyone in the Legislature, the executive branch, or on the Board of Regents, indeed, care?
Ms. de Russy is a trustee of SUNY, an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and a member of the Board of Visitors of the Air Force Academy.