UUP Leader Fears Toll SUNY Cuts May Take

PHILLIP H. SMITH: A terrible time to cut faculty.

Students and educators returning to State University of New York colleges as the school year begins are in danger of a decreased quality of education because of severe budget cuts by the state, United University Professions President Phillip H. Smith warned last week.

Staff cuts, hiring freezes and an increased reliance on part-time Professors will be some of the methods schools use to deal with reduced budgets, Mr. Smith said, and mid-year cuts on the horizon could devastate schools that have already cut to the bone.

Sees More Cuts Coming

"We have been concerned for quite some time with the budget cuts that have affected SUNY over the last couple of years," he said in a phone interview. "SUNY is going to take various steps to redress its situation, and many of those things include fewer courses, fewer faculty and overcrowded classrooms."

The cost-saving measures come at the worst possible time for some colleges, which are experiencing booms in application numbers for the coming academic year.

"The economy's downturn has prompted a lot of people who would perhaps be looking to some of the private institutions normally to look at the more-reasonable tuition at SUNY," Mr. Smith explained. SUNY tuition for state residents is a little under $5,000 per year at a four-year college, and $3,500 at a community college, versus more than $40,000 for many private colleges.

Reports from campuses across the state show that applications are up "anywhere from 10 to 14 percent," he continued, signaling that class sizes will likely grow compared to the 2008- 2009 school year, which was already SUNY's highest on record.

100 Fewer Faculty At Albany

Although Mr. Smith said that staffcut numbers would probably not be known until SUNY budgets were released in November, he believed that "at SUNY Albany, they're going to be down somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 faculty members, beginning the start of this semester. . . if we extrapolate this out, it's going to be several hundred [across the state]."

While colleges deal with these prob- lems, the process will begin anew, when Governor Paterson is expected to call the State Legislature back into session regarding mid-year cuts to the 2010 budget.

Mr. Smith said that his members were already prepared for the worst. "Unless money starts falling off the trees, SUNY's going to be in worse shape than it is now," he said, predicting that there will be no other alternative for the Governor than more budget cuts.

"I think there's no other recourse, but one of the things that I do become very concerned about is the level of those cuts," he said. "Higher education is always a soft spot. Nationwide, they find themselves to be the first cut and the last to recover. Given the fact that we got hit so hard last time, one would hope they would soften up for us this time, but history doesn't bode well for us."

'Need SUNY to Thrive'

Mr. Smith's plea to state lawmakers rests on the fact that "in these very tough economic times, people are always going to turn to public higher education for retraining, re-tooling," he said. "We're the most affordable place to do that."

"We create taxpayers," he concluded. "And that's an important thing. On an individual campus-by-campus basis, our campuses are often the major employer in their locale, and the major economic force. If SUNY doesn't thrive, the economy won't thrive."