FSEC verifies it: no confidence in trustees
Senate's vote relates to academic issues, not union concerns, committee tells Greiner

By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor

Members of the Faculty Senate voted no confidence in the SUNY Board of Trustees on April 6 precisely because they have "no confidence" in the board and not because they wished to aid their union in its collective-bargaining process, members of the senate's executive committee told President William R. Greiner at the body's April 7 meeting.

Greiner had asked FSEC members to verify his "interpretation" of the senate's action the preceding day in which members endorsed a statement of no confidence in the board of trustees that had been drafted jointly by the SUNY Faculty Senate and United University Professions. He said he likely would be asked about the vote by colleagues in system administration, and wanted to give an accurate response.

Greiner's request came in the wake of a letter he and other campus presidents received from SUNY Chancellor John W. Ryan in which Ryan charged that the SUNY Faculty Senate was urging its members to vote no confidence in the trustees in order to give UUP "an advantage in contract negotiations."

Among the laundry list of grievances against the trustees outlined in the statement of no confidence is an item charging that the board is seeking to "significantly disrupt" the public mission of high-quality health-care delivery to the people of New York by attempting to remove SUNY's teaching hospitals from the university. The hospital issue is a key one for UUP, which has a significant portion of its membership affiliated with the hospitals.

Greiner told senators that he believed system administration was making a mistake in attributing the vote of no confidence to an attempt to influence the collective-bargaining process. He said he had hoped to avoid that appearance by suggesting at the Faculty Senate meeting on April 6 that senators drop the hospital issue from the statement.

The statement, he said, should be viewed as "the vehicle through which the Faculty Senate has gone on record saying it is unhappy with the way the SUNY trustees have treated faculty interests and responsibilities."

He cited two issues that probably could be considered the "most egregious" examples, from the faculty perspective, of trustees' indifference to legitimate interests on the campuses: the New Paltz affair, in which Trustee Candace de Russy asked Ryan to remove New Paltz President Roger Bowen from office after Bowen allowed a controversial conference on sexuality to be held on campus, and trustees' imposition of a systemwide general-education requirement without imput from the campuses.

Dennis Malone, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and a SUNY senator, told Greiner that part of the problem with Greiner responding to the chancellor on the issue is that "Chancellor Ryan is part of the problem, not part of the solution." Malone noted that Ryan was present, but remained silent, at the Dec. 15 trustees' meeting where the board imposed the general-education requirement after refusing to let SUNY Faculty Senate Chair Vincent Aceto and others attending the meeting speak before the board voted.

"All he could have said was, 'Let's listen, first, before we vote.' But he didn't even do that. If he attempts to portray himself as the leader of the system, he is very wrong because he is not leading the faculty any more," he said. "Ultimately, I think that if the senate feels that its imput has been treated with contemptuous disregard, eventually the faculty is going to do something about that. This is it; they say they have no confidence in this board."

Mitchell Harwitz, associate professor of economics, said that the statement of no confidence is the first instance that he knows of in which the SUNY Faculty Senate and UUP have made a joint statement of general concerns.

"And to characterize it as the Faculty Senate having been co-opted by UUP is on the face of it an indication of the wrong attitude toward faculty. It's genuinely an insulting interpretation," Harwitz said.

Faculty members were not co-opted, but were very serious in their action in endorsing the statement, he said.

"Faculty do feel very seriously that areas in which they are genuinely and deeply concerned have been intruded upon in a way that destroys the process of the institution."

Faculty members feel that any chance of consultation or collaboration with the board of trustees has been "completely broken," added Judith Adams-Volpe, director of Lockwood Library and a SUNY senator. "And that's why this statement was necessary at this point."

In addition, she said, while the hospital issue may not directly affect UB since the university does not own its own hospital, it was important to show support for colleagues in the other SUNY health science centers on an issue that does affect them.

Samuel Schack, professor of mathematics, said he found Ryan's letter to be "dismissive and looking for a reason to ignore the faculty voice."

He advised Greiner to take the "simplest interpretation: This was a vote of no confidence; if anybody asks what it means, it mean's that the faculty has no confidence in the board of trustees."

Endorsement of the statement does not mean that every faculty member subscribes to every item in the list of grievances, or even that the majority of faculty members subscribe to the item about the hospitals, he said.

"It simply means that in the aggregate, watching this board of trustees' behavior over several years, we have now subscribed to the belief that they are an ineffective board of trustees for this university and we have no confidence in their guidance for this university."