The idea of a multi-year budget for SUNY was enthusiastically endorsed by a panel of prominent leaders in higher education attending a recent "Higher Education Teach-In" at UB.

Assemblyman Edward C. Sullivan, chair of the Assembly Higher Education Committee, in fact has proposed that a five-year budget plan be adopted for SUNY. The proposal is part of the Higher Education and Reinvestment Act (HERA), which is in the process of being drafted.

Sullivan was featured on the panel, along with Arthur O. Eve, deputy Assembly speaker; SUNY Trustee Pamela Jacobs; President William R. Greiner; Christopher Holland, student representative to the SUNY Board of Trustees, and Blair Horner, legislative director of the New York State Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG). NYPIRG sponsored the forum, which was held on March 1 in Pistachio's in the Student Union.

With a five-year budget plan, Sullivan told teach-in participants, "colleges such as UB would be able to plan on a five-year basis as to what money would be coming in," making it "more sensible for all concerned."

He said that although a current legislative body cannot tell future colleagues what they can do, "we can make it difficult for them to change-to cut the budget." Once the budget is law, it would be "politically difficult" for future legislators to reduce the amount because they would have to pass a law to that effect.

Horner noted the idea of a multi-year budget is not an "unheard of approach to governance," pointing out that the Legislature several times has instituted multi-year tax cuts.

"Certainly, there's precedent for the type of long-range, economic planning that you see on the tax-cutting side," he said. "Certainly, we think it makes sense to do it on the educational-planning side as well."

Greiner praised the proposal, noting that "you would not find a president in the SUNY system who would not endorse a multi-year budget."

Jacobs wondered about applying the multi-year approach to tuition increases, pointing out that tuition has not been raised in five years. "How long do we go?" she asked.

Holland noted that the conventional wisdom holds that students automatically will be opposed to a tuition increase. But when the fee structure is added to the dynamic-fees are being imposed because tuition is not being increased-"students are for the idea that we should be planning for these things within the tuition structure so that we can knock some of these fees out," he said. "If we had a rational tuition policy where we would be able to raise the tuition in increments year after year instead of having this plateau and then raising it a couple of hundred dollars five years from now, it would seem more rational and more realistic."

Sullivan said he thinks there will come a time when a predictable way of raising tuition will be entertained. "But we're not there yet," he said, because fees on top of the current tuition "presents too high of a percentage of the cost of educating a student at many campuses."

"I feel that when we get back to the point where the student's contribution-tuition and fees-is at a percentage level that is commensurate with colleges around the country, or the history of this college, or some other criterion, then it will be the right time to start raising tuition in a planned way"-by the consumer price index or some other indicator.

"I agree that we should not have this in political fits and starts. But I think that what we want to do is get back to the point where we're more or less where we should be," Sullivan said. "This is a public university. And it is in the interest of the public that the university be accessible to people without reference to financial restrictions."