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Simpson talks about campus issues
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“One thing I worry about in the conversations that are going on about tuition is that it seems the word ‘quality’ is never used. That’s a mistake.”
As the fall semester of what undoubtedly has been a tough budget year for UB draws to a close, the UB Reporter sat down with President John B. Simpson to get his thoughts on some of the major issues facing the university in the coming year.
The annual legislative “ask”
Simpson told the UB Reporter that despite the state’s budget woes, this is, in fact, not a bad year to put forth legislative proposals to the governor and state Legislature.
“We have an agenda that’s shaped around policy, not around the typical financial ask,” he said. “It’s very much a request to give us the ability to implement UB 2020. It’s a bad year to make an ask if it’s for a lot of money; it’s a good year to make an ask if it’s around changing obsolete policy, which is what we’re trying to do.”
UB’s legislative priorities
Simpson outlined the four items that make up UB’s legislative agenda, three of which are associated with how the university uses its resources and conducts its business.
UB is seeking the ability to purchase and commit to licenses that does not require extensive and burdensome pre-audit by the state attorney general or the Office of the Controller. UB also wants the ability to sell and lease land that belongs to university so that third-party developers can develop capital projects. Simpson noted that UB needed action by the state Legislature in order to have an outside developer build the Commons on the North Campus. “We have that same situation now,” he said. “I want to have—as does every private university in the country and virtually every public university we compete with—the ability to sell and lease university-owned land.”
UB also is seeking the ability to access capital through the Dormitory Authority, appropriate regional industrial development agencies or other appropriate bonding vehicles.
Simpson pointed out that SUNY is requesting these regulatory reforms be enacted for the system, as well.
Tuition policy
UB also is asking that the state adopt a rational tuition policy. Simpson said the state now has no tuition policy at all.
“What we have,” he said, “is a practice where when there is a budget deficit, the state pulls money out of higher education and increases the tuition that students pay. From the point of view of the university, all that does is partially fill the hole the state has created by reneging on its responsibility to support its university. From the point of view of students, they pay more and at best they get the same; more likely they get less,” he said.
He called the tuition increase that the SUNY trustees just enacted “a tax on the students because the state has a budgetary problem.”
“I call this ‘tuition roulette,’” he added. “If you’re lucky, you go through four years here with no change [in tuition rates] because the economy is relatively stable; if you’re unlucky, like current students, you get a big, unanticipated tuition increase.”
“By and large,” Simpson said, “the students I’ve spoken with are less concerned with the fact of a tuition increase than they are with the methodology and the surprise. They can’t anticipate and plan for a big tuition increase, and so it’s a nasty, unexpected surprise. If they knew ahead of time, and they had some predictability, and they knew when they were starting their careers what they were getting into—what the financial considerations were—I think it would be a very different conversation.”
A “rational” policy
The tuition policy that has been proposed is called rational, Simpson said, “because what it does is rationalize and create a policy for tuition that is an agreement between the state and the university with its students.”
“What you do is you tell students they will have small, predictable and regular increases in tuition that they will know about ahead of time. It is reasonable and it’s not roulette; it’s not left to chance. It’s an understanding that the state guarantees how much it’s going to cost to get a higher education and an assurance of the quality of the education,” he said. “One thing I worry about in the conversations that are going on about tuition is that it seems the word ‘quality’ is never used. That’s a mistake.”
Acceptability of tuition increase
Is it a hardship for students to pay higher tuition in the context of the national financial situation?
The answer, of course, is “yes,” Simpson said. “On the other hand, knowing ahead of time what you have to deal with, it seems to me, is even more attractive now because you can understand ahead of time what your education will cost and if it’s not within your means, then you can decide whether or not you want to find some other way of dealing with it,” he said. “As it is now, a student could be, as many of our students are, partway through their education and all of a sudden the state imposes these tuition increases that are utterly unanticipated.”
Some, he added, would argue about the issue of fairness to students who already have committed to pursing their education, but who didn’t expect to have to deal with higher tuition.
“Sure it’s harder to pay because resources are scarcer for everybody,” he said, “but on the other hand, the unfairness is even magnified—the unpredictability is worse—when you are in financial difficulty.”
UB 2020 moving ahead
UB 2020, Simpson explains, is an aggressive agenda of change in the institution. The current budget problems have not brought the initiative to a standstill. “There are many ongoing initiatives that do not require changes in education policy at the state level or an infusion of new resources,” he said.
“If you focus on faculty and student growth, that’s not happening now; we’re contracting,” he said, adding that he and Provost Satish K. Tripathi “are seriously thinking about actually reducing the number of students we serve simply because the state is taking our resources.”
“On the other hand,” he said, “if you focus on the ways in which we do our business and how or where we apportion our resources, those processes have been ongoing for several years and are continuing—as much now, maybe even more now, perhaps with more urgency because the state is whacking our budget.”
Simpson noted that UB 2020 is far more than a growth plan. The changes that have been made, for example, in how human resources, information technology and grant and contract management operate are ongoing and are occurring without any new resources from outside of the university, he said, adding that he believes that these initiatives will make UB a better place to work, no matter what happens with the growth aspect of UB 2020.
New York State, Simpson said, “seems almost unable to think beyond next year’s budget. The point of UB 2020 is decidedly contrary to that because it’s a long-term strategy.”
“What we’ve done with UB 2020 is define where we want to be in a couple of decades, but I don’t have any idea, nor could I have predicted two years ago, what the path from here to there is going to be,” he said. “You maintain your goals and your long-term aspirations, and you keep those in sight and that defines how you deal with circumstances as you along the path over many years.
“The apparent situation is that we’re going in the opposite direction of the goal we want to get to,” he said. “But there are many goals that are associated with UB 2020. It’s more about quality, academic achievement and excellence than it is about growing the number of students that we are able to serve.”
Simpson noted that he and other UB officials met on Wednesday with a number of community leaders and with almost the entire Western New York legislative delegation. The meeting, he said, was very positive.
“To a person, the elected officials there committed to working to their utmost to ensure that the changes we need, the changes we’re proposing in our legislative agenda will happen because UB is so important for the region.”
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