This was the message President William R. Greiner brought before State Assemblymembers Edward C. Sullivan and Paul Tokasz at a Rethinking SUNY hearing held Feb. 16 at Buffalo State College.

"Restore every single dollar to TAP...and strengthen it if you can," Greiner stressed. "That's the unanimous position of every president in the SUNY system. If it isn't, those who aren't on board should be ashamed."

Greiner also told the assembly- members that SUNY needs "an effective accountability structure."

He noted that the University of Minnesota system, a model made up of 62 institutions and 150,000 students, recently decentralized and cut its central office in half, from a staff of 200 to 100.

"We can't afford to have a 1,000-person office processing transactions and so inappropriately staffed. We have to have that reform. There are large savings to be made," Greiner said.

"The chancellor himself will tell you it's an organization that's bottom-heavy....It needs to be stood on its head."

The role of SUNY's central ad- ministration should not be to process paper, cut checks or spend enormous amounts of time performing tasks the campuses could do, Greiner said. The application process, in particular, should be handled by the individual campuses rather than having the papers sent first to Albany. "We're paying way too much for processing applications."

Shared information still continues to be vital, however, and "we have to do better with technology," Greiner said. "We're not taking advantage of technology" such as electronic applications.

Greiner also did his best to allay concerns Tokasz expressed over differential tuition.

"Some of us think presidents will use this as a solution to financial problems now," Tokasz said. "Can you answer me how the university system has thought about differential tuition and how the campuses have thought about differential tuition."

"It can't be a blank check," Greiner responded. "None of us in the State University system have argued for complete independence."

Campus-based tuition should reflect a president's knowledge of his own institution, Greiner said. "I'm expected to know more about my campus...than anyone in Albany. If I don't, then there's something wrong," he said. "What we would like is the ability to recommend what tuition should be."

It's not a unique way of setting tuition, Greiner noted. "Other campuses do it this way. They don't have a one-size-fits-all tuition." And with the budget concerns all SUNY campuses face, "in the short term, frankly, we're going to need tuition revenue to balance the budgets." The State University Colleges also support the plan, Greiner said.

Pooling SUNY tuition money is "counterproductive," Greiner said, because campus budgets are revenue driven. "Whatever the tax dollars are, where is the money going to come from to run our campuses?"

He warned that without adopting legislation that would allow greater management flexibility, the quality of education at SUNY schools will suffer.