Winter 2021 Post-Plenary Report
Winter 2021 Plenary, the View from the Executive Committee
Clearly, a central theme of this plenary was the pandemic and our responses to it at the system and campus level. How do we keep our faculty, staff, and students safe as we go forward; how can we begin to expand some level of in-person instruction and co-curricular activities while maintaining the ability to deal with any increases of cases; what lessons learned from this past year of remote instruction can we apply in our future planning? The pandemic has had and will continue to have severe impacts on our budgets, and be a source of uncertainty going forward. Several members mentioned the need to follow any ongoing discussions of the potential to use furloughs as part of SUNY's response to budgetary impacts of the pandemic.
Resolutions, Winter 2021 UFS Plenary
Please report any campus actions that are follow-up to UFS resolutions using this form.
Requests from committees
President’s Report
Gwen Kay, President
(Slide deck - PDF)
Provost’s Report
Shadi Sandvik, SUNY Provost
(Slide deck - PDF)
The Provost updated the Senate on the following topics:
Conversation with the Chancellor
Jim Malatras, SUNY Chancellor
Chancellor Malatras used his time with the Senate to discuss the concerns presented by Sector Reps (sector statements are listed below). Several themes arose from the conversation:
Sector Statements
Health Sciences
Brigette Desport (Downstate Health Sciences University)
These are the three main areas of concern we want to share with you today:
Healthy Communities. Our mission, as HSC's, is to improve the health of the communities we serve. They include our students, health care professionals, our regions, and our state. We continue to step up and deliver healthcare to our communities, including providing COVID-19 testing and vaccine administration. During the pandemic, our faculty not only provide direct clinical care, but work in close proximity and have physical contact with our students to give them the quality health education they need and deserve. We celebrate keeping our infection rates low while the country’s numbers rise. We’ve been able to be models to our students of how it should be done. We want to keep our campuses safe. How can SUNY continue to help us maintain safe and healthy communities?
Education and Research. Investment in our technology infrastructure to provide quality instruction and support student learning is paramount. Students are entitled to equitable educational experiences. We should invest in simulation instruction to augment their clinical skills, especially when sites close their doors as was the case with COVID. This of course requires bold and creative ways to fund this endeavor across the health science centers. Our graduates are more likely to stay and practice in New York, providing economic and social value to their communities. We are doing the research and collecting the data to help put an end to the coronavirus. What are ways that SUNY can contribute to making our technology infrastructure innovative and robust to continue providing competitive and quality education?
Budget and Finance. We are unique campuses, with distinct needs. Rather than give you a laundry list of the daily and constant financial challenges we face, which you are intimately aware of, we want to emphasize the following: 1. Our medical centers are interwoven with our educational curricula and integral to providing quality education to our students. 2. Our concern is that the focus will be on the educational side and that the medical centers will be shutdown.
Technology and Agriculture
Tim Gerken (SUNY Morrisville)
COVID-19 vaccinations/safety. We applaud the idea of providing faculty who teach face to face with the increased opportunity to get vaccinated. However as the UUP recently reported: The numerous categories of high-priority recipients have meant that millions more people in some states – including New York – are eligible for the vaccine than existing supplies of the vaccine can accommodate. The situation is so bad that earlier this week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo warned that New York could begin to run out of vaccines each week before new supplies come in. Therefore, we are concerned that the staff who clean, feed, support, and have other significant interaction with students on campus are not eligible for the 1b category. From an equity standpoint, (the SUNY Covid-19 tracker lists 5 employees who have died.) We would encourage that anyone who has regular contact with others on campus should also have access to that list. There is also the concern that faculty who are not scheduled (many campuses have already created their fall schedules) to teach f2f will not have the opportunity to get on the list, which could limit the opportunity to increase the number of F2F sections offered which our students need. Any guidance you could provide on how this decision was made, why only teaching faculty were added to the list and, what role, if any, our individual institutions have in this decision making would be appreciated. Ultimately, how will availability of vaccines be made equitable to all persons across campus?
Support. Faculty have been flexible and supportive in order to aid in student success and our campus budgetary crises during the pandemic (teaching times outside of normal hours, large remote class sizes, suspension of course releases and sabbaticals, teaching the same class in more than one format, teaching face-to-face while at risk, etc.). As you know compared to the other sectors, the Tech sector is teaching the largest percentage of online courses. This has required incredible effort especially for faculty that have spent most of their teaching careers focused on “hands-on learning.” We understand these changes are a working solution in response to the global pandemic. However, our current solutions are not sustainable in the long-term, and are not always in keeping with best practices for student success in online learning and have negatively impacted retention. Our online teaching experts at Empire have class sizes between 20 and 30. Currently, some AG/Tech faculty are now teaching synchronous/asynchronous classes with over 100 students per class. We also know that many nursing faculty have had to take on additional responsibilities to ensure students can meet their students’ Practicum and licensing requirements greatly increasing their workload and making it difficult to keep the adjuncts they need to maintain their programs. We ask that you encourage campus Presidents to support best practices when it comes to online class sizes and workload and remind campus leaders that these current policies be phased out and that pre-pandemic policies be fully restored as soon as it is safe to do so to ensure the physical, social, and mental well being of faculty, staff, and students.
Retrenchment and Deactivation. Some campuses are beginning the process of faculty retrenchment and program deactivation and are interested whether these will remain individual campus decisions or might they be encouraged by SUNY as a way to address our current budget deficit.
Comprehensive Colleges
Bruce Simon (SUNY Fredonia)
BUDGET ADVOCACY. We appreciate your passion for and pride in SUNY; we, too, hold that SUNY is an essential public good. In the wake of January 6th, our nation needs more SUNY graduates than ever--from every region of the state. Our sector connects a diverse set of students who engage and change each other through liberal arts, applied learning, and co- and extra-curricular experiences. But we will suffer disproportionately without a fierce advocacy campaign for the distinctive contributions, proven value, and real needs of SUNY’s high-quality public regional universities this budget season.
SPRING 2021. We’re deeply concerned about our readiness to start the spring semester as COVID evolves. To better prepare campuses to work with their counties and communities to avoid or control their first (or their next) outbreak, we need an aggressive, coordinated playbook--one that prioritizes continuing improvements to SUNY’s testing regime, vaccination acceleration, and COVID Tracker. Well-documented successes this spring can put SUNY in a strong position as we enter prime recruiting season. SUNY should be preparing a major marketing campaign that puts the spotlight on our innovative approaches across the system that prioritize the health and safety of our students, staff, and communities as we work through this pandemic and build back better.
FALL 2021. We’ve already started building teaching schedules for next fall, but some campuses are rushing toward normalcy while others seem to be assuming that Fall 2021 will be exactly like Fall 2020. What has System learned from this academic year’s pandemic response and planning efforts that can help all campuses start and finish strong next academic year?
Specialized and Statutory
Carlie Phipps (SUNY Poly)
Although some campuses have done very well with Covid compliance management, some have had logistical issues that have ended up in the laps of faculty to solve on their own. There is not equal support across campuses for managing issues such as discrepancies between class enrollment caps and distanced room capacities, fluctuation in online vs. in person delivery, and responsibilities for daily screening monitoring and enforcement. In a similar vein, variation has been seen in information dissemination in areas such as documentation of eligibility for Covid vaccinations. Campuses are doing the best they can, but some are not succeeding as well as others. We would like to bring this to your attention in order to ask if System can facilitate campus sharing of best practices in strategies and procedures for this modified semester.
A challenge that has affected our sector in particular has been with schedule coordination with our sister institutions and other partners. Our sector campuses have very close relationships with colleges and entities outside of SUNY. As our students need to be able to move between them as seamlessly as possible, we create our academic calendars in conjunction with those partners. The unification across SUNY of start dates and break allowances this semester has created discrepancies that negatively affect the student experience. We would like to ask for more allowances for variation or earlier coordination and communication with campuses in this position in the future if system-wide scheduling is continued.
We appreciate the lengths that SUNY has gone to in order to provide resources for online teaching. We would like to point out that we see this as a positive opportunity to explore assessment in general in a broader context, particularly as many of us try to transition our testing styles to new formats. As this transition occurs, an increase in academic dishonesty made easier by commercial sites such as Chegg.com creates a substantial challenge. We would like to encourage System to continue supporting and expanding teaching resources, particularly with regard to assessment, and request strong institutional pushback against commercial cheating companies.
Finally, pass/fail grades have been an incredible stress reliever on students sorely in need of such a break. As the pandemic environment continues to affect them, requests to expand and continue pass/fail grades have increased. We appreciate the assistance this provides to students, but want to ensure that decisions they make for these classes do not harm them in future transcript evaluations whether for jobs, school transfer, or professional program admission. We would like to ask you to keep an eye on this situation and watch for possible repercussions in continued refinement of pass/fail guidelines.
University Centers
Cemal Basaran (University at Buffalo)
Working on sustainability is a shared governance project. SUNY should be working with each campus and local community for its sustainability of carbon neutrality, transportation, facilities, resources, etc. The issue of implementing sustainability goals is a perfect example of shared governance addressing the issues of all campuses and the communities in which they are found.
University Centers are concerned about the structural changes in higher education that are and will be taking place. The relevant structural changes that need to be addressed are: declining enrollments, decreasing financial support from the state and federal government, declining demand for high cost brick-and-mortar campuses, differential tuition, etc. We urge the chancellor to work through shared governance to strategically address their impacts on all our campuses and the communities in which they are part of.
Budget decisions: We reaffirm our concern that the chancellor insures the involvement of shared governance in the budget process and decisions at the state and campus levels.
Campus Governance Leaders
Lisa Glidden (SUNY Oswego)
Campus Governance Leaders field concerns from all parts of their campuses. We have attempted to distill the concerns into three items. We understand that we (the State, SUNY, our campuses) are facing three interrelated crises: financial, COVID, and mental health. Our concerns are connected to these and their structural and potential long-term impacts.
First, we are concerned about the process by which the contact hours are being restructured and teaching loads are being increased. We agree it is important for campuses to review their policies with an eye toward reducing inequities across and within departments, these decisions are best and most credibly made at the local level, where decision-makers are most aware of workload. We note that workload includes teaching (which also includes advising and mentoring), scholarship, and service. Many faculty are spending a much higher amount of time than usual following up with students in their courses and advising, yet this does not always appear to be recognized or accounted for.
Second, many people on our campuses have taken part and contributed considerable time and effort to academic planning on our campuses. We recognize that external conditions change due to the pandemic, and that academic planning may be upended, but these facts are further challenged when System changes criteria after campuses have submitted plans or does not respond to submissions in a timely manner. This is very disruptive to everyone impacted by academic planning, especially by students, their families who need to move them back to campus, staff, faculty, administrators, etc. Again, the ability to pivot and react nimbly to changing conditions is easiest at local levels.
Third, early retirement incentives have to be adopted at the local level, and we’d like to be able to plan on our campuses. Do you know if there are incentives coming?
Clearly, a central theme of this plenary was the pandemic and our responses to it at the system and campus level. How do we keep our faculty, staff, and students safe as we go forward; how can we begin to expand some level of in-person instruction and co-curricular activities while maintaining the ability to deal with any increases of cases; what lessons learned from this past year of remote instruction can we apply in our future planning? The pandemic has had and will continue to have severe impacts on our budgets, and be a source of uncertainty going forward. Several members mentioned the need to follow any ongoing discussions of the potential to use furloughs as part of SUNY's response to budgetary impacts of the pandemic.
Resolutions, Winter 2021 UFS Plenary
- EXEC: 187-01-1 Shared Governance in These Times of Extraordinary Challenges
- This resolution requests that system and campus administration work with shared governance bodies when making decisions during challenging times, especially in the areas of health and safety, instructional modality, and budget..
- For: 43 / Against: 0 / Abstain: 0
- BLM: 187-03-1 Board of Trustees Acknowledges that Black Lives Matter
- This resolution requests that the Board of Trustees acknowledge that Black lives matter and work to include anti-racist language in the SUNY Mission.
- For: 39 / Against: 1 / Abstain: 2
- BLM: 187-04-1 University Faculty Senate Recognizes and Supports Black Lives Matter
- This resolution requests that the University Faculty Senate acknowledge and support Black Lives Matter in its own work, and ask campus governance bodies to work to eliminate racial injustice on our campuses.
- For: 33 / Against: 5 / Abstain 4
Please report any campus actions that are follow-up to UFS resolutions using this form.
Requests from committees
- Communications (report)
- We are still looking for short and/or long articles/blogs for the online Bulletin on topics of
general interest to SUNY faculty and professional staff. Please submit to Chair Marren
([email protected]) and Acting Chair Knuepfer ([email protected]).
- We are still looking for short and/or long articles/blogs for the online Bulletin on topics of
- Equity, Inclusion and Diversity (report)
- The committee would like to hear how your campuses have reacted to the Racial Equity and
Social Justice Curriculum resolution and what actions your campuses have taken, or if they
have largely ignored it. - We already asked for this in the fall, but it’s an ongoing request: please continue to advocate
for the resolution for Racial Equity and Social Justice Curriculum and engage campus
governance bodies to enact on the resolution action items. We recognize that many
academic programs have little room for additional courses. Therefore, we ask Senators to
encourage academic programs to consider how curriculum mapping and advising practices
can help them maximize student participation in courses focusing on Racial Equity and
Social Justice. Such courses should be available among General Education courses as well as
upper level LAS courses..
- The committee would like to hear how your campuses have reacted to the Racial Equity and
- Ethics and Institutional Integrity (report)
- We would be happy to continue to receive any comments on any of the above issues (in the report).
- Governance (report)
- No specific requests at this time.
- Graduate Academic Programs and Research (report)
- No specific requests at this time.
- Operations (report)
- No specific requests at this time.
- Programs and Awards (report)
- No specific requests at this time.
- Student Life (report)
- No specific requests at this time.
- Undergraduate Academic Programs and Policies (report)
- Communicate anecdotes of excellent outcomes (item 5) to chair (Gordon) or committee
members. - Complete survey as soon as it arrives to you.
- Communicate anecdotes of excellent outcomes (item 5) to chair (Gordon) or committee
President’s Report
Gwen Kay, President
(Slide deck - PDF)
- Board actions and personnel changes: Dr. Tod Laursen has stepped down as Provost and has been appointed Acting President for SUNY Polytechnic; Dr. Shadi Shahedipour-Sandvik, former Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at SUNY Polytechnic has been appointed Provost-in-charge while a search for a new Provost is being organized. In other Board actions, new Presidents were appointed for Environmental Science & Forestry (Joanie Mahoney), Old Westbury (Dr. Timothy Sams), and Upstate Medical University (Dr.Mantosh Dewan); provided a commendation to Dr. Stephen Thomas, Upstate Medical University for his work on the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine; approved rule-making to allow non-tenured faculty take an additional year to go up for tenure, given impacts of the pandemic; reviewed spring reopening guidance; and approved the SUNY budget request.
- Budget: As might be expected, given the current fiscal situation for the state and university, budget was a major component of President Kay's remarks. The Executive Budget from the Governor's office seeks a 5% cut from all state agencies, and that is a best case scenario which assumes that the state will get additional federal funding from a new stimulus package. To deal with the 5% cut, SUNY has asked for flexibility in applying the cut (instead of across the board cuts to programs), delaying contractual increases, differential tuition for some graduate programs, and the potential to furlough staff. Partly, this flexibility will allow SUNY to maintain key diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, such as EOP/EOC programs, TAP assistance for students, and PRODIG programs to recruit diverse staff. Capital funding for critical maintenance is unchanged from last year; while not being cut, the $550M allocation per year is probably not sufficient for long-term sustainability. The Excelsior program has been extended, with the Excelsior gap between funding and actual tuition level continuing to grow until after the 2022-23 academic year, when future Excelsior awards will be reset each year to match tuition costs. There is no specific funding to cover COVID expenses by our hospitals (although they may be able to request reimbursement later), no relief for hospital debt service, and ending of Indigent Care Pool payments. A few bright spots in the budget include $50M capital funding allocation for all of our hospitals (not leaving out Downstate this year), funding of a new Offshore Wind Energy Training Institute (Farmingdale and Stony Brook), and proposed streamlining of academic program approval.
- Task force updates: In spite of the change in leadership in the Provost's office, work continues by the General Education Advisory Committee (GEAC) and the SUNY Online task group. GEAC plans to share a draft plan with stakeholder groups this spring for comment, and submit a revised framework for SUNY General Education for Board of Trustees review by the end of this academic year. The SUNY Online pilot continues, with a solicitation for new pathways in high demand areas going out to campuses. The Mental Health Task Force established by the Board of Trustees is preparing to distribute a survey on mental health issues to campuses soon, and will be rolling out QPR (Question, Persuade, Refer) training shortly. Most recently, the Chancellor has established the Racial Equity Action Plan (REAP) task force, to quickly develop a plan for increasing racial diversity across SUNY campuses.
Provost’s Report
Shadi Sandvik, SUNY Provost
(Slide deck - PDF)
The Provost updated the Senate on the following topics:
- Remote instruction. Provost Sandvik presented summary and snapshot data to show how the System is tracking changes in mode of instruction across the sectors, in order to plan resources and support for students, faculty, and campuses. She highlighted the work of SUNY Online staff to provide programming to faculty and support staff for the pivot to emergency remote instruction, and the Teaching at a Distance and Learning at a Distance websites.
- Mental health. The Student Mental Health and Wellness task force has resumed its work, after being on pause for the pandemic, including ongoing surveys of students and staff about current mental health issues. Final recommendations to the Board of Trustees are planned for this spring. In the meantime, the task force has distributed two interim reports: "Guidance for Faculty in Identifying and Engaging with Students Who May Be in Distress"; "Mental Health Resources at SUNY: Fall 2020/Spring 2021".
- SUNY Online. The Degrees at Scale Initiative continues to develop, with currently 22 programs hosted across 9 campuses. Proposals for additional programs to be added for Fall 2021 are currently being reviewed, with an eye toward meeting market demand and state needs, and the readiness of host campuses to develop needed curricula and scale up academic and IT support. In response to questions, the Provost and her staff reported that Degrees at Scale is recruiting new enrollments to SUNY, and a business plan has been completed and is under review by System Administration.
- General Education. The General Education Advisory Committee is on track to solicit feedback on a new framework for SUNY general education this spring, with the goal of new policy being adopted by the Board of Trustees this summer. Provost Sandvik reviewed the documents that have already been developed, including a Vision statement, a compliance analysis of how SUNY general education relates to Middle States requirements, and revisions that have been proposed for various discipline areas and competencies.
- Racial equity. The Provost ended with mention of Chancellor Malatras' recent Racial Equity Action Plan task force, stressing that the new task force is meant to include shared governance, and build on existing efforts by SUNY to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Conversation with the Chancellor
Jim Malatras, SUNY Chancellor
Chancellor Malatras used his time with the Senate to discuss the concerns presented by Sector Reps (sector statements are listed below). Several themes arose from the conversation:
- COVID-19. SUNY’s testing regime is second to none. and has been essential to support the amount of in person instruction that our campuses have engaged in, and plans for opening up more on-campus activity in upcoming semesters. Our hospital centers, staff, and students are to be commended for their roles in developing testing protocols, and supporting vaccination efforts across the state. SUNY administration is lobbying to get all front-line staff included in the 1B vaccination category, as front-line faculty have been. Going forward, we should revise our criteria for campus closures based on the more robust testing that has been implemented across our campuses, and make use of selective pauses for specific programs instead of campus-wide closures, as appropriate.
- Budget and finances. SUNY's priority in the recent budget negotiations was to maintain funding as much as possible in the face of expected cuts state-wide, and to have the flexibility to limit the harm to specific programs, rather than apply across-the-board cuts. The prospect for additional federal stimulus funding looks promising, given the new administration. Programs critical for SUNY's diversity initiatives such as EOP, EOC, PRODiG have been held constant compared to last year. SUNY sought approval for furloughs as a way to avoid personnel and program termination, but that was not approved. So far, there has been no discussion of early retirement incentives as a way to cut costs in dealing with the budget shortfalls.
- Campus planning. There has been some tension between System and the campuses in planning for Spring 2021. Campuses want planning flexibility to meet the needs of their specific programs, but then request central guidance when issues arise. Conflicting guidelines from the federal government have not helped in this regard. System would normally not get involved in campus calendar planning, but in this case it was important to prevent potential COVID outbreaks by having central guidance not to have a spring break which would encourage travel, and to delay the beginning of the semester to allow holiday-driven spikes to subside. For Fall 2021, campuses are encouraged to think about how they can safely expand on-campus instruction and co-curricular activities, but have a plan B in place in case the pandemic gets worse regionally and nationally. System can play an important role in sharing best practices on contingent campus planning, to support campuses that are having difficulties in developing their plans.
- Faculty issues. The transition to emergency remote instruction has been challenging for faculty (and for students), and has involved faculty in unsustainable efforts that go beyond regular teaching to support student engagement and success. We know how to provide quality online instruction, but more support is needed to make sure the rapid expansion of remote instruction meets those principles. Given faculty and student fatigue with the current focus on online synchronous instruction, safely expanding on-campus instruction over this next academic year will be critical.
- Advocacy. We need to do a better job of marketing the importance of public higher education. For-profit providers pose a threat in that they have business models that don't focus on quality and the public good in the way that SUNY does, and their activities can erode confidence in higher education.
Sector Statements
Health Sciences
Brigette Desport (Downstate Health Sciences University)
These are the three main areas of concern we want to share with you today:
Healthy Communities. Our mission, as HSC's, is to improve the health of the communities we serve. They include our students, health care professionals, our regions, and our state. We continue to step up and deliver healthcare to our communities, including providing COVID-19 testing and vaccine administration. During the pandemic, our faculty not only provide direct clinical care, but work in close proximity and have physical contact with our students to give them the quality health education they need and deserve. We celebrate keeping our infection rates low while the country’s numbers rise. We’ve been able to be models to our students of how it should be done. We want to keep our campuses safe. How can SUNY continue to help us maintain safe and healthy communities?
Education and Research. Investment in our technology infrastructure to provide quality instruction and support student learning is paramount. Students are entitled to equitable educational experiences. We should invest in simulation instruction to augment their clinical skills, especially when sites close their doors as was the case with COVID. This of course requires bold and creative ways to fund this endeavor across the health science centers. Our graduates are more likely to stay and practice in New York, providing economic and social value to their communities. We are doing the research and collecting the data to help put an end to the coronavirus. What are ways that SUNY can contribute to making our technology infrastructure innovative and robust to continue providing competitive and quality education?
Budget and Finance. We are unique campuses, with distinct needs. Rather than give you a laundry list of the daily and constant financial challenges we face, which you are intimately aware of, we want to emphasize the following: 1. Our medical centers are interwoven with our educational curricula and integral to providing quality education to our students. 2. Our concern is that the focus will be on the educational side and that the medical centers will be shutdown.
Technology and Agriculture
Tim Gerken (SUNY Morrisville)
COVID-19 vaccinations/safety. We applaud the idea of providing faculty who teach face to face with the increased opportunity to get vaccinated. However as the UUP recently reported: The numerous categories of high-priority recipients have meant that millions more people in some states – including New York – are eligible for the vaccine than existing supplies of the vaccine can accommodate. The situation is so bad that earlier this week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo warned that New York could begin to run out of vaccines each week before new supplies come in. Therefore, we are concerned that the staff who clean, feed, support, and have other significant interaction with students on campus are not eligible for the 1b category. From an equity standpoint, (the SUNY Covid-19 tracker lists 5 employees who have died.) We would encourage that anyone who has regular contact with others on campus should also have access to that list. There is also the concern that faculty who are not scheduled (many campuses have already created their fall schedules) to teach f2f will not have the opportunity to get on the list, which could limit the opportunity to increase the number of F2F sections offered which our students need. Any guidance you could provide on how this decision was made, why only teaching faculty were added to the list and, what role, if any, our individual institutions have in this decision making would be appreciated. Ultimately, how will availability of vaccines be made equitable to all persons across campus?
Support. Faculty have been flexible and supportive in order to aid in student success and our campus budgetary crises during the pandemic (teaching times outside of normal hours, large remote class sizes, suspension of course releases and sabbaticals, teaching the same class in more than one format, teaching face-to-face while at risk, etc.). As you know compared to the other sectors, the Tech sector is teaching the largest percentage of online courses. This has required incredible effort especially for faculty that have spent most of their teaching careers focused on “hands-on learning.” We understand these changes are a working solution in response to the global pandemic. However, our current solutions are not sustainable in the long-term, and are not always in keeping with best practices for student success in online learning and have negatively impacted retention. Our online teaching experts at Empire have class sizes between 20 and 30. Currently, some AG/Tech faculty are now teaching synchronous/asynchronous classes with over 100 students per class. We also know that many nursing faculty have had to take on additional responsibilities to ensure students can meet their students’ Practicum and licensing requirements greatly increasing their workload and making it difficult to keep the adjuncts they need to maintain their programs. We ask that you encourage campus Presidents to support best practices when it comes to online class sizes and workload and remind campus leaders that these current policies be phased out and that pre-pandemic policies be fully restored as soon as it is safe to do so to ensure the physical, social, and mental well being of faculty, staff, and students.
Retrenchment and Deactivation. Some campuses are beginning the process of faculty retrenchment and program deactivation and are interested whether these will remain individual campus decisions or might they be encouraged by SUNY as a way to address our current budget deficit.
Comprehensive Colleges
Bruce Simon (SUNY Fredonia)
BUDGET ADVOCACY. We appreciate your passion for and pride in SUNY; we, too, hold that SUNY is an essential public good. In the wake of January 6th, our nation needs more SUNY graduates than ever--from every region of the state. Our sector connects a diverse set of students who engage and change each other through liberal arts, applied learning, and co- and extra-curricular experiences. But we will suffer disproportionately without a fierce advocacy campaign for the distinctive contributions, proven value, and real needs of SUNY’s high-quality public regional universities this budget season.
SPRING 2021. We’re deeply concerned about our readiness to start the spring semester as COVID evolves. To better prepare campuses to work with their counties and communities to avoid or control their first (or their next) outbreak, we need an aggressive, coordinated playbook--one that prioritizes continuing improvements to SUNY’s testing regime, vaccination acceleration, and COVID Tracker. Well-documented successes this spring can put SUNY in a strong position as we enter prime recruiting season. SUNY should be preparing a major marketing campaign that puts the spotlight on our innovative approaches across the system that prioritize the health and safety of our students, staff, and communities as we work through this pandemic and build back better.
FALL 2021. We’ve already started building teaching schedules for next fall, but some campuses are rushing toward normalcy while others seem to be assuming that Fall 2021 will be exactly like Fall 2020. What has System learned from this academic year’s pandemic response and planning efforts that can help all campuses start and finish strong next academic year?
Specialized and Statutory
Carlie Phipps (SUNY Poly)
Although some campuses have done very well with Covid compliance management, some have had logistical issues that have ended up in the laps of faculty to solve on their own. There is not equal support across campuses for managing issues such as discrepancies between class enrollment caps and distanced room capacities, fluctuation in online vs. in person delivery, and responsibilities for daily screening monitoring and enforcement. In a similar vein, variation has been seen in information dissemination in areas such as documentation of eligibility for Covid vaccinations. Campuses are doing the best they can, but some are not succeeding as well as others. We would like to bring this to your attention in order to ask if System can facilitate campus sharing of best practices in strategies and procedures for this modified semester.
A challenge that has affected our sector in particular has been with schedule coordination with our sister institutions and other partners. Our sector campuses have very close relationships with colleges and entities outside of SUNY. As our students need to be able to move between them as seamlessly as possible, we create our academic calendars in conjunction with those partners. The unification across SUNY of start dates and break allowances this semester has created discrepancies that negatively affect the student experience. We would like to ask for more allowances for variation or earlier coordination and communication with campuses in this position in the future if system-wide scheduling is continued.
We appreciate the lengths that SUNY has gone to in order to provide resources for online teaching. We would like to point out that we see this as a positive opportunity to explore assessment in general in a broader context, particularly as many of us try to transition our testing styles to new formats. As this transition occurs, an increase in academic dishonesty made easier by commercial sites such as Chegg.com creates a substantial challenge. We would like to encourage System to continue supporting and expanding teaching resources, particularly with regard to assessment, and request strong institutional pushback against commercial cheating companies.
Finally, pass/fail grades have been an incredible stress reliever on students sorely in need of such a break. As the pandemic environment continues to affect them, requests to expand and continue pass/fail grades have increased. We appreciate the assistance this provides to students, but want to ensure that decisions they make for these classes do not harm them in future transcript evaluations whether for jobs, school transfer, or professional program admission. We would like to ask you to keep an eye on this situation and watch for possible repercussions in continued refinement of pass/fail guidelines.
University Centers
Cemal Basaran (University at Buffalo)
Working on sustainability is a shared governance project. SUNY should be working with each campus and local community for its sustainability of carbon neutrality, transportation, facilities, resources, etc. The issue of implementing sustainability goals is a perfect example of shared governance addressing the issues of all campuses and the communities in which they are found.
University Centers are concerned about the structural changes in higher education that are and will be taking place. The relevant structural changes that need to be addressed are: declining enrollments, decreasing financial support from the state and federal government, declining demand for high cost brick-and-mortar campuses, differential tuition, etc. We urge the chancellor to work through shared governance to strategically address their impacts on all our campuses and the communities in which they are part of.
Budget decisions: We reaffirm our concern that the chancellor insures the involvement of shared governance in the budget process and decisions at the state and campus levels.
Campus Governance Leaders
Lisa Glidden (SUNY Oswego)
Campus Governance Leaders field concerns from all parts of their campuses. We have attempted to distill the concerns into three items. We understand that we (the State, SUNY, our campuses) are facing three interrelated crises: financial, COVID, and mental health. Our concerns are connected to these and their structural and potential long-term impacts.
First, we are concerned about the process by which the contact hours are being restructured and teaching loads are being increased. We agree it is important for campuses to review their policies with an eye toward reducing inequities across and within departments, these decisions are best and most credibly made at the local level, where decision-makers are most aware of workload. We note that workload includes teaching (which also includes advising and mentoring), scholarship, and service. Many faculty are spending a much higher amount of time than usual following up with students in their courses and advising, yet this does not always appear to be recognized or accounted for.
Second, many people on our campuses have taken part and contributed considerable time and effort to academic planning on our campuses. We recognize that external conditions change due to the pandemic, and that academic planning may be upended, but these facts are further challenged when System changes criteria after campuses have submitted plans or does not respond to submissions in a timely manner. This is very disruptive to everyone impacted by academic planning, especially by students, their families who need to move them back to campus, staff, faculty, administrators, etc. Again, the ability to pivot and react nimbly to changing conditions is easiest at local levels.
Third, early retirement incentives have to be adopted at the local level, and we’d like to be able to plan on our campuses. Do you know if there are incentives coming?