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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
January 10, 2007

UUP: SUNY needs more budget relief, more full-time faculty

While thanking state lawmakers for boosting state funding to SUNY in the current state budget, the president of the nation’s largest higher education union is asking for additional funds in the 2007-08 budget to cover continued enrollment growth and more full-time faculty.

Testifying before a hearing of the Assembly Standing Committee on Higher Education, William E. Scheuerman, President of United University Professions, said while lawmakers have increased the state’s portion of funding for SUNY, that trend must continue to address problems caused by underfunding in the past.

“As a result of your leadership, the 2006-07 State Budget took critical steps to avert a further deterioration in the University’s educational infrastructure,” Scheuerman told the committee members. “We believe you have set the stage for subsequent actions that would counter, over time, the impacts of historically unfunded enrollment growth and structural deficits caused by inadequate funding of mandatory costs and inflationary increases.”

Scheuerman cited figures showing that in 1990-91, over 75 percent of SUNY’s budget was funded by the state, but by 2005-06, the level of state funding had plunged to 51 percent.  He said that years of chronic state underfunding led to the denial of admission to thousands of qualified students because there wasn’t enough faculty to teach them.

“If the ratio of full-time faculty to full-time equivalent students in 2005-06 was equal to the ratio that existed in the mid 1990’s, the campuses would have had almost 2,000 more full-time academic faculty than was the case last year,” Scheuerman said.

Scheuerman urged the committee to not only maintain the current level of state funding for SUNY in the 2007-08 budget, but also provide new state support to compensate for additional mandatory expenditures and enrollment growth.

Scheuerman also took the opportunity to reiterate the union’s critical concerns over proposals to merge or privatize the three SUNY-operated public hospitals as outlined in the Berger Commission report that became law on Jan. 1.

“The proposals cannot be implemented without undermining health care quality and the capacity of these public institutions to continue serving, effectively, the populations of their respective communities in Brooklyn, Stony Brook and Syracuse,” he said.

 

UUP represents more then 34,000 academic and professional faculty on 29 New York state-operated campuses, and is an affiliate of New York State United Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO.     

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