State lawmakers and Gov. Kathy Hochul did the right thing. But SUNY Chancellor John King Jr. and the SUNY Board of Trustees didn’t listen.
Despite receiving nearly $300 million in direct state aid for the SUNY system in the enacted state budget, for the second year in a row, the chancellor and board allocated the lion’s share of funding to the four university centers. That leaves the 19 smaller, cash-strapped campuses struggling under a combined $146 million deficit — a debt that a fair funding allocation could have easily wiped out.
“The legislators standing with us today fought in this budget year to include over $100 million in additional funding for public higher education,” said NYSUT President Melinda Person of the 10 lawmakers who joined she and United University Professions President Fred Kowal at a press conference calling on SUNY leaders to reverse the move. The deficits, Person noted, are not due to campus mismanagement, but to “decades of underfunding by the previous administration.”
“Once you start cutting, campuses shrink smaller and smaller,” said Kowal, who later led a contingent of UUPers to the SUNY Administration building to hand deliver three boxes of postcards calling for the chancellor to reverse the decision. “We will not watch this chancellor decimate the SUNY system.”