Audio Recording of Meeting, 2013 March 28

One of many that we'll have and would ask that before we get gabbled in perhaps we could go around and introduce ourselves to both the new
chair and the president if we have it with a little bit of background into your into your history. So why don't we start with John?
We'll go to the left.
Well, actually, I'm John Fallon. I graduated from U-Albany in what, 77? I have also a master's degree. I played sports here when I was in college.
And you know, with some people now there's some stuff here that we have. Then on the council I guess I know Pierre said that, but actually I think I'm actually, I think I was on before, but maybe whatever.
I think it's about my first dispute that I think it's about 16 or 17 years. It's been, and you know, it's been great. And I know all of you very well. And we welcome you obviously and hoping that this will work out great for all of us, which I'm sure will. And your reputation is amazing.
And Dr. Jones, we're happy to have you here. Obviously. And this is your first meeting. And although we've met a bunch of times, it's still great to see you here. And you know, I really, I really appreciate everything that everyone's been doing here. Thank you.
Hi, Jim Clancy. I was appointed by Governor Patterson. I want to say 2009. So this is the first term still for the survey on my term of 1990 graduate of the university.
I played sports as well, track and field and cross country. And have been honored to participate in this, on this council of very committed professional and dedicated professionals and look forward to continuing working with both of you.
Thank you.
Steve, why don't we?
Everybody's too bad. It's my presence in finance and business. And I can't just say you know, time for it.
And have worked with the council since my time in this council.
We met with Roy in the civil council meeting for the 12 years.
And welcome my councilman. Please addition meeting and our president is a nation council meeting.
Same for me, Kathy Herman and vice president communications and marketing and I joined the staff just after the metal work.
Because I remember you from the 60 May. That's right.
Someone join us other than Dr. Jackson.
This is Robert Bouchanger.
Oh Rob. Okay. Just want just want to be sure.
I apologize to everyone. I got a city later. I'm actually on the road.
So I'll be there a little bit later. But I'll listen to those long ago.
Okay. Thank you.
You'll be the team.
President has been playing for my 12 year now.
I want to say the university.
And to thank myself.
I'm Christine. I'm your vice president for student success.
I've been here for a little over 30 years.
And I'm also interested in other graduate.
Oh, so we'll check some out in here. No, you.
In the beginning.
That was so long.
I can't take it. I'm like proud president of the Alumni Association for one more month.
And the rest of my background really should be on the record.
So I think I know both of you gentlemen are welcome.
And thank you.
Thank you.
I've been in the council for three years now.
I was so appointed by Governor Patterson.
I'm going to marry three graduate faculty college.
I'll have to work with Dr. Jones in the first year.
Yeah. Call well.
Also an alum went to graduate school here.
A long time ago.
I've been on the council just a little longer than you guys.
I was actually a spitzer appointee.
I slipped in there in a little.
So, you saw an alum's governor but not very long.
It's a horrible amount.
And I'm really excited that we're going to turn over a new leaf.
And really, I think we have a lot of opportunities and committed.
Folks here who want to be more engaged.
And I think we can really do something with that.
So, welcome.
Thank you.
Hi, I'm Mike Stein.
I graduated as an undergraduate here in 1975.
Went away and got my master's and actually then came back for my first job here at the University.
It's a residence hall director.
Did that for a couple of years.
And then left and have done a variety of other things that currently live in Cooperstown, New York,
where I work for the Bassett Hospital in fundraising.
And I've been on the council since a little before Pat, but also a spitzer appointee.
And I feel we have tremendous potential and opportunity here to really relook.
And as we were talking a little bit over lunch, re-shape a little bit of what we are, what we have, and what we will be.
And I've had the opportunity to speak with both the president and Michael recently in the last couple of months.
And I think that we have, that they have a vision for what we can become.
And I think it's an exciting time to be involved.
And Christine Wagger, I'm a professor in the psychology department here.
I'm also in alum.
I've got my bachelor's here.
And I am on this council as the vice chair of the University Senate.
Thank you.
Dr. Jackson, if you'd like to introduce yourself.
Thanks, Vera.
Yes, I'm Jim Jackson.
I served my 43 years as a solid education in the North College School District.
And of course, I've been on successful courses.
I believe this because of the teachers college and the university of Albany.
So I owe the great deal of the students.
So my former student is a teacher, principal and supervisor.
Because of the teachers college and the university of Albany.
Suddenly, I'm a New York State Regents as well as the board of directors of Albany Medical Center.
And so are the old charities, so forth.
And I'm delighted to be a member of the council.
And to make whatever a country I can, to the advancement of the students, study at the university of Albany.
I want to support, to North Germany, 14 scholarships to the University of Albany for students who are very, very strong.
And so that's what that's for.
The other tenors of go to students who attend Hudson Valley and hopefully will be prepared to make it and hope every chance to come to the University of Albany.
Thank you.
Rob, Bill Shondra.
Hi.
The afternoon again, it's all good for my tardiness, but I am on my way up.
I'm Rob, Bill Chandrin.
I join a long-distance class of 1988.
And I've been involved with University in big brick, all the area.
Both when I was a disaffecting lawyer and one of the councils to cover up the CACI.
But, you know, I've always been a little bit in school.
And I've always wanted to figure out ways to make it better for one of us within.
And certainly from afar, and you know, been very blessed to be with the great group of folks there on the council for the past several years trying to move things forward.
And really looking forward to the building blocks that have been laid by the others before us.
And just taking to the next level, such as you, be glad to work at the dean.
And I'm going to be more of the helping in any way I can.
Thank you.
I'm John Morally from the Office of General Counsel.
And here since 1998, I'm attended a fair share of council meetings.
But, credibly, I'm not an alumnus of this dynasty.
I hope you all hope you can strengthen.
I think that was in your bio.
Board work, where you are.
Thank you.
I think that I am from my president for university departments.
I'm the executive director of university at all, his foundation.
And I'm very fortunate to be working with every second of all of you on the same day.
Perfect. And now to break the tone, I am a student for who will present the gables.
And you are.
Gary, I'm Gary Roth, I'm the elected graduate student representative.
I'm alumni in the 2008, 2011.
And I am.
And, excuse me, 2001 and 2000, 2009.
And I'm currently pursuing my doctoral degree at the College of Now scale science and engineering.
And on behalf of the council, I'd like to present the gables.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Then it's now official.
Thank you very much.
I'll tell you very briefly about myself.
I'm 34 and 92, or my degrees, both here from university.
And my relationship is grown every year since then, in every aspect.
But while our name is there, and my name has been there, I've certainly been the recipient.
I've been the beneficiary.
So everything we have done from mentoring kids to hosting classes to some of the more commercial things we've done,
it has propelled both myself and my organizations.
I truly believe that this university is the heart and soul of this community.
I truly believe that.
And I just want to help to contribute to build on what you guys have already done.
You guys have built this to where we are today.
And, you know, I am thrilled to be here.
I will do my best to, while we are not in the medical profession, I will do my best to do no harm.
I am from a chairmanship approach.
I have chaired many things.
My approach is to be an advocate for the members of whatever I am chairing, to try to get the opinions and thoughts to consensus and to bring that consensus forward.
So I am thrilled to be part of this.
And I am very thrilled to have Dr. Jones with us here today to have a sitting and permanent president that will be here much beyond me.
He didn't say that, but I am saying it for him.
34 years is what I am looking for.
I am not committing that long.
Okay, now turn it over to you before.
Why don't we call the meeting to order and start on our agenda and then your presidential report will follow.
So we are officially called to order and I will need a motion to review and approve the minutes of the December 7th meeting.
So Michael, is there a second?
So a second, but is there any discussion on those meetings in minutes?
Seeing none, all those in favor please say aye.
Aye.
Okay, without exception.
And now, our new president Dr. Jones.
Thanks for our most Michael.
It goes without saying I am deeply honored to be here at this first meeting of the council with Michael.
I am both kind of starting our tenure as new leaders.
And so I am very, very happy to be here.
I have an opportunity to kind of share with you some of the very exciting things that are going on at the university as well as some of the challenges and issues that we have learned about in our first 86 days they tell me that I have been here, but who is counting?
It truly has been an amazing three month period for me and as I said, we have learned a lot and we have a good sense of some challenges but also have some good sense of some opportunities that really lie before us.
So Michael and I had a meeting probably a month or so ago shortly after he was named.
And I think we had scheduled it for about an hour and I think we got out of here about an hour and a half hour and 45 minutes that was a lot to talk about because I wanted to get his perspective on some of the challenges that we face as a university but also get his perspective on his fields on how the council needs to work and how do we make sure that we're using your time and your efficiency or talent effectively and efficiently.
I am a fundamental believer of when you're going to have a meeting then it needs to be a purpose and it needs to be for some important reason to get worked on and that be important results that flow from that meeting.
I don't believe in meetings for a meeting sake and certainly know the value of this council and the role that you play in helping me to shape into guide and to lead this great university.
So I look forward to engaging with you as we move ahead.
Also before I get into my report I would be remiss if we didn't take just a moment to there's a resolution that was signed that's one of the signed by me and there's a member from the chancellor regarding the leadership that Dan Thompson played in his long tenure as I guess vice chair.
So that was a long period without having a chair and somebody will have to tell me what that was all about.
Start that from the record.
I'm just joking.
But I think we should take just a moment to read to Chancellor's letter, so we can enter that into the record and then I'll continue with my report.
Right. To the university at Albany Council from Chancellor Nancy L. Zimper.
She writes, I want to take this opportunity to commend Daniel Thompson for his service as council member for the past 16 years.
During that time the university has made significant transformational steps not only in its research activities but in academic excellence, student services, facilities design and of course leadership.
As acting chair and chair of two search committees, Dan has been an integral part of bringing a steady hand to the helm of you Albany and more recently a visionary leader.
Your new president Robert Jones who will move the institution forward to greater success on a personal note.
I appreciate the advice and discussions that Dan and I have had over the past few years and his ability to carefully evaluate the opportunities for you Albany to strengthen and grow.
Dan is truly a champion for you Albany and the SUNY system and I look forward to engaging his support and advocacy on behalf of SUNY in many new capacities in the future.
Thank you again Dan and congratulations on your years of service. Sincerely Nancy L. Zimper Chancellor.
Thank you very much. So at the appropriate time I will be signing the resolution and foring it to Dan but I thought it was important to take a moment out to read so you could hear from the Chancellor.
As I said a few months ago it's been an amazing fast and rapid beginning here over the last 86 days or so as you know I arrived here officially started to work on January 2nd and immediately began to start the process of listening and learning across this university both internally and externally.
Thanks to the presidential transition advisory task force or team that we pulled together you know I've had an opportunity to tour many parts of this university but it's an ongoing process it was virtually impossible to take as deep a dive as I wanted to take in terms of learning about all the different parts of our research, our scholarship, our student life, the staff and the staff support work that goes on.
Each and every day at this university that provides the level of excellence that we enjoy at this great university. So I had a chance to meet with faculty staff students alumni foundation members of our foundation board, the University Council members I think I've met almost with each and every one of you one on one if not at other social gatherings so that's been very very helpful for me.
And we met with elected officials I think I've met with the almost every member of the delegation from from this community and also made a couple of trips to Washington DC to get a place with our legislature right at the federal level as well.
And so all of this was all part of the strategy for me coming in as a new president to gain a deeper understanding of appreciation for the many assets of this university a better sense of where we are today and a better understanding of where we need to go in the future in order to advance the university.
And so it's been a very very enlightening process we are starting to understand and starting to see some common things that continue to pop up that cuts across this great university and hopefully over the next 30 to 60 days and so we will be articulating perhaps a more concise vision for where I think the university is going and presenting that to the faculty.
And as staff and hopefully bring it back back to this body at some point for your meeting and your questions and answers and your engagement in helping us shape that vision as well that's critically important to me as we think about what we need to do in the next year or two and in the next five years to advance this great university.
One of the things that's been very clear to me is I've been engaged over the last 80 to 90 days or so is that the university Albini is perhaps one of the best kept secrets not only in the nation but in the state and in this region.
And so part of what I am very very clear about is that we have to be much more effective, much more intentional and strategic about telling the story of this university.
I mean we all you all know as excellent otherwise you wouldn't be sitting around this table taking time out of your schedules to be here but we have to be a bit more intentional and strategic about making sure others know about what we're good at and the value that we bring.
To this community in terms of being an educational institution or research university that drives innovation and economic development across the state that really improves the quality of life for all New Yorkers and we have to tell that story because unless we tell that story no one is going to tell it for us.
The story that will be told for us is every time something negative of bad happens to one of our students that becomes the compelling message out there and that's not the message that it's president I want out there about the institution that I've been that I have the honor of leading and so we have to tell the positive stories and the innovative ideas and the good things that come out of here so then we can more effectively deal with and manage the bad news that's bound to happen.
It's a part of life it's part of being a complex society and so those things will happen but we can't let that be the only news that comes out of this great university.
We have to intentionally and strategically manage our message and so you're going to be hearing a lot from me about that in the next several weeks about how we're going to perhaps start to think differently about how we manage and create a stronger more compelling message about the value and the assets of the university.
As you know one of the things that happened as the academic calendar year was ending just before the Christmas holidays the governor approved our soon in one soon in 2020 initiative.
It's been signed and appropriation still and the budget that's supposed that was passed by the Senate last night and hopefully will be passed by the assembly today and so the commitment of the resources from the state the approval to spend the resources that's necessary for us to implement in my soon in 2020 is still in there.
You know you just now done deal until you make it through each incremental step which is something that was new for me to learn.
You know I was a customer once something is appropriated is done and the money is there but not so much here.
So I'm learning I'm learning it but but we're pleased to see that that commitment is still there and we're very very appreciative for the governor for his support because I can tell you from my perspective that in my soon in 2020 funding an initiative will be.
Perhaps one of the biggest investments that's been made in the educational research and engagement mission of this university what I like about it cuts across all the academic schools and colleges of this university so it's not about putting all the money and the STEM related or math and science and technology areas as an opportunity to engage and to elevate our humanities and other disciplines and provide opportunities to hire 180 seven.
The higher 187 new faculty about 700 or so permanent jobs to grow our student enrollment by at least 1,350 students and if I have my way it'll be significantly more than that because I think we have the capacity and we have the we will have the brand and the recognition that would allow us to be more strategic about where we grow our enrollment but the enrollment of this university can must and will increase in very strategic ways.
And so the NYC 2020 proposal will be the mechanism by which we are able to achieve a lot of this growth and and at the same time we will construct a state of the art emergency technology and entrepreneurship center about 250 square feet of space that will facilitate the research, the innovation, the public environment, partnership that's necessary to make this work and I'm really very very excited about this and I said this more than once.
The notion that this opportunity was even though the governor had not approved it the fact that this was on the table was one of the compelling reasons for me to really want to come and lead this institution because I think this is another opportunity for this university to innovate and to do something that's unique and that would distinguish ourselves among other higher education institutions across the country and across the world.
So we're very very excited about that we've got we have a working committee in place that we're absolutely committed to two fundamental issues of delivering a capital project.
It will be delivered on time and under budget not over budget but on time and under budget if we possibly can but definitely not over budget because we don't have the resources to cover those costs.
And so we're working through very systematically to make sure that we stay on time over the life of this project which is we hope that it will open some time in the fall of 2017 which is another calibration for me as well.
I've got to learn to be patient that it takes five years to deliver projects here but it's will give us an opportunity to make sure that we do this right and at the building and the programming that goes into the building really will allow us to do this.
We will allow us to carry out and meet the goals and objectives that we're set for in the plan of originally.
So as you can tell we're very excited about this and you'll be hearing a lot about it.
We will be working with our communication staff to make sure that we start a very systematic communication effort in this regard to keep the faculty, staff and students updated and US council members on what's going on with this very innovative strategic idea.
And so just to move on along here I think you all have heard by now that very shortly after my arrival I met the lieutenant governor and before you know it I was co-chair the capital region economic development council.
I know. It's all your fault.
But anyway it's an honor and a privilege and so Michael and I have had a chance to debrief about the the ends and outs and the nuances of that responsibility and so I am deeply humbled to have this opportunity because it's not about me and this is an opportunity for me for all of us to help elevate and again advance the involvement and engagement of the University of Albany and economic development.
I'm just a conduit of vehicle hopefully by which that will occur. And we're very excited about this because I do think it provides an opportunity to raise our visibility for me to better understand the capital region not only from my role and perspective as a co-chair of that entity with Jim Barbara.
But also I think it provides an opportunity for me as president of the University to look for strategic opportunities to make sure that we are highly visible when highly engaged with all the partners critical partners in the eight if not 11 county region.
I understand there's some debate about this eight counties are 11 but regardless we will be reaching out initially I'm sorry in our nine I guess it's the actual number but we will be reaching out to each and every one of those counties as we move along.
In fact yesterday we kicked off an eight nine county tour in Green County and I won't go into a lot of detail about that I think Kathy Herman is going to be providing you a report about that during her presentation but one of the main object was there was for again for me to understand the assets and opportunities and challenges in the nine county region.
And to start a process where I fundamentally want this to be true for the entire state of New York but we start close to home so that people understand that this is their university and that there are strategic opportunities for us to have reciprocal mutually beneficial partnerships that will lead to a situation where we are able to help these communities in these counties address some of the complex challenges that they're facing as well as very practical.
We're able to learn from the experience and experience of learning opportunities for our students and educational opportunities and research opportunities for our faculty and our staff.
And at the same time critical part of this for me is an opportunity for by working more closely with K through 12 districts in these nine counties that we will elevate the presence and the visibility of the university so that as kids young people graduate from those institutions that the university is going to be able to work together.
That the university all but it will be the top of their minds in terms of the place that they want as a first choice to attend when they graduate and start higher education.
So that's part of our goal as well so as we're not just out on a junket as my old department had used to say.
We're not just trolling around looking at pretty size and we're really trying to use this to leverage deep relationships and the next tour is in Schenectic the county.
Next week is it Kathy I think it is?
That's next week.
Let's go on a different calendar.
All right.
The state budget I've already mentioned that and I know Steve Betis is going to give you an update on that so I won't spend any more time talking about the state budget.
Just wanted to FYI want to inform the council members in case you have not heard.
We have initiated the process of launching the search for the vice president for finance and business.
We're still toying with the idea maybe tweaking that title for that position a bit to more reflect the actual responsibilities so it ought to be the vice president for finance or business or we may call it finance and administration or finance and operation.
Minor detail we won't spend too much time worrying about that but this is a critically important position and Steve Betis has provided exceptional leadership as the interim vice president for finance and business so Steve.
Thank you very much for your service and Steve and I joked about this the other day I want to be very clear.
I didn't fire Steve.
Steve and I have been talking about this since when I surely I thought was named I think even before I started we were talking.
But anyway so Steve and I decided that we needed to start a transition to our chief financial officer which is a critical position in these very difficult and still challenging financial times we live in.
And so we've started that process and we've had input from the university senate they provided input in terms of providing names for people to serve on the committee.
I think we have an outstanding committee that's going to be chaired by for Dean, Sinai and Dean.
Don Ziegel almost at Davis Eagle and Don Ziegel and so those are the they are the co chairs and we look forward to that process moving forward here I think we have a first meeting next week if I remember correctly.
So anyway just two more items you probably have heard in the news that there's a possible collaboration between the university and Albany and the Albany Institute of Art.
We are very very excited about exploring the potential of this collaboration.
We think that it will be a win in the situation for the university and for this very fine historic institution that my understanding is one of the oldest museums in the country.
They have very nice facilities and infrastructure recently renovated new additions that have been added but they are having some some some some difficulty and we see it as an opportunity for us to create some synergy so that our faculty and staff.
Can have greater benefit and deeper engagement with that institution to enrich our own teaching education and research program through our own museum as well as mutual benefit from having additional exhibition space and a more visible presence downtown too.
I think that's critically important is something that I've talked about for quite a bit since I've been here.
And so we want to emphasize we're not talking about a takeover merger of Bell out this is not Bell out.
But we are looking for mutual opportunities to leverage both of these entities so that they will come out of this in ways that will advance all of our programs in our effort.
So we'll we're optimistic about the potential here we will go through a very thorough process of analyzing what makes the most sense and how we should go about doing that.
And so we'll keep you and we'll bring that back at the appropriate time as an agenda item to discuss here as well.
There is a I'm sure you all have also been hearing about the in the media about the notion of the college and NSGL science and engineering splitting off from the university.
What I can tell you this juncture is that there is a proposal or an idea I should say that's being floated but there is not a concrete solid proposal with this juncture that I've had the opportunity to respond to.
But the chance and I have been having conversations and playing out different what if scenarios and all I would say at this juncture is that from my perspective in a short time that I've been here, it is very clear to me that the current relationship between nano and the university all been in need to be rethought is not serving us well.
The current relationships are regardless of whether or not nano spends out to be a separate college and not we can't continue down the road that we're going for.
And I just want to be very, very clear about that. My ultimate goal is always to do what's best for the university all of you to what we do to protect this valuable asset that's been created and developed in nurture.
And I want to remain strong regardless of what happens with the nano college. And I'm very, very clear that the nano college must and will continue to be a very important highly effective entity in the state that has demonstrated the ability to drive economic development in very innovative ways.
So you've got to think about how do you create a win-win situation here and I'm all about win-win. It can't be a somewhat of win, somebody loses. That's not appropriate for this situation, particularly in light of all the resources that the university of Albany has put into nurturing that entity and the very impactful work that that entity is doing to drive and put the state of New York on a map, if you will, in an nano technology area.
So my goal is to work very effectively with the chancellor and ultimately we'll bring up a poll back here and have a discussion about what makes the most sense for the university.
There's a lot else going on, but I feel I've been talking too long. I'm getting tired of him all voice now, so I'm going to stop.
But just want to just highlight a couple of things that have been going on in the last several months. I'm sure and you have a copy of it here.
This is something that we're extremely proud of. You know, the US world and news, but the wheels of news and world report is one of those entities that people in higher education, you either love it or you hate it.
You love it when the news is good, you hate it when the news is bad.
And so we're very, very fortunate to have this large number of our programs in the top 100 and actually a lot of significant number of programs in the top 50.
This is what we're talking about when we talk about the excellence of this university that we're much too fired about that we don't talk enough about and that we need to celebrate.
So just thought we share that bit of information with you. And so I'm going to stop there and I'll let others talk about the other excellence that we've demonstrated in terms of our student athletes over the last several weeks and months.
I tell you, I could not be prouder of those young men and women for their talents, their hard work, their commitment that they demonstrated each and every time they took to the basketball court.
And they demonstrated to me the importance of never giving up even when it looks bad, even when there's only three minutes left in the game and you're down by a couple of three points that's always an opportunity to pull.
We got that reversed on us with women's game and we're going to be on the bad end of that this time.
But I can tell you I've never met a more dedicated group of young people who demonstrate their ability not only in the basketball court but also in the classroom.
There are some outstanding students on those basketball teams and I can tell you they brought great visibility, they brought great pride to this university and we're very proud of them.
And we will be hosting some big celebration to recognize their contributions sometime in the future.
So thank you very much. Any questions, Chair?
I've got a comment then we'll open it up for questions but I can say as a modest supporter of the athletic programs in basketball specifically to see the president sitting on the sidelines being as physically contorted as he was.
It really means a lot to those of us that support the athletics to know that you understand the importance of what that means to the kids, to the university and to the community.
I think that that is fantastic. Can we open it up for questions with Dr. Jones at this point?
I'll try to contain myself next season.
I've got about half way through and I said well wait a minute that wasn't very president.
I'm clapping and going on.
My comment is 84 days.
84, 86 whatever I don't know. This is the time to keep it out of the way.
I think one of the areas that I can announce that we're very much enjoying perhaps on our next council meeting is the community engagement which you've spearheaded over here in the last since starting 84 days ago.
And the number of events, the relationship you've developed with the community.
I think you've got a big week coming up next week with the forum on community engagement here on campus.
And the number of things are coming tonight to suggest that we put that on.
Perhaps for the next campus too.
Yes, there's a lot going on there and again I felt I was going on fifth long so I didn't go into a lot of detail.
But we are really driving, started to drive the partnerships with the mayor.
We're working with home on a possible modification of this jobs program that's going to be more connected to a kind of college readiness effort.
He's very, very excited about that. We're deeply engaged with Albany Promise. I met with those folks this morning.
And there are a number of other opportunities that are out there that I think is important for us to have a leadership role in.
And to help this university community really understand what does it mean to be an engaged university?
What does community engagement mean to us?
How does it really cut across everything we do from our teaching, our research, and our service?
We've invited one of my good friends and colleagues, Dr. Andy Furco, who was a hard-earned my stolen away from Berkeley about five years ago.
To start the office for public engagement at the University of Minnesota.
And so he's coming in next week to have a deep conversation with the university community about public and community engagement.
What does it mean to us? How do we incorporate it into the reward system?
And how can we really start to talk about it as a core value of this university?
I was talking to Merriam today and apparently we have a great major sessions and each of those sessions we expect way over a hundred people to attend each and every one of them.
So this is kind of an initiation of our conversation with this community about the values of community engagement, what it means to us and what it's going to look like in the future for this university.
And other questions?
I'd actually comment in a question. I'll start with the comment.
It occurred to me, I was pretty excited about both of our basketball teams, Meade and NCAA.
And I'm wondering if there's a way to exploit those poor young people a little bit more, both from a community engagement standpoint and perhaps from a recruiting standpoint.
We recently had a couple of directed, met, we call them receptions in New York for students that high school students have been directly admitted in this case to school business.
But I'm wondering if perhaps there are students out there that we want to have a attend but have poor on the fence or haven't made up their minds yet.
And is there a way to say come and meet the basketball team or bring the basketball team if there's a cluster of them say on Long Island or somewhere to bring the basketball team there and you know, and say meet the basketball team and kind of lure them into the net to kind of push them over the edge to come here.
And I think we can use them also as I said for community engagement. I mean it would be great to go to the local high schools or whatever and play a game or something.
I don't know. I don't know if we can do anything like that but it seems to be.
I keep waking in me. I feel bad. I want to take them on the road a bit.
Our esteemed chair has said many times I'd like to know what the NCAA ramifications are. I give X or Y.
Oh, okay. I forgot about that.
The NCAA will not permit us to take our existing student athletes into high school because that would be an advantage for us and that's a for example.
Of course it is. That's why I want to do it.
I'm not saying it's possible.
I'm not saying it's possible. Are you here and you're violating your recruitment?
Oh, okay.
But with that said, President Jones is going to have a political game with both of our teams which he's going to announce in the current year of the future.
More importantly, all of our student athletes might just start making women's basketball team or a ball in it.
At least two examples of community service.
Not taking it.
Though they open 25-100 hours, they give nothing for it. They give no compensation.
There's not any internship involved. They do it to make our community better.
So we're doing a lot of that and as long as we do it with eight graders or below could find a good city without a lot of hours to do it.
And let me just follow up with this one point thing.
For the last four years we have done community service days, commitment to education.
And it's a lot of what was basketball game.
We play it and know we invite.
And I think Robert, the second, no, we'll do it with you. We're here.
I think Robert came and observed and talked to me and the young people.
It is one of the neatest things that you'll ever see here.
These little ones and we provide clinics, we provide camps and we provide tutoring for these kids from 8.30 in the morning until 11.30.
And then Charles Wells provides a wood concession there. It's a great day.
And they have a favorable impression of the university.
So we're going to do it when we have to go in with them.
Unfortunately, they come five into the NCAA.
Oh well.
Sure.
But you've touched on something that Lee and others have talked about over the last several days.
We do have to think about how do we leverage all for the success of our athletic team.
For as long as we can to help drive our recruitment process and to help bring great visibility about this university.
Because I can tell you when we won the American East Championship, it's my understanding that the number of hits on our website went up some 6 to 10 fold in the next 12 to 24 hours.
So that means that people were coming there and trying to learn more about these great days and about the university to open.
And when you click on a website, most people kind of troll through and start to get curious about it.
I had a great email from the president of the Archibald Bush Foundation, which is not related to George and rest of the Bushes.
But just one of the co-founders of the 3M Corporation in back in Minnesota.
And she was telling me that her 10-year-old son had picked University Albany to go all the way.
That's the largest goal.
And so we got believers out there.
And so I'm going to have to send this young man a great tape, a sweatshirt, a t-shirt, or something.
Because you might be here in a few years, so I've really got to kick out of that.
But we do need to find ways to leverage off of this, because athletic programs get criticized when things don't go right.
And so they provided an opportunity for this university of visibility.
As I said in the newspaper, it's priceless what this opportunity has provided this university in terms of getting our name out there.
And so we do need to find ways within the rules and regulations of NCAA to leverage it for as long and as effectively as we can.
I had a question.
You referenced a local story, which I guess I don't see them, maybe others, on the relationship between, or a potential relationship between the university and the institute, the Albany Institute.
Are they there in trouble financially? Is that, and they're looking for a partner?
Yeah, I have some financial challenges, yes.
And processing an art museum with financial challenges.
Yeah, right.
But at the same time, you know, this is a valuable opportunity for us because they have rich resources, great infrastructure.
And there's an amazing collection.
And so this potentially could be a win-win situation.
But we no longer have an art history department here.
I don't think.
Not a major anyway.
Yeah, we don't.
My wife was an art history major here.
That's all I know.
Oh, we do have a parent.
No, we did.
So we do have a very rich history department here.
Not art, but a very strong art.
Art, art, art.
It's a story of art.
But I don't know if there's an art history.
We did.
We did.
We're going in more.
Yeah, most places.
Yeah.
A lot of places don't have art history.
No, my wife went to University of Minnesota.
They do have art history.
Yeah.
She went there too, which went from here to Minnesota.
But we have a nice museum just across the way.
No, I don't know.
But it has restricted limited exhibition space.
No, I think it's a beautiful place.
You know, I think it's a great opportunity.
I wasn't just, I just was curious what was there.
Okay.
We had been working with them since 1971 in different programs.
Actually, we have classes that are held and taught at all the
history and art semester.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
We do have done exhibits every year.
And we do Hudson Mohawk exhibit here with them every year.
And we just cultured boost the movie with them.
It's all on Albany Mammies.
Wow.
So great.
As I'm, you got it.
Okay, just one quick question.
You talk about building an entrepreneurship center under, I guess,
I don't know, I guess, my quick question on that is, I'm all for an entrepreneurship center.
But do we need to actually build a new building?
Could we maybe like, hide off one of those buildings from the
Haramon campus?
Or I don't know.
I'm just, it seems like I'm wondering where we're going to build another building.
I guess, right after.
And can we get away without having to actually build a new building?
Well, it's, what is done?
We can't get away with the, we have to have the building.
I mean, it's kind of how the funding was aligned.
And the kind of infrastructure we need, we don't have a building that we can retrofit to do this.
But I think your main point is the notion of, you know,
do we have sufficient space on this campus to really expand and to build that kind of facility?
And so one of the things that we have been doing that we will let the appropriate time bring back to you,
and they've been ongoing conversations about the Haramon campus I guess for the last 10 years.
And so as shortly after I arrived, I, we started to have that, we started to nudge a bit.
And just last week I was down to the OGS office having conversation with the commissioner about this very issue.
Because I think it's, it's very clear to me if we are going to have the space to expand this university in the future.
We have to go east.
There's no place else for us to go.
And it's conveniently vacant.
Or a large part of it is vacant.
They are basically starting to kind of rethink and coming up with a different strategy about the use of that entire campus.
And they are very interested and understand our needs.
They understand our needs.
And you know, I can't make any definite commitments here, but at least they're very open to getting this thing resolved sooner rather than later.
Because it's been back and forth.
I understand events for almost 10 years or more.
And so the commissioner is very excited about the commissioner and the deputy commissioner.
Yeah, very interested in making sure that we have a deep conversation about this and an opportunity for us to be considered for part of that campus for our expansion purpose.
It just seemed like a logical place to me to put an entrepreneurship center or technology part or whatever.
Well, let me just, I won't say more of this part.
Okay, too obvious.
No, no, no, it's not.
No, it's not.
I'm glad you brought it up because you know, so many things to talk about.
And I had to kind of pick the truth.
Yeah.
But this isn't the kind of the early stage of re-initiating the dialogue with them.
But it was a very good meeting.
Vence and I went over last week or week before last and met with them.
And they are very, very excited about this possibility.
So the signs are very positive.
And I'm not a grandmother used to always say you have to strike when the iron is hot.
So we will be moving forth as aggressively as possible to get a commitment on that space as quickly as we can.
So I want to bridge into the next agenda item.
But to end this one with a comment, when Dr. Jones and I met, we had talked about the role of the council.
And I have talked with many of you individual and a couple of you collectively about the role of the council and where we fit.
And the need to do a retreat, if you will.
And I think what we all agreed is that it has been a crazy 86 days for our new president.
And in addition to getting understanding all of the relationships that he's put together, he needs to have a little bit of time to put together his plan for the university.
And then to extend that to our role in the visioning and the oversight that we have there.
So I'm hopeful and I'm glad that the question didn't come up.
But I just wanted to close the little bits of the chair to say we will be doing that.
We're looking at calendars to pick a day that makes sense with some of the other events that Dr. Jones has going on to try to bring us together and address that very issue.
If there is nothing else, I'll see Sorrell that we have a report of this student.
Kevin's not here, so we'll have the pass on the.
Okay. All right.
Christine.
I can just give a brief update. I can give a brief update on the faculty as a whole, but I can give you a brief update on the fact that the governance and the Senate.
We are in the throes of electing new senators for next year and from the schools and colleges as well as senators at large, as well as the SUNY-WIND senators that sit on the SUNY-WIND Senate.
And we're also starting to form the councils and committees of the Senate, which is a major undertaking.
But we've gotten, we've put out a call for service and gotten a robust response, which is very encouraging.
And so we're hoping to have all of that in place by the penultimate Senate meeting in April 29th.
Sir, questions or comments on that report?
If not, thank you.
I'm just very good.
So I'm going to go through a little report from the graduate student organization.
GSO is again fully within its operating budget and compliant with the relevant rules of the university.
So we may have known that's pretty instructive.
You finally sorted it all out.
I'm going to take an unfairly rigorous review of our rules as well and our constitutional committee side on the chair back.
It has recommended numerous changes.
These changes include substantial structural reorganization and a change in the name of the organization and will be voted on concurrently with our spring membership wide election.
We'll also see an around officers at that point.
Additionally, we're also going to be planning to vote our student activity fee, which is currently placed at $11 for hard time students, $22 full time students.
But we don't differentiate in our benefits and we've discovered that it turns out that part time students are actually using more full time students.
I think more time is.
So we're putting to a vote to raise the vote to $22.
I don't know how that vote is going to go because we're out in the full time students like yourself are actually up numbered by far as it's roughly three or more.
We'll see how that goes.
After assuming that vote does succeed, it would need to go to central to central basically to be approved.
And if the and I've been asked by members of GSO by GSO officers to request that if the university council would support that in a light in any way they can, you would appreciate it.
Additionally, there is one incident that does warrant attention assuming any of you may read this, we may have heard about it.
It was discovered during the winter intercessions and private information, including social security numbers, regarding 62 students was accidentally made available on the GSO website.
The expiresions of the GSO, the US maintained that the GSO mandated that the GSO maintained rather than discard this information.
They changed the policy since then, since it's now shown that we should not be maintaining social security numbers.
But there were relatively few contacts to the page. The information was not very obvious.
Nonetheless, the GSO was offered to pay for identities that protection for any students who were exposed in this way.
That motion was passed and we have allocated funds to it.
Additionally, we're still heavily involved in student engagement through January, we log with our four-year hours of community service.
We're anticipating a lot more, we're actually seeing a lot larger numbers than we have in the past.
We're hoping that this will cause us to break records in terms of fundraising events, such as Relay for Life as well as participation in other community events.
Additionally, while it's not directly something that pertains to my update, we were in the past discussing under old business questions relating to mounting student debt levels.
We're going to be able to do a GSO put together a committee to look into what the graduate students perceive as issues in terms of rising student debt and things that we might be able to recommend to try and resolve this.
And I do have a preliminary report summary that I would like to present, so I'd like to motion to add that to all to the agenda, add that in under old business if that's possible.
I think that we have that on a subsequent, don't we have that topic on a subsequent meeting?
Yeah, coming up to the next meeting because we're required by law to post the agenda items so we can advance legally.
So while a discussion can go on, or to regard to any item, the addition of an agenda item, here I may need to bow to also to John Riley, whose value is at the affirmative.
So while a discussion could go on, I believe the addition of an item to an existing agenda can't be done at the meeting.
But I will say that that item is an agenda item for the main meeting when full reports, including from the director of financial aid, on what the debt our current students are and so on, will be detailed.
Could you go reason why comments can't be offered at this point?
Could you provide all of us with that report that is it an actual physical report or a narrative report?
I was going to read just a short summary of the findings.
I think we should hold that to that point, but I think it would inform all of us if you would actually, if you would mind, providing us with the full report.
That way when we have the full discussion, it sounds like that's something of interest to everyone here at the table.
As you were part of, we had that discussion over lunch that it is a situation that is unsustainable and I think it's excellent that you guys took the initiative to move it.
And I think we want to give it the air time that it deserves as opposed to just a sound book.
Absolutely. So in that case, would it be preferable for us to bring to basically a sample of full contents of the report in a single diamond or that onto...
The Steve, correct or so, or Steve, sure.
And then I can send it out and then it can come up again if you like at the next meeting.
Circulating with the material for the next meeting.
Yes, okay very well.
Okay, good. Any questions?
If not, we'll move to K, no one left?
Michael?
Hello.
Look, I need to bring the base for what you're feeding today.
This is my third service.
Oh, my third service.
And as I was leaving the Aka Life door, I was going to another service and packed it in with my things and I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
I do actually have verbal tolerance, but thank you.
Well, while he's looking at those, I just want to say that he certainly do treasure, he was an alum, as a matter of fact, as a full demonstration, that was back in 2010, we, awards, very soon, just to see which alumni award was my award.
And I have to do this, my friends.
Uh-oh.
So a few comments that I do not begin, the page of the game with what gives Michael Costano his edge.
He still, he still feels like a new kid on the block.
He tries each day, starts each day with fresh eyes, helping him adapt by new opportunities and areas and improvement.
It's an approach that has paid off for him at all concern.
But here's the one that I really, I've truly, really loved the moment.
Comes from Bob Black, chairman of the board of Guildhouse, Bob.
He said, Michael has one direction, one direction only, forward, and one approach only, fully committed, and naturally says it all about the fact.
Thank you very much.
We surely do love you.
Thank you.
Okay, onto the business.
I will stay with my picking points about his boss.
Um, well as you know, the very heart of what we do in the alumni is to connect our alums to the university and then to each other.
And so as examples of that, I just pass out so you can see what we're doing going forward.
I'll list some of the events, but if I can just step back a moment, I want to tell you a bit about our big purple ground frozen space,
it was our 16th annual, and as always it was a sellout.
And we just want to thank Dr. Macaroi and this staff and Kathy for promoting it and so on.
It was a marvelous success for you.
I know my friend here was there and we should certainly try to make sure you come in the future.
We had our, we had our, we had our, we had our, first, we had our board meeting and we had the very, on February 2nd, our vegetables coming up April 20th.
But we, we had a very, very, very, very small, a, very good celebration and rejoicing as we welcomed our newest boy member, Holy Clutch, Holy Member, our 19th President Robert Jones.
I forgot, by the way, Dr. Jones, to give you your commitment list, your possible for three out of the 23 committees.
I was asked that by the government.
But I might add that we were so thrilled to have him with us and see the great before from him.
And as I've told him many times, I've changed the way he's saying that his appointment, the art president, was a divine, divine inspired appointment because of who he is.
So I'm delighted to have you as a member of our board.
And just the conclusion, this is my last meeting.
The next meeting would be Tim Murphy.
He'll be with you for two years, wonderful, wonderful person.
You'll enjoy him a great deal.
This clock has certainly ticked faster than I thought it ever would, but I just want to take this opportunity to express to all of you how much it meant to attend here.
It's been the highlight, frankly, of my presidency.
And you've been extraordinary in sharing your support and encouragement.
So thank you all very much.
Thank you, Chris.
Thank you.
I would hope this would be not be your last meeting.
I would hope that you would join us in our next meeting for the appropriate resolutions and best wishes.
Thank you.
I would hand off.
Thank you.
Thanks for your time.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Sorry, our research report looks like that's going to have to hold till the next meeting.
What happens when you meet on Thursday?
We will trip in then to our new business change to the code of conduct.
And I believe we have a motion.
You actually have a new policy in your pocket that's called the Ritz-American 91.0.
That we're proposing to add to the alcohol policy section of the student code of conduct.
And the purpose of this policy is really to encourage students to report a medical emergency and not be worried about repercussions of the campus conduct system when things get to be bad.
Because sometimes they worry if I hold 911, I might get in trouble for alcohol or I might get in trouble for drugs.
So the purpose of this is to really encourage the students to call to put emphasis on saving a light, put emphasis on the bystander behavior as opposed to on any kind of repercussion they might face as a result.
Basically we put this into effect this past year as a pilot project.
And we used it six times during the fall semester.
We used it three more times during the spring semester.
And we do think that it is an effective policy and it's a good way to move forward.
We still have the prerogative, of course, in cases of alcohol and drug incidents to involve the mom and dad.
The student is under 21 and we do do that.
We also can enforce them taking an alcohol prevention course that part of our counseling center or prevention activities.
And so there's ways to still address the behavior without sanctioning the student.
So can I just understand this?
And this is just a matter of form for my purposes.
If we could get a motion to put it on the table and then we can do a full discussion of it.
So is there a motion to...
How motion can cancel a second? Just to bring it up.
Anyone?
Second.
Second.
Okay, so now it's on the table and then we can have a full and open discussion.
Go ahead.
So pretty much. I mean, you've got the policy in front of you.
It's simply a paragraph long.
There's additional FAQs that are a part of this that students can look at as part of our web.
But it's just this paragraph that we're proposing to get to student code conduct.
Discussion? Questions?
Question. While apparently it's come up a parent who died times in the pilot.
Were there any occasions where any grumbling was noted?
Were the students who were involved in the use of this policy subjected to having their parents notified
or these other things that can occur?
And if so, was there grumbling about it?
Because while I think that this policy is definitely step in the right direction,
we were much more concerned with medical emergencies than we are with a dyslary action.
So students still feel they can get a great deal of trouble over there, may still be reluctance.
That is true. One of the things that we have found in this day and age with students that's very different from the past
is that students have a lot of contact with their families all the time.
Students are in contact with their parents either by texting or by phone calls a lot.
They can be very beneficial in helping us address these issues with students.
Now we also have a policy that spans this policy.
If for some reason a student feels that it's going to be very detrimental to them if we contact their mom and dad,
maybe the relationship is not what it should be or there's going to be repercussions that is going to be too harmful for the student
then we do not contact the parents.
So this student is always get afforded the opportunity to respond to this possibility before it's enacted?
Any other discussion?
I have a general point but is it the proper time to do it in general?
The policy has to be, what is the time?
The first joint account that we had a committee for the Kodakanda and we met prior to
the resolution they got for the renewal of the Kodakanda.
Does this have a term, the whole general student Kodakanda?
I thought there was a five year.
I think in previous age it had been set up in five years ago but I think there was a recognition
that circumstances were developing and required in an attitude basis that provisions.
I don't know whether as a matter of practice the entire code is anticipated or scheduled to be reviewed by five year increments.
That's because that's one of the charges that the council has and reviewing and approving.
If there is a time table to do that and we were approaching that perhaps that's an area that the council would become a little bit more involved
than either with a small committee or a test board that we used to do five years ago.
What we used to do here was we only did the updates for once a year and that was because the actual code of conduct was done in a written format
that we published and gave out to each individual student.
We decided that once it was no longer going to be published that way but it would be published on the web
that instead of trying to cram everything into one meeting and talk about all the changes that we would do that must they came up.
Now to your point though right now we are undergoing a full review of the code of conduct
because over time things get into the code and there's a lot of legal ease.
There's a lot of language in there that we believe is not really conducive to a good restorative process with our students.
We're reviewing the code in its entirety now and we're going to be bringing that entire code revision to the council.
I think this might be a time to discuss how we best want to do that.
It takes a long time to do this.
Along with what Pierre is saying, wouldn't that be a situation where it would be something to you, Mike, of course.
But instead of having all of us be handed that piece of paper, I mean it's obviously not a small document.
Should there be one or two people appointed first as many years as possible?
When you stepped out here we reminded everybody that years ago and that's true
that there was a special committee that reviewed the code of conduct and then reported to the board and said,
okay this is what we think and subject to anybody's thoughts, this is what our thoughts are right here.
So why wouldn't given the...
Right, it's going to be an enormous task.
And it's going to be a task that we will go through this process ourselves.
We will run it through council's office to make sure that we're on board with John Riley and his office
and that will bring it to whatever group might best be suited to do that.
And what's your timeframe for that?
We're hoping to complete it this summer.
So we would like to enact it for the fall.
But I mean I think personally I think that there should be a marked-to-show change version.
Right.
Everybody would get a chance to review and then not start from scratch.
And as Pierre mentioned, I think it's a good idea that you know, so what do you, you know, you decide a couple of people
to look at it first and then especially people that come late to the fall.
I got stuff to try to trooper, I had to go through the...
It's a drop-by, I don't know.
I think it's a boy of all in favor.
As a lawyer, Rob should review that document.
I suppose it has to be so much on that.
It's about 325 pages.
And no lawyers.
No lawyers, we're fast.
But we, what's why I asked for the marked-to-show change?
We can probably put it on tape.
We can listen to it in the comments.
But again, I think that's a great suggestion.
And without exception, that's what we'll do.
It's to appoint a couple of people as a subcommittee.
Giving enough time for that committee to do their work and for the full board to be able to review the committee's work.
So as soon as you can, as soon as it's feasible for you to get that to this group, it would be helpful.
Is there anything else on this question?
Yeah, Chris, you have to follow along with that conversation.
We're probably about halfway through from our internal group.
So we still have to go to John Riley and go over all of the changes with him.
So that's why I'm hoping that this summer, a smaller group can look at a total of you.
There's a big question.
A 300 page is going to be a tough one to get.
I don't know if it's due to the two volunteers.
It's probably more like 25.
Yeah, this is...
But, but, all right.
So in that case, it's not quite as daunting, but I was going to say it might be worthwhile to consider either the graduate student representative or the undergraduate or the student member putting one of them on committee,
because they're the ones who are most likely to be able to read such a document best interpret whether or not as a student.
It's readily comprehensible and understandable intuitively.
Okay. Is there anything else on this question?
If not, we have a motion and a second on the table. All in favor, please say aye.
Any opposition? Let's say no, no, it's carried unanimously. Thank you.
Here, I think you're up.
No, I think that's...
Oh, that's gone from. I didn't get the revised agenda, but then leave.
I remember...
I'm planting.
Thank you very much.
It's a plant. It's filling in for Pierre.
Oh, I'm sorry.
As Dr. Jones had mentioned earlier in your packet, there's a resolution on our in Dan Thompson.
I'd like to offer it up on behalf of the entire council for all his hard work and dedication that he's put towards this university.
Here, here.
Second.
Is there any discussion other than applause on this motion?
Well, just the only thing I would say is that we had talked a little bit informally over lunch about the possibility of incorporating that recognition with some event at some point in the future where we could honor Dan, thank him in person rather than just sending...
I mean, I think this is a nice gesture, but it's a piece of paper at the end of the day.
I mean, it would be nice to shake his hand and look at many eye and thank him.
So, I would move...
I don't... it's not motion, but just the comment that we had.
It's a sense of the board and we can work with the discreet to see if we can come up with something.
Yeah, that'd be great.
I would also observe that a number...
There are 20 and I'll get to that in the ACT report.
There are 29 state-operated campuses, which ACT membership is outside of the community colleges, is the state-operated.
There are 261 college council members and over 100 have either expired or are vacant.
And we, as an association, thank those council members that serve an expired term because without those, we would not have forms.
And here's an individual that served not only in an expired term, but went way beyond everything that was asked of you to do that.
So, I want to just second...
And my hat's off to Dan for his dedication and the work that he put into this.
I was just echoing Danny and I were friends prior to joining on the board here together.
I worked for his father in the governor's office and he needed to go to suit.
He was a Cornell guy and we would always remember him whenever we were...
He was part of Cornell.
We could get our own moms to actually love and support this university as much as someone who was not part of the university, at least in the beginning, going to school.
Then we would have no problems going forward.
So, I echo everyone's thoughts both spoken and thought that we'll miss him, but we'll keep moving forward based upon hard work at the folks behind us.
I think the chancellor wrote a very nice letter.
I heard everything.
I heard everything.
It's very, very good.
Can we carry that unanimously?
Yes.
All right.
Thank you.
Lee, now you're on.
This is a rather brief intro to athletics based on the NCAA recertification process.
The PR was kind enough to serve on the NCAA as a Marblevine Z-string committee, which was chaired by Sue Phillips.
The essence of it is an accreditation to determine that our athletic program is in concert with the rest of the campus.
Basically, what we want to do is give you a quick overview of what we're doing and then entertain any questions that you may have.
And as a governing body of the institution, with all the things that go on in college athletics, the governing body needs to be aware of what we're doing and where we're headed.
So, that's the purpose for this and I promise you'll be very brief.
The mission statement that everybody in college athletics has this, is talked a little bit about what we're trying to do and why we're doing it.
Most people don't read this unless we get in trouble, as it doesn't say.
Our parents are not happy, so the mission statement is pretty generic.
The value statements are things that pretty much guide what we do every day.
President Jones mentioned that both in Philadelphia and Delver, we met struggle with parents and they were kind enough to share with us what their kids were getting out of university beyond athletics.
And they talked about being able to get jobs and to get a fine education and make a contribution to society.
So, those are the kind of values that guide us.
You've been talking a lot about our basketball program and it is tremendous, but we've won 63 conference titles in the past 10 years.
And how we divide that up in management and provide oversight is with a group of team leaders and make sure that our coaches and our student athletes have the opportunity to be successful and so you just saw that structurally there.
Our management team, a group of people that people think and Michael Gossel and I talked about this a lot that you just rolled the ball out and over the doors and people show up.
It's not quite how it's done. People have to be taking care of and sports must an area, communications area, compliance area, academic area, student success as we talked about and that is also structurally outlined there.
We want to make sure that our athletes have a total experience and as President Jones said, public engagement and service is a part of that.
And as I indicated probably we donate our teams donate over 25 million hours annually to various entities in the capital region and we're very proud of that.
We will continue to do that.
Student success has really for life which is raising money for cancer and our kids raise over $3,000 for that.
So again, as part of our overall annual plan and what we're going, we do want to win.
That's important. That's one of the reasons the President got so happy.
When we beat Stoney Brook to go to the championship he was very excited about that.
We want to promote first class events. That's important because we want people to return and continue to support our athletes and the university.
Again, part of that action plan is making sure on a day-to-day basis that we're in compliance with all NCAA rules.
I mentioned Pat had some great ideas but if they're in probation.
So we don't want to give them.
We can't get to it in other ways. So these are just activities that are listed there that we practice.
Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and 99.9% of them are good things and positive things in terms of what we want.
And certainly we want them to share those things with you.
As we move forward, that's a thing that's moved faster now.
I thought it was moving too fast.
Well, when you live it every day, maybe it is.
You could send this to us if we had someone wanted to see it.
But again, for the record, we wanted to make certain that it's quite interesting.
It has been a work where we are going and what we're doing.
Our business is drastically changing every day. There's no biggies. Now there's new biggies. Now there's an American 12.
A lot of that has to do with commercialization and whether or not our students are not lead to our true students.
Whether or not they're professionals. So that was quick. But before we entertain any questions, I want to give you some other takeaways about what has occurred.
I mentioned the 63 Championship and what they mean and what we've run in the 27 NCAA appearances over the past 10 years.
I've great point average. Our women is 3.2. Our overall great point every time we're in the entire athletic program with 19 sports and 500 athletes, 2.9.
And I will tell you right now of the hundred and twenty-six teams that were in the NCAA, the only one was basketball tournament.
That not very many that have that kind of academic performance.
When you look at our staff size and I know that President Jones and Steve and I talked about this a lot.
We've had a lot of success but we do it with only 35 full-time people. If you go up to Buffalo, they have 80.
If you go to Stony Brook, they have 75 and even Bington who does not have a football program has 50.
So we're having a lot of success with full resources. And then before I entertain any questions or thoughts, March 10th, the President and several of us went to Vermont.
And we won the American title and it was on the ESPN and National Telecats.
93 million people are subscribed with the ESPN. On the 23rd, we, I'm sorry, the 22nd we played Duke, CVS.
There were 9 million fuels there at noon that time. And then on Sunday, the 24th, we won ESPN 2 again with our women playing in our Carolina.
Again, 93 potential fuels watching that 93 million. So a real, I think, a real advertisement of our university not just our athletic program.
For a two-week period that Kathy is the expert here, I don't know if we have enough money. I don't know if President Jones has enough money to buy a commercial to talk about.
Not just the success of the athletic program, but the academics and the service and the character and what the institution stands for.
That's really what athletics is all about. And one quick anecdote, we were Saturday morning, we were getting ready to go to the game.
And Luke Devlin's parents are straight, one of our three-aw straight-get kids were standing in the lobby.
So President Jones went over and said, I want to shake your hand. You are a mega star. You made the New York Times this morning.
And they kind of looked at it and said, what are you talking about? What are you getting here?
And they were chatting and so forth with the beauty of that is that we have three-aw straight involved who have earned a GP of 3.3 or higher to our academic-arner students, who are just wonderful kids and their parents.
And the role these parents were here, their parents were here. They have no idea why there are 22,000 people on New England screaming on national television, but they were having a good time.
So really a unique experience and a very special experience. And I could go on about our woman. I want to have gender equality here.
We have one young lady, Julie Foster, who was the leading rebounder in the history of our program. And also the second leading point score doing her career.
She was a non-scotch player. Julie is a presidential scholar in the school of business, Michael.
And I think Robert and John Lovato were saying maybe one of the brightest students that he's ever taught in his 40 years of teaching here.
So that gives you sort of a sense of the students of our achievement and where we're going and what we're doing. And lastly, before I can entertain any thoughts or comments or questions, we don't count in our business very much.
But this is something for you to know. When those championships were won, where they were won and what they made to the university.
And we planned it. When more since Robert is here in January, we won four championships. And we talked to him many of his boys, the basketball and two and when many women thought into a track.
So things are going well and I will stop here. Questions and comments?
Good question. And maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention. But I know during football season, they allow the school, at least when I watch football games on TV to do, I don't know if it's a 30 second clip on the school.
Do I have a clip on us that we could use for, I don't know if we could have used it during the NCAA?
Well, Robert Loret and we were running in a locker room.
Yes, we're exactly like that.
The ESPN and CBS, fortunately, unfortunately, control every aspect of a production.
And you can have it in a can, so to speak. But if they have a commercial that runs over, or if they need to tag another commercial, sometimes it doesn't get any on.
But Kathy is a group as prepared.
We did run a commercial during the CBS driven employment.
And we had enough to make it run one commercial.
We just kind of prize around New York and the economy area. And we just got the results back and we reached 96,000 viewers.
And then we also advertised in the Delaware market, those ESPN 2.
Unfortunately, it would run in this market as well, but they dropped the commercial on this market.
So, really ran the Delaware market, which is still wonderful.
We haven't gotten that stack yet back from that.
That was another question.
Yeah, I just want to make a comment.
First, I have to personally apologize for not being as many games as I would like to be, because I really like college athletics, but I don't live right here.
But I just wanted to say a comment is someone who graduated from this university at a time when athletics perhaps a Penn School spirit, I would say Chris, was probably not at its height in the 70s.
Even for the people I graduated with, I mean, I can tell you that the internet was buzzing back and forth with people.
Because, you know, it really does resonate with people.
And obviously, there are people who are very, very fortunate, who were here, who never went to a game when they were at all.
And maybe Hartley, you know, realize that, but this was a very different university in the 70s, the Division of Pre-Program, very fairly low profile in most sports, with the exception of basketball, which was always, because of the duck's hours, with a pretty high profile.
But I just think it does an incredible amount for the alumni association, but I think the important thing is that we're doing it the right way.
And I know you've commented on this before, and I think that's the message, because just winning is not enough.
Because, you know, in all fairness, the NCAA is highly tanked, and for some cases, for good reason.
But the fact that we're doing it, and we're doing it the right way, is really the message, I think we need to get out to our alumni group from all those years, because I think it really will resonate.
And I think that's how we make this maximally impactful for our alumni engagement, to support our fundraisers, and to support everything, is not just by winning, but by showing that we're winning and doing it the right way.
Well, from the zone, when he has a celebration of champions for both of these wonderful teams and wonderful coaches, you will see that.
But another young man, Jacob Yaddy, who was a graduate student, is getting an MBA, has already been hired by Jamie Morgan, and he told me about his interview process, and what it was like.
And Michael, you can appreciate this being in the side of financial side.
He said it was much harder than any practice, or any workup that he ever went through, because it was the most of the day.
And he prevailed, and one of the reasons he thought that he prevailed, because he was a student athlete, and also good, when he won the self-cute top scholar award for the American Specialty Board Championship.
So thank you, Michael, for that.
Well, we can register in the staff, and that was a story in the paper about the lack of students at these games, the mystery of the present drill to me and the community.
I mean, is there any thought of being given to also extend that to alumni?
Because I know a lot of alumni, and there have been two campus to see any games.
You know, that's an interesting point here.
We are doing right now, and President Jones will get the work on this, I think, in late Jones.
We hired the Berkley Easthine Company, a research company, to conduct a marketing study of why, and this is a, let me just say, this is a nationwide program.
This isn't a U.O.A. program.
Produc student attendance down, not care a lot of student attendance is down.
University of Kansas student attendance is down.
One of the things I have learned, I want to take away from the research, one, students don't communicate in the same manner that we communicate with we win college.
The first way that they communicate is through Jackson, the second way that they communicate is through Twitter and Facebook.
So we've got to look at the tools in terms of how we engage them and how we invite them, the fourth way that they communicate is Facebook and Facebook.
That's the least amount of the four main forms of communication.
So are we communicating properly? We don't know.
So this is a national phenomenon. It's much better.
I mean, if you look at the YouTube of our president, when we scored the last second against Stony Brook, he's jumping higher than Mike Black.
And so, the students are rushing the court and President Jones is saying, come on.
And it's going to go on YouTube. We have it in our files in the office.
So it's a national problem. It's just being a threat.
One of the things that's going to help us is that our athletes are true students and they're engaged with the rest of the college.
Luke Devlin lives with three non-assulates. Most of our athletes are in a switch together.
Luke, I went to Coach Violin and said, here's a gentleman from Connecticut and Chris, you probably know this story.
A gentleman from New Jersey and I think much from Mon Island and two of my student leaders.
And they are having the best time of his life because he said, I'm around my teammates all the time at games, on the road.
I don't want to be around the whole time. And they're happy.
And this is a young man that's come 24 hours. We said they're flying to the 28 hours.
And it's new. Nothing about you, Albany, until he stepped off the plane. I think about that.
Think about that. The second thing is I have a 6.9 woman's basketball player from New Zealand.
Never set foot on this campus until she came to be recruited. We fell in love with the coach, fell in love with the player.
And now as a darling of Michigan University and one of his college basketball.
So there's a lot of good things happening. We've got to harness them. We've got to put them in some kind of framework where we can be consistent with it.
And I think that would be the least of our problems.
I think that's a great opportunity to be alumni. I'm really excited.
A lot of them live in this area. And they're not involved.
I can say that just following up on that, Lee, Sarah Villo and his father's death were on the phone constantly, the day after the Vermont.
And with again, tweets and so forth, how can I get tickets? How can I get tickets? How can I get on the bus?
Last thing, and I want to take a bit more time. You've been so gracious with your comments and your questions.
There were 18s in that region. One was for all the golf clubs. Whole other issues.
Right now, by that comment. I'm not going to cover it on that. It's a wonderful story. I'll leave it at that.
But as we're sitting around that room with Duke and Florida golf course George, I'm so forth and so on.
Each of us, and that's one thing I will say that's fair about this process. Each institution gets certain a lot more tickets.
We got 300 and you had a, you could get as many as 250 on consignment. And many of you around the room were involved in that.
And they knew how difficult that was. We were the only team that didn't have back tickets.
Even Duke handed back 50 tickets that they didn't sell. So we're talking about our alumni not being engaged.
And we're not part of that. It was low-cal. I understand that we were in filling. We were in the Northeast footprint.
But we could have given out another 500 to 800 tickets to alumni and students.
We had a student bus there. Most universities don't provide that. And we filled it up in less than three hours.
So as we're talking about this issue, there are a lot of moving parts to it. And that's some good pieces too.
We just have to harness those, which we will.
Thanks. Lincoln, congratulations. Again, for the total. Not just the boys, men and women, the basketball, but just all the sports programs.
You've been just, it's been great having you ever since you just got on board. And you know, it's just like everything is just moving forward.
I was in a city that I couldn't make it to the game. But I was helping for partying and the Alumni Association at a bar.
My buddy owns a midtown. And when we spoke initially, they figured maybe 50 people, 200 people showed up in Friday.
It's there. And if you get the product out there, we have that they will come. So it's a small indication of things there.
I just wanted to just get back to something. We had a discussion before just about some of the metrics that you use.
And you mentioned the grade point averages. And I think, you know, I remember last time we spoke, you said that, you know, benchmarking against our peer groups, we were up there.
Can you share a little bit about what the support is that we provide for the student athletes?
And I was one and it was difficult. And I can also echo your student. It was a JP and a difficulty when I was an MD at Bear and a JP.
They always traditionally want to pull from the Ivy League schools. And it's just kind of blinded or so.
If you get guys that are out there and they can put their arms down to invite the kids in from the industry, they hate it.
They call them non-traditional schools. That's how they go in the game.
It's a surprise that they're not to us because we know, but to many of them, at the caliber of students that we have.
And a lot of times, it is the athletes that able to connect. And then once they see the GPA and stuff that they're brought in over the boat.
Talk about just what you guys do, just collectively that.
That's a nice question. And we have a program that we call the Breakfast of Champions.
And we've had 130 and you can appreciate this as a faculty member, faculty members of TINNA. And basically, we invite each of our athletes and fights, one professor to come and an eight o'clock breakfast to talk about the life of a student athlete, the life of a student athlete.
And they talk about getting up in the morning and going to the lift, going to class, going to practice, going to study hard.
We've got two graduate assistants and two full-time people in our academic support unit.
And one of the reasons that we have such good students is there's not a lot of time for nonsense because between class and film and weight training and study hard, that's just not a lot of time.
One of the great things that we have is if you are below a 2.6-grade point average, you've got to double your study all the time.
So that means students that are not technically at risk, but we're concerned that they're not achieving at a certain level academically.
We yield them extra support. We also utilize our best student leaders as students.
So we have one young lady who is in the lab, in R&A lab. We were talking about the other day, who's a track student athlete.
And the gentleman, Dr. Ergis, who runs the lab said she's the best student researcher that he's had over 30 years.
He's spent 25 years at North Carolina State. So she's a tutor in our program. So we've got great students who are helping students who are not achieving as high in addition to the support that we have on staff.
So we've sort of built a culture of recognition that you've got to do well in a classroom, in a field of competition, and in a community in order to be successful once you leave here and it's working.
Robert was, he's just not saying what he thought. He was in the locker room with that man after the do-game.
And he spoke to them and he talked to them. He was in the press conference with that young woman who were emotionally just torn apart after losing in the North Carolina National Television.
And we were in a game that we control for 37 minutes. That we should have won, you know, unfortunately it didn't happen.
But it's a great question that you pose. But this is a cultural being that's happening in our program that our students have bought into, that our coaches have bought into, that our professors have bought into, and hopefully our council has bought into, and it discontinues to repeat itself.
And with this, you can't cannot go. They didn't go this year, they may because of academic and proprieties. They can't go next year to the tournament because of academic and proprieties.
And we have a benchmark that we call academic progress rate. That is a measure of how you do with retention, a measure of how you do with eligibility. And ours is 980.
And if any of you heard Andre Duncan, a Secretary of Education talk about it, he says, if you're not graduating at least 50% of your athletes, you shouldn't be allowed to participate in championships. That's a 930.
So we're almost at the top. We're in the top 10% of all the vision one programs in terms of academic achievement and performance. So along with the idea of the success that we have in here, we're also having in the classroom.
Great job. Excellent. Any other questions for Lee? Excellent job. Wait, wait.
This is really what Bob is talking about. The guy that's really responsible for all of this over the last number of years that he's been here and sitting here.
And he's the one that hires the coaches, with all the respect. You're involved, everybody else is involved.
He's the one that's hiring the staff. He's the one that runs the show, the program. I've worked with him for years. I view him as a great friend.
My family views him as a great friend. I think all of us here have such huge admiration. I've been on two presidential search committees with him.
The real accolade here should go to him as well to Lee, who is the person behind all this. And if we didn't have Lee, I don't think we'd be where we are today.
And I know everybody knows I'm kind of biased towards certain teams here. That's okay. I think I've got the other bias.
But you know, I'm just saying that Lee's done an all of a job. And I would like to put on the record though that we did beat circuit.
Yes. Thank you.
I got a lot of calls on that one. That was on my national TV. Yes it was. Yes it was.
Why are you talking about TV? We are playing Hopkins on national TV. I'm coming up very soon on ESPN.
But the real point in my comments isn't that. It's really that I think all of us owe a big round of applause to the man who's responsible for us.
Thank you.
The only two coaches in that I did not hire work VVAs in Bob Ford. Bob Ford is on Vini on Loan Moses. I'm old.
I don't think anybody made 1844. Who's ever going to remember who hired? I was 18 years old when I was...
I ran on your view. It was your first year.
I was in that building.
How are you going to follow that steve?
With the budget, we're going to go from mathematics to the budget.
The man responsible for the budget.
As President mentioned, both houses in the Vernon Midnight Oil will last few days sign the budget.
Part of this PowerPoint presentation would say something exactly the budget that changes at the end.
It's a mixed message. There's some good news and some bad news and potential threat.
Which is better than we've presented some years where it's been all bad news.
The good news is that we've got flat year-to-year state support.
So we're making some consistent with the remaining sub-decor provision.
That was included in the New York City 2020 challenge.
Every year we see that happen. We can read the cyber-reviewed letter now.
So we'll try to see it.
TTY, $106 million increase in tuition approach that will reflect the income on the bonus fee from $300.
The increase in President on the graduate tuition.
The third year, the fifth year of national tuition.
Let us do that.
We talked about it in prior meeting.
SUNY was looking at new research allocation line.
All state tuition receipts could come through SUNY broke the token back out in states of partition.
And they're looking at a research allocation model that was replaced.
The rolled back which has been defuncted out for four or five years since it was cut.
It started over five years ago.
The new model was launched.
It was proposed to be used this fall.
And met with some resistance.
Many more losers campuses than the winter campuses.
A lot of consternation heard from the President, including President of this campus.
We used to be used.
Some more funding, we had dollars and funding.
And they put it on hold.
So we're not going to see that.
So we're going to pass through state support that we have in this year.
So state support 61 million as you see.
Our early estimates of what we'll see in new tuition.
Plus, up to $1,000,000,000.
And our academic excellence will generate about a million dollars.
Most of that money is being allocated back out in support of SUNY 2020.
We're already starting down that path.
So Sue Phillips has many, many faculty, hires underway.
The other divisions are also busy staffing up to a limited degree in anticipation of the new student of MFAT.
The teaching staff that we'll see over the course of the 2020 round.
So that's the good news for them.
I'm going to be good news.
These are all the construction that we've seen on campus.
And the stuff that we've been doing every way.
There was a re-apprope.
And the funding for those projects, the school of business,
campus center, extension, and things that were, as I said, learned the way.
There's nothing intervention.
There are two, two, a lot of their work.
And you have to say $80 million pro for the 2020 building.
Wherever that is and how ever we go, it will be our budget on time.
But we've got the 80s, we have a pro-pig.
But the bad news is the misses, but this is a big gap.
Our capital planning part this year has been a couple of days.
No new capital funding.
In the entire state budget from any SUNY campus.
And it's, we were used to from the past 10 years,
seeing at least 33 million here in critical maintenance funding.
And then various strategic initiatives to free.
So that's a concern for us.
Out of your plans, as you can see on the next slide,
at least as the governor's proposed it,
it doesn't call any corporate even capital until 1718.
I don't think that's a statement.
I don't know how we can maintain this campus without any critical maintenance.
And somewhere on the next slide, I guess you'll see that.
We recognize that our deferred maintenance right now is over $1 billion in real needs.
And so how we can manage to do this without any critical maintenance over the next few years is beyond it.
So we think that slowly, but surely, the pressure will go.
This is just the budget.
The whole house will be account for two or three more months.
And as I told, the concern in the union meeting that's really concerned.
As far as I can see, about 100% of our lobbying effort this year has been spent in trying to get capital reinstalled in this budget.
We need it. We've got a lot we like to have got a lot of great plans.
We just finished, remember John Gerussell was in here last year,
giving you an update on the facilities master plan.
A huge effort that basically, well, ready to speed, incurred the forecast of our need for critical maintenance and new construction.
And again, that that that considered a lot of the building plus so we're going to have to wait and see.
A lot of people continue on the present.
The concerns, soon is concerned board of trustees as you can see has requested five billion in this budget.
In the chancellor, after that was not getting anywhere, the chancellor said, well, all right,
my proposal is $2 billion just for critical maintenance.
And that was zero out of his book.
So here we said, we want to do a deal on this campus.
We're waiting to see what happens.
I'm going to concern in one of the looms overhead.
And I don't know how much you've heard about this.
So many downstate medical centers have been real financial distress.
They have fired a second hospital which exacerbated the problem.
And by some calculations, they're losing something over $9 million a month in their operations.
So you said we proposed $50 million a month and a hundred million a month.
Rejected in the upshot of that is that the chancellor has been asked to provide a sustainability plan submitted by June.
So that would happen before the legislature in their home.
Basically, I've visited, I don't even rescue this, for software.
The word of trustees has also been included in the closed little war iron one college hospital.
That was that acquisition that was a truly proven to be so unworkable.
But that only accounts for something like four million of the $9 million.
Maybe three million of the $9 million that they're losing for one.
And they can force, if they sell over $20 million.
I mean, I think they have to be real to me or what.
I mean, the unions protested, they said that the decision to close it was done in executive session.
And there wasn't sufficient public notice.
But they did that last week.
That's done.
That's done.
So it's closed again.
It's no.
I was proposed to close.
It's not closed yet.
It's a quarter order today.
You guys would have to have a plan on fire.
Yeah.
We have a plan actually now.
So you do.
So the big question for us is if the mental center is in the hold to the $2 million and there's no state money to bail out, how does the university amuse?
And the worry is that they'll pass the bill on program to the campus.
And that would be a huge hit on our budget on our property.
So we're holding our breath.
When you see if there's a solution that I was told in a couple of conversations this morning, that Chairman McCall said,
nobody stands but this is not going to happen on the backs of the current students.
We're not going to fix what's really a legislative front on the backs of our campus or other campuses or other students.
How far will getting sustaining that position if they can't come up with a solution?
Which is amazing.
But it's a word.
So they voted to close, glitch, line on college.
Not dance.
Not dance.
Just to be clear.
Close those other six hospitals in the neighborhood.
Struggle.
We've already held the downstate.
As you can see on the next line, we participated in providing downstate 75 million dollar wine credit from our cash reserves.
I'm wondering how that would be paid back.
But it's just that.
And the viable turnoff thing.
We've missed that.
We might get some financial disloyalty.
We're hoping on collective rest.
We're waiting to see how that plays out.
So given what we know right now, it's pretty much a combed-down sketch of what to stay pushing.
It's going to look like we're coming here.
Again, both houses will be in town for only two months.
And I think more work to be on the defense.
We may have an update for you, Pat.
May about some of the outcomes here.
Questions?
I would have a question that is in respect to the council.
If there is an opportunity that the council can weigh in as deemed appropriate,
either through government relations or through budget, or through SUNY, or in support of SUNY, or whatever,
I would stand ready.
I think that we could be-
We're going to have the same question as to one of the things that we are advocates.
And I think we need to do that publicly.
So the question is, how do we do that?
And in coordinated effort both here.
And it sounds like everybody is working together.
Hopefully everyone is working together in the whole SUNY system.
But I think to try to leverage what you have around the table would be beneficial.
I do, too.
Even beyond this table, really, I'm sort of ac-t-t-t-t-t.
The council of trustees across the SUNY campuses, because we're all in general.
It's not just that.
It's a great whole-
That's true.
Other questions, comments?
Steve, thank you.
Kathy, can you tell us about communications?
Is your school?
It's a school.
It's been a very busy first 86 days with the arrival of President Jones.
And the communications and marketing law that's spent the first part of this time introducing President Jones to the campus.
We organized a first-day tour of her, he and his wife, Dr. Lynn Passan Jones.
And we took every corner of the campus, arranged different meetings with the faculty, students, staff to get the word out that he has arrived.
And it was very interesting getting to know everyone.
I was a member of the President's Physician Team.
And that work officially came to the end yesterday.
And so now we are moving our efforts to external exposure.
Have you seen the tunnel shed?
There would be a tour without the tunnel.
Hi, sorry.
I never wanted this first thing.
But did he want this?
I took the president Jones was in the tunnels because our television studios are down there.
Only breadcrumbs anymore.
Breadcrumbs.
Because it's the plimes of breadcrumbs.
Anyway, we have moved our attention now externally.
And as you mentioned before, we are now planning a nine-county tour with the goal of having President Jones gain greater appreciation for the assets of these regions.
And there's a certain criteria for each tour, which is educational, economical, cultural, and any recreational assets of the tour.
Yesterday, we'll be doing this from now until June.
And yesterday we visited Green County.
And already, I think it was a very productive day.
We started off as a Green County school district.
And they introduced us to their principles.
Two of them were our alums.
You all the alums.
So we're meeting alums along the way.
And they are just raring and ready to go to create partnerships with us.
They want to, they have a very good international baccalaureate program there.
And they want to establish a pipeline to send their students directly to you all, you all many, on graduation.
They are looking for, you know, a team to take advantage of our school of education and teacher education programs.
So as you can see, we have a very productive visit there.
We then went to the Thomas Cole house where American art was founded.
And this was President Jones first introduction to the Catskill Mountains.
And it was a splendid day and he had some great views.
And as you know, Green County's economy is really based on tourism.
The two ski slopes there, Windham and Hunter.
And we were able to visit both in two different ways.
This is another alum who was a kind of marketing communications there.
And she headed up the tour at Hunter.
We were able to go on the sky ride there and get just spectacular view of the region.
So anyway, we will continue these.
And I think that we were during that time, we will also take advantage of media opportunities.
President Jones was interviewed on the radio yesterday.
The local papers down there covered it.
We have interest up here for WMC to take ride on and do a radio news story from the bus tour, a future bus tour.
So as we go on, there's going to be more and more opportunities for this.
But let's talk about Tell the University story and President Jones's story about the region.
In between all this time, we were lobbying hard and creating communications for the capital plan.
Steve just introduced.
We had a big forum here with business leaders and the legislative delegates.
And we all know the end of that story, but it's not for lack of trying to get the word out about what our needs are.
Then we had just a wonderful gift, a lot of Lee McElroy.
These are the types of things that every communications and media office and development office, alumni office,
just can't get enough of.
You just want to take this thing and just bottle it and put it on the shelf and sell it.
But we were able to, in addition to all the major media coverage that happened without our office, it happened because of the, as you have a late tournament,
we were able to, and all the increased traffic to our website, we had overall hard page traffic spikes,
we're 182 percent on the day of the men's tournament.
It was just wild.
A lot of the traffic was headed to athletics, but a lot of the traffic went to the story Lee that was on the front page about the RNA,
the student who was the track star and the RNA researcher.
And we had tons of traffic to her, so I think people are thinking about athletics, and so a lot of people,
it was an opportunity to tell the story of our research and our other students.
We, as Lee mentioned about how communications are really happening now, the big dance really equaled big social media engagement.
And we, it just went off the charts with the type of engagement that we had and all the different channels that we have for the University,
because you know we have Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram.
So the, in Facebook, our total reach was about 334,000.
We posted different things along the way.
Again, average daily engaged users was up 300 percent, and our highest engagement was on, with a single post that we put out.
I think, I think it reads, and we met B-com B-Duke.
And in one post got 110,000 different interactions with it.
So it's just, it's just phenomenal, the power of social media, and it really is a direction that we're headed.
And I must say that, you know, in our office, we have a person really dedicated sort of half time to that,
and it's just an area that we really have to be looking at in the future where we start doubling our efforts on,
because the power of that is much greater than any of us in the room.
In Twitter, we had, we increased our followers by 264 percent.
People started following us.
They engaged, and I just wanted to put this list up here of all the different people who were in their contributing to the conversations,
everything from, of course, media, like the Times Union, of the New York Post, he's a mom,
but we know, a person, Gillibrand, the senator was tweeting us, and you know, our Dan McCoy are kind of executive,
and chambers, and you name it.
I mean, it's just amazing.
And this is just a little cross section, because it's a soul-missed secretary type on this list, good news.
It's a session, but it's just, you just get so much awareness from across the board.
There's no really market segment that you're not touching.
The, again, we were able to advertise in both Delware and the New York Metropolitan Market,
and it was just one commercial at Eridat 115 in the afternoon, and they have these things called DMAs,
and that they monitor, and we've reached 96,000 viewers.
And I really thank President Jones for coming through, as like, you know, you're trying to do this very last minute,
and I was just, thank you so much for your support that we were able to do this.
Now, you know, we're shifting our focus, like Dr. Jones was saying, we have an opportunity to leverage the New York City 2020.
I am on the committee, sorry, on the committee, that is a former, trying to formulate the role out of all this,
and the weeks ahead, we'll be starting to implement a communications plan.
We have been working right now on communicating it internally.
There's a lot of different facts that need to be communicated effectively and accurately to the internal community.
So as we roll it out, there's not misperceptions about what we're doing.
You know, of course, we're going to be able to both about increased faculty hires, increased enrollment strategies for doing that,
and supporting enrollment efforts.
Right now, we're working with the graduate studies department, and we are working on a campaign to promote graduate studies in the Albany area.
So stay tuned, you'll be seeing a lot of that later this spring.
And this also gives us an opportunity, as stated in the 2020 plan, to build on research excellence,
and there's four areas that were noted in their biomedical forensic, data analytics, and misper science.
What I wanted to show now, really, to kind of conclude this presentation, is that we have been working with these different areas to strategically try and advance the messaging for what they're doing,
and not only just about what they do, but also to strategically to help them build the business partnerships that they want to build and the collaborations that are all part of this proposal.
So what you're just about to see is some of our efforts in getting the word out more internationally, and I've used atmospheric science as the example.
So to get the word out, to help what we're doing to support their collaborations with business, and also to just educate the public on their different research efforts,
and through that, we're able to get media placements.
So the middle section that you're going to see about researchers doing climate change studies, we're just about to get a big story in Reuters because of this video.
So I'm going to move on to that, and I'll just let the video in my presentation.
There.
Great.
Look here.
Very good.
Over here we go.
Thank you.
Hi.
How are you going to go to the full screen?
For now on the Harikun Sandy, I've joined by a Skyline mate who's boarded from his professor by atmospheric environmental sciences.
Thank you.
In New York state, capsule there, namely the
downtown Yремer Stead Stead, some of that storm a little later in the week.
it later in the week. Professor Dorn, give us a small idea about what makes this door
this perfect and special. Okay, there's a couple of things. First of all, it is an
event that's already named, and that's two more of them. It's been moving out the coast
along the Wall, where it's been more and more since the time of the year. All the next
event is actually the climbing room, except for the last two in Chond.
You know that climate change is occurring, but it's sometimes very difficult to actually
feel or experience, but that looking at places from the year to year, outing between
it can visualize climate change. My name is Mathias Spud. I'm an associate professor
and I work in the department of the Spurring in the Department of Sciences at the University of
Illinois. My research focuses on how climate change in the future of the next decades
will affect the glaciers, the size of the glaciers, their extent, and also the meltwater
they can provide. Just having the ability to have it open and unbiased in the
case of mine with the technology that we're trying to provide.
I'm 11, I'm the CEO of Earth's Technology, who provide four S-guide and Spurring
in the rain. Much of the research that's done here is purpose-oriented
of the methods that we employ in our product, we take up a million. And some of
the faculty researchers here are really getting a lot of work in different research institutions
around the nation. And many of them are doing research for a lot of cases,
it's just a research you can say. But the staff here really understands the real
application of the research in the real world. And a collaborative, engaged in
mine to be in them and ask, we can help them understand how small
weeks of the climate change is there. We wouldn't have a much bigger impact
with the water market out there. As well as it really helps us to understand
what we're going to do when we're down the right road.
So, that last video, that's the type of thing that our atmosphere of science
department can show other businesses and it's like a good positive as to what
our assets are.
Questions?
Okay, thanks, Kathy. Here?
In the interest of time, let me first of all congratulate our news
member, ACT.
I'm going to hand it over to Sarah.
He said, dropping off with that.
We have a director's call which Michael serves on next on the 10th of April,
which we'll go through some of the appointments, discussions that we've been
having, the scholarships that will be presenting at our annual conference,
which we'll be getting out to recommendations from each campus.
We had the University of Albany student one two years ago and we hope to have.
And again, congratulations on the University for 10 students who will be getting the
Chancellor's Award for Excellence next week.
The other points of interest is the conference coming up in October.
You'll hear more about that.
And I think I can cover the rest of it in the minutes from our conference
calls, which we'll share with everybody.
Sure, it's sweet. Any comments or questions?
Okay, 14.
We are still creeping ahead of last year in our total of dollars.
We raised your 8% ahead of last year as end of February at the end of January.
You grow up 6%.
And this is a promising number because this year is so far we have yet to secure a seven-figure gift.
And so we have three proposals out for three seven-figure gifts.
And what has made to change in increased dollars is with our,
we implemented a new system, a new ADP for major gifts that came in,
changed the metrics that the development officers are being measured on.
A traditional model has always been the number of visits the major gifts officer has
with this prospect or prospects for major gifts.
Major gifts at the university at all many is donors that give our capable of giving
us $25,000 over five years at least.
What we did was we changed the metrics from the number of visits,
which is usually 10 to 12 or 12 per 15, to the number of proposals submitted.
And what we had noticed is although many of the development officers were meeting their
quotas for visits, proposals were not being submitted.
And this is not 21's fault.
They started seeing people who would see them.
Now we have to think strategically why am I seeing this person, why am I meeting this person?
Is this person going to get the $25,000 gift by the end of the year?
So what that did was we actually had a 58% increase over the number of major gifts,
gifts of $25,000 that we secured so far this year.
And all the credit to that goes to the leadership of Larry Lichtenstein,
which we just hired in June, and great major gifts officers that many of you work with,
and they out.
And we tried to exploit our new president as much as we could.
He was working for us on October 1st, not January 2nd.
And so that was a major change.
And in December, if you recall, I was sounding alarms that my number of my donors are down.
I'm down 690 donors. These are all $25 and $50 donors or $100 dollars.
And that's a significant number to be down.
I'm happy to report we are actually ahead this year.
And as suspected, it was all had to do with the four weeks that we suspended calling to our sweet spots,
which was due to the storm here, the metronome of city.
We recovered all of them. And part of it is we had our School of Business team had an ingenious idea
of fundraising campaigns called the Pearl Campaign, Personal URL.
And what we did was, there was a fantastic video of it put together.
We sent it to our School of Business graduates, and that they would go see this video
as how the name would appear in the tunnel that goes from School of Business to the podium.
And if you type your name, and you see exactly how it would come up,
we were estimating we would get about $50,000 to $75,000.
We have well more $225,000.
What's the cost to get in your name in that tunnel?
It's $1,000.
A minimum of $1,000 would be secured a number of $5,000 and $10,000 gives.
And one of the $10,000 gives was a version that was only given us $25,000 to $50.
And annually. So this has been one of the success we had.
Another thing is I got a call from a couple of people admiring the timing of our direct mail.
We did not do this on purpose.
We are 80% of our direct mail hits the last Saturday.
You could not type that better.
So we know we're going to get a good return on it.
And also Robert has been with us Florida twice.
Washington DC, we're going back to Washington DC again in 18th.
Lou Weiner is hosting an event along the event there.
And New York City number of times, we're going to Boston later on at some time in May.
We are going there. So we are on the engagement.
It's fully on and also we are discussing very, very sudden phase for a next campaign.
Which is going to be a number that we're all going to be very, very proud of.
And also as far as you already magazine as most of you remember last year you had an email boxes from March 21st, March 22nd.
This is the mail houses and you should have it by mid April.
So the production was delayed by about a few weeks this time.
And this time it was going to 122,000.
And I promised that somehow I would always want to money to send it to 122,000.
This was a big loss when we didn't do that.
And also I would be very glad to be purchased the list and we are mainly going to ask many young colleges and universities as possible.
So for all kinds of showcasing.
What do you need from us?
Money.
And I'm not getting it.
Thank you for your generous support, all of you.
And thank you.
He wants a million dollars.
You know my 70,000 yet.
You said it right?
I don't do it.
I'm not.
Okay.
Yes.
This is Jackson online.
I just had one and we are an update on the acquisition of the old opening high school.
What we are with that.
I can do that.
Change of seat better.
The closing is set for I think April 15th.
So we are good to own it.
What's in jeopardy now is having enough capital to do the kinds of rehab that we have planned in the short term.
So we have got money in the pipeline to acquire the building and now we need to get it in the shape we need to get it.
Okay. And the last point is the smart track.
And at some point, I don't have to pay our smart track program.
And now it's going to be a universal.
Just financial aid.
So we expect that to be at the next meeting.
Okay.
That completes our published agenda.
Yes.
Just to add on some chocolate and the chocolate ones.
And I forgot to pass out to take it in the table.
I don't want to do some problems.
They are lumped again.
Put it out in the milk.
Okay.
This wasn't sure.
I think so.
Both to adjourn.
Second.
Okay.
Thank you all.
Thank you.
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks to the women's team made it to the tournament.
We have this.
I have this.
I have this.