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Budget
When Dr. Toll assumed the presidency at Stony Brook, our state budget was a little more than $7 million. We had 253 faculty, about 530 staff members and research activity was at $878,000. By the time President Toll leftin 1978, the state budget had increased by 12 times to $86.5 million; research activity had jumped to more than $21 million; the University had four times more faculty, six times more staff, nearly 16,000 students and 35 graduate programs. This is remarkable growth, and an amazing testament to Dr. Toll and all who aided him in these early days.

Stony Brook University’s total budget today is 2.1 billion dollars, of which 1.4 billion is associated with our medical center complex, and the remaining 700 million on this side of Nicolls Road. Of our total budget, $295.1 million comes in the form of state allocation, which is made up of $147.5 million in the form of state tax support and $147.6 million from tuition and miscellaneous revenue. These figures do not count monies that come from the State to support our fringe benefit costs. While $295 million would seem to be significantly higher than the $86.5 million we had 33 years ago, in fact, if one accounts for inflation, we actually had more “buying power” in 1978 than today.

Last year, I spoke of our tremendous budget challenges, and unfortunately the State’s fiscal crisis led to even more cuts this year. As shown in the next slide, we have now had to deal with more than $82 million dollars in cuts over the past four years, a cut of nearly 27% in our State support. We have coped by aggressively pursuing cost savings, reducing adjunct faculty, consolidating programs, freezing and reviewing staff hiring, using state wide and locally developed voluntary separation plans, and implementing shared services.We continue to make significant progress towards our goal, developed as part of Project 50 Forward, to reduce our non-academic spending by $27 million annually. But these cost-cutting efforts have come with a price, in terms of fewer class sections, larger classes, and we cannot forget that our efforts to improve administrative efficiencies have led us to make an already lean organization even leaner, with those remaining shouldering even more of the work effort. We have worked hard to avoid lay-offs, and I am very grateful to all of our faculty and staff who have risen to the occasion, and been willing to take on more to keep Stony Brook moving forward. What we do at Stony Brook really matters, and I am proud of each and every one of you, and your unique and vital contributions to this University.

But as everyone knows, despite these severe cuts, our budget picture today looks far brighter than last year. This year Stony Brook University and all of our supporters helped lead the fight for something historic, NY SUNY2020. This groundbreaking legislation contains the first 5 year tuition plan in State history, and will allow the 4 University Centers to charge an academic excellence fee in recognition of their higher costs to educate, to initiate annual increases in out-of-state tuition, and to receive 35 million dollars in capital for a project of their choice.   Within the NYSUNY2020 act is also the commitment by the legislature and the Governor to work to avoid further cuts in SUNY’s budget which would counter the effect of the tuition increase. The NY SUNY2020 act is a game changer. For the first time ever, we know our future revenue, and can engage in long-range fiscal planning.  We achieved recognition and support for the higher cost of educating a student at a research institution. And we will use the capital funds to help us build a $194 million state-of-the-art Translational Medical Research Building on the East campus. The MART will be a 250,000 square foot, eight-level building that will house 25 cancer labs, a 30-room cancer clinic, a 300-seat auditorium and new classroom space. This building will be transformative for Stony Brook University and our region, helping us to recruit new researchers in cancer and imaging, and helping our physicians and staff provide better clinical care for cancer patients.

Before I leave this topic, there are two critical points I want to make about NYSUNY2020 and Stony Brook University.  Our intention is to use much of the increased revenue from tuition and fees to directly benefit students by hiring more than 250 new faculty, and 800 new staff.  More faculty mean smaller classes, more class sections, (helping students get the classes they need to graduate on time) and more research opportunities for our students. However, while we will receive significant increases in our revenue from tuition and fees under this plan, those increases will not offset the cuts we received to our base budget until the 5th year of the plan. So, we will achieve our faculty hiring goals only if we are successful in dealing with the ongoing effects of the prior years’ budget cuts by continuing to reduce administrative costs, increasing revenue from other sources, or obtaining an increase in the State allocation.

The second point is about access. We have made the decision that these tuition increases, while modest, will not effect the ability of our state’s most economically disadvantaged students to attend Stony Brook University. Among all of the SUNY schools, only Stony Brook will completely cover the TAP gap (the difference between the tuition increase and the maximum provided by the State’s Tuition Assistance Program) for New York students with family incomes of $75,000 or less. Why are we doing this? Because we believe that access to a quality education is at the heart of what we do, because we are proud that we have the second highest proportion of economically disadvantaged students in the AAU, and because it is the right thing to do.

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