President Harvey Stenger addresses full faculty meeting

The year of celebration continued as President Harvey Stenger addressed the full faculty Nov. 12 in Old Union Hall in the University Union.

Stenger admitted that his presentation would be a version of his State of the University address, delivered in October, highlighting the anniversaries of schools and women’s athletics, as well as the Nobel Prize won by Distinguished Professor M. Stanley Whittingham.

Binghamton is getting better, Stenger said, giving the official enrollment for the 2019-2020 academic year — 18,105 students (3,958 graduate students and 14,147 undergraduate students) — and noted that Binghamton continues to do well in national rankings.

He mentioned accomplishments in scholarship and education as well: Diane Miller Sommerville as a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Prize; a conference held this past spring by the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention that brought representatives from 14 different countries and five different continents to hold discussions around critical topics; the launch of the Human Rights Institute; a $2.8 million grant for the Decker School; and an expansion of the First-year Research Immersion program, including the Source Project.

“We’re in an elite crowd,” Stenger said, as he reminded the audience that Binghamton is now among only 131 institutions listed as an R1 — very high research —school by the Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education. “It’s the first time we’ve ever been in that classification, and I just talked to Bahgat [Sammakia, vice president for research] and he said we’ve crossed $50 million in research expenditures this year. There’s a lot of good news in the last 12 months for our research on campus.

“And, did I mention that Stan Whittingham won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry?” he asked.

Stenger reviewed the “bump in the road” from the past year when the University used reserves to help cover raised for faculty and staff. The University put a halt to its initiatives and searches and created a new budgeting process that allowed incentives to be gained by schools and colleges around graduate enrollments, he said. A hiring hold put in place was lifted recently.

“We were helped by the state legislature, which gave us $5 million in one-time funding and by a tuition increase,” Stenger said. “We only spent about $8 million of our reserves, rather than $13 million, and put a new hiring process into place that each is division responsible for finding the funding for their hires and the raises for their hires.

“Now we’re back on track,” he said. “Basically, what I came away with was that in a relatively quick time, we solved a problem. That gives me confidence that whatever challenges we have in the future, we can turn them in opportunities.”

Stenger told the faculty that the University is in the non-public phase of a seven-year comprehensive gifts campaign and is ahead of the target. “At the end of the second year of the silent phase of the campaign, we had exceeded $50 million, so we’re in good shape to reach our goal of $150 million over seven years.”

A number of large gifts have come to the University recently, Stenger said, including an additional $1 million from an anonymous donor for I-GMAP, alumna Ellyn Kaschak, late Distinguished Professor of Chemistry John Eisch and Marilyn Link. “Did you know that John Eisch was in chemistry, also the home of Stan Whittingham?” Stenger asked.

“We’ve done a marvelous job of fundraising, with 13 $1 million or greater gifts in the past two years, compared to five in all of our prior history,” Stenger said.

Stenger wrapped up his presentation with a status report on the growth and renovations at the Health Sciences Campus in Johnson City, the name change for the Decker College of Nursing and Health Sciences, improvements being made to buildings on the Vestal campus and progress on the University Initiatives that were temporarily stalled.

“Looking ahead, we’re going to apply for Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement status,” he said. “We’ve formed a committee and it will take a couple of years. It’s not an easy process.”

The comprehensive gifts campaign will also be both a challenge and an opportunity, Stenger said. “And we’re looking to develop a master plan for the Fine Arts Building, probably three years out after the Libraries’ third-floor renovation. We’ve also hired a director for our new physical therapy program and a director of speech-language pathology will start soon.”

Plans also continue to develop a Living Building at Nuthatch Hollow and a welcome center at the entrance to campus.

“The future? It looks positive right now,” Stenger said. “We solved last year’s problems quickly and efficiently, which says to me that we can get stronger and better from meeting these challenges.”

Following Stenger’s presentation, the Faculty Senate approved a new Master of Science in Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, with minor modifications requested by the Faculty Senate Diversity Committee.

The Faculty Senate also voted to endorse a University Faculty Senate resolution calling upon Elsevier to negotiate a new contract earnestly and in good faith with SUNY to reach a fair and reasonable agreement on a new contract for access to Elsevier’s ScienceDirect, a website that provides subscription-bases access to a large database of scientific and medical research. The current contract, which makes up 25% of SUNY’s overall expenditures on journals, expires Dec. 31, 2019.