Editorial: The future of SUNY Poly

THE ISSUE:

A scandalous trial offers an opportunity to consider where SUNY Polytechnic Institute is going.

THE STAKES:

What's best for the school and the SUNY system, not personalities and politics?

With the looming corruption trial of Alain Kaloyeros, the founding president of the SUNY Polytechnic Institute, it's an ideal time for the State University of New York to consider the school's future. That study should include understanding its past.

Regardless of the outcome of the trial, the holding pattern in which SUNY Poly now finds itself ought to be a lesson in the danger of basing decisions more on the gratification of ego than the good of an institution.

Spinning off SUNY Poly from UAlbany in 2013 never made clear sense. The rather vague vision offered back then — a grand scheme of high-tech schools stretching across upstate like some higher ed Erie Canal, and some new paradigm of interdisciplinary learning rather than traditional subject matter silos — seemed more like a concept than a blueprint. The split, which created two schools literally across the street from each other, seemed like an outcome in search of a goal — the outcome being a college presidency for Dr. Kaloyeros, with a gleaming new campus of his own.

SUNY Poly was already acting as an independent school, with Dr. Kaloyeros reporting directly to SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher rather than UAlbany's president. It was also acting as much like an economic development tool of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration as an institution of high learning.

If one is looking for what enabled the backdoor wheeling and dealing that is a key part of the corruption case against Dr. Kaloyeros, the culture of secrecy that long prevailed at SUNY Poly — where buildings rose, a highway was moved, and public debt mounted with barely any public discussion — is no doubt a major factor.

The reasons to return SUNY Poly to its former role as a college within a major university are in many ways the same as the reasons not to divide the schools in the first place — most notably the elimination of duplication and efficiencies of scale. And a merger would enhance UAlbany's portfolio without diminishing SUNY Poly at all. The only arguable loss of status would be in SUNY's Poly's president's office — a post that is currently vacant, being filled on an interim basis.

This is not to say a merger would be free of complications. Chief among them is SUNY Poly's debt, on which the school pays about $54.6 million a year, though revenue left a slight surplus this past year. SUNY campuses typically pay their own debt service out of revenue; what impact this debt would have on UAlbany would need to be considered. There's also the question of how the Utica campus would fit in, though there's no apparent reason why it, too, couldn't come under the UAlbany umbrella.

The bottom line of any review must be what's best for SUNY, UAlbany, and SUNY Poly. Normally, that would seem obvious. But if the past has shown us anything, it's that the obvious bears saying out loud and, as with the discussion of SUNY Poly's future, in public.