The State Senate Democratic Policy Committee held a hearing yesterday featuring some of the major players in the State System of Higher Education’s planned consolidation of six universities into two, and Senator Jim Brewster of Allegheny County urged Chancellor Dan Greenstein to slow down the process.
Brewster wants time to find more funding for the schools – he suggested delaying by two years – but Greenstein said any delays of more than a couple of weeks past a mid-July legislative vote on approval of the mergers would push them back by a year, to 2023. Greenstein told the committee the entire State System problem could be solved by annual increases of “$150 million annual incremental (funding) on top of the $477 (million) appropriation,” but he said that’s the state’s decision to make.
Dr. Jamie Martin, the president of APSCUF, raised a number of issues that concern the faculty union, including the power structure at the merged schools, the lack of community-impact studies and input from APSCUF’s survey of the faculty at the affected schools, and the cost of the consolidation, which she said was expected to be $29.6 million over five years, with a savings over the same time period of only $18.4 million.
A State House Democratic Policy Committee meeting on the same topic is scheduled for Thursday at one o’clock.
