Holiday Speech

December 22, 2010
Kenneth H. Levison
Vice President for Administration

What a year!  In 2009-2010 and again 2010-2011 we are experiencing the worst financial crisis the College has ever faced.  And yet, our Division had another year of exemplary accomplishment.  I am convinced that our success is due to the dedication and hard work of all of you, who work behind the scenes to keep the College running smoothly and looking great.  As I wrote to the President, we take our satisfaction from meeting our goals and exceeding benchmarks.  We take our satisfaction from improving the quality of our services each year and meeting our customers’ expectations.  Our Division had to absorb a large share of the cuts to the College and the majority of the early retirements, but even as our staffing has been reduced, you remain steadfast in trying to provide the College with the highest level of service possible.  I am sure you see that we are, as our motto says, truly Dedicated to a Spirit of Service.

Fiscal stringency is never pleasant, and with our two cuts last year came additional reporting requirements.  Our Budget Office not only met all these, but also managed our resources so that we ended the year having met our savings targets and with every fund in balance.  The Grants Management Office, with newly hired Traci Phillips, continues to offer outstanding support to our researchers on campus.  This year, in conjunction with Human Resources, they implemented E-Verify, an internet-based system operated by the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the Social Security Administration to verify the employability of newly hired employees.

Human Resources and Payroll Services also teamed with the Budget Office to create a better line tracking system.  Having gotten what I characterize as the “foundation services” stabilized and standardized, they offered an impressive number of new programs and training opportunities.  Among these were a workplace violence prevention program, a Phased Retirement Program for Faculty, a Voluntary Separation Incentive Program, and 17 different programs ranging from effective problem solving to basic computer skills.  In all, 547 employees received training during the past year.

The most notable accomplishment for the Accounting Department was the successful transition of the Geneseo Foundation’s accounting operations to our area.  In addition to the improved reporting to the Board and a clean audit, Foundation accounts were moved to a new bank at midyear.  Partnering with John Haley and Financial Aid, a new automated scholarship delivery system was implemented.

Purchasing continued doing an outstanding job by keeping us in the top three in the University for our use of Woman and Minority Owned Businesses, exceeding the University’s goals by 9.96 percent.  Increased use of the procurement card led to a decrease of 18 percent in the number of purchase orders over 2008-2009 and a 78 percent decrease since 1998!  Our mailroom processed over 46,000 incoming student packages during the academic year.  

Student Accounts downsized its staffing by one position, but has been able to increase services to students and parents.  In conjunction with Financial Aid, preparations for Direct Lending were undertaken.  Electronic billing and refunding has been a smashing success with over 1,000 students using the system, an increase of over 105 percent in just three years.  Our collections remain outstanding at 99.84 percent.

Financial Aid had a most challenging year.  The recession brought a flood of special consideration appeals from students and their families.  In addition, work on the new Direct Lending Program and the Foundation new scholarship distribution system were successful.  During the year, there was a 37.7 percent increase in Pell Grants, a transition to Banner 8, and the use of auto packaging for PLUS loans.

In Facilities Services, where a disproportionate share of College reductions fell, both customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction improved.

Custodial, Core, and Zone Shops, even with reduced staffing, set up the ice arena for commencement without use of overtime.  Our Core Trades and Zone Shops completed over 25 special projects throughout the college during the year.

We continue to hear from Alumni and visitors that our grounds are beautiful and well maintained, and they are.  The Grounds Crew’s special projects this year included installing smokers’ stations and bicycle racks throughout campus, restriping all parking lots, and creating a disc golf course for Residence Life.

Facilities Planning and Construction oversaw the completion and occupancy of Greene Hall and the very time sensitive Saratoga Hall HVAC retrofit, which was completed in time for students to occupy in the fall.  Also the “crowning jewel of our world class science complex,” as Jeff Kaplan describes it, the observatory dome, was finally installed on the ISC roof.

Environmental Health and Safety teamed with Residence Life to perform pre-fire audits in ten percent of student rooms.  This reduced the number of fire violations the Fire Marshall reported by 61 percent over last year.  The Office conducted 225 training sessions attended by over 2,900 people.  The Office also coordinates the disposal of hazardous waste.  This past year we removed 2,231 pounds of hazardous waste from campus, a reduction of 58 percent over 2008-2009.

All this plus awards by the Rochester Business Journal for our Sustainability Efforts, shows how successful we have been over the past year.  It demonstrates how our efforts and service excellence contribute to the excellence of Geneseo.

January is named after the Roman god Janus, who was the god of doorways, beginnings, endings, and time.  He is often depicted as having two heads, one looking forward into the future and the other looking back into the past.  It is appropriate that we take this time to reflect on the past and look toward the future.  It is all the more appropriate this year as we face the on-going financial challenges from the State’s fiscal situation and the changes that will necessarily follow from the actions we have taken to deal with the drastic cuts in funding over the past three years.  We have seen our ranks depleted through unprecedented use of the retirement incentive and through position deletions, so we will have to change the way we do things.  Change, while a constant for us, will be more dramatic as we move forward.  One thing that will change, and I want you to be the first to know, is that I will be retiring and leaving the College in June, so this will be the last Holiday Luncheon that we will share together and the last time you will have to endure my holiday observations.

Let me indulge myself a bit more than usual at this special time.  I first saw Geneseo when I was teaching at St. John Fisher College in Rochester in 1977.  Some friends and I were out picking raspberries, when they suggested that we drive to Geneseo and see the College.  I remember that day vividly.  The College looked nice, though the upper quadrangle looked more like a pasture than an academic quadrangle, and the view of the valley was spectacular.  As we were about to leave—and I kid you not—there was a fireman’s parade on Main Street, and we sat on the curb watching this quaint, rural tradition parade past us.

Some eight years later, when I was appointed Vice President here, I thought that this would be a good place to start an administrative career in Higher Education, and that I would be here not more than five years.  Well, it has been 25 years—a quarter of a century—and it is time for me to move on.  Why am I here this long?  I guess, in part, there was a lot to be done, and more important, because of the wonderful people here to get things done.  And what we have accomplished!

Our Division has been a change agent on this campus.  We have found bold and creative ways to get things done better than in the past.  We have changed the landscape of the College not just physically, but organizationally as well.  Just thinking back over the past 25 years, some of the changes we have seen include:

• Moving from paper account records to computers in Accounting.
• Being able to keep our own accounts without relying on week-old reports from Albany.
• Taking over accounting for the Geneseo Foundation and making it a professional, dual entry accounting system from the home grown, unsophisticated one in use for over 30 years.
• Creating a Budget Office which developed a budget reporting system that was adopted by SUNY System Administration and is now called SMRT.  It allows account managers to see up-to-date expenditure and revenue data on-line.
• Our Student Accounts operation moved from the drudgery of stuffing envelopes, mailing bills and receiving them, opening envelopes, sorting, filing and entering the payments, to a lockbox operation and then to e-billing and e-refunding.  Now we have instituted e-marketplace, where bills and items purchased can be paid for on line all with one financial transaction.
• Financial Aid moved from Student Services to our Division.  We now can disburse financial aid within days of receipt as opposed to weeks in the past.  We provide a wide range of on-line services, from loan applications to exit interviews.
• When I arrived on campus, Purchasing was virtually an arm of the Office of General Services in Albany, purchasing exclusively from State contracts.  There was one telephone book in the office on a stool in the middle of the room.  We now have a state-of-the-art procurement operation that has not only saved us money, but has kept Geneseo in the top three institutions in the use of MWBE.  They negotiated a copier lease contract with Toshiba that saved the College over $500,000 and we are about to institute a new printer and copier plan that is projected to save an additional $200,000 per year.
• Human Resources has gone from a processing operation to one that provides high quality service to our employees.  We were the first SUNY institution to implement an on-line job application system and are now providing much expanded training and support services to our staff.
• We created an Environmental Health and Safety Office that has helped us keep in compliance with the many EPA and DEC regulations and has streamlined our hazardous waste disposal process.
• From reacting to unethical practices when I first came, we now have a robust Internal Control Process, one that was used as a model by SUNY System Adminisrtation, to insure that we comply with all financial and programmatic rules and regulations.
• We developed the campus TQM program, CQUIP, and expanded it in our Division to a continuous quality improvement program using assessment programs in each department.
• To provide better service to our customers and to our buildings we moved to zone maintenance.  We were the first in SUNY to implement Team Cleaning and to use green cleaning products.
• We gave the College a facelift with the most aggressive building and renovation program since the major construction of the campus in the early 1970’s
  • The College Green
  • South Hall
  • Saratoga Townhouses
  • Putnam Hall
  • Seneca Hall
  • Integrated Science Center
  • Greene Hall
  • Mary Jemison Dining Hall
  • The ice arena
  • The Track
  • The Mall between the Union and MJ
  • Reconstruction of Letchworth Drive
  • Doty
  • The design and future construction of the stadium
  • Renovation of the North Village with the design and future renovation of Letchworth; 
  • The current design beginning the renovation of the Central Village; and
  • A very exciting Facilities Master Plan that will be presented to the campus in March.
• In these 25 years there have been well over $150 million of construction projects, not to mention the upgrades and renovations we have done with our own staff throughout the campus.

This is not an exhaustive list, but some highlights of how far we have come.  I use the word “we” intentionally.  Everything we have achieved, you achieved.  You should be proud of this record.  Whatever we put our minds to, we accomplished.  How many people can say that?

We have worked hard and accomplished amazing results.  People who visit our campus are impressed with how we look, how our facilities are maintained, and how good our services are.  We are competing with private colleges with tuitions ten times higher than ours and endowments 900 times ours.  Yet, through your dedication and hard work, we make things work and make an impression.  

We have worked well together through these years and I am extremely grateful.  This does not mean that we always agreed, but through discussion and working through problems, we have emerged stronger and better.  I want to thank all of you who were willing to take chances, to think creatively and to dare to strive for excellence.  I want to thank my management team of Brice Weigman, Jim Milroy, Julie Briggs, George Stooks, Mark Scott, and Teresa Sexton for unflagging hard work, great insights, and professionalism through thick and thin.  They have been a great support and are one of the strongest management teams in SUNY.  I also want especially to thank Ed Quackenbush and the CSEA leadership for being open and honest; for being principled and fighting for their members, but particularly for their willingness to listen and work through problems.

We are currently in the middle of a storm, not the perfect storm, but one that has us and the State teetering on the edge of a morass.  The future is uncertain, but we can safely say that things will not change much for the next several years.  It reminds me of the Rogers and Hammerstein song, “You’ll never walk alone”:

When you walk through the storm

Hold your head up high

And don’t be afraid of the dark

At the end of the storm

There’s a golden sky

And the sweet silver song of the lark.

Walk on through the wind

Walk on, through the rain

Though your dreams be tossed and blown.

Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart 

And you’ll never walk alone

You’ll never walk alone.

Nice sentiments, but walking on with hope in your heart is just not enough.  There are many of our sister SUNY schools that are facing the current storm by treading water and hoping that the golden sky is around the corner.  We chose not to take that approach.  We have taken a riskier, but ultimately more assertive tack, by biting the bullet and making permanent base budget reductions that will ultimately strengthen our school and allow us to reallocate what resources we have to invest in areas of growth.  Hope alone is not enough.

In bad times more than ever, I believe we need not hope, but faith, dedication, and creativity if we are to survive and emerge stronger.

Faith.  We need to have faith in the College where we work—Faith that we can be part of its ultimate success.  Also, we need faith in our leaders that they will make good decisions and set the right course for the College.  But finally, we need faith in ourselves—that we can make a difference, each one of us, in what we do and how we do it.

Dedication.  Nothing of value is achieved without hard work.  We need to realize that and continue to do what we can to improve our areas and help the College achieve its vision of being the premier Public Liberal Arts College in the country.  Particularly in hard times, this will only come through hard work, by going above and beyond so that we can continue to improve and continue to provide outstanding service to our College.  With fewer people we may have to do less, but doing a bad job or doing what we need to do poorly is not an option.  It is through dedicated involvement in the College and in our jobs that we will emerge stronger and better and find greater personal satisfaction in what we do.

Creativity.  In his book entitled How the Mighty Fall and Why Some Companies Never Give In, Jim Collins writes of the stages of decline of top companies.  He notes that organizations that continue to be great and not decline are those that adhere to core values, have a willingness to experiment, and have mechanisms for self-improvement.  You will be successful if you approach your tasks every day with the question, “how can I do this better”.  Over the years we in this Division have made amazing and dramatic changes in our workplace and how we deliver our services.  That is what has made us better than most.  We cannot forsake that willingness to change, that drive to be creative.  If we do, we will lose interest in our jobs and the institution will wither.

Collins states that “Great companies foster a productive tension between continuity and change.  On the one hand, they adhere to the principles that produced success in the first place, yet on the other hand, they continually evolve, modifying their approach with creative improvements and intelligent adaptation.” (p. 36).  Without creativity, without a willingness to change, to question how or why we are doing certain things, we will fall into mediocrity.  We cannot afford that.  

So, while hope is a great thing to hold—and I hope that the Legislature will cease being dysfunctional and will recognize the importance of SUNY and fund us—it is not sufficient.  We need faith, dedication, and creativity.

In closing, let me say that I have enjoyed every day I have worked here.  Unlike some unfortunate people, I have not, nor will I count the days to my retirement.  Every day has brought new challenges.  And every day has brought a great sense of satisfaction that we have been able to make tremendous progress and move this place forward.  As I leave, I am sure you will hear people say what I have done here at Geneseo.  The truth is I have done very little.  You have done it all.  You deserve all the credit for our achievements; you deserve the recognition for your willingness to let go of the old ways and try new ones; for your courage, your dedication, your willingness to pitch in and yes, your willingness to let us know when things aren’t just right.  If I have been at all successful, it was through enabling each of you to use your talents, skills, and abilities to build a better workplace, a better way of doing things, and ultimately to make a better College.

My satisfaction has come from your achievements, your triumphs, your good spirit, and your willingness to give.  I am honored and humbled to have had the opportunity to work with all of you.  You are wonderful people and you are supremely important to the success of the College.  Don’t ever forget that.

So as we go forward from here, please don’t forget all the things you have accomplished over these past 25 years.  Don’t be afraid to let go of the old way of doing things and to try new things.  Be willing to stretch; you will be amazed at what you can reach.  While we may all have hopes, please keep your faith, dedication, and creativity.

I am sure I will have a chance to speak with each of you before I leave in June.  But I do want you to know how much I respect you and how much I have enjoyed working with you.  

I wish you all a Merry Christmas, a joyous New Year, and a future filled with satisfaction and accomplishment.