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CUNY’s Veteran-Student Problem


military veterans veterans day

Veterans Day (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


Last month the New York City Council held a joint hearing of the veterans and higher education committees on services to military veterans at the City University of New York (CUNY). It was the first hearing regarding CUNY and veterans in several years. CUNY representatives touted the university as committed to making its campuses a first destination for veterans.

But, the hearing also helped expose gaps in the services that CUNY is providing to military veterans who are enrolled in its school system, and helps us understand the need for better support for student-veterans in New York City.

To help veterans transition from military service to college, in 2012 President Obama signed Executive Order 13607, which established principles of excellence for educational institutions serving veterans. Among its requirements, the order tasked institutions that receive funding for veteran education benefit programs to comply with a range of consumer protections pertinent to veterans, as well as provide veterans, before they use their benefits, the tools to compare institutions with respect to affordability and value.

Locally, in April 2013, then CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein convened a task force to address the needs of student veterans and to develop recommendations to improve their experiences.

The task force created a report that focused on five areas for CUNY to better assist veterans. Those five areas included: “Establishing the Basics,” “Fostering Military Cultural Competency Campus Wide,” “Streamlining the Student Veteran’s Introduction to the College,” “Developing Services and Programming to Ensure a Successful Academic Journey,” and “Ensuring the Veterans Continued Success Post Graduation.”

The report also predicted that the number of military veterans applying to CUNY would grow as the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan drew down, which proved correct. In 2009 there were slightly more than 1,700 veterans enrolled at CUNY. Today, there are more than 3,100, putting CUNY in the top ten for student veteran enrollment among the country’s higher education institutions.

The CUNY system is an essential resource for our returning veterans as they transition into civilian life, part of the system’s larger role in offering opportunity to those seeking higher education.

But, if you’ve been following David W. Chen’s reporting in The New York Times, you know that CUNY has major problems, including a morale and funding crisis, a federal investigation regarding the president of one college, and her resignation; as well as broader abuse and financial mismanagement. This has led Governor Cuomo to recently call for major reforms at CUNY, including a new inspector general.

It is indeed time to reform CUNY, and these reforms should include military veterans.

In the three years since the report of the CUNY task force on veterans was released, progress in the five areas the report focused on has been difficult to gauge. Campuses across the university seem to offer uneven services for veterans; with the key to success or failure seemingly based on how each college president regards veterans and their issues. Case in point: while every other campus currently has either a veterans coordinator or director, Baruch College does not.

This type of deficiency is the result of a troubling trend. Over the past six years, while the number of veterans attending CUNY has increased, the number of staff focused on supporting veterans at CUNY’s central office has decreased to only one full-time person. The lack of personnel has hindered the university’s ability to “look in” on campuses to make sure they are carrying out the policies and recommendations that the task force put forth.

The ongoing scandals and changing leadership at CUNY’s central office and the various colleges have hurt transparency regarding how City Council and State Legislature grants are distributed to the campuses for veteran services.  As a result, there appears to be no mechanism requiring the colleges to account for how those monies are spent on veteran services.

This makes the divide between CUNY’s central office and the colleges even greater, which has invariability led to the uneven services across campuses.

So it’s understandable why many student-veterans at the recent City Council hearing were surprised listening to officials from CUNY central office talk about the great things CUNY is doing for veterans. The testimony appeared disconnected from what many veterans are experiencing at their respective campuses. With insufficient staffing, the will to implement and enforce policies, and a veterans mental health program on only four campuses, CUNY has no way to baseline the services for veterans on each campus.

As a consequence, the more veterans in the community talk about those campuses that are not providing services, the more veterans will only consider those that are. The more veterans struggle on colleges with minimal services, the higher their attrition and transfer rates will be.

As the chair of the city’s Veterans Advisory Board recently stated, the importance of a sound, accessible post-secondary education to New York City's veteran strategy cannot be understated. It is the engine for economic mobility. Therefore, it is strategically important for the Governor, the Board of Trustees, and the leadership at CUNY to “look in” and put the necessary resources into its veterans offices and programs, enforce its own recommendations and policies; and see where the money is going and how it’s being spent at the colleges. CUNY can and must truly set the standard for success in veterans attending public colleges. That would be a win for New York City.

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Joe Bello served 11 years in the U.S. Navy/Naval Reserve and has been a veterans advocate in New York City for two decades. He is the founder of NY MetroVets.

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A Public Safety Agenda for 2017 in Albany


nypd family cropped

An NYPD family (photo: @NYPDnews)


As we continue to dissect the election that just occurred and look ahead to the Trump presidency, there is also business close to home to consider for 2017. New Yorkers must contemplate the grotesque failures of leadership exposed by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, while the Brennan Center for Justice has repeatedly told us that New York’s in the most dysfunctional state government in the nation.

Still, there are substantive matters that deserve our attention, and we must push state lawmakers, including Governor Andrew Cuomo, to move ahead on important reforms in a variety of issue areas. Since law enforcement and criminal justice is my area of expertise, that is where I focus my attention.

As we head toward the new legislative year, here are three public safety objectives for 2017.

First, as the crisis in police-community relations continues, the Legislature should create a new program to address it head on. New York needs a bill that would appropriate funding to the Government Law Center at Albany Law School to bring together community activists, law enforcement executives, and academics from across the state to develop a unified and coherent agenda of criminal justice reform to bring to the state's Executive and Legislature. It's high time we invited the community into the discussion and hosted real dialogue with a shared goal of agreeing upon concrete policy plans.

This agenda will promote community policing and confront the crisis in police-community relations head-on. The bill will also give the Division of Criminal Justice Services responsibility for managing a new local assistance program offering technical assistance and small grants to support the creation of community councils dedicated to creating a relationship of partnership between community stakeholders and law enforcement agencies. We have a groundbreaking model that has been developed in Albany in recent years that offers a way forward to all municipalities.

The kind of nominees President-elect Donald Trump is offering or floating for top public safety posts in his administration are unlikely to be sympathetic to our cause. If Governor Cuomo and his allies in the Legislature are sincere in their commitment to keeping New York a bastion of progressive public safety policy, they should back this proposal.

Second, we succeeded this year in having legislation introduced that will create a center for the study of transnational organized crime at SUNY. The Centennial of the New York State Police will be marked in 2017 -- in 1957, that agency made history with the exposure of the existence of the mafia, leading to decades of engagement by law enforcement agencies all over the nation in the face of the growing threat of organized crime.

In 1985, under the leadership of the late Tom Constantine, the New York State Police initiated an investigation that, six years later, saw the exposure of the operations of Colombia's Cali Cartel in our state, bringing to light the fact that we had been invaded and occupied by a powerful, wealthy, well-armed, ruthless foreign criminal power with tentacles throughout New York.

Constantine took over the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1994 and oversaw the defeat and dismantling of the cartel, the largest and most powerful criminal conspiracy in history. Organized crime gets little press today, preoccupied as we are with the war on terror. But terrorist organizations have symbiotic relationships with criminal enterprises in many nations. Long after the political, ethnic, and religious impetuses for the terror movements we know today dissipate, organized crime will still be with us.

The 2017 centennial of the state police and the respect and affection that many prominent law enforcement leaders around the world still hold for Constantine provide an auspicious moment and opportunity for launching a new institute that, in years to come, will organize and host annual conferences in Albany bringing together the best minds to develop advice to the world's governments on how to face down the threat of global organized crime. Our bill designates this institute The Thomas A. Constantine Institute for the Study of Transnational Organized Crime.

Third, New York and the entire nation have been going through an historic sea change in attitudes toward drug addiction as the result of the heroin/opioid epidemic. The past two years have seen positive results in New York. There is, however, an important gap in our panoply of prevention programs that we must urgently address.

There has been no generally accepted prevention program that targets the key demographic of high school-aged kids. It is in high school that most kids are first exposed to the opportunity to obtain and experiment with drugs. It is in high school that kids often stop listening to adults and become more receptive to the opinions of their peers for good or ill. A peer-to-peer approach is the sound approach.

In recent years, I was introduced to Mentor International, an internationally respected youth drug abuse prevention program founded by Queen Silvia of Sweden in 1994. We debuted Mentor in Columbia County last year. I have been working with Gunilla Girardo, CEO of Mentor Foundation USA, the U.S. affiliate set up in 2010, to introduce the program to policymakers at the state level. Mentor has made New York a priority.

Successful introduction of the program here will have national influence. It is supported by the private sector and recruits community leaders in business, government, and the nonprofit sectors to serve as mentors to youth and to create mentoring opportunities for kids in a variety of workplaces. The hallmark of the program is its reliance on the peer-to-peer approach in getting kids to take up the cause of influencing their friends to make positive and healthy choices in life.

There is, of course, a role that the Legislature and the Governor can, and should, play in promoting Mentor.

The crisis in police-community relations, the challenge of global organized crime, and the heroin/opioid epidemic are national problems that were little discussed in the recent election. They require urgent, but thoughtful responses. The program outlined here offers a dynamic response to all three. As the political dust settles and we move forward, let's join together to assert New York's historic leadership in confronting the true issues of the day.

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Terry O'Neill is Director of the Constantine Institute in Albany, an organization that promotes constitutional, legal and ethical standards in law enforcement and advises state and local governments on police issues. He is a lawyer and served as a criminal justice adviser to the administration of Governor Mario Cuomo from 1988 to 1994.

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New York Needs a Political Primer on the State Constitutional Convention Referendum


boe poll workers and voting booths 1

(photo via NYC Board of Elections)


The following essay is a slightly edited version of J.H. Snider’s introduction to a Fall 2016 symposium, “The Politics of State Constitutional Reform,” published by the Law & Courts Section of the American Political Science Association. The symposium provides a summary of notable presentations at a short course, A Political Primer on the Periodic State Constitutional Convention Referendum, presented at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, whose theme for 2016 was “Great Transformations: Political Science and the Big Questions of our Time.” The short course and symposium provide an inter- rather than intra-state perspective on New York’s November 7, 2017 referendum on whether to call a state constitutional convention. Gotham Gazette has previously published four op-eds by J.H. Snider providing an intra-state perspective on the upcoming referendum.

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At the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, I produced a short course, “A Political Primer on the Periodic State Constitutional Convention Referendum.” The short course consisted of two parts.  

Part I included a two-hour compilation of TV documentaries and political ads. The TV documentaries included excerpts from past constitutional conventions, mostly U.S. state constitutional conventions held during the latter half of the 20th Century, plus a smattering of recent path-breaking constitutional conventions held in other countries. The unedited TV ads, mostly 30 seconds in length, were either for or against calling a state constitutional convention at an upcoming referendum. The TV documentaries generally described the past constitutional conventions in hagiographic terms. Most of the professionally produced TV ads were negative and characterized a future constitutional convention as a grave threat to the people’s rights.  

Part II consisted of four panels of experts, each panel approximately 30 minutes long. The first panel focused on New York, which on November 7, 2017 has the next referendum on whether to call a state constitutional convention. The panel included a history of New York’s 11 state constitutional conventions since 1777 (by me) and an argument why New York’s upcoming referendum was of national interest (by Sandy Levinson).

The second panel reviewed the history of U.S. state constitutional conventions (John Dinan) and changing public opinion towards them (William Blake). The third panel examined the merits of alternative legislative bypass mechanisms, including Ireland’s 2012 constitutional convention with randomly selected members (David Farrell), Florida’s periodic constitutional revision commission (Carol Weissert), and the constitutional initiative (Craig Holman and John Dinan).  The fourth panel focused on the politics and policy of New York’s upcoming constitutional convention referendum, including an identification of the political actors (me) and arguments generally for (Richard Briffault) and against (Craig Holman).

The short course, which was recorded and posted online at The State Constitutional Constitution Clearinghouse and The New York State Constitutional Convention Clearinghouse, is intended as a resource for local opinion leaders in states with upcoming state constitutional convention referendums.

Between 2016 and 2034 at least one U.S. state every two years will have a referendum on whether to call a state constitutional convention: New York (2017), Hawaii (2018), Iowa (2020), Alaska (2022), Missouri (2022), New Hampshire (2022), Rhode Island (2024), Michigan (2026), Connecticut (2028), Hawaii (2028), Illinois (2028), Iowa (2030), Maryland (2030), Montana (2030), Alaska (2032), New Hampshire (2032), Ohio (2032), and Rhode Island (2034).

No periodic state constitutional convention referendum has passed since 1984—contributing to the longest drought in convening a state constitutional convention in U.S. history. After reviewing many debates leading to constitutional convention defeats, I concluded that the debate discourse was often ill-informed, partly because of a lack of local experts on whom the press could rely for historical and comparative information about state constitutional conventions.  

To rectify this problem, I have sought to provide easily accessible background information in a variety of different formats, including newspaper op-eds, online information clearinghouses, scholarly articles, public history events, and this short course.

My information clearinghouse on Rhode Island’s November 4, 2014 state constitutional convention referendum, the most recent such referendum, is the most comprehensive online documentation of the politics of such a referendum ever compiled online. The results of my research will be published in Snider, J.H., “Does the World Really Belong to the Living? The Decline of the Constitutional Convention in New York and Other U.S. States 1776-2015,” The Journal of American Political Thought.

Since only a tiny fraction of Americans has lived through a state constitutional convention in their adult lifetimes, and since Americans are not taught about state constitutional conventions (as opposed to the federal constitutional convention of 1787) during their formal schooling (even those such as myself who received a Ph.D. in American government), Americans approach these referendums starting with a huge knowledge deficit, making local opinion leaders that much more influential in public debates.

Too often local opinion elites and the public don’t focus on the referendum until only weeks or days before the vote, when the debate is dominated by lowest common denominator sound bites, including poorly informed opinion elites distracted by higher profile candidate races.  

Such a lack of attention and expertise should not be confused with lack of importance. As every young student learns, the preamble to the U.S. Declaration of Independence states that the American people have an “unalienable” right “to alter” their government. Thirty-seven of 50 U.S. states would eventually include similar rights language in their state constitutions; and all 50 state constitutions include some type of mechanism to implement that right. Clearly, the right to alter one’s constitution is one of the most fundamental, perhaps even the most fundamental, political rights Americans have. Implicit in that right is the right of the people to peaceably alter their constitution in the face of legislative opposition.

Fourteen states implement that right in part by granting the people the right at periodic intervals (ranging from 10 to 20 years) to call a state constitutional convention via a statewide referendum.  This institution, like the constitutional initiative, dramatically reduces the legislature’s gatekeeping power over constitutional amendment. Since legislatures have an institutional conflict of interest in proposing reforms that might weaken their own power, this institution serves a vital democratic function--albeit one that is rarely politically salient to the average voter.  

Motivating voters to care about the direct provision of collective goods, such as education or transportation, has proven hard. Harder still has been motivating people to care about indirect collective goods such as redistricting, campaign finance, or other “good government” reforms that serve as the platform for providing direct collective goods. Hardest of all may be motivating average voters to care about infrequent and unfamiliar mechanisms for creating good government—arguably, the ultimate collective action problem.

The price of serving as a check on legislatures is that legislatures are this institution’s intrinsic enemy. Powerful special interest groups with a track record of successfully influencing legislatures are also intrinsic enemies, as their ability to control a constitutional convention is a wildcard. Partly as a consequence of this intrinsic opposition and the collective goods nature of this institution for average voters, campaigns that oppose calling a state constitutional convention have tended to be much more sophisticated and better funded than campaigns that support calling a constitutional convention.  

A state constitutional convention referendum has the ingredients of a collective action problem: concentrated benefits for opposing one and diffuse benefits for favoring one.

Better educating the public about this institution via local opinion elites cannot eliminate this classic political problem, but it can mitigate it.

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On the short course page at NewYorkConCon.info, links can be found to the essays of the other symposium contributors as well as a two-hour documentary researched and compiled by J.H. Snider that consists of excerpts from TV documentaries and political ads on state constitutional conventions.

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