A recent Buffalo News op-ed provides insight into SUNY’s continued fight to get university reforms through the State Assembly.

“Count on Assemblyman Mark Schroeder to tell it straight. The Buffalo Democrat on Wednesday laid into Speaker Sheldon Silver for blocking a bill that would let the University at Buffalo and other SUNY campuses become the economic powerhouses that upstate needs them to be.

Not only is Silver hindering the region’s development through his obstructionism, but Schroeder says the speaker is also breaking a promise to support the bill if SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher endorsed it. Zimpher has, emphatically, yet the bill remains bottled up in the Assembly. Silver could move it along, but he won’t. What is this man trying to do?

Reports are that downstate members oppose letting campuses set their own tuition rates, a key part of the bill, because it could jeopardize the ability of poor New Yorkers to go to college. It’s not an unreasonable concern, but the answer is to deal with the issue, not to reject a visionary program that could jump-start the upstate economy and, not insignificantly, make upstate less dependent on tax dollars generated downstate. That’s what a leader would do. It’s not what Silver is doing.”

To read more click here.

Douglas Turner: Silver’s dominance blocks UB progress

Buffalo News columnist Douglas Turner is even more pointed in his view that the Assembly Speaker is an“obstructionist”.

“To call Sheldon Silver an “obstructionist” is like saying that the absolute lord paramount of the Assembly is from Manhattan and a Democrat.

All Assembly Speaker Silver does is stare, deal and block. However, Assemblyman Mark J. F. Schroeder, D-Buffalo, picked an inopportune time to blurt out the truth.

The reason is that Silver is on the threshold of drawing new election district lines for the Assembly, the State Senate and the U. S. Congress. The occasion is the census.

Silver is apt to reward Schroeder’s candor with a new Assembly district a mile wide running along the Buffalo River, the lake shore and eastward hugging the Pennsylvania border toward the Delaware River. Schroeder’s anger was stirred when Silver broke his word to advance legislation granting the University at Buffalo desperately

needed autonomy from the bureaucrats in Albany. Why Silver is blocking this bill I will tell you below.”

To read the rest of the column click here.