The Historic Perspective

In the early 1970s, another Vice Chancellor’s taskforce was appointed to review and make recommendations on contract provisions. A group consisting of the principle auxiliary service professional at each SUNY campus was initially organized to conduct a collaborative review of the standard contract format and represent the interests of all the corporations in the continued The Historic Perspective R E A D Y F O R T H E C H A L L E N G E S S U N Y A U X I L I A R I E S 3 system. That group evolved into the SUNY Auxiliary Services Association (SASA). From time to time over decades, some ASCs experienced financial, legal, or organizational crisis. As necessary, and to ensure the interests of SUNY and local campuses, SUNY Central (now System Administration) worked collaboratively with SASA to develop appropriate oversight and control mechanisms to forestall problems and keep the ASCs financially solvent and organizationally stable. The most recent contract formats recognize the localized relationship and accountability of each ASC to its home campus. Since its original charter, SASA has been an effective spokes-group, advocate, and resource for the university’s ASCs.

Paralleling the development of the university, the original mission of the campus ASCs to offer food, books and vending products blossomed into a wide proliferation of other services such as laundry, amusements, resort facilities, faculty/student housing, hair salons, accounting and computer services for campus organizations, check cashing, campus transportation, rubbish removal and cleaning services. The National Association of College Auxiliary Services (NACAS), having amembership of almost 1400 college campuses, identified [94?] campus service functions providedby their members under the general title of “auxiliary services” (see EXHIBIT 2). While no singlecampus ASC provides all services; collectively, they were well represented across the system.

With most ASCs showing modest profits during the later 70s, and when public (tax based) support of SUNY began to shrink, campus administrations sought support and underwriting for (non-educational) development activities and other initiatives that could not be funded through continued S U N Y A U X I L I A R I E S R E A D Y F O R T H E C H A L L E N G E S 4 SUNY’s state budget appropriations. Such assistance from ASCs came forth under the banner of “program funding”. Each ASC, working collaboratively through its Board of Directors, soon developed its own methodology or formula by which it would allocate a portion of excess revenues to these purposes according to each corporation’s resource and asset structure, while maintaining fiscal stability.

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