By CRAIG FREILICH

POTSDAM – SUNY Potsdam Interim Pres. Dennis Hefner, who began work last month, has pledged to meet with the mayor and police chief on “town and gown” issues including student drunkenness.

“I understand we have a young population, and, when there are instances of excessive drinking, that that can create problems in village neighborhoods,” said Hefner in an interview last week.

“We don’t want that to happen, we don’t like it to happen, and we are more than willing to work with the village to try to limit those episodes.”

President of SUNY Fredonia for 16 years, Hefner came out of retirement to guide SUNY Potsdam until a new permanent president can be sought out and hired.

He said he hasn’t met with Mayor Steve Yurgartis and Police Chief Kevin Bates yet, but “I will be meeting with them to see if there are issues we can work on together and be good neighbors.”

His experience apparently informs him that a college town depends on police to keep young people from hurting themselves or others and keeping them from offending the locals.

That was a point driven home during the November 2011 vote against village government dissolution, when the possibility of a police force reduction seemed to turn the tide against the idea of the village abandoning its services to an uncertain future.

Other Issues

Other issues Hefner expects to work on during his stay here include the governor’s Start-Up NY economic development ideas for SUNY campuses, the state university’s emphasis on cost-cutting through sharing services among SUNY units, working to reverse diminishing enrollment at the college, teacher placement in the North Country, and countering charges that teacher training at the college is not measuring up to at least one group’s standards.

“I know there are external groups with agendas that are designed more to make headlines than to provide real analysis,” Hefner said, criticizing not just the methodology but the motives of a group called the National Council on Teacher Quality, which gave Potsdam and other SUNY units one out of four stars under assorted criteria.

“This group is not looking at the relevant research,” he said. Things NCTC said SUNY Potsdam was doing wrong, such as giving teacher trainees experience at two schools and not just one, is in fact established as a “best practice,” Hefner said.

“All the SUNY schools are doing the same thing. All the research shows this produces better teachers.”

As further evidence of the effectiveness of the school’s training, Hefner pointed to two tests that teacher trainees have to take before they get their credentials.

On both tests, the statewide average is a 60 to 70 percent pass rate. Over the last five years, one student out of about 1,300 failed the elementary education test; and 3,000 Potsdam teaching students in the last five years have taken a required writing test, “and every single Potsdam student passed that test. So personally, I feel very good about the quality of our teacher education program.”

Job Issues

As for placing new teachers from Potsdam in jobs in the North Country, Hefner feels there are a couple of reasons for diminishing success lately. There are fewer teachers at North Country schools in part because the numbers of public school students here have been declining for years, and with recent budget crunches, many teachers have been laid off.

But if a newly minted teacher is willing to move to places like New York’s Hudson Valley or North Carolina, they will have more success, Hefner said.

But, shining a positive light on Gov. Cuomo’s Start-Up NY business development proposal for SUNY communities, Hefner said, “It seems to me if Start-Up NY is successful in courting new jobs, the outcome will be good for everybody,” including teachers who will be in more demand.

And he believes there are a couple of reasons for a recent decline in enrollment at the college.

“It’s primarily because of a reduction in the number of high school graduates in the North Country,” and he says he will be “working with various offices around the campus to expand our outreach to high school student populations where we are yet to be involved.”

Another reason for lower enrollment, particularly among graduate students, is an effect of the lower demand for teachers in the North Country: more new Potsdam teachers are taking their bachelor’s degrees and moving to where the jobs are, and then taking their master’s degree courses there and not here.

Sharing Services

As for sharing services among SUNY schools, “I have no problem with campuses working together to save money and improve efficiency,” he said, but “I do feel too much attention has been paid to shared services. and not enough to the accomplishments on this campus over the last few years.”

That might be because the sharing initiative from Albany got off to a bad start a couple of summers ago with an ill-advised attempt to force Canton and Potsdam campuses to share a president, which resulted in faculty protests and a general outpouring of opposition from both campuses about a possible loss of uniqueness at the two very different colleges. After that, some people were wary of any attempt to share positions and programs, no matter how sensible.

But that initiative took a big step forward this week with the signing of a joint memorandum of understanding with a list of things SUNY Potsdam and SUNY Canton have agreed to work at combining and sharing, over and above the shared financial and information offices that have been established already.

Hefner said the new effort was aimed at “clearly defining the shared services we’ll be working on over the next two years,” in academic programs, support services, and joint purchasing. Hefner said those plans will be “sent to SUNY to inform them of what we’ll be doing.”

As for the presidency of the college, Hefner says the formal process of finding a new executive will begin in December and that he expects interviews to begin in the spring, with a new president in place in time for the fall 2014 semester.