SUNY trustee nominee appointed today
-
- January
- 29
Linda Sanford of Chappaqua, Westchester County, received approval from the Senate today to serve as a State University of New York trustee. She is the third of three nominations Gov. Eliot Spitzer made to the 16-member board last June. Two others—former state Comptroller H. Carl McCall and former state Board of Regents Chancellor Carl Hayden—received approval in the fall. She joins the board as it searches for a new chancellor. SUNY has had an interim chancellor in place since June.
Sanford, 55, replaces the Rev. John Cremins of Queens, a trustee since 2002. She is senior vice president for on demand transformation and information technology at IBM. Before that, she was senior vice president and group executive in charge of IBM Storage Systems Group and held other jobs with IBM. She is co-chair of the state Business Council and serves on various boards, including St. John’s University, which she attended as an undergraduate, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she earned a master’s degree.
“I believe in this transformation. I believe in the SUNY system and you will have my full commitment,” Sanford told Senate Higher Education Committee Chairman Kenneth LaValle, R-Suffolk County.
Committee members interviewed her this morning, then her nomination went through the Senate Finance Committee before being approved by the full Senate. Trustees are not paid.
Sanford said she would need to learn more about a proposal for modest annual tuition increases at SUNY before forming an opinion. Spitzer’s Commission on Higher Education recommended annual increases to make tuition more predictable and prevent large spikes. SUNY needs to stay true to its mission of affordability and access to all, and the system should focus on asking former graduates for contributions, she said.
Sanford said the next chancellor of the 64-campus system has to be a leader and an “agent of change” who thinks creatively and forms collaborations.
Sanford she’d like to be known on the board as the trustee for innovation and transforming SUNY to a great university system for the 21st century.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 6:57 pm by Cara Matthews.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
