It is unusual for a state lobbying effort to gain a passing reference in a book that garnered national attention – especially if that effort is hardly the stuff of political debate and breathless editorials. But ARIA did it.
In his book on the abbreviated administration of Eliot Spitzer, longtime friend and Spitzer confidante Lloyd Constantine references NYSHEI’s Academic Research Information Access (ARIA) act. In the book, Journal of the Plague Year: An Insider’s Chronicle of Eliot Spitzer’s Short and Tragic Reign, Constantine writes of his frustration to advance particular policy concerns:
“I thought I was so tricky and smart – inserting promises into the State of the State speech during that chaotic last-minute drafting session, thinking that this would guarantee at least some modest delivery on the rhetoric. In other areas, however, such as a $15 million promise to the state’s academic libraries, which I stuck into Eliot’s speech, but the budget division veterans ignored.
I also argued directly to Eliot for more funding for public higher education. He pointed to his State of the State promise to convene a Commission on Higher Education. The Commission would propose vastly increased funding and how it should be used. Increased resources for higher education would begin in the 2008-2009 budget. The next year and the next budget would be the time and place for higher ed. to become a major pillar of New York State’s bright future.”
That Commission, which was managed by Mr. Constantine, would directly recommend ARIA as the “academic library pooling of electronic information,” and that the State “invest $15 million to facilitate college and university libraries moving from individual library licenses to state-wide shared licenses.”
You will find no review of the Plague Year here (but you can read about it from the NY Times and Newsweek among others). Instead, I only offer the sincere gratitude of NYSHEI to Mr. Constantine for doing every thing he could to adopt our issue and work toward its fulfillment. Although the end of the Spitzer administration was – among many other things to many other people – a setback for the ARIA initiative, the life breathed into that proposal by Mr. Constantine laid the foundation for the mounting successes of our advocacy.
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