cIcu | Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities

Meet cIcu's New President

Laura L. Anglin, an economist and authority on finance who has served in New York State government for more than two decades, became the seventh president and first female chief executive of the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities (cIcu) on July 16, 2009. She succeeds Abraham M. Lackman, cIcu’s president since 2002, and will now lead, coordinate, and represent the public policy interests of the more than 100 college presidents of New York State’s private, nonprofit institutions of higher education.

Born in New York City, Ms. Anglin grew up on Long Island and then came to Albany to go to college, where she received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from the State University of New York at Albany.  Her first job with New York State was as an intern economist with the Department of Environmental Conservation, where she had to determine how to value natural resources.  “At the time,” she says, “the State was taking action against Exxon for the oil spill [under the Arthur Kill waterway, one of the largest underground oil spills in history], and I was brought in to work on the case and research different methods to track a course for the State to recover damages.

“That was my first experience in State government. I loved the mix of policy, politics, and finance all at once…It was a good fit for me.”

It’s that same mix of interests, along with a formidable and relevant set of skills, that Laura Anglin brings to cIcu. Her earlier ambition, to become New York State’s Budget Director, was achieved when she was appointed to that post in 2008 by then-Governor Eliot Spitzer. Before that, she served as Deputy Comptroller for the State of New York after several years at the New York State Assembly, where she began as a fiscal analyst and rose to the position of Budget Director and First Deputy Fiscal Director for the Assembly Ways and Means Committee under Speaker Sheldon Silver.

Having met the various demands of being Budget Director, Ms. Anglin is looking forward to tackling the long-term challenges facing New York State’s Independent Sector. As an economist, she notes that although New York State has seen a decline in employment in almost all sectors, opportunities in two areas, health care and education, continue to increase. In addition, as the U.S. economy shifts away from manufacturing, and New York State from a financial sector that was once an engine of growth, the State’s colleges and universities are poised to play an even larger role during the transition to idea-driven creative industries.

“We’re moving away,” Ms. Anglin says, “from certain traditional bases that the economy has relied on to new areas. I don’t think New York’s economy will be anything like it’s been in the past. We’re going through a very long transformation that is just starting now, with colleges and universities not only retooling the workforce but also contributing to the sciences, to research, being incubators of new businesses and important, stabilizing economic forces in the communities around their campuses. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the State economy, and I think we have an opportunity to ignite a real transformation, with the independent colleges and universities at the core of that change.”

She does not underestimate the challenges ahead, among them losses in college endowment funds, the increased dependence of many colleges on tuition payments, decreases in the availability of loans, and a decline in student enrollment in the State’s primary schools. But with the resources of New York State’s many diverse institutions of higher education, and her own extensive experience in public policy and finance, Laura Anglin is ready for and even enthusiastic about meeting those challenges. As she puts it, “I do believe that for a university and college to be successful, you have to have a healthy community…the two really are intertwined…being here and finding solutions is a very exciting thing for me.”

Laura L. Anglin's biography