CEO of Opportunity America and special assistant to Mayor Giuliani. A year later, on June 7, 1999, the task force report entitled "An Institution Adrift" characterized the "moribund conditions" of a public University system "caught in a spiral of decline". Schmidt and his colleagues called for a complete restructuring of the City University of New York system. Specifically, Schmidt advised CUNY to organize into a unified university system, rather than continue under a system of governance in which each of its 17-campuses runs itself as a separate fiefdom. Similarly, in a section on financial planning, Schmidt advised the university overhaul the passivity of CUNY's central Executive Administration. Four years later, Governor George E. Pataki appointed Benno C. Schmidt Jr. to the position of chairman of the City University of New York Board of Trustees. In 2003, Schmidt was reappointed to the position of chair. Prior, Schmidt served CUNY's Board in the positions of Vice Chairperson, from 1999 to 2003. In 2006, Governor George Pataki reappointed Schmidt to the position of Chair another seven-year term. In 2016, financial impropriety by the former City College of New York, and an investigation conducted by the New York State Office of the Inspector General, concluding the City University of New York financial system was "ripe for abuse" due to a lack of proper oversight of decentralized funds, resulting in "financial waste and abuse," prompting Governor Andrew Cuomo to replace Schmidt with a new chairman, and most of the CUNY Board of Trustees with a new bloc of politically prominent trustees. Other professional and civic service Schmidt has served as Director/Trustee of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation; chairman of board for the Council on Aid to Education - a not-for-profit providing colleges and universities assessment and strategic planning services; National Humanities Center (NHC), and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as an advisory board member of the Happy Hearts Fund, a nonprofit focused on rapidly rebuilding schools in disaster-stricken areas. Schmidt serves as Vice Chairman on the board of directors of Edison Schools, Inc., after serving as the organization's chairman from 1992 to 2007. In 2014, Schmidt delivered a talk at Yale commencement, entitled "Governance for a New Era", or "The Schmidt Report", and subtitled "A Blueprint for Higher Education Trustees", in which the former University president harshly criticizes passive governance over the nation's public and smaller private institutions, which serve the vast