Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York attorney general who has been investigating the relationship between student lenders and universities, has issued subpoenas to Columbia and to the CIT Group, and requested information from the University of Southern California and the University of Texas.

A senior lawyer in Mr. Cuomo’s office, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing, said, “As we gather the information we have subpoenaed from CIT, and we’ve subpoenaed both documents and testimony, we certainly will get to the bottom of all these relationships.”

The New York State Ethics Commission twice approved Mr. Ryan’s membership on the CIT board, in July 2003, when he was president at SUNY’s Maritime College, and again in July 2005, when he became SUNY’s acting chancellor.

Mr. Ryan said he had been unaware until yesterday that Maritime College, where he was president for three years, had listed Student Loan Xpress as a preferred lender last year, after he had left the campus. He was Maritime’s president from 2002 to 2005. He recently announced his intention to step down as SUNY’s chancellor at the end of May.

“I don’t make loans,” he said. “I don’t make any decisions as chancellor about who is going to be permitted to make student loans at each university or college. They have professionals that do that.”

Mr. Ryan said that CIT, a New York-based company that specializes in commercial and consumer finance, had not been in the student loan business when he joined its board in 2003. He said it entered that business in 2005 with the acquisition of Education Lending Group, the parent company for Student Loan Xpress. He said he had undoubtedly voted on the acquisition, but had not been consulted individually about it.

At the time of the acquisition, CIT’s chairman and chief executive, Jeffrey M. Peek, said student lending was attractive because it was a “higher growth business with predictable performance characteristics.”