The New York State Legislature rebuffed Gov. Andrew Cuomo last year when he proposed that the State University of New York, which has 64 campuses, and the City University of New York, which has 24, develop a plan for combining their administrative functions.

Legislators correctly saw this as a stealth plan for merging two systems with dissimilar cultures and different educational missions and, in the process, undermining City University’s historic commitment to the urban poor.

Nevertheless, the merger idea reappeared this year in news reports and again when Mr. Cuomo, complaining of administrative bloat at City University, tried to cut its state allotment by nearly half a billion dollars.

The merger idea has been around for quite a while. As the City University professors Stephen Brier and Michael Fabricant explain in their forthcoming history, “Austerity Blues: Fighting for the Soul of Public Higher Education,” Nelson Rockefeller, who essentially built the state’s public higher education system, wanted to absorb New York City’s colleges into the state university system at the beginning of the 1960s.