I disagree that Cornell is an elites-only institution. Besides, how would you have spent the money within the CUNY system? According to [1], their FY14 budget is $2.154B, so $133M would be a 6% bump for FY14. Any ideas?
Having spoken to administration who work for CUNY Baruch (which is a great school) who formerly worked at NYU, that money could make a huge difference. For instance, $40,000 was apparently practically a rounding error at NYU, while at Baruch the only way to free that up would be to fire someone, essentially.