Council of Illinois University Senates Minutes

April 18, 2005

Founders Suite, Bone Student Center

Illinois State University

Normal, IL

(Approved)

9:00 a.m. Welcome/Brunch

9:30 a.m. Call to Order: The meeting was called to order by ISU Senate Chairperson, Professor Lane Crothers.

Present: Lane Crothers, ISU, Curt White, ISU IBHE-FAC Representative, Allen Shub, NEIU, Paul Stoddard, NIU, Kathleen Tunney, SIUE, Ken Andersen, UIUC, Matt Blankenship, WIU

Morning Session

Approval of CIUS Minutes of November 15, 2004

The Council approved the minutes of November 15, 2004.

MAP Funds to Private Institutions

Professor Andersen: Given the balance of legislators, who have strong ties to the private schools and we met in FAC with a lot of them, MAP is very important to them.

Professor Blankenship: What is the break down of the portion of monies going to the private schools?

Professor Crothers: It’s is about 54% to the privates, approximately 30% to us and the rest to the community colleges.

Professor White: That is what Elliot Regenstein told us at the last board meeting. There may be a time when things settle down when we can sit down and say it’s nice that the privates have been getting this money, but it time to make a change.

Professor Andersen: Also, it’s sticker price versus real price. So much of what the privates charge gets turned around as being tuition offsets and so the price that they put on their tuition is not really their tuition cost.

Professor White: Eureka College cut its tuition by one third and they have increased the number of deposits of those who apply there by 90%. So, in some ways for the privates, that big sticker price is a deterrent because people look at and they think it’s real. It’s useful for them strategically to gain more MAP money, but it also drives away a lot of students.

Professor Andersen: We are facing some of the same problems at the U of I; our applications are very sharply down for minorities. What they don’t understand is if they would apply, they have all of these aid packages and monies that could come along. We talked about some of that in the Accountability Committee of the IBHE and I tried to make the point that psychologically, some of these people are just not applying even though U of I is not as expensive as some of the other institutions. So this matter of affordability is going to hurt all of us.

Professor Crothers: Our minority applications are up this year. Until someone from SIUC or otherwise chooses to come up and make a vigorous case for that one, we can consider that at least tabled.

Policy for Irregular Administrative Admissions

Professor Shub: At our university, we have had two deans who have been administratively appointed without a search. We have had associate deans, an associate provost and, in fact, even our president was appointed by the Board of Trustees without a search. These are permanent appointments. When I have asked about that, the Affirmative Action Officer told me that if anyone has ever gone through a search before, they don’t have to go through a search again. I have never seen that in writing; to me, it doesn’t make sense.

Professor Crothers: I checked with our HR officer and he said that that is true under the law, but on our campus, they wouldn’t do it.

Professor Andersen: What you are saying is if they have gone through a search before, meaning that if you have looked at them before on your campus, they can then appoint them?

Professor Crothers: Apparently so.

Professor Andersen: Did the HR person say anything about appointment of faculty?

Professor Crothers: I did not ask that question. We have a formal set of administrative selection policies, though we have spent the last three years redrafting them. There are exemptions in those polices for interim appointments and for turning interim appointments into permanent appointments, but they are rarely implemented.

Professor White: Dr. Goldfarb was made permanent provost after a one-year interim by President Strand at ISU, without a search.

Professor Crothers: Jan Shane was appointed as the Associate Provost in the same way.

Professor Shub: The dean of the graduate school re-appointed an interim associate dean for another year and that raised many concerns. It had to come through the University Council before he was allowed to do that, so he had to back up and resubmit everything. We may not require a full search, but it would at least have to come through the governing body.

Professor Andersen: At what level would a search have to start?

Professor Crothers: Our policy varies by the nature of the job, but vacancies for the four vice presidents, in the draft policy, are announced by the President to the Senate. A search committee, which was written into the policy, is then formed. The chair of the search committee is a faculty member. That faculty member is chosen from the “Panel of 10”, which is ten people that the Academic Senate elected to potentially serve in these roles. Then there is a distribution of representation on the committee. Deans' positions are announced by either the President or Provost, but the rules about constituting the committee come from members of the college.

Professor Shub: Would a dean go through a search?

Professor White: Absolutely.

Professor Shub: How about an associate dean?

Professor Crothers: It would be up to the dean how elaborate a search he/she would want to have.

Professor Blankenship: I don’t know about in terms of associate deans, but our process sounds a lot like yours in terms of deans. One of the things we included in our procedures was that there is some discretion for the president or the provost to add people to the committee, but faculty majority has to be maintained.

Professor Tunney: That would apply to searches as well as to appointments of the type that Professor Shub referenced?

Professor Crothers: Were these deans in interim positions or were they just appointed.

Professor Shub: One dean was an interim when she was appointed. The dean of the graduate college was a totally new appointment.

Professor Tunney: Without faculty input?

Professor Shub: Without faculty input.

Professor Andersen: Our statutes provide for the chancellor to assemble the committee, but we control the number of members and from what constituencies. Gradually, we have opened that up to more constituencies in addition to faculty. Increasingly, now we have done things like nominate two people to chair the committee from whom the president selects one. All of general university officers have to discuss it with the Senate’s Conference, which is the governing body for the three campuses, and they don’t have to necessarily concur, but they have to at least seek their advice. Dean search committees tend to be appointed by our chancellor or provost in consultation with the executive committees of the colleges involved. Increasingly, those committees are being chaired by a fellow dean rather than by faculty. I am not sure that that is a good move.

Professor Crothers: Our dean searches are chaired by faculty from a different college and there is an administrative appointment, such as a department chair, who will serve as the secretary of the search committee.

Professor Andersen: I think our Springfield campus probably has less faculty control of their administrative appointments. Chicago has more and we probably have the most on our campus. The cultures do make a difference.

Professor Shub: For the College of Ed interim appointment, it wasn’t a big deal; but for the graduate college it was a surprise that this particular person was appointed. The most recent thing that has occurred, which we will take up at the next Senate meeting, is that the College of Business Dean recently appointed a new associate dean. The individual has been at the university only a year and a half and is not tenured. The dean has a history with this person from a former university. I don’t know if there are any grounds for overturning an appointment.

Professor Crothers: My experience in general is that associated deans are searched, but that is by the dean’s choice. We have no rules governing associate dean searches. You need to get beyond the case and began to make an argument about creating policies for selections. You could start working with the president and others to see if they can understand the positive benefits of not having the appearance of an unfair search or appointment.

Professor Andersen: I think that one of the problems that we have is getting people to participate in shared governance. I am retired and I am still active in the Senate because if I wasn’t there, we would have an empty slot for our department. Increasingly, I see more and more of the aging of governance participants and nobody coming along to replace them.

Professor Crothers: I think we are out of bodies in the sense that we have had a huge turnover in faculty; the rehiring has really slowed down on our campus and therefore you have a population of senior faculty and a population of new faculty who shouldn’t be put into most of those kinds of leadership roles. Therefore, that population of experienced, middle faculty is pretty thin.

Professor Tunney: At our university, the associates are the burden carries. One of the things that I want to take up in the fall when I become active as Senate President is the issue of scholarship of service and looking at how you document excellence in service.

Professor Andersen: Some people view service in faculty governance roles as not being service and service to your discipline as not necessarily service. So, they define service in a kind of limited way of reaching out to the outside world or to non-professional bodies and I find that to be a very strange view of service.

Professor Tunney: I agree and I think that that has to change. I want to study the literature and operationalization of what university service really means.

Professor Andersen: A couple of years back, we composed several documents in our Senate in which we tried to lay out what constitutes service. I could check with our Senate office and they could probably send those documents to you.

Professor Crothers: I meet every other week with the President and the Provost separately. Is that typical on other campuses?

Professor Tunney: We meet once a month with the Chancellor.

Professor Crothers: Because of Professor White, who was chairperson before me, my office is now in between the president’s and provost’s office.

Professor White: I always said that that was the most important thing that I did in increasing the Senate’s visibility.

Professor Blankenship: We have been asked if we want to move our Senate office into the main administrative building. It has been a tradition, however, that it is always outside of the main administrative building.

Professor White: The tendency is that in adversarial moments, it’s too easy to say, ‘we don’t have to take them seriously’. It’s more difficult for them to say that if you are sitting in the middle of them and your office looks a lot like their office.

Professor Crothers: The symbolism is also there; when people are on their way to the Provost’s office, they walk by the Senate office.

Professor White: It’s all about visual rhetoric. It was former Provost Goldfarb who actually got us set up in that office.

Professor Andersen: We used to have faculty representatives working in the vice president’s office. They would work there for a year or two and then go back to their slot. When I was in the Vice Chancellor’s office, I was faculty. It makes a tremendous difference when you are sitting at the table. If I had my choice, the provost, the deans, and the Vice President for Administration would all have part-time faculty doing work in their offices.

Professor Crothers: That is not a bad idea.

Truth in Tuition:

Professor Crothers: I don’t think that we are having any big hassles with Truth in Tuition. I think we are going to maintain our freeze on fees with the exception of the part that goes to pay raises.

Professor Andersen: Our fees have gone up sharply because of student demand for very luxurious physical ed and other kinds of facilities. The demand from students seems unlimited and they will vote for them all the time.

Professor Crothers: We are freezing fees for all four years and we are only allowing increases for the amount of the fee that pays salary increases.

Professor Shub: We actually raised our fees by about 8 or 9%. A huge chuck of that came out of the rise in health service fees. Actually, the carrier they had for the students wanted to increase its charge to the university by 50+%. We negotiated with somebody else and so it was only a 27% increase.

Professor Crothers: I was on the health fee committee this year and our insurer came back with about a 14% increase, but also increased the individual liability from $200,000 to $1 million. We are not increasing fees to cover it.

Professor Andersen: So how will you cover it?

Professor Crothers: Reallocation.

Professor Andersen: From a student account chunk or from somewhere else in the university?

Professor Crothers: No, it would have to come out of fees.

Professor Andersen: One impact of truth in tuition is that it does exacerbate that impact of people being deterred by the price, where as if you were incrementing each of the four years, there would be less impact.

Professor Crothers: We are forming a task force about graduate tuition, because that is not affected by truth in tuition and it is not amortized across four years. Do you want to see 14 and 16% graduate tuition increases every two years? So, right now our graduate tuition is becoming significantly less than our undergraduate tuition.

Professor Blankenship: At the end of last year, we voted to approve a cost guarantee for our graduate programs. We had across the board increases for our undergraduates, so it was a 9% tuition increase, as well as a fee and a housing increase.

Professor White: What percentage of our grad students actually pay tuition?

Professor Crothers: That is another dimension; it is a relatively small percentage. In some cases, tuition waivers are in real dollars and, in some cases, they are not.

Professor Andersen: Are you getting pressure from students about textbook costs?

Professor Crothers: A statewide committee did a report last year and I have not heard anything back since then.

Professor White: That’s because it died at the state level.

Professor Andersen: Most of our students don’t complain; but the governor has certainly latched on to it and apparently it is going to come back.

Professor Stoddard: Our students are complaining about the high cost; even the paperbacks are so expensive.

Professor Shub: Our student newspaper came out fully in favor of textbook rental despite start up costs.

Professor Crothers: There is also the issue of storage; where would you store all of the books?

Professor Stoddard: We have decided to focus on reducing the costs as much as we can by putting things on line where copyrights are not an issue and making up our own printed packets of materials. You don’t have to buy the whole bundle with the study guide and CD and are pointing out to the faculty that you can just assign the textbook and not all of the other stuff.

Professor Crothers: I am not sure that there is that much complaining on this campus. I wonder if it just a natural distribution. As ISU has gotten more expensive, I don’t know if better-off students are ending up at certain campuses.

Professor Blankenship: We definitely have a sense at our school that when student government latches on to something, you can tell by how many articles are in the paper. There was a lot of discussion of this. One of the things we found helpful and I think the students are excited about is that our bookstore sent all of the orders electronically through a distributor called E-Follet. The company makes the information about the required text available electronically. We don’t even have to do anything extra in the way of getting that information in the students’ hands, for example, by July. So, they are not necessarily captive consumers at our campus. They are free to go to Amazon.com. I think that some of the student groups might start to advertise that fact and about going to the E-Follet web page. Our faculty were totally against the idea of a rental system.

Professor Tunney: Students at our school are encouraged to buy some of the textbooks at the end of the class and they can so do very, very cheaply.

Professor Stoddard: With rentals, you have problems with academic freedom because you have to commit to the same book year after year.

IBHE Big Picture Meetings

Professor Crothers: The Big Picture Meetings was a topic that came up last year. Previously, the IBHE had gone out to campuses to do these Big Picture Meetings. Some campuses were open about having governance group members participate and others were not. I believe that the main reason that the IBHE did not go to campuses this year but held the meetings in Springfield was because the new Director of the IBHE has a child who is quite ill. I don’t know if next year they will come to campuses again.

Professor Blankenship: I was disappointed that we did not have the IBHE meeting at our campus, but I understand. Ours are open; there was, however, no invitation to go to Springfield with the administrative team. We had talked about the issues that they were going to be pushing.

Professor Stoddard: At our campus, I don’t think that the Chair of the Faculty Senate has ever been invited to the Big Picture Meetings on campus.

Professor Crothers: The Senate Chair and the Civil Service and AP Chairs are invited.

Professor White: My impression when I used to go to the meetings was that the IBHE was very happy to have us there. They asked us questions and so if there is anyway for you to put pressure on your provosts and presidents to give you a seat at the table, I would strongly recommend it.

Professor Crothers: A lot of what I am hearing is that this governor has marginalized the IBHE a great deal and tried to turn it into a direct wing of the governor’s office rather than an authority.

Professor Andersen: This governor wants to own every single agency. It is clear by what he wants to do to SURS. The reason I think that the IBHE delayed starting a search was because that there was some concern that the political machinations would undo a search so they were better off staying with Lamont as interim.

Professor White: Interestingly, the IBHE has really seemed to turn FAC loose as a kind of a lobbying group. They don’t try to put any kinds of limitations on us. Now, they seem to say, ‘if you want to think of yourself as a lobbying group going straight to politicians, go ahead.’

Professor Andersen: I think that Lamont feels that we can do some things that they can’t do; provided that we don’t go off the ranch too much, go to it.

Professor White: If you see an IBHE head in there that is a voice for the governor’s office, they will try to rein us in. The IBHE feels now that they are being treated by the governor’s office as if they don’t really count. So the IBHE, working with FAC, now has to find its friends in Springfield working against the governor.

Professor Blankenship: Is Illinois unique in the appointment of board members to university boards?

Professor Andersen: In the majority of states, the governor does appoint. The way in which it goes varies from state to state. The U of I used to have elections, but they changed that. Under Edgar, we thought the appointment procedure worked very well. That view has since died and so a lot of people would like to go back to the elections because we feel we had better representation. One of the problems with new appointments it that they don’t know the history—what the basis of the decisions were.

Faculty Productivity Report/Community College Four-Year Degrees

Professor Crothers: Is not the Faculty Productivity Report by all accounts dead?

Professor Andersen: Not really. The Priorities, Productivity and Accountability Committee split into two parts. The B part has already reported and recommended several different recording mechanisms, some of which the Faculty Advisory Council endorsed. Essentially, it would lighten the burden on administrations as far as the reports that they have to generate. There is a draft now out of the report from the A part, which is priorities and productivity. The issue there is do we make any glancing mention of faculty workload or do we leave it out. Faculty workload has simply not been an issue that that committee has spent any time on. The area of most focus and concern has really been on distance learning kinds of things, especially as those managed by the for-profit institutions and Kaplan has been quite concerned about that, because he believes that it is a consumer protection issue. So a lot of the committees work has been providing information on how they certify the programs, what the standards are that the staff uses in approving the offering of degrees and certificates.

Professor White: At each FAC meeting, virtually every politician and every IBHE member have all said that this is going to come eventually—faculty productivity and workloads are on the agenda and are not going away. But everything we have seen from the committee itself would indicate that it is not on the front burner.

Professor Crothers: At least in the short term, I think we are going to have to worry about these productivity requirements. I think that the work on assessment that FAC and now the university has been doing for several years has political advantages. You can actually present the matrix and the results in a report to them.

Professor Andersen: The Performance Indicators Report has been very helpful in that respect.

Professor Blankenship: Did Steve Rock come back to FAC with anything because he asked the Faculty Senate if we wanted to get involved in producing some kind of a journal of the average work week? By virtue of being part of the American Democracy Project, our campus was asked to participate in a research survey and all 600 faculty participated. The survey was from UCLA; it had all sorts of questions about job satisfaction, work habits and research and service proportions. Our suggestion to Steve was that as soon as those results came out, that that might be something useful.

Professor Crothers: I haven’t heard anything in a while about community college four-year degree offerings.

Professor Andersen: The statement made at the board meeting was that the sponsor of that has not moved it to committee so it is dead essentially for this year. However, the FAC is meeting next Friday at Harper College, which is the college that wants to offer the four-year degree. There is very strong opposition coming from a lot of other schools and the community college board is opposed to it. Community colleges are making their facilities available for degrees offered by out-of-state schools. That’s legal to do. Are there other states that are dealing with the issue of four-year degrees from community colleges?

Professor Crothers: I know in North Carolina, it is an integrated system. From the University of North Carolina through the community colleges, it is one giant system. They don’t have to deal with these dimensions because they have established roles for each of the institutions and have invested heavily in them to make sure that they have the capacity to meet the needs that exist.

Professor Andersen: One of the issues that this state is going to have to address is if we are talking about including the high school curriculum, they are going to have to do a lot of consolidation of down-state school districts. That gets to be an incredibly controversial issue, but I think it also has an impact on what is going to happen at the higher educational level if these kids come out of inadequate programs. Some schools can’t offer a curriculum that gets them ready to do what they have to do at any institution in this state.

Professor Stoddard: Is HB 750 pretty much dead?

Professor Crothers: From all accounts.

Professor Andersen: Well, it’s hard to know.

Professor Crothers: The last I heard from the governor’s office was that it is a tax increase and he won’t pass it.

Professor White: That is what Regenstein said.

Professor Andersen: The bill introduced by Rick Winkle to the Senate is to devote a chunk of the dollars raised for higher ed to public institutions. He is going to do the tax swap with property taxes, but he is not going to solve the structural deficit issue, so his is a smaller tax increase than is proposed in house bills.

Health Benefits

Professor Crothers: Most of us know that the governor replaced Caremark by another prescription administrator. I think that most of us are discovering the concerns with long-term prescription drugs having to be ordered by mail or only a few pharmacies locally agreeing to serve us.

Professor Shub: The only thing that came up is that with Caremark, there was a very long process in terms of getting the other pharmacies on board. With Caremark, they were reluctant to pass on whatever information was necessary. The concern is that with the new agency, we are going to see a repeat of that. All of these people who finally came on line a couple of months ago are going to have to start all over again. We had a couple of smaller, locally-owned pharmacies that went in on it and it is just a major hassle for them.

Professor Andersen: I have been told that a lot of the small pharmacies simply can’t afford it.

Professor Crothers: It is aimed at the mega distributors. I know that Walgreen’s is trying to get a new policy by July. The other thing is that there are complaints that our health benefits are always negotiated by AFSCME, but no one ever asks us what we think.

Professor Stoddard: What Caremark tends to do, which will change with Medco, is when your physician prescribes something, Caremark often calls physicians’ offices to try to get it changed. I know a couple of physicians who say that they never talked to Caremark, but then Caremark says that they did speak with the doctor. I think that since there are so many doctors who say that they have never spoken with Caremark, I tend to believe the doctors as opposed to Caremark.

Professor Andersen: A big issue for Champaign-Urbana is that they tried to do away with Health Alliance.

Professor Crothers: That provoked a huge dissent here as well.

Professor Andersen: But, apparently, they are going to renew them for next year.

Professor Stoddard: Our human resource department is very reluctant to tell anyone what is going on until they are sure of what is going to happen.

Professor Crothers: I usually get information from the Provost and the President when I talk to them.

Professor Andersen: I think that HR doesn’t want to give out information that may not be fully accurate.

Lunch Break

Afternoon Session

Pension Concerns:

ØLetter to Governor Regarding Proposed Pension Cuts (Professor Jean Wolski, EIU)

ØLetter to Legislators Regarding State Pension Commission Recommendations (Professor Gary Lyon, Governor State University)

Professor Crothers: I have composed a letter to the governor for endorsement by the ISU Academic Senate, using the letter from Jean Wolski at EIU as a template. I just highlighted the main points in our letter and made a few revisions. I thought that the salary increase language was a little unclear and so I tried to clarify some of that. For the most part, most of us get a huge bump from the end of career salary increases for teaching summer school and whatever else.

Professor Andersen: One of the reasons that they use that is that they freeze the salaries once you have been with them for a certain amount of time and then they offer this as an inducement for you to stay on because when you retire, they will give you this big bonus. As Hacking points out, instead of doing it in the last four years, you can do in years five through eight and then form some kind of agreement that you will serve four more years.

Professor Blankenship: It is kind of an odd practice; doesn’t it turn out very inconsistently from person to person? It seems like administrator X from a public school system is going to be treated a little differently than someone at a different school system, in the same part of the state even.

Professor Crothers: It is clearly a situation where political abuse is potentially very high. For us, it is less of an issue. In my department, we structurally advantage soon to retire faculty for summer school teaching. So, they are first in line to get the slots.

Professor Andersen: It depends. If you are on the Money Purchase Formula, that bump may not be that much; if you are on the standard formula, then it will make quite a bit of difference. The majority of our faculty retire on money purchase because it is a much better deal for them, so there is no point in working those extra summers.

Professor Crothers: Unless they take away the Money Purchase Formula.

Professor Stoddard: It is not that you won’t get the additional benefits, you will; it is that the university or the school district has to pay for it instead of the state, which is obviously a big disincentive for the university or the school system.

Professor Andersen: The other problem with that is when you went with that system and you got half of your sick pay back as a bonus at the end, nobody put the money in against that. The result has been that in many cases for faculty retirement, we have had to leave the position vacant for at least year in order to fill in those dollars. That has had a very negative effect on course load.

Professor Crothers: We have been doing that for years. We have no choice; we have the Academic Impact Fund, which has now been squeezed. After the payouts, the fund is supposed to operate such that the difference between the retiree’s salary and a non-tenure track salary provides us money to redistribute for lines. Now the gap between the retirees’ salaries and the incoming faculty salaries has gotten so small, that a lot of that saving effect is no longer there.

Professor Andersen: The salary compression in the last few years has been astonishing. I have had trouble in our Senate getting anyone concerned. When I chaired the Budget Committee, we did a letter writing campaigns that did make a difference. The current Budget Committee Chair worries about the university budget, but doesn’t worry about getting anymore money put into the system. What I am going to try to do is go to the Senate Executive Committee to act on the behalf of the Senate in writing that letter.

Professor Stoddard: The question I raised earlier was whether this body would like to write a similar letter. It was suggested to me that that would be a very good idea and would carry some weight. Usually, from groups like the senates, a letter carries about as much weight as a letter from an individual. Certainly, individual letters carry a lot of weight, but our folks seem to think that this body would have a stronger voice than an individual senate would have.

Professor Crothers: Sure, all you need is someone to draft it.

Professor Stoddard: I would be willing to compose a first draft. I would like to see talking points about what people would like to see included. Certainly, from my standpoint, I would talk about recruitment numbers.

Professor Andersen: I would talk about “brain drain”, that we stand the risk of losing a tremendous number of senior faculty overnight if this pension change goes through.

Professor Tunney: I think that the angle of how it is going to affect student learning should be included. As the National Association for Social Workers lobbies for equity in salaries, we are seen as lobbying for ourselves and not for the clients we serve.

Professor Crothers: Our students at ISU have regularly said that they want well-paid, qualified faculty, from which tuition increases are coming from.

Professor Tunney: I don’t know where that evidence is; perhaps just various reports from our campuses would support that point.

Professor Stoddard: If that is available any place, perhaps you could e-mail it to me. I would include that because I think that they assume that students are not concerned about the quality of the faculty. We need to demonstrate that students are willing to pay more or that they are just generally concerned.

Professor Andersen: The students on our campus have voted for tuition increases on the grounds that they want to have a quality faculty providing quality education. That is their only rationale.

Professor Blankenship: I think that those kinds of things are powerful statements. I don’t know if there is anyway to hook this up to student-learning outcomes.

Professor Stoddard: Especially since we are talking about a possible outcome that has not happened yet.

Professor Blankenship: Colleges need PTOs, because they are the voters.

Professor Andersen: Are we going to focus largely on the pension system or you also going to add a plug for the adoption of a quality budget for higher education, which includes the pension funding.

Professor Tunney: I would say the latter.

Professor Andersen: I think you need to push for the notion that we need the funds for the education budget requested by the IBHE, which includes the amount certified as necessary for the pensions.

Professor Blankenship: One of the things that came up in a forum that was really an eye-opener was just the funding history of the pension. I don’t know what the year was, probably about 1950, but that was the last time that at least 50% of the budget was matched for SURS—that a reasonable portion of the money that they said was going to go into the pensions actually went into the pensions.

Professor Andersen: Higher ed consorted with the legislators and the governor to not fund the pension systems. So really, the administration said we want our money.

Professor Stoddard: In terms of unfunded pension liabilities, Texas has a $22 billion, California $25 billion, New York $28 billion, Ohio $29 billion. Illinois is of course 50^th at $43 billion.

Professor Andersen: Other systems are worse off than SURS.

Professor Stoddard: SURS is actually one of the best.

Professor Andersen: One thing Hacking pointed out is that we are getting fewer and fewer people withdrawing their money from the SURS system underneath the state. Once they are vested, they are tending to leave it in because we have a very good policy on the amount of the minimal salary. The base that they will pay on the minimal salary is pretty high. He said, “People are just leaving money in, so the State is not getting back its contribution.” Normally, when you leave, you only get the amount that you have contributed. When you do retire, then the State has to pay you the rest of the time at the minimum level. People are wising up economically and not taking the money out.

Professor Crothers: Ours is a double-edged sword. They the took the $3 million for Medicare out of our budget, but we are a healthier population than the average population, so our medical needs typically have been lower, but as a consequence, we live longer.

Professor Andersen: So we have got in there recruitment issues, brain drain, student learning and the IBHE budget request. Is there anyway to link in student migration from the state? Once students leave the state, the odds of their coming back are diminished.

Professor Crothers: We tried, but the state doesn’t look at higher education as a developmental tool in Illinois; the engine of economic growth is Chicago. They expect Chicago to be an engine of economic growth separate from the higher education system.

Professor Stoddard: Just a reminder, if you have anything about students specifically that we could quote from, that would be the single strongest argument that we could make.

Development of Lobbying Strategies

The council chose not to discuss lobbying strategies, as they were previously discussed at the 11/15/04 meeting.

Board of Trustees Issues

Ø Elect or Appoint Board of Trustee Members

Ø Faculty Representation on BOTs

Professor Crothers: There was an issue from the U of I about the election of Board of Trustee members. I guess you are not entirely happy with the board members who have been appointed?

Professor Andersen: That’s right.

Professor Crothers: You are thinking about creating a screening committee?

Professor Andersen: There are several possibilities. The Alumni Association originally began slating people who were not recommended by the various alumni groups. Out of that grew a move to the appointment process. We ended up getting that legislation through. Initially, that seemed to work; then increasingly, they began to ignore any recommendations from the Alumni Associations. Under the current governor, they have become his agents very transparently. The governor said after his first round of appointments that he would consult with the alumni groups, but he did not. We asked the University President if he had any input. The president had no input whatsoever on the Board. The thought was can we do something that would require the governor to at least do what is recommended by good agencies—that is to have some kind of recommendation and analysis procedures to get a slate of quality candidates.

Professor Crothers: We are very lucky on our board right now. I am curious how other people’s relations with their boards are going.

Professor Stoddard: Ours is really excellent at the moment, but there is one vacancy and three people are due to be re-nominated or not. We are all on kinds of pins and needles about what the governor has in store. Basically, they have been supportive of everything we do.

Professor Blankenship: We have a new board member who is at odds with a lot of our administrators and other board members. One of the issues that he was very vocal about was our increase in tuition. He runs a consulting business in Chicago. He used to be a state representative from our district and I guess he has quite a history with other administrators and board-types. The governor’s agenda is reflected pretty strongly in his ideas. Otherwise, we have a great board. They obviously brought in Dr. Goldfarb and we have been very happy with his performance so far.

Professor Shub: Our board has been very supportive; in fact, the Chairman of the Board is actually an NIEU graduate. Even in the days of the Board of Governors, he was involved with the university. He has been our chair ever since the Board of Governors was dissolved. He was the one who was paying $400,000 out of his own pocket to help out with the strike for some of the increases that the union was looking for. The Board of Trustees is almost too cozy with the President, because it seems like the President can get everything that she wants with this particular board.

Professor Tunney: The board has a priority of keeping access to education open to both minority students, as well as to students who may be first-generation-college-grads in their families, which is a powerful issue. I am encouraged. My sense of it is that there has been some shifting in membership in the last couple of years, but it seems hopeful and supportive.

Professor Andersen: The thing I am going to be very curious about since U of I has a new president chosen by this board is whether or not we will see a change in climate. Perhaps they will be more willing to back him. I also think he is a much better communicator and I think he will do much more work with the board and educate them. So it may be what we were seeing was the way in which the former president related to the board.

Professor Crothers: The short-term question is, is this just something that we want to monitor?

Professor Andersen: Yes, but we are still of the view that we would like to see a faculty voice on the Board of Trustees. We would like to see a faculty member appointed as a faculty member to the IBHE. The unions adopted those recommendations a decade ago. I don’t think that anyone has changed their view. It is still a goal that we have because we think that some things would change in the deliberations of the board with a faculty member at the table.

Professor Blankenship: Are all boards constituted in the same way? I know we have a student member.

Professor Crothers: Yes, all boards must have a student member.

Professor Andersen: The students were very effective in lobbying in that and got it introduced. I think someone from Urbana actually introduced the legislation and it went through.

Professor Crothers: The legislators were of the opinion, ‘their parents are paying the bills, so we have to let them have representation’.

Professor Tunney: So, who would make the case for a faculty representative?

Professor Crothers: We have tried in various places and FAC has tried in various places. We have done a little bit of investigation in this body about a year ago. Right now, it is against the law in Illinois to represent the university you work for. So, we have looked at could we have a faculty member from a university across state lines on an Illinois board. The issue was then, was it really worth it to get an out-of-state faculty member to attend a board meeting at ISU?

Professor Tunney: Could it be an emeritus faculty member?

Professor Crothers: It could be.

Professor Andersen: There are three emeritus faculty now on the IBHE, so yes, it worked there. The other thing is that you could put in a provision that the faculty representative would not vote on matters of tenure and other specific things where there is a clear conflict of interest.

Professor Crothers: I think the brutal fact is that it is important to keep monitoring it, but there is no way anything is going to happen short of a crisis for a reform movement. Too many people are too invested in the way it is now.

Professor Andersen: Some private schools do have faculty on their boards, but often their boards are larger and powers are differently constituted.

Professor Crothers: I guess the basic question is what your communication is like. We have a group that is a faculty, civil service, AP and student group (Campus Communications Committee) that makes a presentation at every board meeting to the board. That is a formal part of the meeting so it gives us a conduit for information.

Professor Andersen: We have a faculty member from each U of I campus who attends the board meetings. Often, the Senate Exec Committee goes as well. The last time the board met, these people were invited to meet with a member of the board to go over the agenda a day in advance of the meeting. We are not sure if that is going to continue.

Professor Crothers: Unless you ask, the people in charge may not be opposed, but they are just not thinking about it.

Professor Shub: We have something called the University Advisory Committee, which is a group of people who go to the different subcommittees and I go to the full board meeting. They always ask if the UAC representative has anything to say.

Professor Andersen: Our senates report once a year to the board giving a kind of overview of what we have done during the past year.

Professor Blankenship: What again was the state law that prevents faculty from serving on boards?

Professor Crothers: It is the same law that created the university boards and specifies that employees of the university cannot serve on the board.

Adjournment