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Questions and Answers with President Stukel
Q: To what extent do you think
that the university’s capability to provide a quality affordable
education has been compromised by reductions in state funding?
A: Well, if you look at the core
programs, we’ve been able to preserve those pretty much by
reallocating money out of the administrative budgets, of course
by increasing tuition, which has gone into the core programs.
So, with regard to course offerings or the type of courses being
offered, I don’t think we’ve been hurt. Where we’ve been hurt is
the number of sections that are available for courses, and the
class size has gone up.
 So,
in terms of the courses to be offered, in terms of the
disciplinary courses and the core courses, they’ve been offered.
The number of sections, however, available and the class size
have gone up. So I think that’s the major issue.
Second is that we’ve lost
faculty that we’ve been unable to replace, and that begins to
hurt in the long term. You’re able to make due in the interim,
but once you begin losing people without replacing them, that
has a longer-term impact on the quality of the educational
experience. So I think that those are two issues that would
probably impact you in the classroom.
Q: In terms of faculty salaries,
how much have the reductions in state funding affected that? …
Has [the budget situation] affected salaries to the point where
it’s adversely affecting the university and our academic
mission?
A: Well, if you look overall, we
have peer groups on all the three campuses that we compare our
salaries to. And the reality of it is for public higher
education, all public universities have been impacted negatively
by state budgets. It’s not just Illinois. If you look at UIS and
you look at UIC, they’ve basically kept pace with their peers
regarding faculty salary comparisons.
Urbana has also kept pace with
their public university peers, but half of their peer group are
private universities, and they have not kept pace with those
faculty salaries. So, by and large, we have not lost a great
deal of ground to the public universities that are our peer
institutions.
Q: I was just wondering what you
feel in the last couple of years have been some of the major
contributions that the U of I campuses have made, whether it be
separately or combined.
A: Well, UIS has had a terrific
nine years. … Nine years ago, I became president, and it was the
25th anniversary of this campus, and I came and I
made some comments at that time. And at that time, you were an
upper-division university. Since then, we have Capital Scholars;
it’s been initiated. The incoming classes for Capital Scholars
are No. 2 in the state with regard to ACT scores.
The online education program has
been initiated here, and UIS has become a national leader in
terms of fraction of faculty who are offering online courses and
the fraction of the student body and off-campus students who are
using the U of I Online program. And, you’ve … received some
wonderful foundation grants in recognition of your national
stature regarding online education.
The campus has been transformed
in terms of buildings. You have residence halls, you’ve got a
quad developing because of University Hall that was just
dedicated, and it’s just a very different looking institution
than it was nine years ago.
You have classes all day, not
just in the evening. You have a vision of becoming a
high-quality undergraduate arts and science program, which
focuses on governmental affairs with internship programs in
government and work-study programs in government, with master’s
programs and a Doctor of Public [Administration].
So, it’s just been an incredible
nine years, and the campus has been transformed; I mean, the
university has been transformed here. So, it’s become a part of
the Illinois family and has taken its unique role, really, of
wanting to … focus on really high-quality undergraduate
education in the arts and sciences, in contrast to the Urbana
and the Chicago campus, which are very large research-intensive
institutions.
So, Springfield is small and
intimate, student focused in everything it does, and it is
really a really neat place to go to school, I think, and I would
hope you would agree. So, this campus has just, I think, done
extremely well and is a very proud part of, I hope, the
University of Illinois family that we have.
Q: What was your reaction when
you learned that higher education – and U of I obviously
included – would be receiving level funding for fiscal year
2005?
A: I was delighted. Having had
multi years of cuts and having had a cut projected this year,
which was pretty steep; I was elated that we had a level budget.
And, that didn’t come without a lot of effort on the part of our
governmental affairs people. Remember, the governor’s budget had
a cut for us, and it was the work of Speaker Madigan – and
Minority Leader Tom Cross and Minority Leader Frank Watson on
the Republican side – that was able to save higher education
from additional cuts.
The cuts we’ve had in the last
three years – and both the permanent cuts and the temporary cuts
– have been the deepest since the Depression. I mean, it’s just
been a very, very difficult period.
… The economy is one thing, but
two is [that] higher education, as you observed just a moment
ago, is not a priority of this administration. It’s just isn’t.
Q: Which administration?
A: The Blagojevich
administration. It’s health care, K-12 [education] and security
[that are the priorities]. I mean, that’s it. Higher education
is not a priority of the Blagojevich administration, which has
been pointed out over and over again by the budget cuts. And,
after the budget process was over with, when the governor was
interviewed by a radio station; he said that if he had it his
way, he would’ve cut higher education again this year. So, we’re
obviously not on his priority list, except for cuts.
Q: Do you think that … level
funding for fiscal year 2005 is going to set a precedent now
that, finally, after all these years, higher education is not
receiving cuts? Do you think it’s going to create – at least in
the minds of the legislators and the governor – a precedent that
it’s time to do things a little bit differently now and at least
give higher education level funding?
A: Well, I would hope they would
give us positive funding, not level funding. It depends on the
state economy. … There are economic indices that the university
business school creates to see how things are going, and for the
first time in a long time, our economy is … modestly growing in
Illinois.
So, the hope is the economy
grows, which means you have more new money available, and hope
that higher education is then on the list to get increases. I
hope the coalition of Mr. Madigan, Mr. Cross and Mr. Watson
holds together in the next year in support of higher education.
If it does, then there’s hope that if there’s new money,
there’ll be new money going to higher education.
If you look at not just
Illinois’ economy, but the federal economy, knowledge creation
is the thing that makes us different than other countries. If
you look at all the outsourcing going on, we can outsource
probably everything we do … because if you look at the costs of
doing things outside the U.S., they’re typically lower – not in
the European countries, but other countries. So, at least
theoretically, you could outsource most things.
… The one thing we do that
nobody else in the world can do at the scale that we do it is
knowledge creation. Knowledge creation is something that the
United States does better than anybody else in the world. And
it’s knowledge creation that has given rise to our increase in
productivity, that’s given rise to our technology advances,
which has then given rise to our standard of living. So, that’s
the one thing we can do.
Now, why do I raise that? Higher
education is crucial to knowledge creation, right? It’s
important because having an educated populace is necessary.
Having educated engineers and scientists is necessary at the
undergraduate level. … You have research activities that are at
the very heart of knowledge creation. … And, public higher
education does almost 60 percent of all basic research done in
the United States.
So, if you believe that
knowledge creation is the engine of our economy, and if public
higher education does almost 60 percent of the basic research
done in America in support of knowledge creation, wouldn’t you
think that you would invest therefore in higher education as an
economic development instrument and as a way to keep our country
and our standard of living at the level that it is?
… That’s a longwinded answer to
your question, but if you put the pieces together, higher
education is pretty important. And public higher education,
because it’s so large and is what most people have access to, is
absolutely crucial to the future of the state and to our
society, no doubt about it.
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