To:                  Academic Senate

From:              Planning and Finance Committee

Re:                  2007-08 Institutional Goals and Priorities Report

Date:               April 11, 2007

Preamble

The Illinois State University mission statement calls on the entire University community to engage as scholars, students, staff and friends to work together to promote the widest range of academic options while retaining a comfortable, safe and collegial atmosphere for learning, teaching and intellectual and personal development.  In support of this mission, Educating Illinois, the University’s strategic plan, states that the University’s goals and highest priorities are to maintain strong, mutually reinforcing commitments to scholarship (research and creative activities) and to undergraduate and graduate education. This commitment is to be achieved within the context of five core values: individualized attention, public opportunity, active pursuit of learning and scholarship, diversity, and innovation. 

Achieving the ideals embedded in the University mission statement and strategic plan is a shared obligation of all members of the University community.  Moreover, these goals can be achieved only over time, through the development, implementation and thoughtful assessment of policies and programs intended to make the ideals of the mission statement and Educating Illinois real in the lives of students, faculty, staff and alumni.  Whatever the University does should be explained in terms of how it advances the ideals of Illinois State University’s mission and strategic plan. 

As required in its charge as stated in the Academic Senate Bluebook, the Planning and Finance Committee has developed a list of priorities it believes the University should focus on in the next few years in specific fulfillment of its mission and strategic plan.  The Committee believes each will advance the goals of the University as outlined above.  A description of the processes the Committee used to develop this list is appended at the end of this document.  The Planning and Finance Committee seeks the Academic Senate’s endorsement of these priorities for submission to the President.

Priorities:

1. Continue efforts to improve competitiveness of faculty and staff salaries with the effect of achieving at least peer group median salaries within 3-5 years. 

The Academic Senate calls on the University leadership to continue its work on this multi-year, fundamental institutional priority with the goal of achieving and surpassing peer group medians for Illinois State University faculty and staff.  This plan should continue to intermix mid-year, targeted pay raises for under-rewarded merit within categories of employees who are below peer group medians as well as annual, general merit-based raises.   

2. Increase operations budgets. 

The Academic Senate calls on the University leadership to devise and implement strategies to enhance department and unit operating budgets.  These budgets have remained constant—or been reduced—for over a decade even as new pressures for travel, faculty start-up costs, computer upgrades and other requirements have been placed on these budgets.  The issue of increased operating budgets is even more pressing since the entrepreneurial summer school experiment of the summers of 2005 and 2006 has ended: where once some departments were able to earn additional variance dollars for overhead or academic capacity costs through successful e-summer offerings, this ability no longer exists.  The Academic Senate expects administrators and managers to enhance or hold equal operations budget items for existing departments and units before advocating program expansions or new facilities.
 

3. Enhance resource bases to units to help maintain aging facilities. 

The Academic Senate calls on the University leadership to establish a strategy by which a sufficient pool of money can be saved over time to address one-time, major expenses for repairing infrastructure.  There is simply too much infrastructure on the verge of wearing out to ignore the problem.  In addition, the University must be aggressive in seeking rehabilitation funds from the State.  Moreover, the lure of projects funded from the comparative flexibility of student fee dollars, such as is happening with two major on-going rehabilitation or construction projects at Illinois State University (the rehabilitation of campus housing and the student recreation center) should not be allowed to obscure the needs of the rest of the University’s aging infrastructure. 

4. Promote a campus-wide conversation about alternative financing models at Illinois State University.

The Academic Senate calls on the University leadership to support it as the Planning and Finance Committee leads a campus-wide discussion of the future of Illinois State University as a teaching, learning, research and service institution.  The historical model of high levels of state support for public higher education has already passed; no amount of hand-wringing or wishful thinking will change this fact.  This discussion should include entrepreneurial courses, public-private partnerships, alternative tuition models and any other ideas that might promote new forms of income to Illinois State University.  In particular, the Academic Senate requests that the University administration fund a “best” or “alternative” practices study from the Center for Higher Education Policy at Illinois State University under the auspices of the Planning and Finance Committee with which the Committee can lead a true campus conversation about the future of the University.  If preferred, additional funding might be sought from other state universities and/or public and private foundations since, as a practical matter, the problems facing Illinois State University are common across the United States and the rest of the world.  The specific details of scope and size and cost can be addressed once the University agrees to sponsor this report.