Labor negotiations, spending cuts, creating a new model for budget planning, developing the new College of Engineering, and, oh yes, graduation this weekend — Illinois State University has a lot on its plate right now.
ISU has been reducing its budget to address big red ink. Recently approved contracts with Faculty United ISU, the tenured and tenure track faculty union, and other bargaining units on campus include pay raises that will cost millions of dollars to implement.
In a WGLT interview for Sound Ideas, ISU President Aondover Tarhule acknowledged that and other recent contracts complicate efforts to close the structural deficit.
“It's a challenge. As you know, last year, we projected a deficit of about $9 million at the end of this fiscal year, and that's what we've been trying to address. And so as we negotiate more contracts that have a higher dollar amount, that adds to the overall expense, and we have to take that into account,” said Tarhule.
Tarhule said he is happy the bargainers reached agreement, and with a provision that will bring faculty pay up to market rate. He said full professors were notably below peer institutions in compensation.
Non-union workers won't be getting raises because of the structural deficit, and Tarhule acknowledged that may create pressure to increase unionization on campus. He said ISU has tried and will continue to try to make wage increases across campus when the money is available, noting union contracts that require pay increases must be honored, which puts non-union workers at a disadvantage.
“It's something I'm very mindful of. It's something I'm very sensitive to," said Tarhule. "We have many discussions about how to try to address this. The irony from my point of view, as more people unionize … eventually you get to a point where you have to start shedding people because then you can't pay everybody.”
Is ISU at that point?
“Not yet,” he said.
ISU continues the process to develop a new budget model driven by revenues and not historical expenses.
“It's hard for me to get a sense of what will happen once we start putting numbers in the new budget model," said Tarhule. "The new budget model doesn't make more money available. What it does, is develop a different method for allocating that money. When we put numbers to it, we'll see what it does for the institution as a whole.”
The Resilience, Innovation, Sustainability, and Excellence [RISE] Task Force has had four town hall meetings with campus constituencies and done other stakeholder assessments on what the new budget should look like. Tarhule said a third-party provider is now using those preferences to generate the new budget template.
“Obviously, people want metrics. Part of what I've heard, for example, are things like student success and strategic priorities. These are big bucket categories. If you take student success, that is further subdivided into retention, graduation rates, things like that. We had more than 160 different suggestions from people across campus,” said Tarhule.
Part of the new budget will create a strategic initiative to improve ISU's flexibility to respond to new opportunities. Tarhule said a lot of campus groups weighed in on what that might look like and who should decide whether, how, and who should be able to approve spending money set aside for such initiatives. He said the numbers that emerge will come from that grassroots process.
“There are institutional priorities," he said. "You also have priorities at the level of the vice president and colleges and units ... we want to be able to take the range of numbers and ideas that people suggested, put it in a model and run several scenarios and see what that does to the budget chain.”
He said it’s hard to say, right now, how big that strategic reserve should be.
“First, we've got to be able to determine what's the base amount necessary to keep all units functioning without having to run a deficit. The strategic priority is not something we're going to take off the top,” said Tarhule.
He thinks strategic priorities can be of any scale and time to implement — from departments seeking to improve retention rates over the short term, working toward raising overall campus graduation rates, or creating entire new programs over several years.
College of Engineering
Last year, ISU bought the Country Financial facility on GE Road in Bloomington for the new College of Engineering. Design planning has happened. ISU has issued debt, certificates of participation similar to bonds, to raise money for the construction.
On Friday, the administration will ask the board of trustees to authorize spending the money on construction. Tarhule said it is the last formal approval needed to create the college.
“We had more than 1,200 students apply to that college. Our plan is to recruit 150 from the 1,200. Come Aug. 15, we will have students in the College of Engineering, ending this long process that began many years ago before I even got here. I'm very excited by the progress we have made,” said Tarhule.
ISU hopes the new building will be available in the fall of 2027.
Federal pressure
Recently, Tarhule joined more than 400 college presidents in a public statement warning of growing political interference in higher education. The statement criticized what it calls “unprecedented government overreach,” as former President Trump continues to threaten funding for institutions that don’t align with his political goals.
Tarhule said it was important for ISU to be a part of that statement opposing the administration agenda.
“I signed that letter because it's changing the very character of what universities are and what we do in a way that most of us feel is inconsistent with our values. A big part of what makes universities special is academic freedom, which gives faculty and researchers the opportunity to investigate what they want based on their talent,” said Tarhule.
To some, many research topics may seem odd or even useless.
“But a lot of discoveries and practical applications of things that we now use in everyday life were once deemed esoteric at the time people investigated those topics. If we decide to limit knowledge based on what we know now, that's a very limiting concept of what knowledge discovery is,” said Tarhule.
He said cutting off research will do the nation no good as the U.S. faces increasing competition from other parts of the world.
Harvard has directly taken on the Trump administration in a lawsuit over canceled grant funding. Most of the higher education sector is closely watching that progress.
So, what does Tarhule think that case means for other colleges worried about the future of federal grants and the climate of higher education? Tarhule said grants are essentially contracts.
“One party to a legally negotiated and signed contract unilaterally is canceling the contract for reasons that have nothing to do with why the contract was signed ... Imagine if you entered into a contract with your landlord to rent housing, and your landlord wakes up one day and says, ‘Hey, I saw you with a black tie, and I don't like black ties, therefore I'm going to cancel your contract?’ That's almost the situation we're facing,” said Tarhule.
He said not just higher education, but the nation as a whole should be troubled by this.
“This is not something that you would typically associate with a developed, law-abiding country like the United States. This is something we would expect to hear from maybe a third-world country. Part of what creates stability and progress is you can rely on a contract,” said Tarhule.
Other universities have not been as aggressive at Harvard. Some have even caved to administration pressure. Tarhule said other flavors of collective action by higher ed will emerge. Delay has stemmed from the speed and "stunning nature" of many of the Trump administration actions that people would not have anticipated several years ago.
It has taken until now for a semblance of organization to emerge about how to respond.
“This week, the Association of American Universities and Association of Public and Land Grant Universities [AAU and APLU] … are now combining forces to express their dissatisfaction," he said. "What you see, I believe, is only the beginning of concerted actions to try and counter both the narratives, but also the changes the government is trying to implement.”
State government support for higher education as reflected in budget appropriations has fallen in recent decades. It can be argued that suggests colleges and universities have failed to make the case higher education is a public good. Coupled with the current administration's stance, that puts higher ed in a difficult position as it seeks allies, Tarhule acknowledged.
“One of the things that people sometimes ask us in higher ed — to which we have no answer — is why isn't the public out there clamoring for support for higher ed? And it says something that they are not,” said Tarhule, who is not sure whether colleges and universities have not told their stories effectively and placed responsibility for soaring tuition costs where it properly belongs.
“The single most important factor leading to increased cost of attendance for higher ed is government disinvestment. Government is making the decision that this is no longer a public good, and parents and students should pay for it,” he said.
That is not what parents want to hear and believe as they try to find ways to pay to send young adults to college, Tarhule noted. Non-educators are more likely to claim cost increases come from university spending on unnecessary programs or on administrative bloat. He said there may be some of that and higher ed can do better, but that is only a small part in the run-up of college costs.
“Under the kind of threat that we are facing, it makes it really hard for us to turn to the public, our stakeholders, for the kind of support and advocacy that you would ordinarily expect you would have,” he said.
Tarhule and other college leaders say they're open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight. But they reject what they call "coercive use of public research funding" and other undue government intrusion.
