The predicament of Southern Illinois University is plain to see in the condition of the engineering building’s leaking chiller, which has been rigged up with an aluminum gutter and a couple of garden hoses for drainage. Like so many things on this campus, it is slowly deteriorating, and there is no money coming from the state to fix it.
Illinois’s state-budget deficit, at $13-billion, is one of the worst in the country. And it follows years of lackluster support for higher education. Over the past nine months, the state has failed to pay the regular amounts that it has promised to Southern Illinois, forcing it to juggle money just to make payroll. The university has already cut $13-million from its budget, and now it may have to fight off a state-budget rescission that could force officials here and on the smaller Edwardsville campus to lay off one of every six employees.
“There is no good outlook financially for this state, and therefore there is not one for the universities,” says Glenn W. Poshard, the university’s president. He maintains that there may be a way out of this mess that doesn’t hurt the working-class students that SIU attracts—a tough decision to raise taxes might be one big step. But he wonders about the political fortitude to find that way: “If there is a will to do it, there are consequences to be paid, politically or otherwise. But isn’t that what leadership is about?”
When Mr. Poshard discusses tough political choices and their consequences, he knows what he’s talking about. A blue-collar, populist-style Democrat who is a former state senator, Congressman, and gubernatorial candidate, he has been a persistent, even provocative, voice advocating for higher education in the Capitol—a role that may provide lessons for college leaders in cash-strapped states across the country.
“He is the most involved university president that I have seen in the 20 years I’ve been at the General Assembly,” says J. Bradley Burzynski, a Republican state senator.
“Poshard has been very aggressive about going to the comptroller’s office and going to the governor’s office,” says Allan Karnes, an accounting professor who chairs the budget committee in the Faculty Senate. “There is a tendency among a lot of top administrators at other schools not to push too hard, because they don’t want people to get mad at them or mad at their school. ... He knows people, and he’s not afraid of them. He sees them as equals.”
But things have gotten so desperate, Mr. Poshard says, that college leaders here have little choice but to be heard much more loudly in the halls of government. The University of Illinois may increase tuition 20 percent over the next four years to cover cutbacks in state support. But SIU, he says, cannot raise tuition, because it serves many lower- and middle-class students from the poor, southern part of the state. Here on the Carbondale campus, 33 percent of the undergraduates get Pell Grants. Those students, he says, are at risk of losing access to an American ideal.
“When I was in Congress and the Illinois State Senate, no one had to tell me that there was a value to public higher education that was very much greater and very different from the Department of Transportation or whatever,” he says. “The one transformational agent that we have in American society is higher education, and public higher education is the one that has the greatest responsibility for citizenship education. ... My fear is that this is all getting lost in this financial crisis.”
Years of Hurt
Amid the pain of the fiscal fallout, Mr. Poshard talks first about college affordability and first-generation students like Johnathan Kiwala, a junior majoring in political science, who comes from a poor, single-parent household in Rock Island, Ill. He helped organize a protest last fall after state legislators threatened to cut in half a $440-million student-aid program that is relied on by 140,000 students, including many at SIU. Eight busloads of them rode up to Springfield to join with students from other universities and raise hell in the capital. The aid program was spared.
Mr. Poshard, 64, might see something of himself in students like Mr. Kiwala. He, too, was the first in his impoverished family to get a college education, here at SIU. He went on to earn a master’s and a doctorate there, in higher-education administration. “This university opened every door for me in my entire life,” he says. “Without the education I got here, I couldn’t have aspired to anything else.”
He grew up near Carmi, on the Indiana border—an area that may have had more in common with Appalachia than with the rich agricultural land to the north. His father, who had lost an arm in a childhood shooting accident, made a living as a hunter, trapper, and champion coon squaller, which involves luring a raccoon down from a tree by imitating the sounds of a fight between a dog and a raccoon. He was also a political-precinct committeeman and an admirer of President Harry S. Truman. Mr. Poshard, who would work the polls with his father during elections, says that’s where he got his love of politics and his devotion to public service.
The young Poshard admired President John F. Kennedy. He joined the Army after graduating from high school, in 1962, and went to Korea, where he walked the demilitarized zone. “All that time I was walkin’, man, I was memorizing Kennedy speeches—all the inflections and everything,” he says, in his southern-Illinois accent. He went to SIU when he returned, taught school after graduation, and started working his way up the ranks of local politics.
He won his first State Senate seat in 1984 and later served 10 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he became known for refusing corporate donations and PAC money. In 1998 he ran for governor against George Ryan, a Republican, who narrowly beat him.
The loss still stings. Given the hostile attitudes toward government today, Mr. Poshard maintains an optimistic and even idealistic view of its role to buoy society and its institutions. “I really wanted to be governor,” he says. “I really thought I could help this state.”
He went to work for the SIU system in 1999 as a vice chancellor, then served as chairman of the Board of Trustees before becoming president in 2006.
The gubernatorial loss did not dim Mr. Poshard’s love for the political atmosphere, however. One recent afternoon, he is on his way into the Statehouse to testify, as he does often. His contacts, his folksy charm, and his innate knowledge of the byzantine lawmaking process have helped him push legislation through to passage. In 2008, Mr. Poshard and former U.S. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, a Republican, were key negotiators in breaking a deadlock in the legislature to pass the state’s first capital-construction bill in 10 years, bringing $1.5-billion to colleges.
On his agenda now: a bill that would give colleges authority to borrow money in emergencies.
He pumps his fist at his side as he moves closer to the rotunda, talking about the students’ bus caravan last fall. “These kids are motivated for democracy—they get public participation in a way that not even the faculty get it,” he says.
When Mr. Poshard tells senators that they should consider the burdens of rising tuition, it seems that he is not only drawing from personal conviction, but also consciously plugging into a powerful and vocal constituency: students and their parents. The dream of advancement through college is political leverage: “Our public universities in this state are moving quickly toward becoming private universities, accessible and affordable only to those who have the economic wherewithal to afford them,” he tells a roomful of senators. “It is time to put the public back into public higher education.”
But he is disappointed, he says later, that for the most part, “higher ed is the one community that will not take it on themselves to get involved” in the political process.
“I don’t want to be a university president that just manages—I didn’t get into this business for that,” he says. “I don’t think it compromises higher education to stand up for what you need. There was a time when we got it without asking. Those days are over.”
Mr. Poshard speaks to a committee in support of the emergency-borrowing bill—a bill that many university leaders in the state initially criticized as bad policy but now support. He emphasizes that SIU refuses to raise tuition on its working-class students. Tuition and fees at the university amount to about $10,400; room and board add about $8,300 to the cost, which is well more than double what it was 10 years ago. The legislation passes the committee by a wide margin.
As he leaves the hearing, he walks out under the Capitol’s stained-glass dome. Mr. Poshard knows people everywhere. He stops to shake hands, calls people “pal,” endures some good-natured ribbing.
“Who’s running the university? You’re always in the Capitol building!” says one man, a director at a state agency. In a lower voice, he suggests that Mr. Poshard make another run for governor or lieutenant governor. “I couldn’t stand the money chase,” Mr. Poshard replies. “And my wife would kill me.”
He walks down to the Senate chamber, amid columns with gilded capitals, to see his former seat. “I love this old Senate. ... I love debate,” he says, touching the back of the leather chair. He tells a story: When he was a freshman senator, he stood to support a controversial bill to eliminate the state’s investments in companies that propped up South Africa’s apartheid government. No one expected a white senator from a southern district to support the bill, but he took the floor to speak, referenced the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” and talked about the equality of men in the eyes of God. His speech drew just enough support to pass the bill, which eventually became law and led other states to follow.
“That was one of the best moments of my career,” he says. “I felt like I had a little piece of history. Just a piece.”
$135-Million Short
Mr. Poshard has a love for what politics can do right, but politics have done much wrong to this state’s universities. Support for higher education is 24 percent less, adjusted for inflation, than it was in 2002, while support for public schools, by contrast, is 12 percent greater.
Since the national recession hit Illinois, the comptroller’s office has held on to money wherever possible. In February, eight months into the fiscal year, the state had paid its universities only 40 percent of what it had promised in the 2010 budget. (At that time, Southern Illinois University had gotten a mere third of its state money—short by about $135-million.) The institutions have been diverting money from other priorities, like much-needed maintenance efforts, just to make payroll.
Budget-watchdog groups have said that Illinois cannot get out of its financial hole without a tax increase—a politically dicey proposal that Mr. Poshard favors, but which has not gained support.
Mr. Burzynski, whose district includes Northern Illinois University, says raising taxes would ease the urgency to curb spending. And he believes that the state’s universities could find more areas to cut back—although he struggles to come up with solid examples, citing building programs, textbook costs, and administrative pay. “I have seen some of the salary increases,” he says. “They have to learn to tighten their belts.”
Belt-tightening has been under way at Southern Illinois University for some time. Since last year, Mr. Poshard has overseen more than $13-million in cuts—consolidating courses, eliminating travel, leaving open positions unfilled, cutting back on purchases.
That kind of contraction affects not only the university but its environs as well. Southern Illinois was a coal-mining area until the federal Environmental Protection Agency wrote regulations that killed the market for the high-sulfur coal that comes out of the ground here. Now SIU—which operates in Springfield, Alton, and East St. Louis as well as in Carbondale and Edwardsville—is the biggest downstate employer.
The university started out in 1869 as a teachers college but has transformed itself into a research university in the past 50 years. The Carbondale campus ranks 209th out of 679 institutions in federal research support, and its government research grants have grown 124 percent since 1998. With the waning of state support, however, some faculty members worry that the university’s research reputation will diminish.
“The departments are stripped bare—we’ve got nothing left,” says Mr. Karnes, the accounting professor, who has been at the university for nearly 30 years. Facing a dismal budget outlook and the increased teaching loads, “the people who are really good at research will probably look for a new place.” He would, too, he says, if he were 20 years younger.
Local businesses in Carbondale are dependent on the university, and any talk of layoffs or a shutdown produces waves of worry. George Sheffer’s True Value hardware store sells supplies to the university. Lately he has had to wait up to 60 days for payment. He is taking out loans to cover the gap between the time he pays his suppliers and the university pays him.
His customers around the town, who also rely on SIU, are well aware of the university’s unsteady finances. People are holding off on remodeling a kitchen or buying a new washing machine. “If SIU closed, I wonder what would be left in this town,” he says. “I don’t even want to think about it.”
Making Calls, Right or Wrong
After two days in Springfield, Mr. Poshard is back in his office in Carbondale, looking drained. He has had his trials in his four years as president. He faced calls for his resignation and a revolt among faculty members during a scandal a couple of years ago, when he was accused of plagiarism. (A faculty panel found that the plagiarism was “inadvertent.”) But the budget crisis is a constant worry for him. He says he doesn’t sleep well at night—sometimes only a few hours. It’s early afternoon, and he has not eaten yet; his face is noticeably thinner than it was in his inauguration picture.
At a Board of Trustees meeting late last year, Mr. Poshard suggested that in a worst-case scenario, the university could be forced to shut down. Some people on the campus criticized him for creating a “climate of fear,” as one professor put it at the time.
“Any part of leadership is gathering everything you see, analyzing the data, trying to look at the problem, and bringing resources to bear on the problem, but not pulling any punches along that process,” Mr. Poshard says. “It’s tough when you come out wrong. I’ve done that a number of times. I have had a lot of failures.”
One that still hurts: When he was in Congress, he proposed a small tax on utility-company ratepayers to help support coal miners in the region who would be put out of work by clean-air regulations. The revenue would have been used to develop clean-coal technology. But the idea got no support among fellow lawmakers. “I had to watch 24,000 people lose their jobs,” Mr. Poshard says. “I felt they were all looking at me, thinking, ‘You coulda done better.’”
He is determined not to let that kind of thing happen now. “I don’t want to lay our people off and shut this school down.”
At a news conference that Mr. Poshard has called to quell fears of immediate layoffs, he lays out the financial realities. His final points are put forth like a battle plan: The university has to defeat the 10-percent budget rescission, squeeze more money out of the comptroller’s office, pass the borrowing bill, and prepare for more cuts.
His haggard look—and a moment when he pauses for several moments, complaining of dizziness—may be what prompts a question from a young TV reporter: “University aside, Glenn Poshard, as one of the faces of SIU, how are you doing with all this?”
Mr. Poshard shrugs off the question, but he repeats his answer several times, maybe to persuade the audience, maybe to persuade himself: “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m doing fine.”
