Southern Illinois Shelves Plan to Transfer $5 Million From Flagship to Other Campus

A proposal to shift $5.1 million in state funds from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale to the Edwardsville campus was voted down by the system’s Board of Trustees on Thursday, The Southern Illinoisan reports.

The vote followed a tense meeting in which people from both campuses debated the merits of the shift. The rationale for the proposal involved rising enrollment at Edwardsville and lagging enrollment at the flagship campus. Why not invest the money in growth? the Edwardsville partisans argued.

The Carbondale campus gets the bulk of the system’s state appropriations: $91 million, or 64 percent, compared with $51 million, or 36 percent, for Edwardsville, in the 2018 fiscal year.

After the vote, the system’s president, Randy J. Dunn, said he would seek an outside consultant to review the system’s funding formula to better reflect enrollment changes on the two campuses. “I’m all in for Carbondale’s success, but in looking at this, I’m also system president,” he told the newspaper.

One board member, Thomas C. Britton, said at the meeting that trustees needed to “make sure we’re not dividing and not pitting campuses against each other.”

Phil Gilbert, a member who voted against the $5.1-million reallocation, said his vote was “not a vote against SIU Edwardsville.” He said he was in favor of its getting “a larger slice of the pie” but called the proposal, which was introduced last month, “premature and ill-advised.”

The Edwardsville campus is expecting an increase of 10 to 12 percent in freshman enrollment for fall 2018 over last year, according to the chancellor, Randy Pembrook, cited in reports by the Belleville News-Democrat. A 20-percent increase in graduate students is expected as well, he said.

Carbondale currently has about 800 more students than Edwardsville, according to enrollment data.

Pembrook wrote in a message to the campus that legislation will soon be introduced by State Rep. Jay Hoffman, a Democrat, to help create separate governing boards for Carbondale and Edwardsville, and to take the allocation conversation out of the system’s hands and into the legislature’s.

Carbondale’s chancellor, Carlo Montemagno, wrote in a blog post that he was “grateful” for the decision to not take $5.1 million away from the university. The reallocation talks began in March and, earlier this month, he wrote that the proposal would have compromised the financial stability of Carbondale, especially since the state budget had led to $20 million in cuts in addition to $19 million in cuts last year.

“Since 2014, SIU Carbondale has reduced its budget by more than $31 million and has about 500 fewer employees,” Montemagno wrote. “We cannot absorb any part of the additional $5.1-million reduction by further increasing tuition, by further deferring maintenance of our facilities, or by reducing staff without damaging the quality of programs and services we provide.

“I do not fault my colleagues at SIU Edwardsville for making a case that they believe is in the interest of their institution,” he continued. “However, I feel strongly that a sudden, unexplored plan to advance one institution while damaging another is not in the best interests of the SIU system.”

The proposal came at a moment of leadership controversy in Carbondale. The system is looking into Montemagno’s hiring of his daughter and son-in-law to administrative jobs on the campus. And this month, the student newspaper published a story about the chancellor’s former employer, Ingenuity Lab, in Edmonton, Alberta, where former employees have accused him of running a “toxic” and “hostile” work environment. Montemagno was director of the nanotechnology lab.

“My management style is to hold people accountable for their work,” Montemagno responded to the newspaper. “Some rise to the challenge and are successful, while others are not.”

He has proposed restructuring the university in response to its financial problems. A small faculty group that opposes the changes has publicized a survey finding general disapproval for his plan among students and faculty members.

In response, Montemagno said the findings mislead people into thinking there’s widespread disagreement over the reorganization.

A former president of the Faculty Senate at Carbondale, Kathy Chwalisz, wrote in an op-ed essay before the system trustees’ vote that the blame for any controversy lay with Dunn, the president. “I don’t understand how President Dunn could find any managerial wisdom” in allowing the $5-million funding shift to go before the board, she wrote.