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While 82 SIUC employees received notice last week that they would be laid off, another 72 employees are left playing the waiting game to see if they will still hold the same positions in the fall.
The layoffs came just weeks after Gov. Rod Blagojevich imposed a budget cut of $16.6 million for SIUC's campus.
Seventy-two other employees were also notified that they could be bumped from their position if someone with seniority who was facing a layoff wanted their job. Each layoff has a potential domino effect on employees with less seniority.
"It's a situation that I wish we didn't have to deal with," Chancellor Walter Wendler said. "We have scoured the budget for the past six or seven months and were as careful about this as we could be."
One of the concerns of the SIUC Faculty Association is that this campus is spending too much money on administrative costs instead of focusing on education in the form of academic colleges and departments.
"Every year, there are studies done by the state of Illinois that show how money is spent on campuses," said Morteza Daneshdoost, president of the SIUC Faculty Association. "During the past six years, less and less funds have been made available for SIU's academic colleges and departments in a comparison involving the other big five colleges in the state."
The five big colleges in the state include Illinois State University, Northern Illinois University, University of Illinois-Urbana, University of Illinois-Chicago, and SIUC.
"The SIUC FY2002 Normative Cost Report indicates that SIUC spent $10.1 million less on academic departments than it would have had its budget been adhered to by the state norms." Daneshdoost said. "In 2001, our academic departments were $7.46 million behind the norm. This year, we fell even further by another $2.64 million. The trend shows that we are spending less and less on academic programs."
Wendler said that he did not agree with Daneshdoost's statements, and all of the layoffs were related to administration costs.
The state considers anything that is not directly associated with instruction to be considered an administration cost, according to Wendler.
Wendler said that these cuts were made while the University was facing an 8.2-percent budget cut. He also said that he is aware that the process used is not perfect, but he felt that the University was very careful about the choices it made concerning layoffs.
Daneshdoost, however, was unsure about the layoff decisions that were made.
"We are not sure if they are trying to save money where they should have," Daneshdoost said.
