Raises for Civil Service Employees

To the editor:

In my 24 years as a university professor I have been constantly amazed at some of the decisions that get made at SIU. In fact, it gets to the point where one wonders whether any common sense exists in the ranks of the upper administration. A clear case in point is the recent squabble over raises for civil service employees. It is one of those situations that I am always telling my wife: "If you lined up ten people on the street and asked them?" I cannot imagine anyone disagreeing with the assertion that giving raises preferentially to one group of civil service employees (at Edwardsville) and not to another equally deserving group (in Carbondale) is only going to raise hell. An elementary school child could easily identify the flaw in such a plan. Yet the SIU administration has done just that, once again shooting itself in the foot. And in so doing, the administration is spending valuable time and effort putting a spin ("Civil service denied raises," Thursday) on a bad situation that they themselves created. Indeed, if there is any REAL logic to giving preferential pay raises, I have yet to see it in print. Professors are constantly making decisions about students. But I know of no professor in his or her right mind who would make bonus points eligible to males but not to females, or who would set one deadline for turning in a paper for sophomores and another for juniors in the same class. Yet in essence, this is what the administration has done with the civil service raise fiasco, and they should bail themselves out by releasing the $212,000 necessary to give the Carbondale civil service staff a raise. In the long run, it would be a small drop in the financial bucket but a large one in the bucket of goodwill. Few would argue with the assertion that "faculty are the heart of the university," as one SIU administrator put it during the threatened faculty strike several months ago. But it is also a truism that the University runs on the backs of its civil service/AP employees. We would not have a university without them. Thus, in my opinion, Anthony Hall should come up with the money, as it does time and again for the things it REALLY wants, and give these highly deserving, hard-working folks a raise.

Michael T. Madigan professor of microbiology

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