The Daily Egyptian is published by the students of SIU at Carbondale. Except during vacations and exam weeks, The Daily Egyptian is published Monday through Friday during the fall and spring semesters and TWThF during the summer semester."

April fools

I was sorry to see you missed the "story" that appeared today in the Southern Illinoisan. It was so appropriate, appearing just below the date.

It appears that with all the cutbacks and savings the University administration has found the funds to give 20-percent raises to four upper-level administrators. Since administrators are ten times as productive as faculty and staff it is not surprising that they are rewarded with raises that are ten times as big.

If I had been asked, I could have found better uses for the money. Last August our department had one of its secretarial lines reduced to half time because of the budget crunch. The raise for the chancellor's secretary is enough to have prevented that.

The raise for the director of Athletics by itself could provide the funds for our department to hire a Ph. D. to teach four sections at the 100 level. But then, we know that athletics is more important than education in a university.

The raises for the director of Communications and the director of Diversity would have been enough to replace 15 to 20 three-to-five year old computers in our department so that the impacted faculty and staff could meet the demands of increased productivity.

We are told the raises recognize the increased responsibilities and productivity of the individuals. But when purchasing was decentralized and everyone started using P-cards, the people charged with managing those cards and all the computer entry involved didn't receive a raise to cover their increased responsibility. When AIS was adopted and all sorts of duties previously handled by General Accounting were pushed down to individuals with no accounting training there were no raises for increased responsibility. When class sizes and contact hours were increased there were no raises for increased productivity. The chancellor's secretary has the increased responsibility of receiving reports regarding emergency preparedness and needs a raise. But the employees who were pressed into being part of the B.E.R.T. program to do actual planning receive no recognition of their increased responsibility.

It's quite a story. But then, it is April 1st. What did you expect?

George Parker

associate professor, mathematics

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