My Turn | Time for UI to stop short-sheeting its flagship campus – The News-Gazette

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When Illinois taxpayers send over $600 million a year to University of Illinois System President Tim Killeen for general operations (not including health and pension costs), one would expect that the students at each of the system’s three campuses would get their fair share of those funds.

Not so much, it turns out.

In fact, this year alone under President Killeen, the system has short-sheeted the Urbana campus to the tune of almost $47 million by not equally allocating taxpayer dollars between the total number of full-time-equivalent students on each campus.

Even after spotting the UI’s Chicago campus its special taxpayer add-ons for the hospital that it manages, under President Killeen’s general operations allocations, the students of the Urbana campus end up effectively subsidizing the UIC campus.

One way of looking at this is that students (and their parents) are paying $47 million more in tuition here at the flagship campus to subsidize students at UIC. Affordability? That’s $47 million more in student loans taken out by Urbana-Champaign students.

Maybe you are a faculty member reading this; this is $47 million that could have gone to retention or recruitment of world-class faculty. Or, maybe that $47 million could have gone to address the campus backlog of deferred maintenance that President Killeen and Chancellor Robert Jones are always talking about — that’s a lot of work for plumbers, electricians, painters and carpenters who live here and pay those taxes that President Killeen is divvying up.

However you look at it, this is $47 million of our tax dollars that aren’t coming back to central Illinois — and $47 million is a lot of “cheeseburgers and beer” that would, in turn, fuel other businesses and employ people locally.

The DPI debacle

As the ranking member of the state Senate Appropriations Committee, I look at a lot of numbers. So, last year, when I first asked President Killeen about this vast discrepancy, he told me my numbers were wrong.

After letting him know that I got my figures from his staff, he then engaged in an amazing round of rhetorical evasion and obfuscation — “dodging, ducking, dipping, diving and dodging,” to paraphrase the late, great Patches O’Houlihan — before finally landing on: “We’ll get back to you.”

Unfortunately, it turns out, “getting back to me” was a single meeting over the summer with a vice president of the system. To be fair, after I raised the issue of this massive disparity in allocation on WDWS and other radio stations in January, they have since called to schedule a follow-up.

To be clear, some disparity wouldn’t have surprised me, but I would have expected the president to attack this issue head on out of respect for the students, faculty and staff at the flagship campus. However, as it turns out, maybe he didn’t want to get back to me, because I later discovered that in the last six years under President Killeen, the allocation disparity has increased by more than half — going from under $30 million in fiscal 2020 to nearly $47 million in the current budget.

Unfortunately, the financial issues don’t end with the general-operations allocations; last week, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that the UI has lost $30 million on President Killeen’s own signature initiative, the Discovery Partners Institute.

What is DPI? It was billed as a public-private partnership led by the UI to revitalize specific neighborhoods in Chicago by transforming them into a digital tech hub and make investments in other universities throughout the state. Seven years and three mission changes later, we now read about more financial chaos.

Plan of action

So, what are we doing about this in Springfield? Here are just a couple of the higher-education-related bills I filed or will be filing this year:

— SB 1369 would require the UI Board of Trustees to distribute the lump-sum general-operations funds to each campus of the university equitably, on a per-student basis.

— A resolution will be filed before the audit commission, of which I am co-chair, that would require the auditor general to perform a complete financial and performance audit of DPI. The taxpayers deserve to know where this money is going and what, seven years later, they have to show for it.

— SB 1370 would require the chancellor of each campus to fight for what is good for their campus, not the system as a whole. This is not a knock on the outgoing Chancellor Jones, but he, like all the campus chancellors, is an employee of the president.

It is time to rethink the governance of our university system. Too often, chancellors are forced to put the interests of the more extensive university system ahead of what is best for their own campuses. My proposal ensures that chancellors are able to advocate for what benefits their students, even if it conflicts with the larger system. This bill would empower our next chancellor to stand up for us, even if their “boss” doesn’t agree with it.

Your turn

I would note, of course, that you don’t need legislation to get a fair “split” for Urbana-Champaign students. President Killeen and the board of trustees could just do that on their own.

To that end, I would invite the campus senate and student government members to take up this topic. I’d be happy to supply them with raw numbers and data. Who knows — bringing almost $50 million back to the Urbana-Champaign campus might be a far greater use of their time than engaging in small-minded debates over honorary degrees and tarnishing one of the university’s greatest alumni in the process. But I digress.

In all, I’ve filed over a dozen bills designed to strengthen higher education and get a better bang for the taxpayer and student tuition payer’s buck. I’d invite you to review them at ilga.gov.

More importantly, I’d invite readers to send me direct feedback and their own ideas on what they would like to see the UI do differently. You can submit your comments by clicking on the “contact” tab at senchapinrose.com.