President Hahs attended her first Board of Trustees meeting since her election as university president last week. Hahs laid out some of her new initiates including a statement of values for the university and a set of peer institutions NEIU will use as bench marks to measure against. Other items on the agenda included discussion of Governor Blagojevich’s proposed budget for the university, and votes for tenure.
In the public comment portions of the meeting Matt Larson, one of the two students arrested at the CIA demonstration called on the board to drop the charges against him. Students and faculty spoke on behalf of two professors who were ultimately voted down for tenure, Dr. Elaine Rodriguez in Political Science and Dr. Mikhail Yanovitski in Music.
Rodriguez has consulted a lawyer and is considering bringing legal action against the university in response to her denial. After the meeting she told the Independent that she felt she had fulfilled the requirements for tenure and promotion with a contract and written manuscript for several chapters of a book and with a project in research in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood.
Rodriguez said that Chair of the Political Science Dept. Chair Dr. David Leaman did not support her bid for promotion to associate professor or tenure, that a committee within the Political Science Dept. made up of both tenured and non-tenured faculty rejected her bid for tenure but that Dean of Arts and Sciences Kate Forhan and another larger university personnel committee had supported her tenure. Dr. Leaman refused to comment on the matter as it involved personnel matters.
Green Cycle Group President Amanda Woodall gave a presentation to the board on what might happen if the referendum on green energy passes in the SGA election, “While we’d love to have solar panels to rally around, or urban wind turbines or any or these projects that would be great P.R. for the university… its just the little simple things like changing all light bulbs to energy efficient light bulbs, the automated sensors.” Board member Laurino said she appreciated the idea of starting small with easy changes and applauded her work.
Board Chair Nancy Masterson responded to Woodall’s presentation “We were discussing the new Education Building and we will definitely treat it with the green idea and see what kind of foot print we can organize… it is very important to our board.”
On the peer set of 11 colleges and universities, Hahs said, “We have identified actually 11 additional institutions in our peer set and the criteria all includes starting with masters [degree] public institutions. We’re looking primarily at midsized urban institutions that have a high percentage of part time students, and a high percentage of minority students, if you’ll notice eight of the institutions are also designated as Hispanic serving institutions.” Hahs said these “peer set” universities would be used for “benchmark” comparison to NEIU.
The institutions named were Chicago State University, The University of Texas at Brownsville , The University of Texas – Pan American, City University of New York (CUNY) Lehman College, California State University – Dominguez Hills, New Jersey City University, California State University – Stanislaus, Texas A & M University – Corpus Christi, Auburn University – Montgomery AL, Indiana University Northwest and Purdue University – Calumet Campus.
The President’s Report to the Board of Trustees presented at the meeting states that capital funding in Gov. Blagojevich’s budget for the Education Building is $59,329,000 as a capital project [separate from NEIU’s operational budget].
Blagojevich’s operational budget was initially set NEIU at $77,108,400 but that was adjusted on recommendations of the Illinois Board of Higher Education to a 1.5% increase instead of a 1.9% increase due to mid year appropriations for of $400,000 at CCICS for a study of the Atlantic Slave Trade and to hire advisors to address concerns over time to degree for students. This was verified and further explained to the Independent by VP of Finance and Administration Mark Wilcockson.
Wilcockson also said that new money from the Illinois Capital Development Board was not coming in due to a political impasse in the Illinois State Legislature over raising the debt ceiling. Current projects underway were approved and appropriated before the impasse cut off future funding.
The Board voted to upgrade and modernize portions of the fire alarm and suppression systems at the Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies (CCICS).