The Board of Trustees for Western Illinois University is doing something faculty hoped they wouldn’t do — lay more of them off.
After 35 staff and faculty were laid off in late-June, the board met in special session in Macomb Tuesday and voted to lay off more contingent, tenured, and tenure-track faculty along with more staff.
Only question is, how many?
“I know it may not seem like it, but this administration is committed to minimizing that possibility,” said Kristi Mindrup, Interim, WIU President, at Tuesday’s meeting, “to minimizing the number of layoffs that we actually have to make. That’s why we’re working so diligently, that’s why sometimes when we seem evasive about how many is it going to be, we’re trying to make that as few as possible.”
The board rejected a request to sell the president’s residence in Macomb as part of a proposal to start addressing what was called a structural deficit and a cash flow problem.
The board’s actions didn’t please Merrill Cole, president of the WIU Chapter of the University Professionals of Illinois, Local 4100.
“We do not need these layoffs,” Cole told the board. “We are already hemorrhaging students. They’re transferring out right now. Their parents are saying, ‘I can’t let my son/daughter go to WIU.’ The kids are like, ‘I don’t want to go there anymore. You are doing enormous damage to our institution.”
The union later put out a statement saying that selling the president’s residents could immediately have addressed the cash flow issue, calling the board “out of touch.”
It is anticipated that the layoffs will impact both the Macomb and the Quad Cities campuses.
Mindrup said in a statement issued after the meeting the university has, over the last ten years, weathered “the ongoing transformation of higher education and the enrollment decline due to population shifts, changes in funding, and a misguided narrative that higher education is not worth the investment.”
The university’s alumni association, meanwhile, called for what it said was “shared sacrifice.”
