Your articles about the University of Illinois describe the unfortunate state of undergraduate education nicely, but in my opinion miss the point in blaming neglect of students on faculty research. My experience with the Urbana campus faculty is that they take both teaching and research seriously. The real problem is that most of the university employees are doing neither.
As you note, the Urbana campus has 7,274 administrators, professionals and support staff, 1,214 statewide administrative staff, and only 2,713 faculty. Thus ”teaching versus research” only matters for 24 percent of this group. Abolishing even a fraction of the administrative and support staff positions, and shifting the positions to teaching faculty, would improve the quality of undergraduate education dramatically at no cost to taxpayers and without raising tuition.
Another way to see this is that large public universities spend on average about $1,500 per student on administration. If Urbana follows this trend, about $52 million is being spent this way. Diverting half this sum would be enough to hire 400 new faculty,which would certainly provide for smaller classes and better student/faculty contact.
