Growing budget problems at the University of Illinois at Chicago are heightening the controversy over whether its aim to be a Harvard on Halsted Street is compromising its traditional undergraduate mission.
Due to proposed state budget cuts and unavoidable expenses, UIC must now trim $42.4 million in spending, about $15 million more than initially expected. The tightening budget is increasing resistance to a new vision for UIC that supporters hope will one day put the school among the best public and urban research universities in the nation.
Now, there are faculty cuts–which will lead to larger class sizes–even as some star professors have been drawing signing bonuses.
Much of the latest improvement drive is led by Stanley Fish, a renowned yet controversial Milton scholar and one of the highest paid academics in the state with a $260,000 salary.
Critics fear attempts to raise the stature of UIC, especially during a money crunch, smacks of elitism and detracts from the university’s historic mission to serve immigrants and the poor. Many point to a proposed 10 percent tuition increase as another sign of becoming out of touch with its roots.
Fish, dean of the college of liberal arts and sciences, is an aggressive recruiter who’s hiring top scholars at six-figure salaries, sometimes using “sweeteners” or signing bonuses of $10,000 to nearly $60,000 above base salaries for humanities professors.
The incentive packages, which national education officials say are becoming more commonplace, are sometimes earmarked for summer research. But it’s often mostly a recruitment tool.
“You’re spotting someone whose promise you believe in and you think this person is going to do great work,” Fish said.
One of Fish’s recent recruits, Walter Benn Michaels, earns a $175,000 annual salary and won a $58,000 summer research stipend for each of the past two summers. Jennifer Ashton, Benn Michaels’ companion, was also paid a $20,000 research stipend on top of her $60,000 salary.
“Summer pay [and other signing bonuses] are now part of the game,” Fish said. “Forget about any particular person. We are competing against universities that offer packages. Either we offer packages with similar components or we don’t compete.”
State Sen. Steve Rauschenberger (R-Elgin), a leading higher education critic and chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he plans to review the signing bonus issue.
“I just don’t buy their long-term argument that [hiring stars] somehow translates into effective undergraduate education,” he said.
Rauschenberger, who has a son at UIC, said there’s a “clear pattern” of schools like UIC slighting undergraduate education in favor of prestige hires.
“Side deals for rock star professors begs the whole question of what is their primary mission,” he said.
Many of the lowest-paid staff–lecturers who can carry the most demanding teaching loads yet often work on one-year contracts at roughly $22,000 a year–are infuriated.
In the English department alone, 18 lecturers are set to lose their contracts unless the budget improves.
Balancing act
As lecturers leave, class sizes increase. One English course with five sections in the spring has been reduced to a single lecture with more than 100 students for the fall, said Nancy Cirillo, an associate professor and head of undergraduate studies in the English department.
Cirillo says undergraduates also suffer from poor advising. She and two graduate students–working part-time–do all of the academic advising for more than 550 English majors.
“The vision of the university has turned almost completely away from educating undergraduates,” Cirillo said.
Student concerns
“I believe UIC has strayed from its urban mission,” said Brian Crowe, president of undergraduate student government and a senior at UIC. “Raising tuition by [more than] 44 percent over the past two years is not something you do when you want to cater to Chicago public school students. You don’t hire these nationally renowned professors when you’re trying to save money.”
But the University of Illinois’ leaders argue that UIC should no longer be considered a poor sister to Urbana.
“People coming from underrepresented groups ought to have the opportunity to have the very best people in the classroom,” said James Stukel, president of the U. of I. system. “This [the budget crisis] is a major bump in the road, but in the long term, we have to continue to build a great public university in Chicago.”
Fish refers to professors and lecturers who have complained about his decisions as “whiners.” He invited his liberal arts and sciences staff, some of whom recently got notice that their contracts wouldn’t be renewed, to a year-end reception, concluding the memo, “Forget your troubles, come on, get happy.”
He and others argue there are signs of UIC making gains.
Total undergraduate applications were up nearly 30 percent this spring, and freshmen enrollment is projected to increase.
UIC ranked 52nd for universities nationally in total federal funding, up from 73rd in 1995.
Two faculty members in the past five years have been awarded the university’s first MacArthur genius grants, one of the most prestigious faculty awards in the country. The university had its first Rhodes scholar last year. The number of Guggenheim awards to professors has also been increasing since the 1990s.
Partly because of Fish’s leadership, UIC is attracting far more nationally known scholars as guest lecturers and full-time faculty members. Fish has a number of top scholars from such elite schools as the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Brown, Vanderbilt and Michigan State Universities–all places UIC rarely, if ever, recruited from before his arrival.
For some faculty members and graduate students, the shift in UIC’s status is long-awaited and exciting.
“Stanley has put [the college of liberal arts and sciences] on a national map in the way it wasn’t before,” said Benn Michaels, the new chairman of the English department whom Fish recruited from Johns Hopkins University, where he was department chairman.
Great strides
David Ward, head of the American Council on Education, agreed that UIC “has really come a long way. [Fish] put UIC on the map in areas not anticipated.”
Still, roadblocks remain. U.S. News and World Report rankings put UIC in the third tier among national doctoral research universities.
Retention and graduation rates remain a concern. Four-year and five-year graduation rates are 12.5 percent and 33 percent, respectively.
Fish, 64, sees the mission to transform UIC as a crowning achievement to an accomplished career, most recently spent building the national reputation of Duke University’s English department.
He said he’s committed to getting into the trenches and plans to teach a freshmen grammar course in the fall. Still, he turns off some on the faculty with his Jaguar and boasts about putting up star recruits in some of the city’s best hotels.
For some, even the renovated campus cafeteria feels like a symbol of Fish’s showiness. It includes a white tablecloth dining area for faculty members to lunch privately and order wine and beers in the afternoon. Some jokingly refer to it as “Cafe Poisson”–French for fish.
Fish said his critics don’t understand university financing because his recruitment money couldn’t be used for other purposes anyway.
Besides, he said, he’s had to feel the pain of budget cuts like everyone else. His original plans for hiring this year fell from 40 to 9 faculty. Still, he expects and hopes the budget crisis will soon subside.
“Mounting a first-rate university is extraordinarily expensive,” Fish said. “They built up all of this stuff; either you support and sustain it or you announce that you’re retiring from this particular level of operation and go back to something else.”
