Walter Wendler, Chancellor of SIUC, has unveiled his long-range plan to bring respect to the University. His plan included celebrating Faculty excellence. He also wanted to increase research and service and to improve teaching, areas that are traditionally tenure-track faculty roles. As a tenure-track faculty member at SIUC, I strongly support the idea of bringing respect to faculty and celebrating faculty excellence. I join my campus-wide faculty peers who are engaged, with excellence, in these highly valued research, teaching and service activities and believe that such respect is long overdue. I encourage the chancellor and his fellow administrators at SIUC to examine the pool of highly talented tenure-track faculty here to appreciate the extent of excellence that currently exists at SIUC. I further challenge them to implement a successful retention strategy to maintain my excellent faculty peers as a part of their faculty-respect campaign.

I suggest a retention plan that would include, but not be limited to, the following:Pay competitive wages to faculty; honor faculty driven merit systems that value research, teaching and service; honor existing unit-to-University policies regarding promotion and tenure; voluntarily comply with the terms of the contract between the SIUCFA and the Board of Trustees; support faculty-driven initiatives to guarantee gender and race neutral faculty deployments that support scholarship and teaching excellence; provide on-going resources adequate to support excellence in faculty research and teaching. I believe that the current administration’s failure to succeed in these areas appears to produce an atmosphere of hostility and contempt between the current faculty-of-excellence and the University leadership. Such an environment is instrumental in driving away the very resources, the talented faculty, which SIUC requires for success, today and in the future.