I am writing this letter as an individual faculty member, not as the official representative of any group. Not an outsider to current negotiations, I am not negotiating any collective bargaining issue. I am expressing my views according to my First Amendment rights.

In Associate Vice Chancellor Winters’ letter to the faculty Feb. 4, she criticizes alarming statements made by the association concerning the reduction of faculty research load in the administration’s counteroffer. She continues, Anyone who understands the pride which the University including the board has in the work of its community of scholars knows better than to accept such a claim.

The administration’s counteroffer speaks for itself (p.14). As Dr. Winters knows, there are no funding agencies in many disciplines sufficient to buy out research time through grants and contracts. Equally at odds with this claim of support for faculty research is the administration’s continuing reduction of faculty lines. According to figures released by Institutional Research, the number of tenure-track lines at SIUC has dropped from 287 to 172 between 1987 and 1997. This represents a loss of 115 lines, or 40.8 percent of all tenure-track lines, in only 10 years. More cutting is underway this year.

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Beginning with Chancellor John Guyon’s 2 percent plan, this cutting of faculty lines has become the administration’s knee-jerk reaction to any fiscal problem at SIUC, whether caused by decreases in student enrollment, the need to fund Oracle or covering moneys returned to the legislature for alleged mismanagement of the University vehicle account. For a decade, administrators have claimed that faculty lines are the only place where money can be taken. Now, in advance of any negotiations on this issue with the association, Provost John Jackson has announced the recall of additional lines already authorized for ongoing searches to fund any raises negotiated over 3 percent, with the warning that fewer people are going to have to teach more classes.

Last year’s prioritizing of graduate programs demonstrates the disastrous effects of loss of lines to graduate programs. As graduate programs become thin in the coverage and depth of course offerings to graduate students, they become vulnerable to merger or elimination. Since faculty retire at some point from all departments, no graduate programs are safe from attrition.

The administration is attempting to pin the blame for lost lines on the association, which has repeatedly demanded that the administration cease cutting faculty lines. Winters’s claim of pride in this community of scholars does not correlate with the continued administrative claim that the only place to find money is from cutting yet more faculty lines.