After reading recent letters from faculty colleagues and also the official response from the administration, I decided to go to the Board of Trustees proposal online and see for myself the board’s positions concerning faculty workload and research. The text is indeed eye-opening. To quote, …the normal assignment in instruction will be 12 credit hours during the fall and spring semesters. Later it states, Commencing as early as July 1, 1999, the board may elect to employ, and compensate, all faculty within an academic unit (or units) based on an 11-month contract, with 100 percent teaching load being defined as 30 semester hours of instruction within the 11-month period.

What about research? Surely since the board has such pride (to quote Margaret Winters) in our collective scholarly achievement, they included some provision for its accomplishment. in fact, to again quote, the maximum assigned time for research will be one-third of the faculty assignment. Hmmm. Well, pride is one of the seven deadly sins. Perhaps it’s best that we don’t have too much of it.

To be sure, the board proposal does say, Additional research time may be purchased through external grants. But in an area of basic research such as mathematics, even the most generous grants would merely provide dollars to buy back summer research time; and in an era of shrinking external funding, only a handful of faculty would be able to do this. Perhaps it is different in other disciplines, but I suspect most academicians receive only modest compensation for their research time.

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Now, before I get accused of quoting out of context, let me urge each faculty member to go, as I did, to the website and read the full text for themselves. It can be found at http://SIUC-faculty-assoc.org.

It seems clear to me that if anything close to the board’s position on faculty workload is adopted, the graduate program in mathematics will be destroyed. Mathematics will not be alone in this position. Despite administration denials, SIUC will become strictly an undergraduate institution. The faculty at SIUC simply cannot allow this to happen.