Anita Wilbur-Utgaard’s Jan. 23 letter observed that tuition prices have risen sharply here for students in the past five years, and services from professors have flatlined. If flatlined means that professorial services to students have neither increased nor decreased, then the faculty can take some grim satisfaction in having maintained a constant level of productivity in this area in the face of serious attrition in faculty numbers and significant increases in other areas of their workloads.

First SIUC Faculty Association, and now the Faculty Senate (see the Feb. 11 front-page Daily Egyptian story), have publicized that during the period 1987-1997 the number of tenured-track faculty fell by 16 percent!

Not only are there fewer faculty trying to do the same job, but the job itself has grown during that period, especially in the area of non-teaching duties an area that is not easily perceived by most students. Although teaching is sometimes described as a professor’s primary duty, in reality it is only the visible tip of an iceberg whose underwater portion is steadily growing. Much of the growth is resulting from an ever-increasing concentration on accountability. Professor’s time available for teaching and preparation, research and office hours is more and more in competition with the need to write more frequent departmental self-study reports for the justification of programs in the face of budget squeezes, to plan and execute efforts for recruitment, to administer supplemental testing and record-keeping for purposes of assessment and to trace the whereabouts of current and former students for purposes of retention and statistical reports on productivity. Meanwhile, norms for teaching loads have stayed at the same levels they had before the rapid growth of these other duties.

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Yes, the University has simultaneously raised tuition while cutting back instruction. So where IS the money going? Many of us feel that our dues to SIUC Faculty Association are a small price to pay if it can help us get to the bottom of this mystery!

Lee Hartman, associate professor

foreign languages and literatures