A resolution was passed unanimously by the Faculty Senate Tuesday that requested that the administration avoid the elimination of tenured faculty.

The Faculty Senate also resolved that the ratio of students to tenured and tenure-track faculty be decreased to levels of 10 years ago.

The senate’s Budget Committee contends that there has been a 15.8 percent drop in tenure faculty from 866 in 1987 to 729 in 1997. The amount of non-tenure track faculty has increased from 359 in 1996 to 466 in 1997.

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Geoffrey Nathan, chairman of the Budget Committee, mapped out the scenario in very literal terms.

People with professor before their name have gone down, Nathan said. They are being replaced by people who do not have professor before their name.

Jim Allen, chairman of the Undergraduate Education Policy Committee, said these results affect the main purpose of the University.

This decrease means a loss of expertise in the classroom, Allen said. That’s alarming.

Another concern Faculty Senate members expressed is the ratio of students to tenured and tenure-track faculty has increased from 27.9 in 1987 to 30.1 in 1997.

Our faculty-student ratio has not gotten better, Nathan said.

In relation to the faculty-student ratio, the student headcount has decreased from 24,160 in 1987 to 21,908 in 1997.

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Nathan said lost tuition revenue from the enrollment drop may have played a part in the University not hiring tenure faculty.

John Jackson, vice chancellor for Academic Affairs and provost, said one reason the number of non-tenure-track professors increased is because they can teach more classes because they don’t conduct research.

To some extent we tried to free up more teaching power, he said in an interview after the meeting. You get much more teaching out of a term position who is willing to teach four courses or sometime more than that during a semester.

We had to make sure there were enough classes covered to offer the curriculum and particularly the core curriculum.

Jackson maintained that 83 tenure-track professor searches throughout the University are under way, and that SIUC does not have more non-tenure track faculty than other universities.

When I looked at our percentages of tenure-track and non-tenure-track compared to others in the Chronicle for Higher Education, we were a good deal lower than the universities nationwide, Jackson said. Meaning, our University stood up well compared to others on this list.

Although non-tenure track faculty do not conduct research, Jackson said many of them still are very knowledgeable and have exceptional teaching skills.

In the best of all worlds we would want the numbers not to go down on the tenure-track side, Jackson said, but we live in a very imperfect world and we’ve learned to deal with it in the best way we know how.