About a year ago I was elected Student Trustee by my peers.

Openly campaigning against the wild incompetence of our school’s administration, I won in a landslide victory by a nearly two-to-one margin against my opponent.

The students were pissed off at the ineptitude of our university’s leaders, need I remind you leaders who were not elected by the people, and most of whom has absolutely no business governing a university.

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If this past year of “leadership” has accomplished anything, it is the cementing of SIU’s legacy as an institution being violently run into the ground by a small and powerful group of severely detached elites.

Things in Carbondale are getting so bad so fast (something people on right and left seem to agree with) that the most reasonable course of action is to dethrone SIU’s ruling class and restructure from below.

I have said this before and I will say it again: most — but definitely not all — of the administrators I’ve worked with over the past year, as best as I can tell, have noble intentions at heart. They honestly want to see SIU and the surrounding regions prosper, specifically those on the Board of Trustees.

With that said, they are entirely unable to get us to anything remotely resembling prosperity.

The board holds a near monopoly on all of the institutional power of the SIU system, an institution whose health determines the well-being of all of southern Illinois. As such, this small group of people controls the fate of the entire region.

This way of structuring power is not only inherently unstable and irrational, but is at its very core unjust and fundamentally undemocratic.   

A small group of people who, because of their social capital or perceived prestige within their community, were appointed by the Illinois governor to the SIU Board and now, as a result, wield ultimate power over the university.

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These people have final say on tuition and fees, policies, budgets, academic reorganization, university personnel and more. And while the university’s president and chancellors wield substantial power too, they ultimately must report to the board.

But besides their proximity to campus and an SIU degree, most members of the board are not directly involved with the day-to-day operations of the university, as many of them have day jobs to attend to.

By its very nature, the Board of Trustees, this removed group of preoccupied working professionals that meet five or six times a year, do not possess the time or knowledge to steer our ship. Plain and simple.

In all honesty, it wouldn’t even be fair of us to expect them to make wise decisions. How are they supposed to know what is good or bad for SIU if they don’t even spend their days on campus?

The more you think about the less sense it actually makes.

Because of its detached nature, its existing as an outside governing body, the board is understandably ignorant of what professors actually need, of what this university needs and especially of what it means to be a student in the twenty-first century.

The reason SIU is crumbling before our very eyes is because the system itself is fundamentally flawed.

We operate within a structure where those in charge of all of the big decisions, those with the final say and the most influence, are people who, for the most part, know nothing about running a healthy and just institution of higher education.

The whole thing is asinine.

This institution is predicated upon a profoundly toxic hierarchical system in which the decisions being made affect everybody except for those making them and the actual stakeholders have no say in the matter.

And while the board members are not paid, they clearly have no problem shelling out the big bucks to hire random people from out of state to make the decisions for them, as is evidenced by the zealous piety of the Carbondale trustees when dealing with all things Carlo — insisting everyone just back off as the chancellor turns SIU into Ingenuity Lab 2.0.

To no one’s surprise but everyone’s detriment, as our school and community collapse the top-paid administrators reward themselves with hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Student researchers get laid off by the dozens as our upstanding chancellor invents new positions for his daughter and son-in-law so his family can get even richer.

It is the same old bullshit happening everywhere else, from Wall Street to Washington DC — the ruling class destroys everything we have come to love, everything we have worked so hard for, and then walks away unscathed to go do it somewhere else.

Why should we trust administrators who command hundreds of thousands of dollars for their so-called service?

Why should a small group of people, many of whom are not even academics, wield ultimate power over the university, over our university?

The Southern Illinoisian just published a piece about the infighting at the top of the SIU pyramid, but that article doesn’t even scratch the surface.

The personal vendettas and drama between those on top is enough to cause our university to lose what little footing we have left. As I said earlier: this way of structuring power is fundamentally unstable.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The solution to this madness is really quite straightforward — dissolve the SIU Board of Trustees, fire the chancellor and create a democratically elected, rotating body of students, staff, faculty and community members to run the university.

We don’t need any more lavishly compensated administrators walking all over our school like a damn stepping stone for their careers.

We don’t need some self-righteous, all-powerful Board of Trustees in order thrive. In fact, quite the contrary.

Are we really that unqualified as academics, researchers, students, scientists, staff, scholars, professors and community members to not be entrusted with the task of determining what is best for our own university and the community in which it is situated?

Strictly from the standpoint of reasonable governance and, well, common sense, the academy must be run by those deeply embedded in the day-to-day functioning of it — people intimate with the complex relationships between faculty and staff, teachers and students, students and knowledge, the university and the culture of its community.

Overall, my experience as Student Trustee has been a pretty insufferable one, but it has taught me one thing: those in power at SIU have literally no idea what they are doing and if we don’t get organized, rise up and take back that power their reign will be end of SIU, taking the entire region down with it. 

No more Pharaohs in Little Egypt.

Student Trustee Sam Beard can be reached at [email protected] or by phone at (618) 453-8418. His office is located in the Registered Student Organization Suite on the third floor of the Student Center and his office hours are Mondays and Thursdays: 12:30 pm – 2 pm or by appointment.

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