Confusion prevails around distance education money

Daniel Bethers

Hundreds of thousands of SIU dollars earmarked for everything from scholarships to equipment to student travel is suddenly at the center of a mystery, with department directors and faculty wondering where it is or whether it even exists.

The money is from Distance Education (DE) funds promised to SIU’s departments in exchange for the work required to put classes online.

“The School of Journalism and Advertising jumped at the opportunity to offer an online degree and as a result, the DE (distance education) funds have been a critical stream of revenue for us and the college,” said Jan Thompson, the director of the School of Journalism and Advertising. “For instance, I need to replace 25 computers in the newsroom and 40 computers in two classrooms. I was going to use DE money…but, I can’t plan for that because it is not clear if there will be DE money. We have heard there may be no money.”

Thompson said she remembers the distance education program was started by former Chancellor Rita Cheng.

“[It started] as an incentive for departments and schools to start to offer online courses-the department/ school would get a cut of the revenue,” Thompson said. “I think it has been around 40-50%.”

Chancellor Austin Lane told the Faculty Senate the distance education promise came at a time when the university was in deficit spending mode because of extreme cutbacks in funding from the state legislature. Before questioning Lane, the senate said it had received inquiries from three different colleges about the matter.

“During economic hard times, this was extremely important, because of financial difficulties we had,” philosophy professor Kenneth Stikkers said. “There wasn’t any money for doing a lot of things like faculty travel. There was no money at all for faculty to travel, let alone student travel. And so the DE (distance education) money was extremely important. Eventually, things got so bad that the administration was not distributing that money for a while, it was such hard straits. And people complained, they said, ‘Well, you know, there’s no incentive to offer these courses [online] if there’s not some kind of benefit.”

The “hard straits” the university was going through were nothing short of 37.8 million dollars in state appropriations that SIU was forced to go without, thanks to the state budget impasse of 2015, which continued to disrupt funding to statefunded universities and government agencies across Illinois until late in 2017.

Before the 2015 budget impasse, in 2002, SIU had hit an all-time high in state appropriations, receiving $130.6 million dollars in funding directly from the state of Illinois. In early 2015, before Bruce Rauner’s state budget would have taken effect if all went smoothly in the state legislature, SIU received a more average appropriation sum of $101.6 million, sufficient to continue operations as normal. In the financial year (FY) 2016, SIU received a scant $29.27 million dollars when SIU administration was anticipating more than three times that amount.

Set on his “Turnaround Agenda,” then newly-elected Governor Brunce Rauner had begun to veto all attempts at passing a new state budget, which would span the second half of 2015 and the first half of 2016. This included most state funding offered to universities, with only half measures for purposes of damage control making it through to SIU’s coffers. spend regardless of time passed.

The resulting $29.28 million would be the only money SIU saw from the state for the rest of 2016. In early 2017, the university received approximately $54 million in state appropriations, which it was forced to immediately apply to its expenses from 2016. Although SIU would receive an additional $47.54 million dollars in 2017, great damage was already done.

In 2017, the university was forced to run itself using only that last sum of $47.54 million, in addition to its other incomes. According to Interim Associate Provost Marc Morris, as a result of this hardship in 2017, as well as the previous year’s greatly reduced budget, that the university began to dig deep for the funds to continue running.

Morris said the university ran its accounts at a deficit, spending more funds than it had in order to stay functional after the unexpected drop in state aid. When addressing the Faculty Senate on the issue of distance education, Lane called it money that SIU had taken from its “reserves.” In doing this, the university incurred no interest rates, or fees of any kind, according to Morris.

However, the university’s thenadministration understood it was vital that SIU’s accounts were balanced again for the sake of long term sustainability. For this purpose, it drafted the Financial Sustainability Plan. The plan made large reductions to the university’s budget in a variety of areas, to be distributed across future academic years.

“So Hahn, Professor Hahn, he teaches a lot of online courses,” said Stikkers. “So he generates a lot of money and he had made an arrangement because he conducts the study tour to Egypt. He conducts several [study tours] each year, and he had made a kind of a deal - not quite sure who would sign off on this, probably the dean - that some of these monies would be directed to fund the students and help enable them to go out on these studies, and so he had want to do this.”

Stikkers first heard of the issue when Professor Jonathan Bean, director of the School of History and Philosophy, passed down a notification telling the rest of the school that the distance education funds would no longer be available and that travel expenses for professors wouldn’t be covered to the same extent as before. For this story, Bean told the Daily Egyptian that he had no comment on the situation.