Feb. 29--My alma mater is making headlines lately, and not for reasons worth celebrating.
I went to Eastern Illinois University, where I majored in (and fell in love with) journalism and was editor-in-chief of the daily student paper. It was a tremendous learning experience, both socially and academically.
Now, 20 (gulp) years after I graduated, university employees are being laid off by the dozens and the school's credit rating has been severely downgraded. Students are wondering how much worse it will get.
"It's getting ridiculous," Shirmeen Ahmad, Eastern's student body president, told me. "Students are working so hard and wondering, 'Are we going to be able to finish what we started?' I have to stop and ask myself, 'Wait. I am graduating in May, right?'"
Eastern, like the rest of the state's public universities, hasn't received a single dollar from Illinois in eight months, thanks to the General Assembly's and Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner's failure to agree on a budget.
Larger schools, like the University of Illinois, are leaning on alumni networks and foundation money to get them through. Smaller schools aren't faring as well. Western and Southern are borrowing from reserve funds and laying off employees. Chicago State University sent notices of possible layoffs to all of its 900 employees Friday.
At Eastern, which was expecting about $40 million for operations and $7 million to $9 million for Monetary Award Program reimbursements from the state this year, 177 civil service employees were just laid off. Kim Turner, an office administrator in the communication studies department, was among them. Her last day is March 12.
"I manage our departmental budget for eight financial accounts," Turner told me. "I oversee and process scholarships for students, process travel vouchers for faculty, make purchases for equipment, change and edit our course schedules."
Those sound like mission-critical tasks, I told her.
"It's a vital position," she said.
University President David Glassman put out a letter to students Monday addressing rumors circulating around campus.
"EIU is not closing," Glassman wrote. "The university is financially secure with an appropriation from the state. We fully expect our appropriation to be enacted soon."
But what if it's not?
"It seems surrealist, to be frank," said Richard Wandling, professor and chair of Eastern's political science department. "It's beyond baffling."
Wandling has taught at Eastern for 29 years.
"As a political scientist and as a person who has followed the budget process over the years, I certainly have seen times when things were a little bit dicey," he said. "But I think very few people could have imagined we'd be in this situation now. It's frustrating. It's playing with people's minds -- from the civil service workers losing their jobs to the students who are concerned about their futures all the way down to the high school level, where we know students are making decisions about where to go to college."
