The University Board of Trustees has failed its faculty, staff and students.

On Friday, the board held a special meeting to discuss pension reform legislation, more specifically a typo in the legislation that could cause 3,500 to 4,000 University employees to either retire or lose thousands of dollars worth of benefits, all because the wrong year was indicated in the legislation.

Friday was the first meeting the board held to discuss the issue, but the meeting was too little too late. The board decided to take no action until its meeting on May 14, less than 60 days before the June 30 deadline to retire. 

Professors must decide soon whether they want to return for the next year; and if they must choose between losing the savings that were promised to them or retiring, most are likely to choose retirement. And we don’t blame them.

Instead, the blame lies with the board for letting it get this far without intervention. Whenever it became apparent that a mass exodus of faculty was likely, the board should have stepped in to restore the benefits to faculty members. 

While the board had to postpone taking action because it did not have a concrete plan for a supplemental pension program, it should have guaranteed employees already eligible to retire that they will receive the benefits that were initially promised to them.

Going forward, the board needs to pass a supplemental retirement program to make the University a competitive employer for faculty members. Without it, senior faculty will leave for institutions with higher retirement benefits and we will miss out on the presence of influential employees.

The Illinois General Assembly can fix all of this with a simple bill fixing the typo — and this is what it should do. It is not in the best interest of the state to see its flagship institution sink “like the Titanic” as chemistry professor Ken Suslick put it.

However, the board should not have let a simple typo scare away top faculty members and betray the trust of the employees of the University.

Faculty members make the University what it is. Students come to the University to learn from experts in fields across the board. If the board proves to be an unreliable employer, then the faculty will stop coming (or even stop staying), and the students will have less of a reason to come here.

The University of Illinois is nothing without its faculty. The Board of Trustees needs to remember that.