Christophe Pierre, vice president for academic affairs, who spoke at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Faculty on Monday, summarized the past academic year with a quote from author Charles Dickens.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Pierre said. “For the University, it is a time of much good, and it is also a time of serious concerns.”

Among these concerns, Pierre and Chancellor Phyllis Wise listed a slew of economic issues that affect students and faculty.

State debt has taken a toll on the University, Pierre said. In fiscal year 2014, the University did not receive an increase in appropriation from the state, which currently is about $640 million. Additionally, allocations from the state to the University have declined by 25 percent in the past 10 years, despite an enrollment increase of 16 percent, he said.

“The state has continued to owe us money,” he said. “It currently owes us $309 million — that is almost half of our yearly appropriations from the state. These cash flow delays continue to hamper University operations.”

Pierre said the state of Illinois also continues to take cuts out of money reserved for the University in order to cover pension deficits, which has ended up costing the University about $9 million.

“We still don’t know what pension reform will be, and we still don’t know what cuts pension reform could bring to the University,” Pierre said. “We are also subject to state procurement requirements. These impede research and even reduce revenue generating opportunities.”

Wise addressed some of these economic concerns by introducing a new, three-year strategic plan.

“It is a way of us measuring how we will continue to be and even become a greater preeminent public research university,” she said. “We want to be doing innovative teaching, meaningful engagement, and we certainly want to have a hand in economic development.”

The strategic plan’s four main points are to build a strong faculty, to provide students with a transformative learning experience, to engage in research with societal impact and to find and manage the resources in order to accomplish those first three goals, Wise said. This includes recruiting 500 new faculty over the next five to seven years, increasing faculty salaries in LAS and FAA, and increasing campus-wide changes in the way the University gives out indirect costs.

“We have done a very good job of really trying to figure out how to give money back to the units … where people have put a significant amount of time into hiring people,” Wise said. “We also know that in order to achieve the first three goals, we cannot count on increasing tuition, and we cannot count on federal grants and research. We have to do it through private philanthropy.”

Pierre agreed that refocusing spending priorities and using resources well is critical to the success of the University.

“Despite the lack of state capital budget for almost 10 years, we have found funds to rehabilitate several buildings, including the Natural History Building, and make certain improvements to classrooms and labs, which are our spending priorities,” Pierre said. “The challenge here is to make the very best use of the resources that we have through careful planning and careful investing.”

Pierre also touched on reforms that were discussed in the annual University Administration Review conducted by seven review teams, each chaired by a college dean. The review team outlined 47 recommendations for reform that they suggested to University President Robert Easter.

“In mind, the purpose of the University Administration Review is to focus on the basic missions of the UA — one of these is to represent the best interest of the University to constituents, but also to the state of Illinois,” Pierre said.

After Pierre and Wise spoke at the meeting, faculty members were given the opportunity to address some of their own concerns. Stephen Kaufman, professor emeritus of cellular and structural biology, questioned Pierre and Wise about the lack of protection for the pensions of retirees.

“This is a concern that involves thousands of other retired persons,” Kaufman said. “It has been enormously disquieting to me, as a retiree, and to thousands of other workers, that the University is so ready to compromise the retirement benefits of its workers instead of being a strong public advocate for that workforce.”

Kaufman called for the University to take action toward protecting retirement and health benefits of employees in order to maintain the high quality of faculty that Wise had emphasized earlier.

Pierre responded, promising that the University has worked with the state to deal with pension decreases as much as possible.

John Kindt, chair of the Urbana-Champaign Senate’s Faculty and Staff Benefits Committee, seconded Kaufman’s assertion and suggested that “faculty, staff and the University take a more aggressive view on (pension issues).”

MaryCate can be reached at [email protected].