As you'll have learned if you are following the SIUC Unions United blog, the attempt to gut our pension benefits failed to pass, though the signature of a prominent pro-business (i.e., anti-tax) lobbyist on the memo announcing the end of that push is rather troubling, to say the least.
Glen Poshard, in an email report sent to faculty on Thursday, reports that state appropriations for next year will also be rather less bad than had been feared, and a number of proposals detrimental to SIUC have been defeated. I can't say how much credit Poshard himself deserves for achieving this result—most of the results he describes spared all state universities, of course, and thus were no doubt fought for by his colleagues at other state universities as well. But presumably his political experience isn't hurting us any--and his rather full report on the state legislative session shows his (or at least staff's) full engagement with these issues. Most of you will have received his email (which I paste at the end of this post), but I'll here pull out some of the high points and consider their impact on our budget.
