Bryant, Rauner losing support in Southern Illinois

Rich Miller reports findings from a new PPP poll showing that Terri Bryant is losing support rapidly.

In August Bryant had a 50-27% positive approval rating; she's now at 42% approve and 43% disapprove.

Rauner himself carried Bryant's district 60-33, but now 57% of voters disapprove of how he's handling his job, as opposed to 33% approving.

The only head to head poll I can find  dates back to February, when it was reported by the Illinois Observer; it showed Bryant ahead of her democratic opponent, Marsha Griffin.

As Rauner's victory margin shows, Bryant's district (which includes the western half of Carbondale) leans Republican, but her race certainly looks competitive at this point.

Griffin will appear at the FA event this Wednesday from 5-7 at Evergreen Park, together with Illinois Senate candidate Sheila Simon. FA organizers are also promising good food and drink. I would assume there will also be a report on progress (or the lack thereof) in bargaining. So come out and vote in the FA election, meet local General Assembly candidates, and celebrate the end of the semester.

April 20 Protest Day

A comment just made by Mike Sullivan reminds me that I should flag the April 20 rally in Springfield.

Here's the announcement, which came in a recent email from FA president Rachel Stocking:

The Faculty Association has already organized and/or participated in a number of budget actions over the last months.  On April 20, the FA (working with the Illinois Coalition to Invest in Higher Education and other unions across the state) will be taking people up to Springfield as part of a campaign to fund higher education in Illinois.

We will leave at 8:30am from the IEA office in Carterville.  We have a full day planned: IEA contingents will meet at 12:00 at the IEA headquarters, have an event with speakers, and then go speak with legislators in the capital.  Rides are open to people not represented by the FA as well, such as students, friends and family, etc. We want Springfield to know Southern Illinois is upset!
 
To RSVP call the IEA Carterville office - (618) 733-4472 and tell Linda or J’Neita.

Supreme Court splits 4-4, preserving fair share

[Update: the Guardian has a more detailed story on the case.]

The remaining 8 Justices on the Supreme Court announced a 4-4 split today, leaving a lower court precedent in place that preserves fair share. A number of California teachers had sued, arguing their free speech rights were imperiled by having to pay for union representation.  This from the NY Times story:

A ruling in the teachers’ favor would have affected millions of government workers and weakened public-sector unions, which stood to lose fees from both workers who objected to the positions the unions take and those who simply chose not to join while benefiting from the unions’ efforts on their behalf.

The last part of that sentence explains why unions call it "fair share": they argue that all employees who benefit from union representation should pay for it. The only campus IEA union not to have the option to get fair share is the FA. NTT, GA's, and AScE (Civil Service) bargained contract provisions last time that would give them fair share if they could get to 50% membership first. Fair share is one of many items being bargained by the FA right now.

This 4-4 split, which took place only because Scalia is now off the court, means that fair share is on the table at SIU--at least if Rauner doesn't succeed in taking it off the table.

Administrative bloat and union passivity?

On Monday (3/14) the Southern ran a fairly lengthy article with the thesis that folks at SIU blame Springfield, not the administration, for looming cuts. In it SIUC spokesperson Rae Goldsmith is quoted as saying that SIU already has a low ratio of administrators to students, so doesn't anticipate many cuts there. There is a similar conversation in this Carbondale Times story from Friday 3/11.

The last time I checked SIUC was not top-heavy at the highest administrative levels, compared to peers. We were however a bit heavy in administrative staff below the top grade. If there is bloat compared to peers, then, it resides at the level of all those administrators with words like 'vice', 'associate' or 'assistant' (or some absurd combination of such terms) before their titles, or in the broader ranks of AP and "Executive Civil Service" employees. (There certainly isn't bloat in rank and file CS positions, which have been cut back massively over recent years.)

Goldsmith's answer also begs the question of whether higher education in general is top-heavy. I remember a time some years ago—a rosier fiscal time, in fact—when the SIU administration was making a big point of limiting administrative costs, rather than defending them. At a very minimum, the current defensive stance strikes me as bad for morale (why not stress that we are all in this together and looking for cuts everywhere?) and bad PR (given that there's a bipartisan agreement, whether well-based or not, that universities have too much bureaucracy).

Supposed passivity by the unions after the break.