Sharing the Burden

Student trustees from each of the three University of Illinois campuses are calling on university administrators who earn $150,000 or more to accept a two-year pay freeze, The News-Gazette reports. The student trustee from the university’s Springfield campus told the daily newspaper, based in Champaign, Ill., that the students plan to raise the issue at the next Board of Trustees meeting in November.

The savings from such a freeze would be minimal compared with the university’s overall annual budget of approximately $4.2-billion — “probably less than $250,000,” according to James Winters, the University of Illinois at Chicago student trustee who was recently chosen by Gov. Rod Blagojevich to hold the official student vote on the board. But if adopted, the measure would signal administrators’ willingness to share the economic burden with the rest of the university community, which is facing tuition increases and struggling to do more with less in these times of financial hardship, the newspaper said. It quoted Paul Schmitt, the student trustee from the Urbana campus, as saying, “This should be the foundation of a growing trend of fiscal responsibility in the university and how we manage our money.”