SPRINGFIELD — Faculty at the University of Illinois Springfield went on strike Friday after contract negotiations failed to produce satisfactory wage increases and address other concerns.
The strike at the campus of 4,300 students at one of the three University of Illinois system schools marks the first by a public university in Illinois since three universities went on strike in April 2023. It’s the first strike at UIS since May 2017.
Tenure and tenure-track faculty at UIS have been negotiating with administrators since last spring, when nontenured faculty avoided a strike. A 2022 collective bargaining agreement expired last August and despite help from a federal mediator, the UIS United Faculty Union has been unable to reach an agreement after voting last month to authorize a strike.
A group of several dozen faculty members and supporters held a rally on campus Friday after a 10-hour bargaining session on Thursday failed to produce a deal.
“This is not where we wanted to be on this beautiful Friday morning,” said Dathan Powell, an associate theater professor and president of the UIS faculty union. “We wanted to be in our classrooms. We wanted to be in our offices with our students, working with them on research, doing service for this institution to keep it running. But we're out here. We're out here because the administration of this university has not been valuing its students. It values its students when it invests in its faculty, in its staff and in the institution itself.”
University ‘disappointed’
The university said in a statement that it is “disappointed” by the union’s decision to go on strike.
“We remain hopeful the union will return to the table so negotiations can continue,” the statement said. “UIS is committed to supporting students who are affected by the faculty’s decision to participate in a work stoppage and has plans in place to minimize the impact to them. The university continues to work toward a fair and fiscally responsible contract that serves the entire university community and hopes to reach a timely agreement with the union.”
The university told students in an email on Thursday that they should continue attending classes unless their professor cancels it. Not all professors are part of the strike and the university said contracts with other faculty groups prohibit them from engaging in a sympathy strike.
“The students who are worried are rightfully worried, and we are worried for them because we see that the administration has valued them so little by refusing to negotiate with the faculty,” Powell told reporters.
Several UIS students spoke in support of the faculty at the rally.
“When you hurt the faculty, you hurt the students,” UIS communications student Braden Nuttall said. “We are not separate; we are one. One does not come without the other. The faculty is not asking for anything more than what they truly deserve.”
The UIS staff union is also considering going on strike but are continuing negotiations.
What’s being negotiated
A key point of contention is the size of cost-of-living adjustments. The administration offered 1% raises, which they said aligns with a University of Illinois system program on salary and raises. The union is seeking a 2.6% increase in the current fiscal year and 6% over the next two years, according to the university’s bargaining update.
“What they're providing would not even buy or fill a tank of gas,” University Professionals of Illinois President John Miller said.
The union says wage growth for faculty has been lower than for top administrators who earn six-figure salaries.
Faculty are also hoping to boost the $55,000 minimum salary that was set in 2017 by $11,000 — UIS has offered a $2,000 increase. The union also wants the university to set aside more money for faculty to attend conferences, which have also risen in cost.
The union is seeking protections from artificial intelligence, making a pilot program on employee leave permanent and limiting rate increases for on-campus parking. They also expressed fear the administration is trying to walk back agreements from the 2022 contract.
“We want for them to recognize that the faculty and the staff here at UIS are the ones who provide the support and the education for the students here, and the way that they can do that is by bargaining with us collaboratively,” Powell told reporters. “Oftentimes, what happens in bargaining, however, is that our proposals are presented, we talk through the logic and the reason behind them, and we are often met with just a rejection.”
The next bargaining session had not been set as of Friday morning, Powell said.
Broader budget talks
In a March 26 email to students obtained by Capitol News Illinois, the UIS administration said they are working to address a structural deficit pegged at $19 million in the current fiscal year. Reducing hiring and targeted budget reductions have helped the university advance its long-term financial plan, the email said.
UIS’ budget struggles and the strike come as lawmakers down the road at the Statehouse debate creating a new formula for higher education funding.
Read more: University funding overhaul bill advances in House despite U of I opposition
The proposal calls for increasing university funding by about $135 million each year over the next 15 years. That new funding would be distributed under a formula that sets an adequacy target for each institution and gives priority for new funding to those institutions furthest away from their target.
The University of Illinois system is opposed to the bill over fears funding would be redirected to other universities. According to the Coalition for Transforming Higher Education Funding, U of I Urbana-Champaign is funded at 89% of its adequacy target. UIS is at 57%.
“The U of I system has plenty of money, but it has chosen not to fund UIS at an appropriate level,” Powell told reporters. “There is a cost of running an institution of higher ed in Illinois, and they are not paying that to the institution. So the state funds that come into the system are held up by the system and not dispersed evenly to the campuses that need it most.”
UIS accounts for 2% of all of the university system’s spending in the current fiscal year, according to the system’s budget documents. UIUC receives 44% and the University of Illinois Chicago 31% while the rest goes to the system’s administration and university’s hospital. UIS also receives only 3% of state funds allocated to the system.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.