Guest Speaker:  NIU Provost Lisa Freeman

NIU Executive Vice President and Provost Lisa Freeman discussed the state budget impasse and the decline in funding for higher education which has been going on for a decade now. Also, student enrollment has been dropping and is now below 20,000 students. This happened despite a four year tuition freeze.

She provided budget details to show the dire straits the university is in, along with all the other state schools. In FY 2015 when the state last passed a budget Northern received $91.1 million. But in FY 2016 they were hit with a 71 percent budget reduction when the state had no budget and allotted only $26.4 million in stopgap funding. In addition to this the state has not released the $15 million in capital development monies to continue renovation work on Stevens Hall and the whole project had to be shuttered. This resulted not only in lost jobs in the construction industry, but added cost to NIU to shut down and winterize the project, plus loss of planned facilities to students, staff and faculty.

For FY 2017 NIU received a partial year budget of $48.3 million and now that temporary six-month fix has expired and they don’t know when the state will come through with more funding. Freeman added that university employees have not had a raise since 2012.

She said Northern is trying to cope by eliminating under-used or outdated courses of study, adding new programs where there is a need, recruiting more foreign students, and not filling many faculty and staff positions when people leave.