CHARLESTON—The Illinois Board of Higher Education mandated three annual education status reports.

The board approved its Committee on Scope, Structure and Productivity’s suggestion to amend the state’s educational mission statement while leaving the university governing structure in place and to increase productivity by mandating the publication of three annual reports.

Universities are now required to publish their first annual consumer report for prospective students by this fall and the first productivity report for the board by spring 1991.

The board voted to publish a third report for the public and legislature about the condition and performance of state higher education.

The committee’s comments on the scope and mission of higher education were first presented at the February board meeting.

Board members and educators sent a total of 36 pages of comments and criticism in response to this section of the report.

Board of Regents Chancellor Roderick Groves and his staff criticized the “light treatment given graduate education and university research … (the committee) seems to assume that graduate education can take care of itself although national reports suggest otherwise.”

Regency staff also criticized the committee for failing to address issues such as increasing minority access through community college transfers, campus goals and past “governance suggestions … including the presence of alumni on governing boards.”

The Regency staff said the report failed to mention the impact of “the major downward slide in (financial) support” on meeting higher education goals.

Groves and his staff call the consumer report “the most clearly justifiable” of the three reports.

J. Carroll Moody, NIU Faculty Assembly chairman, also responded to the committee’s report.

Moody said the report diminshes the importance of faculty research and “passes the blame for lower productivity from the state’s lack of funding to faculty’s time out of the classroom,” Moody said.

Moody said the report “provides a very limited vision of the purposes, roles, and contributions of higher education in Illinois. Its assumptions do not appear based on sound evidence and analysis.”

“Moreover, (the report) suggests the IBHE has accepted … that erosion in state support will inevitably continue. Universities and their governing boards should expect greater vision, higher ideals and greater support from their higher education coordinating board.”