Lobbying for a better higher education budget, reviewing a report by the Illinois Board of Higher Education committee and adjusting to the formation of the Faculty Senate are topics for today’s Faculty Assembly meeting.

The meeting will be held at the Holmes Student Center’s Heritage Room at 3 p.m.

The assembly’s rules and governance committee will bring up a set of bylaws to accommodate the Faculty Senate, which will begin in the fall and replace the Faculty Assembly, said assembly Chairman J. Carroll Moody.

“The whole idea of forming the senate is to have a representative body of the faculty…to represent each department,” he said.

Currently, the assembly does not include faculty members from each NIU department since members were elected on a college level, Moody said.

The assembly is in the process of electing faculty to the University Council, which the assembly works with, he said.

After the final ballots are counted Friday, each department then will begin to elect a representative to the senate to produce a much larger body, Moody said.

Under new business, the assembly will be asked by the executive committee of the American Association of University Professors to “take a position on the manner in which annual salary increases are distributed,” Moody said.

Faculty salaries are given through “a set percentage which is assigned to everyone and the rest of the salary increment is based on the person’s merit evaluation,” he said.

“There will also be discussion encouraging the assembly to write state legislators about adequate funding for higher education,” Moody said.

The current proposed budget is “inadequate to maintain the universities at any acceptable level,” he said. If the budget is not improved, a tuition increase is likely to occur, he said.

In related business, Moody said he will present his analysis of the IBHE’s report by its “Committee on Scope, Structure and Productivity.”

“There’s a great deal wrong with the report…a great deal left out,” said Moody, who hopes the assembly will endorse his statement to send to the IBHE.