Three NIU participants in the state prison education program are saddened by, yet supportive of, a university refusal to renew contracts this year because of a mandatory drug testing requirement.

NIU chose to end a decades-long program at Stateville and Dixon prisons rather than subject instructors to urine tests for detection of drugs. The state’s Department of Corrections made it clear that contracts ending June 30 would not be renewed unless NIU agreed to the tests.

NIU maintains the teachers are not DOC employees, and each university has the right to choose its own faculty.

The testing policy was set last February, but NIU was allowed to finish out the contracts if it did not add new instructors. NIU and SIU are the only schools in the prison program to oppose the tests.

Jim Kennedy, NIU associate professor of English, taught 10 courses at Stateville Prison near Joliet from 1979 to 1983. He criticized the exemption of current DOC employees from the test, while instructors that have been teaching for years in the prisons must now be tested. Current DOC employees are tested only if there is “reasonable suspicion” they are using drugs.

“I don’t see why the DOC can’t extend that same kind of agreement to Northern,” he said.

If the DOC is able to fill the teaching vacancies created by the NIU-SIU bow-out, “the loss will be mainly to the faculty at Northern,” Kennedy said.

“If I had the choice, I’d take the test and I’d go. It’s besides the point. I don’t have the choice.”

Jim Thomas, NIU associate professor of sociology, taught criminal justice and sociology at Stateville from 1980 until 1987. “I unequivocally support NIU. I’m unequivocally very sad.

“We (the teachers) do not support NIU’s decision lightly. What evidence is there that drug testing new employees will reduce the flow of drugs into the prison?” he said.

Teaching at Dixon prison this past January and February was “stimulating” for NIU political science Associate Professor Kevin McKeough.

“Even though they (the students in his Political Parties and Elections class) had lost the right to vote due to their incarceration, they were very alert and very well-informed.

“I concur with the judgment of NIU that to subject faculty members to drug tests is not only a violation of privacy,” but he said he doubted whether the testing would curb drug use.

“There are a few students, a couple in particular, that I would have enjoyed teaching again. They could’ve gotten a lot from the program. I would have gotten a lot from them,” he said.