Legislation that would eliminate the Board of Regents and give NIU its own governing board was introduced to the state senate Wednesday.

The legislation would create a total of seven new individual governing boards for the universities presently overseen by the Regents and the Board of Governors.

The bill will go before the Senate Education Committee March 25, and likely will be voted on by mid-April.

Assistant Lt. Gov. Mary Reynolds said the individual boards would have similar powers to the Regents and the BOG. She said the boards would be patterned after the individual boards at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

Reynolds said the role of the Illinois Board of Higher Education would remain essentially the same and that the bill did not call for the IBHE to attain program-cutting power.

Reynolds added that student representation would be included on the individual boards, just as it is on the Regents. She said it was a “non-issue” because there was never any consideration not to have nonvoting student members on the boards.

State Sen. Frank Watson, R-Carlyle, chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Education, said the intent of the legislation is to “eliminate a level of bureaucracy which is unneeded.

“The intent of the legislation is to take the responsibilities of the Regents and place them with local boards at the universities,” Watson said.

However, he said the IBHE “would have a more direct impact over universities” because the IBHE would not have to go through the Regents or the Governors and could deal directly with the universities.

Regents Chancellor Roderick Groves said the legislation does not eliminate a step in the process of governance. He said governance matters still will go from the universities, to the governing boards and then onto the IBHE.

One criticism the legislation will face is that instead of streamlining the system of governance, the bureaucracy might actually grow under the new plan because of the increase in the number of the boards.

Watson said the Illinois General Assembly will be able to keep the growth of the new boards in check because they will control “the purse strings.”

Reynolds said the boards’ staffs would be made up of personnel “reallocated” out of the presidents’ offices of the universities, and that no new people would have to be hired for the new boards.

However, Groves said there would be no cost savings under the new plan and that costs actually would increase. He said it would be hard to judge the increase because some of the costs would not be very evident.

Groves said utilizing the presidents’ staffs in different ways might increase cost in a way that would be hard to track. The staff members, having to devote more time to board matters and less time to their traditional university responsibilities, would be a cost to the universities that would be hard to measure.

He also said costs would be incurred because some planning would have to go into how the individual boards would function in relation to the university.