With university budgets tight and student enrollment up, an Illinois instructors union is concerned that public universities spend too much money on administration and not enough on education.

In a report released this month, the University Professionals of Illinois – the union that organizes instructors at NIU – announced that throughout Illinois, universities have hired more non-teaching personnel than they have teaching staff.

According to the report, administrative staff positions have increased 10 times faster than academic positions in the last decade.

“It just puts up a flag to me and says, ‘hey we’d better look at this again,’” UPI President Sue Kaufman said. “We’d better look at where our universities are placing their priorities.

“And the priorities, in our view, need to be on providing quality teaching staff and support staff that students need to get the quality education that they deserve.”

Steve Cunningham, associate vice president of administration and human resources, believes that the report may be misleading because of when the numbers were gathered.

He said many of the numbers in the report were taken in the summer when far fewer instructors are working. This matter of timing makes the numbers for NIU look damning. There also is a concern about who’s being counted as an administrator.

“There’s been an increase in tech-related specialized professionals,” Cunningham said. “All of the universities have added a lot of staff in those areas in the last decade. Also, advising positions have grown.”

When these discrepancies are considered, the staff numbers at NIU, specifically, have seen little change over the last decade. This may not be so for Illinois in general, however.

“We’re considered fully employed,” Cunningham said.

Despite this, the faculty-to-student ratio is up slightly because of NIU’s high student enrollment. Some colleges and departments may be feeling this more than others.

“[Liberal Arts and Sciences] is stretched because we have a lot of new students,” Cunningham said, “and many of them must go to the college for their gen-eds and core competencies.”

Tensions are high among faculty regarding this. If many teachers retire, or the state hands down more budget cuts, the whole university will feel the pinch. A heavy restriction on the hiring of new teachers adds to the stress as well.

“We’re not being indiscriminate about [hiring],” said Ivan Legg, NIU’s executive vice president and provost. “We’re being careful because we don’t know what is in store for the state budget over the next year.”

Because of these financial concerns, university administrators try to keep teaching costs down by hiring lower-paid staff.

“In general, what has happened is that universities across the country have begun to increase the number of, what we call, instructors,” Legg said. “And that helps up to a point.”

Still, UPI believes that the budget crisis provides a great opportunity for universities to review their budgets and cut back on “administrative waste.”

“It’s time for the universities to take a long look at this again,” Kaufman said. “We have to pay attention to this in the decades to come.”

The UPI report is the first of its kind in Illinois and was prepared by the Chicago-based Center on Work and Community Development.