Minutes of the

NIU Board of Trustees

ACADEMIC AFFAIRS, STUDENT AFFAIRS

AND PERSONNEL COMMITTEE

November 15, 2001

The meeting was called to order by Chair Barbara Giorgi Vella at 9:08 a.m. in the Clara Sperling Sky Room of Holmes Student Center.  Recording Secretary Sharon Mimms conducted a roll call of Trustees.  Members present were Trustees Robert Boey, Myron Siegel, Student Trustee Alex Alaniz and Chair Vella.  Also present were Committee Liaison Ivan Legg, President John Peters and Board Parliamentarian Kenneth Davidson.  With a quorum present, the meeting proceeded.

Confirmation of Open Meetings Act notification compliance was given by Board Parliamentarian Ken Davidson.

Trustee Siegel asked that Agenda Item 7.d., Collective Bargaining Agreements, be added to the agenda and then made a motion to approve the agenda as amended.  It was seconded by Trustee Boey.  The motion was approved.

It was moved by Trustee Siegel and seconded by Trustee Boey to approve the minutes of the September 7, 2001 meeting.  The motion was approved.

Today we have one action item, Chair Vella said, collective bargaining agreements, and three items for information only.  The first information item will be the sabbatical leave reports presented by two tenured faculty members, Dr. Chris Carger of the Department of Literacy Education and Dr. Paul Stoddard of the Department of Geology and Environmental Geosciences.  The third report will be presented by a member of the Supportive Professional Staff, Dr. Anna Beth Payne of the Counseling and Student Development Center.  The committee will also hear a presentation by Associate Vice President for Administration and Human Resources Steve Cunningham and Affirmative Action and Diversity Resources Director Elizabeth Ortiz on the affirmative action and diversity resources program.  Steve Cunningham will also provide an overview on updated salary benchmarks for NIU faculty.

The Chair welcomed University Advisory Committee representative Dan Griffiths who remarked that he was looking forward to hearing the sabbatical reports.

The Chair asked Board Parliamentarian Kenneth Davidson if any members of the public had registered a written request to address the Board in accordance with state law and the Board of Trustees Bylaws.  Mr. Davidson noted that no requests for public comment had been received.

Agenda Item 7.d. – Collective Bargaining Agreements

Mr. Cunningham explained the bargaining agreement reached between Northern Illinois University and the Metropolitan Alliance of Police, which represents approximately 23 police officers.  The police decertified their old bargaining agent, the Fraternal Order of Police, and this is the first agreement with the Metropolitan Alliance of Police.  It is a comprehensive five‑year agreement, he said, with no reopeners through the life of the agreement.  The conditions for wages and salaries are all set forth in the agreement and are consistent with university guidelines and policies.  Chair Vella asked for a motion to endorse the agreement.  Trustee Boey so moved, seconded by Student Trustee Alaniz.  The motion was approved.

Agenda Item 7.a. – Faculty Reports on Sabbatical Leaves

Dr. Legg made a few comments regarding the sabbatical leave program, which he described as very critical to the functioning of the university.  All tenured faculty and the supportive professional staff have the opportunity to apply every seventh year or at the end of their sixth year of service for a sabbatical leave.  The sabbatical leave concept is extremely important, he said, and is a very integral part of the quality of higher education in the United States.  In fact, it is one of those issues that contributes to the continuation of faculty and staff success through many years of service, and he was very pleased to see that there was a sabbatical leave for Supportive Professional Staff when he came here, Dr. Legg said.  If he were to note only one aspect of the importance of sabbatical leaves, it would be the concept that you strengthen and renew yourself in your scholarship, and that is very closely integrated into the quality of the teaching and education that we bring our students.

Three representatives were selected to present a brief summary of their sabbatical leave experiences.  Provost Legg introduced Dr. Chris Carger, who has been on the faculty of NIU’s College of Education for eight years.  Dr. Carger holds a Ph.D. in Reading from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she specialized in bilingualism and reading.  Her dissertation, “Of Borders and Dreams, a Mexican‑American Experience of Urban Education,” was nominated for the Outstanding Dissertation of the Year in 1996 and has become a book widely used in multicultural education classes across the country.  Presently she is Associate Professor in the Department of Literacy Education and teaches multicultural children’s literature courses, bilingual and TESOL courses and reading methods.  Dr. Carger serves as chairperson for the America’s Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, a national committee that recognizes high quality children’s books for Latinos at a yearly awards ceremony in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.  Dr. Carger was awarded a sabbatical in spring 2001 to study the effects of literature circles with bilingual primary grade students.

I appreciate the opportunity to speak about my sabbatical work, Dr. Carger said, and to publicly express my thanks for the opportunity to do the work that I love and feel passionately about, and that, for me, crosses into vocation rather than job.  For my semester of sabbatical, I very simply returned to the classroom.  Over 20 years ago, I taught as a primary bilingual teacher in the near west side of Chicago in the Pilsen‑Little Village area with Mexican origin children, and that is what I decided to do again.  This time, I concentrated on the subject of reading and the area of children’s responses to literature.  I wanted to use beautiful multicultural children’s picture books featuring Latino characters so that my Latino students could see reflections of themselves in the literature.  Then I wanted to see whether these young bilingual students from the heart of an urban, economically challenged area where families worry for the safety of their children when they walk to school would be able to respond in meaningful and personal ways to stories.  I believe that if we are going to create lifelong readers, we need to have children connect with books, feel that the author and illustrator is really reaching out and touching them, rather than just be concerned whether they can recite back what happened first, second and third in the story.

In my field, Dr. Carger continued, we categorize responses to children’s literature in two ways – efferent responses, which are really seeking information.  Can the child tell us who, what, where, when?  Or aesthetic responses in which we try to see whether children can reach those higher‑level thinking skills, appreciate the beauty of the language, the beauty of the art work, connect their personal backgrounds to what they are hearing in the story.  What I have seen is that there is a trend in education to feel that bilingual minority children cannot handle higher‑level thinking skills, and so they are taught in Chicago in what is called a direct‑instruction mode.  Direct instruction, or DI, as it is commonly called, was created for mentally retarded children.  It is now being used for bilingual children, assuming that they need basic skills and that they cannot go any further.

What I found, after transcribing over 30, 2‑hour tapes and examining all the transcriptions, Dr. Carger said, was that the children were really able to handle higher level thinking skills with no problem at all.  I have been categorizing their responses in the categories that you see on the screen.  I found that they could make cultural and experiential identifications with the books used, that they made metalinguistic comments.  In other words, they actively thought about the difference between English and Spanish and the vocabulary that was being used in the books.  They had semantic inquiries.  They had comments on the illustrations, on the text.  They had suggestions for me as a teacher.  They made empathetic remarks, and they made remarks that showed an awareness of social and political situations in the world.

Another thing that I looked at, Dr. Carger said, was how we have children respond to books.  Instead of just having them talk and write about the books, I allowed them to respond artistically to the books.  We read books about ancient Native Americans making pottery, and then we actually tried it ourselves.  And as we did that, the students would talk to each other wondering how parents decorated these articles for their children centuries ago and trying to make their articles look the same way.  That showed me that they comprehended the story, the mood and the theme that the authors were trying to get across to children much more than any kind of a worksheet would do.  I also had the children do creative writing.  We wrote letters to different characters that we read about in the books.  Here were these urban children in very poor neighborhoods.  One day, I showed them a picture that showed a little girl’s room being painted.  The colors were being swirled, and one student looked up at me and said, “You know teacher, that reminds me of a Van Gogh painting.”  The student sitting next to her said, “Yeah, I think it was ‘Starry, Starry Night.’”  And I thought this was fantastic.  These are children that in the classroom are not allowed to express these ideas and these connections.  So, after this, because they had such an interest in him, we read biographies of Vincent Van Gogh, and I had them write letters to Vincent Van Gogh.  Their responses showed me that they could go far beyond just reciting facts back to the teacher, which was what was happening in their classrooms.

My sabbatical not only allowed me to bring these beautiful books to a very poor neighborhood and to examine the responses of over 50 children, Dr. Carger said, but it really affirms my teaching when I now go back to my preservice teachers.  It really legitimizes my ability to talk to them, to teach them how to plan engaging lessons, to turn out young teachers that I feel have a sense of looking at the potential children have rather than getting caught up in the deficits they may have to deal with.  I am presenting my sabbatical research at the National Reading Conference next month in Texas, she said.  It is really a welcome addition to the field where we are struggling with trying to convince people in administrative and programming positions that bilingual children, that minority children, are capable of higher level thinking skills.

As another outgrowth of my sabbatical work, Dr. Carger said, we now are taking 20 students from NIU into the same neighborhood with the children I worked with on my sabbatical, and we have started a tutoring partnership through one of our literacy education courses.  So, I thank you very much for this opportunity, she concluded, and I hope I gave you just a little sense of what I did.

Before I had a chance to sit on the Board of Trustees, Trustee Boey said, like most community members, I had a very fuzzy, vague idea of the definition of sabbatical.  Through the years that all of us have been on the Board here, I have really come to have an appreciation of what the sabbatical means and the results of it.  And I think it is so necessary.  Faculty need to recharge and do research in the areas in which they have a particular interest, so I am really supportive of this whole sabbatical idea.

Dr. Legg added that the work Dr. Carger was doing was extremely important as the Latino/Hispanic population continues to expand in this part of the country, and he congratulated her for what she had done with her sabbatical.  I found your work to be very important, Trustee Siegel commented.  We all learn differently.  Something that stimulates the mind of one person does not necessarily stimulate the minds of all.  Your work identifies some teaching techniques to help our children, and I am pleased that you will be able to give this knowledge to our NIU students who are going to be the teachers of the future.

Next, Dr. Legg introduced Dr. Anna Beth Payne, who has been at NIU’s Counseling and Development Center since 1986 and has been the associate director and director of the APA‑accredited predoctoral internship in professional psychology since 1989.  She received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1982.  Dr. Payne’s work at NIU includes therapy, crisis intervention, consultation to faculty and staff at NIU, and training and supervision of practicum students, interns and staff.  In addition, she has been actively involved in planning assessment with Student Affairs.  She has been a frequent presenter at the Association of Counseling Center Training Agencies as well as a past member of their board of directors, an active member of the association of Psychology, Postdoctoral and Internship Centers and a frequent accreditation cite visitor for the American Psychological Association.  Dr. Payne’s clinical interests have long been in the treatment of students who have suffered from abuse or trauma coupled with a passion for training graduate students to practice therapy.  Her sabbatical presented an opportunity to more deeply explore how to teach a fundamental and yet elusive component of all therapy, but particularly therapy with survivors, that of developing safety.

It is really a privilege to be here to talk with you, Dr. Payne said.  It is wonderful when people in student services are able to take sabbaticals, and it is a little harder, sometimes, to explain how they are connected to the teaching mission.  I think, especially in clinical and counseling psychology, it is the simple concepts that are the most difficult to teach.  Much of my sabbatical year focused on exploring something that seems to be basic and simple – the concept of safety.  I know each one of you already knows that safety is a crucial element in any helping relationship.  We need to feel safe with our doctor, our lawyer, our spiritual leader, our teachers and, of course, with our therapist.  If we have been hurt or traumatized, we want safety; but we may see it as elusive or even illusory.  After September 11, I think all of us really understand what that means better than we ever did before.  However, Dr. Payne said, long before that I found I really needed time to develop my ideas about how to teach psychology trainees.  Specifically, I wanted to teach them how to provide treatment to trauma and abuse survivors, but to do so in a way that integrates core ideas about safety and therapy with more specialized and focused ideas about the safety needs of survivors.

My lab was not a research lab, but a clinical setting, Dr. Payne said.  My data were hours of therapy sessions on tape.  The sessions included, as any therapy session will, many moments in which my clients seemed to feel increasingly safe as well as moments in which they seemed to grow cautious and wary.  So, the question I had was, how could I draw on this vast array of information to answer the questions my students ask?  How do I make therapy safe for every client – each one individually?  What did I do that just worked?  Students do not always know the answer to that.  How is it that when I tried to be supportive, my client acted as if I was being mean?  These are questions that sound simple, but they are not.  They are not simple because the answers actually include the piecing together, as in a quilt, of many different elements.  And just as when you are making a quilt, the elements can be pieced together in so many ways that each effort is unique.  So, I spent my sabbatical trying to take apart the quilts, if you will, of my sessions Dr. Payne said, I ended with writing a manual.  The core of the manual is transcriptions of the therapy with one client.  I wanted to bring to trainees a real therapy done in the real world of a clinic rather than a research or training lab.  I also wanted to be able to present the details from the entire course of treatment.  I was interested in exploring how concepts such as the relationship or safety evolve over time.  And, I was interested in illustrating how the therapist’s understanding of the client evolves beyond the initial assessment.

Finally, Dr. Payne said, I wanted to present work with a client with a difficult, painful and even traumatic history.  So, I wrote a manuscript in which each session is presented with only identifying information removed, going through each session three times and making three sets of marginal annotations, paying particular attention to the concept of safety.  I tried very hard to emphasize research about trauma and trauma theory, but I found that it was actually broader than that.  Reading those comments gave a sense of how wide ranging the connections between research and practice really can be.  When I read them all together, I really understood how difficult it is to learn to do therapy and how difficult it is to teach it.

What I also learned in the process is a way of explaining, teaching and demonstrating safety that exposes the rich textures and complex patterns underlying the apparently basic concept, Dr. Payne continued.  I learned to focus on three factors of safety and how they shift over time.  I ask you to think about these three questions from the perspective of a client, and it does not have to be a therapy client.  First, there is a power dimension.  Are you going to hurt me?  Second, there is a skills dimension to safety.  Do I know how to take care of myself in this risky situation?  And third, there is an expertise dimension.  Do you know what you are doing?  Clients feel safe when all three answers are yes.

Yesterday, Dr. Payne said, I had a very brief encounter with one of our students who is being called up from the reserves.  It was a very short interaction, and at the end of it, knowing that he is about to go do whatever it is they do in the services, I said, “Good luck.”  And he said, “It’s not about luck; it’s about training.”  He clearly was feeling safe using his skills, where I was not feeling safe for him, because I do not know the skills he has.

What I also realized was that the helper – the teacher, the therapist, whoever – has exactly the same questions that the client has and wants the same answers.  We too want to know, are you going to hurt me?  Do I know how to take care of myself?  In other words, do I know what to do?  And, do you, the client, know what you are doing in this encounter that we are having?  So I realized that the helper has the same questions and wants the same answers.  That makes creating safety a reciprocal and interactive process, and it is not a simple matter at all.

Since returning to NIU and CSDC, I have used the manual and the concepts to teach an optional summer seminar for graduate students in psychology.  I have also used it when training predoctoral interns, doing clinical supervision, in seminars with our staff and in the therapy I provide to NIU students.  The benefits of my sabbatical have been enormous to me, she said, and, I firmly believe, will have long‑term benefit to the students I encounter.  Finally, I do not think I ever again will say to someone, as I may do casually, “Stay safe,” without being aware of this as a profoundly complex and meaningful hope.  So, thank you, and, “stay safe.”

It is clear that the work you do is an important component of the support mechanism we have for our educational mission, Dr. Legg commented.  It is critical to have this along with all the other support mechanisms.

Our last presenter is Paul Stoddard, Dr. Legg said.  Paul Stoddard is a member of the Department of Geology and Environmental Sciences.  His primary research has been in the field of plate tectonics and geodynamics, but he is shifting more to planetary geology.  He received his bachelor of science degree from Brown University, a master’s from Texas A&M and a doctoral Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from Northwestern.  He also spent three years in the oil patch working for Conoco.  Relative to his sabbatical leave, Dr. Stoddard notes that his teaching of Geology 103, Planetary and Space Science, has confirmed what he has long thought – many students are genuinely interested in planetary geology.  Since this has also always been a hobby interest of his, when the opportunity arose to return to Brown University, one of the premiere institutions in planetary research, he felt he could develop enough of his expertise there to improve his teaching of Geology 103, begin to take on graduate students in planetary science and develop higher level planetary courses at NIU.

Thank you for having me here, Dr. Stoddard said.  As Dr. Legg said, I took my sabbatical at Brown University in the fall of 1999.  For several years, I had the feeling that my particular branch of research in plate tectonics was being pushed more and more toward the fringe.  My ultimate goal was trying to determine what drives continental motion, plate motion, doing so from what we call a kinematic viewpoint or examining how the plates actually moved and then trying to determine what that tells us about what is driving them.  More recently, however, people have begun to do more sophisticated computer modeling involving parallel processors and supercomputers to model the convection currents and the mantel, which are ultimately what will be driving the plates.  And I realized that both in terms of my background and ease of access, there were facilities available, but one would have to go off campus to get them, or I was not going to be able to make the contributions I wanted to in that particular field.  So, my interest in research declined.  However, I did have the opportunity to go back to Brown for my sabbatical.  They are one of the premiere places, one of three or four in the country, that do planetary work.  I was able to work with Dr. James Head there.  Dr. Head pops up on the Discovery Channel and NPR when there is something interesting in planetary news.  And he, as it turns out, taught me my first planetary geology course 25 or so years ago.  So, it was a nice chance to go back home, as it were.

Once I got to Brown, I was thrilled with the decision I had made.  They have an extremely vibrant group there.  The Planetary Geology group consists of four faculty and about 30 graduate students.  Other faculty in the department there also dabble in planetary geology from time to time.  As a visiting scientist, I was invited to all the research meetings, and these were primarily run by Dr. Head with his graduate students.  For about an hour a week, we would get together and talk about the problems they were trying to solve on Mars and Venus and the moons of Jupiter and our moon as well – all places where we currently have or have recently had space probes returning vast amounts of data.  I was able to sit in on these discussions and encouraged to participate, and I was occasionally able to tell them something they had not thought of before, which is always very interesting.  For Venus, we were studying specific landforms imaged by the Magellan spacecraft that orbited the planet of Venus in 1993 and 1994.  We actually were working with the raw data.  For a scientist – we were among the first to see this information – to be able to work with raw data is always a thrill.  So we were able to do that and try to determine something of the history of each area we were looking at.  We looked at specific hundred square kilometer or thousand square kilometer images and tried to piece together the history of those areas.  I was involved not only with Dr. Head and several of his students but also with visiting Russian scientists who like to come to Brown.  So, I actually received a bit of international exposure as well.

We talked about Mars, Dr. Stoddard continued, and several of the ongoing research projects there.  Most dramatic, I think, is the search for water on Mars, he commented.  This is not water we see there today, but water we think may have been there in the distant past.  Actually, while I was at Brown, their group published a paper citing evidence for a standing ocean on the surface of mars, a stable ocean, that persisted for millions of years.  This article was published on the front page of the New York Times as well as Science.  We also talked about the moon.  They are using results from the Clementine mission.  While it was functioning, it took a lot of pictures of the surface of the moon in different colors with different filters.

For the moons of Jupiter, there is the Galileo spacecraft, which is still in orbit in the Jupiter system returning images.  We were looking at both the innermost moon, Io, which is the most volcanically active world we have ever seen in the solar system, and its neighbor, Europa, which we now believe has a large liquid water ocean and potentially is a place we might find life.  So, Europa is suddenly becoming a very fascinating place to planetary scientists.  We were looking at studies involving the nature of the distribution of volcanoes on Io and the types of surface features we were seeing on Europa, some of which look similar to features we see on earth in terms of sea floor spreading; but there are some very intriguing differences in there as well.  We do not see anything that corresponds to a subduction zone.  On earth, seafloor spreading is where we create new crust for the planet.  Subduction zones are where we get rid of the old crust.  And they work in tandem, obviously, to keep the planet from getting bigger, or smaller.  But on Europa, we find evidence for spreading, for the creation of new crust, but we cannot yet figure out where the old stuff is going.  And we are fairly convinced that this has been going on for millions, probably billions, of years.  The moon cannot be getting larger over the course of time, or it would be rivaling Jupiter in size.  So there must be a mechanism by which we get rid of it that has not yet been determined, and that, specifically, was one thing Dr. Head and I were looking at.

I found the experience at Brown extremely invigorating, Dr. Stoddard said.  I found it gave me the background I needed to initiate projects here.  It gave me access to data that I would not otherwise have been able to get – topographic data for Venus, Mars and the moon – which I have been able to turn around and use for several URAP (Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program) projects.  I have had two students working on that, one of whom might continue that URAP work.  The other student is undecided about what he wants to do, but he is convinced he wants to do something in the planetary field.  Dr. Jay Stravers and I have begun teaching one of the upper level courses I had hoped we would be able to offer.  This is a graduate level course, but I also hope to be able to introduce an upper level undergraduate course, because many undergraduate students have shown a great deal of interest in the area.  Hopefully, in the next year or two, we will change that.  I have to say that as an opportunity to change course academically, as a chance to get reinvigorated, as a chance to get access to data, and as a chance to see what is going on in the planetary field at its highest levels, Dr. Stoddard concluded, the sabbatical was truly a fantastic experience, and I want to thank everybody responsible for letting that possibility happen.

Trustee Boey asked Dr. Stoddard if he had an opportunity to do research on a grand basis in the nonpeak hours, or summertime, in a locale other than Illinois such as on a research ship oceanside?  Some of our faculty, for example, have the opportunity to work in Antarctica, and they have to go out in what is our winter months.  I am a little bit familiar with that because one of our past associates, a retired professor, did a lot of research work Antarctica.  Dr. Stoddard said that, unfortunately, his opportunity is in front of a computer screen.  But seeing images coming back that have just been downloaded from the jet propulsion lab and essentially being the first research scientists to see them is very exciting, he said, not quite as exciting as being there in person, but we take what we can get.  I forgot to mention that I have the opportunity to go back to Brown whenever I like.  They pretty much offered me a standing invitation, and so, the summer after my sabbatical, I did go back for several weeks to continue working with them.  It is interesting to hear that your research and what you have learned in planetary geology is going to mean new courses for our students who apparently have a desire to learn more in this area, Trustee Siegel commented.  I am looking forward to some of the new projects that you may have and hope you will keep us apprised of some of these things.  Obviously, you are invigorated and that will translate into your students being invigorated.

Chair Vella thanked Dr. Legg for organizing the sabbatical presentations.  We are always honored and excited to hear about what our faculty is doing, she said.  Dr. Legg thanked Dr. Virginia Cassidy for arranging the presentations.

Agenda Item 7.b. – Affirmative Action and Diversity Resources Program

One of the most significant things that is happening in our society is the growing importance of diversity in our culture, Steve Cunningham said.  As a university, the extent to which we value and engage diversity is very closely linked to our performance in the future.  Accordingly, we established the Affirmative Action and Diversity Resources Program in 1999 and have reported to the Board on that program several times during its development.  This year, we opened the Center for Diversity Resources.  One of the characteristics of the program is that it links considerations of diversity to a wide variety of operational and administrative processes ranging from search procedures to recruitment, retention, compensation, public relations and community relations.  Mr. Cunningham recognized Elizabeth Ortiz, the university’s first Director of Diversity Resources.  Some of the near‑term things we are working on include an update of the Affirmative Action Plan, implementation of a representation analysis program that will be linked into the search procedures, an update of search procedures and applicant tracking, and the initiation of a pay equity study for faculty.  Additionally, he said, we have launched affirmative action and nondiscrimination, sexual harassment prevention and complaint procedure training to the entire campus, presenting to almost 700 employees already this year.

Agenda Item 7.c. – Faculty Salary Benchmarks

Dr. Legg stated that the Board would have a brief review by Steve Cunningham of faculty salary benchmarks, something very critical to the growth of the university because it bears directly on the reward system for the faculty.

The status of faculty and staff salaries is, as Dr. Legg indicated, one of the most critical factors with respect to maintaining our excellence as a university, Mr. Cunningham said.  We monitor several benchmarks on a continuous basis to evaluate salaries.  The first is maintaining competitiveness.  This varies, depending upon which benchmark is used.  Faculty and staff salaries are gauged against a number of benchmarks, which we will review.  Competitiveness not only relates to average or median salary comparisons and appropriate benchmarks, but also to salaries in real terms, considering the cost of living in this region compared to other regions from which our data is obtained.  Northern also has a substantial merit based salary increase program, a long history of having merit be the primary factor in salary increases.  Additionally, we have market and critical retention factors every year in our increment guidelines, he said, and these have been consistent with the appropriated guidelines during the last three fiscal years.  We are going to focus on faculty salaries, the status of which is a very good indicator of the overall status of salary competitiveness at the university.  We have a number of benchmarks we looked at:  national data from the American Association of University Professors, NASULGC, the IBHE peer group, the Mid‑America Conference and the other public universities in Illinois.

Our current proportional average salary or medial salary comparison salaries are relatively stable, Mr. Cunningham reported.  We had a five percent, a five percent and a six percent salary increase guideline during the last three years.  Although that was substantial and beneficial to the university, the rest of higher education, given the economic conditions, also received similar funding.

Mr. Cunningham showed charts that demonstrated a pattern very specific to NIU – the effect of the local cost of living on the status of salaries in real terms.  A comparison of full professors in the IBHE peer group put NIU around the middle.  However, when the cost of living is factored in and we recalculate, it substantially reduces our relative standing.  So this is an influence that is felt by all of our faculty and staff, he said, and it is something that we must continue to address in our salary increase programs.  We see the same trend for associate professors and assistant professors.  In the MAC, we see similar trends, a substantial difference in the cost of living in the DeKalb area compared to most of our peer institutions.  With respect to Illinois, we are holding at third place for full professors.  That is what we want to do in terms of average salaries.  Again, for instance, between here and Carbondale, there is a 9 percent difference in cost of living.  So that is not accounted for in this analysis, but our goal is to maintain a third place standing in the state of Illinois.  With associate professors, we are down a bit.  These vary somewhat every year due to turnover and other factors.  Currently, NIU is fifth for assistant professors.  That was a quick run‑through, Mr. Cunningham said, but the trends are pretty consistent.

There being no Other Matters, Chair Vella asked for a motion to adjourn.  Trustee Siegel so moved, seconded by Trustee Boey.  The motion was approved.  The meeting was adjourned at 10:53 a.m.

Respectfully submitted,

Sharon M. Mimms

Recording Secretary