The Illinois Board of Higher Education will be holding a meeting today to create a board to look into part-time faculty issues and to vote on a grant allocation, which Eastern stands to receive over $100,000 from.

Eastern stands to receive the second largest grant, $116,400, out of 44 to be awarded to Illinois universities and colleges for the Illinois Cooperative Work Study Program.

Shelly Flock, director of media relations, said Eastern President Carol Surles will be in attendance at the meeting, which will be held at Triton College in River Grove.

The grant will be used to place up to 130 undergraduate students from a variety of disciplines into the program, which provides at least a 50 percent match toward a student’s salary when involved in a work study program, according to the IBHE agenda.

The IBHE will also be voting to create a board committee to study part-time and nontenured track faculty at public universities.

The review is legislatively mandated by House Joint Resolution 19, which was approved by the 91st General Assembly, of which one of the points was “to review the growing dependence on part-time and nontenure-track faculty in Illinois colleges and universities.”

In coordination with the approval of the new board, the IBHE will hear a presentation from the IBHE Faculty Advisory Committee on the same issue, according to the agenda.

Les Hyder, member of the advisory committee and chair of Eastern’s journalism department, said that one of the advisory committee’s major concerns was the the part-time faculty are not being paid a “fair and equitable salary.”

“As a result of the unfair salaries, the quality and caliber of those faculty may not be as good as it could have been otherwise,” Hyder said.

Increasingly, Hyder said, colleges and universities are taking advantage of the part-time faculty. Also, the increase in part-time faculty leads to fewer faculty that can advise students and have after class time with students as well as fewer faculty to participate in the governance and direction of the university.

Hyder said, “It probably is a bit of a problem at Eastern, but not as much as elsewhere.”

The IBHE will also be meeting to approve their allocation of Ryan’s $10 million cut in the total IBHE recommended increase for all public universities and colleges and Ryan’s capitol improvement budget recommendations.

The IBHE allocation of Ryan’s reccomendation will cut $98,000 from Eastern’s IBHE recommend increase in the operating budget and Ryan’s capitol budget cuts will slash $2.6 million from Eastern’s IBHE recommended increase for capitol improvements.

In other business, the IBHE will be hearing a report that will be presented to the governor and general assembly on under-represented groups in Illinois higher education.

Eastern has been scheduled to host the IBHE on August 21.