Eastern’s University Professionals of Illinois chapter’s House of Delegates met Monday in the Lumpkin Auditorium to draft resolutions for a statewide meeting.

David Radavich, professor of English and Eastern’s UPI president, led the session in which important issues were discussed, delegates broke into groups and rough resolutions were drafted.

Delegates came up with 11 possible resolutions to bring to the state UPI House of Delegates meeting, which will be held Oct. 19 in Springfield.

Radavich proposed a resolution to deal with “administrative bloat.”

He researched the increase in administrators from 1998 to 2000, and he found the ratio of administrators to faculty went from 1- 6 to 1- 3, respectively.

“There was a huge increase in the period of President Surles,” Radavich said. “Given that, I would like to come up with a resolution on what’s the appropriate percentage of administrators to faculty.”

Other proposed resolutions included setting appropriate workloads for teachers to be determined by different schools and establishing a civil liberties fund and academic freedom to speak on post-Sept. 11 issues. Anne Zahlan, professor of English, spoke on a proposed resolution to set criteria for appointing Board of Trustees members. Although Eastern’s BOT is comprised of alumni, some schools in Illinois complain they have no graduates on their board at all.

A general issue of professionalism the delegates proposed was improving working conditions for annually contracted faculty, or those on the non-tenure track.

Radavich said these individuals are hired year to year, and are sometimes pressured to do inappropriate things or risk losing their jobs.

The recent actions of the state’s Central Management Services also were in question during resolution discussions.

CMS, which is in charge of handling benefits such as health care, took $45 million of funding away from public universities in order to cut the budget, Radavich said. He said CMS didn’t go after any other state employees because they felt public universities can always raise tuition.

Faculty issues such as faculty control of modes of instruction as well as shared governance of faculty and staff were discussed as proposed resolutions.

The delegates also proposed resolutions on graduate student teaching and reasonable health care costs.

Eastern’s UPI House of Delegates will present these 11 resolutions in polished form at the state-wide meeting, and the state delegates will decide if the resolutions will be adopted as official UPI policy. The resolutions then go to the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and if they are accepted there, they go on to the American Federation of Teachers. Radavich said Eastern’s UPI House of Delegates had eight resolutions adopted as official policy at the state-wide meeting last year and has had resolutions make it to the national level in the past.

“I’m always impressed when we go to the state-wide House of Delegates, because we always have really good resolutions, and we usually have the most,” he said.