The administration divulged details of its offers to the faculty in labor negotiations in a meeting of the Council of University Administrators. The meeting was called after faculty members picketed at Old Main to protest the state of labor negotiations and voice other complaints.

Bob Wayland, chief negotiator for the administration, said the administration has decided to release some of the highlights of the negotiating terms since it felt the University Professionals of Illinois, the faculty union currently negotiating, has been giving out inaccurate information about the state of negotiations.

Charles Delman, chief UPI negotiator and mathematics professor, said the sides agreed to share details of negotiations “discreetly” and only when necessary and stipulated one side must notify the other if it plans to disclose information.

Delman said Wednesday that UPI officials shared information with members and constituents at a meeting Tuesday and notified the administration before doing so. Wayland did not inform UPI before disseminating negotiating details at the council meeting, Delman said, which puts the administration in violation of the agreement.

Although UPI is dissatisfied with compensation offers so far, Wayland said the administration has offered a “very, very generous” package to the faculty. That package includes no raise for next year and the possibility of three-year contracts for annually contracted faculty.

The administration pledged to continue annualization of salary increases from the last contract, and offered for the second and third year of the contract a raise of 1.5 percent on top of whatever funds the state of Illinois gives the university for faculty salary increases.

“We have tried to offer the best package that we can to the faculty,” Wayland said.

Delman said annualization is no replacement for a raise and is something the administration had already agreed to in the last round of negotiations in the fall 1999 semester.

“They offered us no raise,” Delman said in an interview Wednesday.

The lack of a first-year raise is equivalent to a pay cut when inflation is considered, he said.

While the administration has said no state dollars were appropriated for faculty raises, Delman said such a statement is misleading. State appropriations were not broken down into such terminology this year, he said. That means just because money wasn’t specifically named for faculty salary increases doesn’t mean it isn’t in the budget, Delman said.

The raise offered during the second two years of the contract would come with stipulations UPI found unacceptable, Delman said. Tuition would have to increase 10 percent, and tenth-day enrollment figures needed to be at 10,750.

“We didn’t find it acceptable to tie a salary increase to a tuition increase,” Delman said.

Another item the administration has included in its package during negotiations is allowing faculty to have intellectual property rights to course materials and scholarly works, Wayland said. If a faculty member were to leave Eastern, the university would have the right to keep the course materials for one year.

For patent rights, the administration is proposing to give faculty 10 percent of any revenue that would come out of its invention or innovation through university research, because the patent belongs to the university.

The university feels the faculty is receiving fair compensation because they have finally reached the median salary of faculty in the 15 other colleges nationwide the administration considers being in Eastern’s “peer group.”

Although faculty at Eastern do receive higher salaries than nine other schools in the peer group, they still receive less than faculty at the comparably-sized Western Illinois University and Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville.

“We are still lagging behind the other institutions in the state, and this is something we would like to catch up to,” Weber said.

Delman said those universities were not chosen to measure faculty salary against. He said many of the universities exist in communities not at all comparable to central Illinois, where the standard of living is dramatically different. That factor and the quality of each university were not taken into account when comparing faculty compensation.

During the meeting, Wayland and William Weber, associate vice president for academic affairs, pointed out what they felt were flaws in the UPI’s arguments in negotiations.

One of the issues the UPI is negotiating for is a smaller class size, because it feels classes have become too overcrowded since the enrollment increase of over 600 students this year.

Weber countered that class sizes have not gone up significantly this year, and the departments worked diligently to add more sections to many classes.

According to statistics compiled by the administration and distributed at the meeting, the number of lower division classes with over 76 students has risen by eight in the last year, and the number of upper division classes has decreased by two classes.