In a bid to cut costs amid an ongoing financial crisis, Western Illinois University has announced that it will be laying off 89 employees — 57 faculty members and 32 staff — this school year.
The announcement came just days before the beginning of a new fall semester at the Macomb, Illinois, public university and less than two months after 36 contingent faculty were informed that their contracts would not be renewed.
WIU has found itself struggling with a shrinking student body, the fallout of the 2015-17 budget impasse and state appropriations that haven’t kept pace with inflation. Now, the university is trying to shrink its budget deficit and escape a cash crunch — and WIU officials say there aren’t many options left.
During an Aug. 6 WIU Board of Trustees meeting, Interim President Kristi Mindrup said she was committed “to minimizing the number of layoffs that we actually have to make.”
The cuts so far this year amount to nearly 8 percent of WIU’s fall 2023 workforce.
The latest round of layoffs includes 40 tenure-track faculty, who will continue to teach for the 2024-25 academic year. The 17 contingent faculty who were laid off in this latest round will remain on contract through the fall semester. Civil service employees received 90-day notice.
The hardest-hit departments include Accounting, Finance, Economics & Decision Sciences, which lost eight faculty, and Kinesiology, which lost 5. The library system lost eight faculty. Staff were cut from across the university.
The university will also move 16 faculty and staff positions from the Quad Cities campus to Macomb.
WIU English professor Merrill Cole, president of the University Professionals of Illinois local representing WIU faculty and technical support staff, slammed the layoffs in a statement.
“Layoffs are not a plan,” Cole said. “They are a desperate attempt by this administration to appear as if they are taking bold action.”
Budget woes
Like many regional public universities, WIU has suffered from dwindling enrollment.
At the start of the fall 2014 semester, more than 11,000 full-time students attended WIU. A decade later, projected enrollment for fall 2024 is 6,000.
Meanwhile, the university is running out of cash.
Mindrup said WIU currently faces a $22 million budget deficit. In a presentation to trustees, WIU’s executive director of financial affairs, Ketra Roselieb, said the university has run deficits since fiscal year 2022. WIU’s income fund, made up of students’ tuition dollars, dipped below zero in 2023. As of June, the university has less than $5 million in unrestricted funds.
“With deficit spending in fiscal year 2023 and 2024, the cash balances at the university have declined to critical levels,” Roselieb said.
A university spokesperson declined to provide information on how much the university expected to save as a result of the layoffs.
According to a press release announcing the layoffs, WIU’s HR department will offer counseling services and a job fair to affected employees.
Administrative turnover
At the Aug. 6 Board of Trustees meeting, it was hard to escape the sense that WIU’s current leaders felt they had been dealt a bad hand.
The university has churned through three different administrations since its longtime president, Jack Thomas, resigned in 2019 amid budget struggles and tensions with faculty.
Mindrup assumed the interim presidency in April following the sudden resignation of her predecessor, Guiyou Huang. The interim provost, Mark Mossman, took office in November.
“Over the past few years, our institution has engaged in short term fixes and patches to our finances based on the promise of more students,” Mindrup told trustees. “These strategies were not sustainable.”
Mindrup said that previous administrations had tried to shore up WIU’s budget using strategies — like amped-up advertising and recruiting — that ultimately relied on increasing the size of the student body. In the face of a declining local population and competition from other universities, that approach was bound to fail, she said.
“This is the day that we make the conscious decision to not pass the buck to future students and current and future faculty, staff and administration,” Mindrup said. “With all other options exhausted, this is the work that has been handed to us.”
Waves of layoffs
Layoffs aren’t a new strategy at Western.
In May 2016, the university cut 147 employees, including 30 faculty. In 2018, WIU laid off 24 faculty members and two academic affairs employees. Then in 2019, the university laid off another 132 employees.
During the layoffs, enrollment continued to decline — by almost a thousand students each year.
Several faculty argued at the Board of Trustees meeting that the layoffs promoted a vicious cycle. In his Friday statement, Cole wrote that past layoffs “made matters worse by lowering enrollment and decimating educational programs and student services.”
At the meeting, Board of Trustees chair Carin Stutz said WIU should be open to raising its student-to-faculty ratio, which is currently 11:1, noting that many of its peer schools have higher ratios. (Southern Illinois University, in Carbondale, also has an 11:1 student-to-faculty ratio.)
Mindrup said 80 percent of WIU’s budget currently goes toward personnel.
She told meeting attendees that her administration had taken a voluntary 15 percent pay cut compared to their predecessors, axed two vice president positions and left several other administrative posts temporarily unfilled. In March, the trustees approved a 3 percent tuition increase along with hikes to fees, room and board.
John Smith, who serves as WIU’s interim leader of both facilities management and finance and administration, said he was doing his best to save on facilities costs. That involves closing off unoccupied dorm floors and reducing the frequency with which buildings are cleaned.
But trustees voted down a resolution to explore selling off the University Residence at 2001 Wigwam Hollow Road, a columned estate that’s typically home to the WIU president.
Mindrup has stayed in the University Residence on occasion but does not live there full-time.
An uncertain future
University leaders described the layoffs as a move to reset WIU’s finances and “right-size” the school for a future with fewer students.
Agriculture Science major Cody Cornell, the student representative who sits on WIU’s Board of Trustees, said in an interview that WIU students have been greeted with a dismal view of campus: deteriorating buildings, cracked sidewalks and parking lots, and a two-week wait for counseling services.
He said the layoffs — which he voted to authorize last week — will help WIU focus more resources on its student body.
“Ultimately, what this will allow is for us to put money back towards what matters at our university, and that's our students,” he said.
Mindrup said she hoped WIU would be able to focus on offering professional development and certification programs to attract adult and online learners, improving retention and easing the experience of transfer students.
Still, she described the layoffs as “heartbreaking.”
John Nichols, a College of Arts and Sciences graduate student, said at the Board of Trustees meeting that help from WIU faculty allowed him to study Czech in Prague and take a field course on Darwin’s finches in the Galápagos Islands.
“My horizons were dramatically expanded by my interaction with faculty inside and outside of the classroom,” he said.
Math and philosophy professor Tom Blackford said in an interview that he wondered what exactly WIU’s future will involve.
Would Western become a small liberal arts school, a community college, a regional campus of the University of Illinois, or something else?
He's heard administrators say WIU is finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, he said. “But they don’t tell us what’s going to be waiting for us at the end of the tunnel.”
Tilly Robinson is a summer reporting intern with the Gannett/USA Today Network at the Rockford Register Star. She can be reached via email at mrrobinson@gannett.com and on X @ tillyrobin .
This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: 89 faculty, staff lose jobs: What led to Western Illinois University's most recent cuts
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