By: Diane Benjamin
A strike is threatened by tenured and tenure-track facility at ISU.
Do you know what ISU costs (before any financial aid)? The cost per year goes up from here – click on other majors: https://financialaid.illinoisstate.edu/paying/2024-2025-undergraduate/index.php
Remember the lady with a Masters Degree in Communications who can’t afford rent? Does she have student loans because of high tuition?
How much is tuition going to go up if teachers get a huge raise? Has anyone told the Computer Science majors they may not be able to find a job when they graduate because AI is replacing them?
Are these teacher’s creating assignments that can’t be done by Chatgpt or Grok? I hear lots of students are letting AI write papers for them. If ISU isn’t monitoring this, they will be graduating a bunch of kids who failed to learn and only want a piece of paper.
Guess who was walking with them. Will students get a refund if they can’t go to class?
Sharon Chung, Dave Koehler, and Cody Hendricks.
I found the sign on the right funny:
The President of the University has a vast number of people and programs to oversee. No surprise he gets paid more. Of course every college does this since the people paying the bills aren’t allowed to see how these salaries come to be.
$450,000 / 7 = $64,286. That as a starting salary isn’t enough? It is a STARTING salary. I wish WGLT had used some names, I’d love to look up their pay in openthebooks.com
The sign on the right is funny too. Facility only supports students if they get paid more?
I can show you the salaries of the two authors, Emily was either a student in 2024 or started her job late last year:
Below are salaries of two other WGLT staff you probably know. RC McBride’s salary actually went down since 2022, I don’t know who Dawn is:
Taxpayers need a State, County, City and University DOGE!!
This is not ISU, but Barry Reilly (Past Supt. of District 87.) makes $205,000A on Retirement.
Cody is an officer in the teachers’ Union.
Of course he is, not a surprise
64k starting salary is not bad, but nevertheless, 450k for Tarhule is ridiculous. He was making 375k while interim president, took a 75,000 raise, and then started talking about how ISU needs to tighten up on spending. Get real.
No surprise Dave Koehler shows up. A real Republican needs to run against him. Get him out of office. The sooner the better. The users of the B/N airport should pay for it’s funding and not property owners! Free parking should be fee parking.
Sharon Chung the death by pill advocate also is there. Maybe when she’s 85 her physicians will say well Sharon you are a financial burden, we have a pill for you. Oh well you opened that door. Another candidate to be replaced by a Republican.
No “For the Children” signage by the teachers union member? I’m shocked.
Little do they know, not enough funds guess who looses their job. The money pie only goes so far.
Tuition is a windfall for the colleges and universites. Jack it up and they know students can get loans. They don’t care how far in debt they have to go. AI will likely replace more jobs than it creates including teachers.
Excellent post. All anyone has to do is look up Koehler and Chung histories. Dave has always been a bought and paid for union apologist that hasn’t worked a real day in his life. He attended a broken down college in the Dakotas (Yankton) that doesn’t exist anymore. He studied to be a Calvinist minister but opted to be a community organizer instead before he brought his grift to Illinois. Chung is a native of S. Korea and likely has more allegiance to her birth country. She’s suppose to teach music (violin) but seems to have never had full time employment since showing up in BN. This is the kind of phoney garbage that gets elected to political positions in Illinois. The more important question is who monetarily backs them and why?
If the professors and supporters had a brain, they’d realize that monetary and other policies are the problem. Employers are going bankrupt trying to keep up with O’Biden’s inflation. It’s the democrats that got us into this mess so essentially the idiots are marching against their own policies wanting more power to destroy us ALL with their incompetency.
Diane,
Your distaste for a few local politicians is really pointing you in the wrong direction here. And attacking WGLT reporters, who are the only ones in town who try to keep ISU administration accountable, is really counterproductive. In reality, they’re doing the same job you claim to – reporting things nobody else does.
You’re absolutely right to be worried that ISU is handing out worthless pieces of paper, but the responsible party is the highly paid administration. They want enrollment high so that they can demand higher salaries (high enrollment means more facultly, not hired paid ones). Maybe you should FOIA some communications (e.g., 9/24/24 from the provost) and you’ll see the pressure from administration, not faculty, to lower academic standards.
Meanwhile, part of what Tarhule oversees, and you seem to want to defend, is a number of DEI initiatives – I’m surprised you don’t think about that. Maybe cutting these could lower taxpayer burdens and provide cost of living increases to the working people at ISU:
Students are required to take a DEI course to graduate: https://illinoisstate.edu/catalog/undergraduate/ideas/
Meanwhile Amy Hurd (salary = $214K) has tried to justify her position with a revision of the curriculum to remove math and science: https://academicsenate.illinoisstate.edu/documents/
ISU is starting an engineering school devoted to DEI:
https://www.wglt.org/local-news/2022-05-06/isu-approves-an-equity-focused-engineering-college-new-housing-and-higher-tuition-and-fees
https://www.wglt.org/local-news/2022-03-17/engineering-groups-enthusiastic-about-equity-direction-of-isu
As well as other programs: h
ttps://universitycollege.illinoisstate.edu/stem-alliance/
https://hr.illinoisstate.edu/managers/hiring/search-advocate/
https://provost.illinoisstate.edu/initiatives/faculty-success/fdep/#:~:text=The%20Faculty%20Diversity%20Enhancement%20Program,ethical%20behavior
https://multiculturalcenter.illinoisstate.edu/programming/social-cultural-justice/graduation-recognition-ceremonies/
You should also FOIA recent emails from Heather Dillaway (salary = $265k) and Ani Yazedijian (salary not disclosed by ISU) telling faculty to continue to pursue DEI even in the face of executive orders or telling faculty that ISU is working “behind the scenes” to protect DEI.
It’s nice of you to finally turn your attention to ISU because its highly paid administrators drive all sorts of activity in Bloomington-Normal, including a housing shortage driven by their unwillingness to build dorms, recent violence near campus during homecoming, and long lines at the food bank driven by the international graduate students they recruit but don’t pay.
And yes, I’m sure the faculty union has some ideas you and I don’t like. But ISU had a $7 million surplus last year, supported by taxpayer subsidized grants and loans, and yet seems to have you convinced they are poor – not so poor they can’t spend 100k on a search firm that hires Tarhule, who they already had! hahahahha.
If ISU administration keeps bringing in record enrollment but can’t pay the bills, it seems like the people who should be fired are the administrators you seem to want defend so much.
I’m a graduate and have continually wrote about burning my diploma. Maybe when the wind dies down.
Something is strange about Yazedijian. She’s been at ISU since 2013 and doesn’t show up in OpenTheBooks. Their data comes from reported salaries to SURS.
Try her married last name: Hensleigh
She makes $350,000/year.
“…revision of the curriculum to remove math and science” That’s a lie and you know it. Not all math is learned in an MAT class and students can still take two, or more, science classes. In fact, a student can graduate from UIUC, Harvard, Yale, any number of other institutions without ever having been required to take a math class.
I’m guessing you’re a math faculty member….
Well now, that is interesting since I was required to take math to get my Associate Degree before going to ISU. I have never heard where math was not required. I was also required to take a science class.
Maybe that’s why Harvard has remedial classes now, graduate students need them
Yes, you are required to do a quantitative reasoning class for an associates degree, and will still be required to do so at ISU. My point is, not all quantitative courses are only taught in a math department. For example, statistics is taught in a variety of departments at ISU, Information Technology (programming) courses are another example.