THE Illinois higher education system is currently headed in the wrong direction, according to a state university president who resigned last summer.

Daniel E. Marvin Jr., Ph.D., who stepped down from the presidency of Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, said in December that the state's higher education operation is moving "more and more toward sameness and a bueaucratic approach to its management."

The former EIU president, who served slightly more than six years before becoming a bank president in Mattoon, called for greater autonomy for the individual campuses. Fostering the movement toward greater centraliztation, said the 45-year-old Marvin, is the system of systems, an administrative structure found nowhere else in the nation.

The solution to the problem that he perceives is a better, stronger management team on the individual campuses.

Each president, he said, must be allowed to assume greater control of the day-to-day operations as well as the planning and development of his campus.

Presently, all senior institutions are under two boards: the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE) as well as a more specific governing board. The University of Illinois, Urbana and Chicago campuses, is administered by its board of trustees (the only elected board of the system). The same is true for the Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Edwardsville campuses.

The Board of Governors of State Universities and Colleges supervises five institutions: Eastern, Western Illinois University, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago State University and Governors State University. The Board of Regents governs three: Illinois State University, Northern Illinois University and Sangamon State University. The state's community colleges are under the Illinois Community College Board, which is under the IBHE, and each district also has a board elected locally.

Marvin, a former biologist, joined the Illinois system in 1977 to assume the EIU presidency. He had served five years as director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia after serving as its associate director the previous 18 months. He had also been a professor of biology, a dean and a vice president at Virginia's Radford University.

He brought to his Illinois position other credentials as well. He was chairman of the presidential National Advisory Council on Extension and Continuing Education, the Appalachia Educational Laboratory and the State Policy Committee for Automated Data Processing in Higher Education. He had been a board member of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, the Community-Junior College Research Quarterly, the Central Virginia Educational Television Corporation and other education-oriented organizations.

Sources on the Charleston campus comment openly about Marvin's frustration with his job and the control from Springfield, a main reason for his resignation, they said. Marvin himself stated:

"I have visited face-to-face with students and faculty who had personal and professional problems of the greatest magnitude. Often, I found it difficult, if not impossible, to assist those persons because decisions were being made by those elsewhere who had no campus experience and who could not possibly comprehend the problem. The dynamics of Eastern and the people who made it up were lost in the system approach to management. As a result, decisions were not always in the best interests of the people."

Marvin, given high marks for his EIU efforts by faculty and students, praised Illinois for being ahead of its time in moving to form the IBHE in 1961. "I firmly believe coordination still has to take place, but the Illinois system has become too complex for today. It creates the problem of sameness and bureaucracy."

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What's the solution? As Marvin sees it, the state's leaders will first have to agree that there is a problem. It's ironic to him that the system of systems calls for input into the IBHE and the separate governing boards from students, faculty, Illinois citizens and others, but does not have any provision for its presidents to talk directly with the IBHE.

A major change is needed in communication between and among the university presidents of Illinois, Marvin said. "Not enough time is available to the presidents to deal with real management and curriculum problems on their individual campuses. They find themselves burdened with countless statewide meetings and with too many layers of state officials," he said.

Marvin believes the state's approach to funding of higher education is a major problem. When he came to Illinois, he foresaw the problem of obtaining adequate financing for higher education in the '80s. In 1984, as in 1977, funding of the state's publicly supported institutions continues to be looked at as an "on-going expense," he warned. Instead, he believes the state's leaders and legislature need to consider the financing of higher education as "an investment." "The rationale goes that if we have declining enrollments we should be able to reduce expenditures for Illinois higher education. That is just not possible," Marvin said.

"To look upon higher education in Illinois as an investment," Marvin said, "will require a significant change in philosophy. A good business will make available risk capital for the future. The state's higher education needs such risk capital. We need a pool of funds from which can be drawn funding to make major changes, not at the sacrifice of existing programs, but as an investment in the future. Unless we are willing to do something like this, higher education in this state will continue to be a hand-to-mouth operation."

If Gov. James R. Thompson and the state legislative leaders agree that the system needs to be reevaluated — and Marvin stressed there must be genuine interest by all in such a proposal — he indicated a study commission on the state's higher education system might prove useful.

"We need a system that does not take away institutional autonomy and de-emphasizes institutional differences.

Instead we must strengthen our institutional decisionmaking processes because as decisions become more and more complex, they can best be made closest to the site of the issue," Marvin said. Various proposals to move one university from its present board to another, he warned, do not answer the problem. "It does not make much sense to tamper with the individual institution within the system," he said.

Any proposed higher education study commission, he said, must be made up of a combination of the legislature and private citizens. Persons presently serving on any of the current boards or working in their offices would probably be excluded from membership by Marvin.

In looking toward the future, Marvin said higher education must realize that it will no longer have a corner on the market of providing information and know-how. "For me," Marvin said, "one of the good things that might result from the changed way in which information, knowledge and know-how will be provided in the future is that higher education will be more in the business of turning out more broadly educated people. More attention will be given to enlightening the values, mores and the like so that we produce educated persons, not vocational professionals."

Marvin would go much further in criticism of America's system of public education than the recent presidential commission did. "We have allowed our educational system from kindergarten to the Ph.D. to move into a kind of mediocrity that is terribly disconcerting and troublesome for this country."

Calling for us to recapture a sense of the value of an educated person, Marvin said higher education must stop trying to do everything. "We have to stop putting emphasis on programs that teach people to do one thing. We need to recapture some of what education did for people when its goal was simply a liberally educated citizenry," Marvin stated.

The former EIU president believes Illinois, however, has done a better than average job in maintaining quality of education. "Some Illinois institutions have done an excellent job. I'm extremely proud of what we did at Eastern, during a period of very tight finances, to maintain quality." Pointing to increased ACT freshman scores at EIU, Marvin also maintained that its faculty quality had remained excellent in spite of lower salaries than the national averages.

"Illinois has not met the challenge of the '80s, though," Marvin contended. While quantity has not been put before quality yet in Illinois, the former president warned that given the present system there is potential risk of this. While Illinois has not had the severe problems of Kentucky and Michigan, it has linked funding with numbers of students more directly than is perhaps beneficial for Illinois higher education, Marvin believes. "They pushed us a little toward the numbers game while I was at Charleston but not nearly as much as in other states," he commented.

Marvin was quizzed numerous times about why he left the directorship of a state's education system to come to EIU in 1977. He had as many questions in the past months about his switch to the financial world even though he had offers of university presidencies elsewhere.

He cited his family's preference for eastern Illinois and a personal interest in banking as reasons for taking on the running of Coles County's largest financial institution. "My background has been in management, personnel and financial skills, and certainly banking involves such. I also picked banking because it's where changes art now happening. I had consistently told students at Eastern and in Virginia that I see the areas of communication and finance as today's areas of excitement and change in this country. I simply took my own advice and decided I was young enough [45] to say yes to the job offer."

The people of Illinois are another basic reason for the Marvin family remaining in Coles. "Here in the Midwest you have fundamentally a production-oriented society. We came from a service-based economy. People here believe in working. They work to produce success. They think in terms of production, are proud of their own accomplishments and are persistent," Marvin concluded.

Daniel E. Thornburgh is chairman of the Department of Journalism at Eastern Illinois University, Charleston.

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