A response to this article will be published in November. Written by James M. Furman, former executive director of the Illinois Board of Higher Education, it will defend Illinois' 25-year-old system of public higher education governance.

Since the 1960s, public higher education in Illinois has been organized in what has come to be called a "system of systems." Under this arrangement, the state's 12 senior public universities, grouped in four separate systems, are "coordinated" by the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE). (There is actually a fifth, much less formally structured system, which serves as the state's "umbrella" agency for the public two-year colleges.)

Prior to 1962, in the absence of any state agency specifically charged with responsibility for public higher education, the individual systems and schools dealt directly with the state legislature and with the executive branch. Quite naturally, each campus or system attempted to negotiate for itself the most favorable treatment possible, whether for operating budget, construction funds or other desired objectives; academic ethics being what they are, each campus also tried to ensure the most unfavorable treatment possible for its competitors, actual or imagined.

The resulting inter-institutional warfare eventually became too burdensome even for Illinois' normally tolerant legislators. In 1961, with only a single dissenting vote in the entire General Assembly, the IBHE was established to serve both as a funnel and, it was devoutly hoped, a buffer. Under the new structure, for example, the individual system budgets go initially to the IBHE for "R and R" — that is, review and reduction. The IBHE, in turn, forwards to the governor a consolidated budget which covers operating and capital expenditures for all of public higher education.

To be sure, neither the legislature nor the governor need accept the IBHE budget recommendations — and rarely do. The eventual appropriation is almost invariably less. But, with few exceptions, the amount proposed by the IBHE for any given school or system represents a ceiling on what that school or system can realistically hope to secure.

The IBHE was also empowered to review all proposals for new degree programs, as well as the "quality" of those already existent, in the public colleges. Armed with de facto power over budget, de jure control over program, and under able and aggressive leadership, the IBHE and its staff have steadily expanded their authority. From modest and uncertain beginnings, they have become the single most potent factor in shaping Illinois' higher educational policy.

Presumably, the system of systems has been seen as an improvement over the previous anarchic "every school for itself mode of operation, for it has survived largely unchanged for a quarter-century. Of late, though, there has been a rising rumble of criticism — sometimes in the press, sometimes in the legislature, and with growing acerbity, though usually voiced in private, from the senior administrators of the public institutions. Among the charges most often heard are:

• The IBHE is more concerned with protecting private, than with furthering public, higher education. The accusation is directed primarily at the staff, given the tendency of the board, as one member put it, simply to "rubber stamp the staff position." A good example of the "pro-private school" bias, it is alleged, was the IBHE's recent attempt to mandate sharply increased admission requirements for the public institutions, an attempt blocked, at least temporarily, by the legislature. The new requirements were to apply only to the public colleges; the IBHE did not even suggest that the private institutions might raise their standards until some of the public college officials threatened an open fight on the issue.

• The IBHE has become a compliant gubernatorial tool in limiting expenditures for public higher education. After the annual budget recommendations for the public institutions are developed by the IBHE and formally presented in early January, the governor's proposed state budget is unveiled in March. For the past several years, the governor has cut the IBHE proposals rather drastically. Not once has the IBHE criticized the governor; not once, no matter how severe the slashes, has the IBHE asked the legislature to appropriate more than the amount specified by the governor. Although initially the ''creature of the legislature," as one observer puts it, the IBHE "has been effectively coopted by the executive branch."

• The IBHE has been increasingly ineffectual at what is presumably its major responsibility, i.e., providing policy leadership and direction for public higher education. Most often cited as examples are: the recent acquisition of a School of Law by Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, a move opposed by the IBHE; the IBHE's subsequent public stance supporting the creation of a School of Engineering at Northern, despite the privately admitted distaste of both the board and the staff; and the almost unanimous vote of the state legislature, in the face of an IBHE recommendation to the contrary, for a law which sought to ensure that faculty have a satisfactory command of the English language.

• The IBHE's budget recommendations consistently favor the University of Illinois, the state's flagship system. The most recent example, it is charged, can be found in the fiscal year 1987 capital request. Of the top 30 construction requests approved, some $90 million was for the University of Illinois — and only $24 million for all the other systems combined.

• The system of systems, with its boards, system heads and system staffs layered on top of the campus officials, is needlessly expensive. With a multitude of administrators and a plentitude of bureaucratic levels, even minor initiatives take an inordinate length of time and expenditure of effort. Reorganization, critics argue, would yield sizable savings and, even more important, lead to greater efficiency.

• The system of systems is inherently irrational with regard both to its overall structure and to the manner in which the individual institutions are grouped into systems. Four systems are too many, especially since two of them have only a pair of campuses each. Worse, two of the systems are composed of schools with strikingly different characteristics in enrollment, graduate vs. undergraduate programs and missions. The need to compromise and balance the resulting divergent campus demands "lakes it almost impossible for the systems, let alone the state, to develop anything resembling a coherent educational strategy. Further complicating the situation, the plethora of systems gives Illinois five separate boards, each plausibly claiming a role in the formulation and implementation of educational policy. The first three allegations of favoritism toward the private sector, subservience to the executive branch and failure to provide effective policy leadership — are directed primarily at IBHE itself and do not easily lend themselves to dispassionate discussion or empirical treatment, let alone resolution. The other three criticisms, however, are directed at the structure of Illinois public higher education itself. These three are more readily amenable to factual analysis and assessment.

History, chance and politics manifestly played a greater role in shaping the present system constellation than did administrative or educational logic — or propinquity, for the systems spread amorphously across the state.

Three of the systems (Southern Illinois, Governors and Regents) are headed by a chancellor, with presidents at the individual schools; the University of Illinois system is led by a president, with chancellors at the unit level. The University of Illinois' Board of Trustees is chosen by statewide election; the trustees have six-year terms and are eligible for reelection. Board members for the other systems are appointed by the governor for six years and are eligible for reappointment.

The composition of the IBHE is a bit more complicated. Ten members are chosen by the governor, with the advice and consent of the Senate; the heads of the four system boards and of the Illinois Community College Board constitute an additional five members; and, since 1973, there has been a nonvoting student member. With the exception of the student (who serves a single year), board appointees have six-year terms.

Before assessing the evidence on these three points, a framework for weighing the budget data is needed. It is important to remember that the IBHE makes a series of budget recommendations, not just one. The first is the initial formal, consolidated, request. Then come the IBHE's allocation of the (almost invariably lower) funding proposed in the governor's budget; and, ultimately, the IBHE's allocation of the appropriation finally voted by the legislature and approved by the governor. The last constitutes the sustenance which the universities actually receive and is the basis of this analysis. To provide a more informative measure, appropriations totals are translated into support per FTE (full-time equivalent) student and faculty (see table 1).

On a per student basis, the University of Illinois receives $1,900 more than its closest competitor (and almost double the funding provided for the Regents system); on a per faculty basis, the advantage is relatively less but still quite impressive - ranging from $7,600 to $14,000 per staff year. Striking as are the differences between the University of Illinois and the other systems, they do not tell the whole story. The University of Illinois system, particularly the Urbana-Champaign campus, generates considerable additional revenue from grants, contracts and related activities. In 1986, for example, the University of Illinois system received almost $110 million in federal grants and contracts alone, an amount several times greater than that earned by all the other Illinois systems combined. This additional income, not to mention endowment and other earnings, widens even further the disparities shown in table 1.

These figures do not reflect preferential treatment in the sense that the University of Illinois, from one budget year to another, is awarded percentage increases larger than the other systems. The IBHE follows an "even-handed" policy: annual increases (or decreases) rarely vary among the systems by more than a fraction of a percent. Thus, for instance, the 1987-88 proposed increase over 1986-87 was 7.9 percent for the University of Illinois, 7.5 percent for Southern Illinois, 8.6 percent for Governors and 7.9 percent for Regents. But, the University of Illinois' percentage is applied to a much, much larger base. The net effect of this ostensibly egalitarian policy, as critics have observed, is to widen the per student and per faculty dollar funding gap between the University of Illinois and the other systems.

A much sharper picture of partiality emerges from the capital funding provided for each of the four systems the past half-decade. The University of Illinois, which has about 35 percent of the public university enrollments, received almost two-thirds of the capital funding the preceding half-decade. And, if the latest IBHE recommendations hold, that figure will jump to over 80 percent for the current fiscal year.

Whether looking at the operating budget or at capital recommendations, the University of Illinois has fared well compared to the other systems. Caution should be used in drawing any conclusions about operating dollars. The University of Illinois was better funded than the other Illinois institutions in 1962, when the IBHE came into existence. IBHE policy has simply served to perpetuate, or worsen, already existent inequalities.

The same explanation, however, does not account for the capital budget data. Instead, the explanation comes from one of two hypotheses: either there is a definite IBHE pro-University of Illinois tilt or the University of Illinois' need for facilities is overwhelmingly more urgent than those of the other systems. The latter theory is not overwhelmingly persuasive.

At the same time, this discussion is not intended to suggest that the University of Illinois system receives more funding than it actually needs. By no means. Graduate research institutions require a markedly higher level of support than do schools focusing primarily on undergraduate education. That same need must be conceded to the other Illinois state institutions with similar graduate and professional missions.

What economies might be achieved if Illinois were to do away with the "four systems plus IBHE" structure? Or, alternatively stated, what are the costs entailed in the current arrangement? (See table 2.)

Before answering these questions, based on the 1986-87 funding specifically earmarked for the board and staffs of the four systems and the IBHE, two points should be made: These figures understate the real costs, and they only show direct costs. The illustration that immediately comes to mind is the Southern Illinois University-Carbondale air "charter service" operated for the monthly convenience of its board members. The annual cost of some $200,000, however, is shown as a school, rather than a system, expense. In general, individuals actually performing "system" functions are occasionally carried on the campus payrolls instead of being counted as a system expenditure.

Besides the system direct costs for salaries, supplies, travel, etc., no one has detailed the amount of campus staff time devoted to meeting system-generated demands of dubious utility (Parkinson, it is now widely agreed, was one of the great minds of the 20th century.) At a conservative estimate, these indirect costs could easily equal the direct costs.

If three of the present systems — Southern Illinois, Governors and Regents — were eliminated, $4 million in their combined direct cost of operation would be available for other educational purposes. Using the one-on-one estimate for indirect costs, perhaps another $4 million would be saved. That's $8 million ("real money" as Sen. Everett Dirksen might have said); nonetheless, it is less than 1 percent of the state's expenditure for public higher education. From a cost-savings perspective alone, reorganization hardly seems to be justified. The contention that the system of systems is irrational beyond the call of bureaucratic and political duty rests on three arguments. The first speaks to the multiplicity of systems. Does Illinois need five separate boards, plus the legislature and the executive branch, involved in public higher education? Although there is no principle or body of data which will readily resolve this issue, the maxim "less is better" can be as productively applied in matters of educational organization as in architecture and design.

The second argument is that four systems are too many, especially when two contain only two institutions each. Granted, there is no widely accepted formula which specifies the minimum number of campuses which justify a "system." Still, two does seem to be on the low side. Given the costs entailed, the burden of proof should rest on those who defend, rather than those who challenge, two-campus systems.

The third argument is directed at the manner in which the four systems are constituted — that is, at their institutional "mix" — rather than at the number of units within each system. An empirical approach permits a more conclusive answer here than for the other two contentions. This approach requires a look at the individual schools in terms of the key characteristics normally used to classify universities — i.e., enrollment, budget, advanced graduate and professional programs, and external funding (see table 3). By most accepted rules of administrative organization, the charge of structural irrationality is not without substance. Consider this portrait of Illinois' four systems: two contain only two schools; two contain quite different types of institutions; and the four graduate universities are distributed across three systems. By every measure, the four graduate institutions clearly lead all the others in key characteristics. That is hardly surprising, since these are the only four public universities, according to the IBHE itself, which meet the criteria for classification as either a "major research university" (UI at Urbana-Champaign) or a "comprehensive university" (Northern at DeKalb, Southern at Carbondale and UI at Chicago.)

What could be done to correct these shortcomings without reverting to the pre-1962 turmoil? Two alternatives come to mind: one is New York's "all in a single system" concept; the other is California's "different mission, different system" design. While either might be better than the present arrangement, the New York approach would leave unresolved the difficulties encountered when institutions with dissimilar objectives are brought under a single administrative roof, a problem which has plagued the State University of New York since its inception. It took four decades, for example, for the SUNY graduate institutions to receive legislative recognition of their special financial needs.

For that reason, the California model seems better suited for Illinois. If it were adopted, there would be just two systems: one would embrace all institutions with a primary graduate educational mission, as does the University of California; the second would encompass all other senior institutions, as in the California State University. To create this new University of Illinois, the two UI schools plus Southern-Carbondale and Northern would simply be brought together as one system. That done the remaining institutions, united, would constitute the State University of Illinois system. (See table 4.)

Grouping together institutions with similar programmatic objectives makes obvious educational and administrative sense. The resulting two systems would be sufficiently sizable to justify their titles — and their costs. Furthermore, the elimination of three systems would also free up several million dollars, as noted earlier. Some of this money, reallocated to Southern-Carbondale and Northern, would help appreciably in bringing these campuses to a funding level commensurate with their mission. To mention only a few possibilities, moving three law schools, two medical schools and four schools of engineering under common management, could lead to other savings.

Administering the two proposed systems should not add materially to the costs already entailed in operating the University of Illinois and the IBHE. In fact, if deemed desirable (or politic), administration of the State University of Illinois system could be assigned to the IBHE, with the board and staff suitably renamed and reconstituted. Conceivably, even further personnel savings might be achieved in the process, since the four largest and most complex institutions would no longer fall under the IBHE's aegis.

Although they might oppose the idea at first hearing, Southern-Carbondale and Northern, institutions with distinguished histories and proud traditions, would actually be special beneficiaries. Both would retain their institutional identity, alumni associations and other distinctive characteristics, just as do the constituent units of the University of California —Berkeley, UCLA, Santa Barbara, San Diego, et. al. More important, both would finally be in a system which understood their special needs as developing graduate institutions. The proposed change offers them, in fact, their only realistic hope of achieving that status, a possibility essentially precluded by their present system locus.

In fact, almost everyone would benefit. Educationally, administratively and fiscally, the two-system structure would be a significant improvement over the present system of systems. The state and the taxpayers would enjoy a more logical and efficient management of educational resources; the elimination of three systems would yield immediate economies; the University of Illinois would be expanded; Southern's Carbondale campus and Northern would gain; the other state universities, united in a single system, would be in a much stronger political position vis-a-vis the University of Illinois; and, looking to the middle and late 1990s, Illinois would finally have in place a network of high-quality research institutions, just as do most of the states with whom we compete most directly.

There is, to be sure, the objection that such a reorganization would compel the legislature and the executive branch to deal with two systems constantly in a tug of war with each other. True, but that has not been an insuperable problem in California or elsewhere. In any event, Illinois institutions and systems have been "end running" the IBHE with increasing frequency of late; given Illinois' political climate, there is a greater likelihood of more rather than less of this behavior in the future. Besides, a two-system structure which more effectively pursued what the universities regard as their legitimate aspirations might actually lessen the temptation, let alone the need, to invoke special legislative or gubernatorial intervention. For all these reasons, the advantages of a two-system structure far outweigh any realistically foreseeable drawbacks.

Albert Somit is now a distinguished service professor (political science) at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He served as president of that campus from 1980-1987. From 1970-1980 he was executive vice president of the State University of New York at Buffalo. The author wishes to express his thanks to Kathleen M. Allen, Professor John H. Baker and Professor Harold G. Richard, all associated with SIU's Office of Institutional Research and Studies, for their help in providing much of the data on which this article is based.