DIALOGUE

Southern Illinois University's President John Theodore "Ted" Sanders returned to Illinois last year.

Thirty-five years ago, John Theodore "Ted" Sanders was teaching sixth-graders in Mountain Home, Idaho, wondering if one day he could rise to the relatively lofty position of school principal or possibly district superintendent. The notion that he one day would be the nations second-highest education official was the furthest thing from his mind.

But the next few decades took Sanders across the country and up the administrative ladder — through policy-making posts in New Mexico, Nevada and Illinois — until he landed in Washington, D.C., in 1989 as President George Bush's deputy secretary of education.

"Early on, I had not even an inkling of the possibility of ending up in a position like that," says Sanders, who spent five years as Illinois' superintendent of education before being tapped for the federal post. "But when I saw the possibilities in a policy-setting role of affecting the course of education, I knew that was exactly what I wanted to do."

Under then-Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander, Sanders played a key role in funnelling money to student assistance programs. When he left the nation's capital, he became superintendent of public instruction in Ohio before heading back to the Land of Lincoln last year to become president of Southern Illinois University. He was hired at an annual salary of $160,000, plus an $18,000 housing allowance and use of a university vehicle.

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DIALOGUE

The prospect of leading one of the state's largest universities into the next century wasn't the only thing that lured Sanders back to Illinois: He and his wife Beverly have four children and grandchildren living here. Nonetheless, he is motivated by the school's ability to offer what he calls an affordable "non-elite" education to thousands of Illinois students.

What's more, with the scheduled 1997 opening of a think tank at SIU headed by retiring U.S. Sen. Paul Simon, Sanders is excited by the opportunity to expand the school's reach and influence — as former SIU President Delyte Morris did when he built what began as a teacher's college into the major university SIU became after World War II.

More than 34,000 students now are enrolled at SIU, pursuing studies ranging from two-year technical degrees to doctoral programs in 27 fields. Besides the main campus in Carbondale, SIU has a branch in Edwardsville, a dental school in Alton, a medical school in Springfield and a campus in Nakajo, Japan.

Sanders takes the helm of this far-flung institution at a time when higher education in Illinois has just undergone a major reorganization. Last year, the legislature dissolved the Board of Regents and the Board of Governors, creating seven independent university systems. The move left some of the smaller institutions worried they'd be overwhelmed by the University of Illinois, so they hired their own lobbyists to make sure their interests are represented in Springfield. So far, though, Sanders sounds pleased about the relative cooperation he sees among the state's higher education community.

Q.What does last year's reorganization mean for higher education in Illinois?

A. I don't think in the long term any of us knows. In the short term, it appears [the state's colleges and universities] are starting out with a high likelihood of developing a fairly good set of working relationships so that we may be able to speak with a single voice on the needs of higher education. Which I think will surprise everyone.

We've had some conversations, and that looks very promising. We've all lined up behind the Board of Higher Education's [$1.9 billion] request to the governor. I think the board has been very effective. They reflect the realities of the day — they frame good budget requests but don't request everything under the sun. We've agreed we will advocate with the governor and the General Assembly — not just the university presidents but the community college presidents, too.

It seems highly unlikely to be realizing that spirit of cooperation today, given everything that happened last spring. I thought it was possible, [but] I didn't know how probable it would be. I do believe it's necessary, or we will all come up the losers.

Q.What does SIU have to lobby for on its own?

A. We don't have to just plug our own agenda. Hopefully, across the higher education community there will remain broad support because we'd like to stand together. But there are particular needs at SIU where we have to think about protecting the public's investment in the capital aspects of the university. Our problems with deferred maintenance are one example, and also our need for technological infrastructure. We need to look at what the consequences are if we don't address these problems.

For example, we have parking lots and streets on our Edwardsville campus that are falling further and further into disrepair. To do the right kind of maintenance on them would cost about $8 million. If we don't do it soon, the asphalt surfaces would have to be totally replaced and the cost would triple.

So if we don't protect the public investment now, we'll have to pay a lot more down the road.

On the technological end, a fiberoptic network would have an impact on every nook and cranny of the university. There are large numbers of classes, labs, administrative offices and residence halls that do not have access to our computer network. We need to improve this.

If we're really going to provide the kind of opportunities and contributions to the state that we ought to, then we need a technology infrastructure that does not currently exist, but that would cost us alone upwards of $30 million.

Q.What is the relationship between universities and community colleges?

A. They can view themselves as competitors and work to protect their own turf, or they can respond to workforce needs in the state. I think it's important for both school systems to work together. SIU has a very good history — I'd say we're ahead of all other state schools, probably — with articulated agreements so students can easily transfer to SIU. Community colleges fulfill a very important niche. We ought to be working together, including making it easy for students to transfer when it's appropriate.

Sanders says he is inspired by the potentially progressive role SIU can play in the southern part of the state — an idea also espoused by Delyte Morris. "He believed if you raised the education level of the citizens of southern Illinois, industry would come down here and solve the economic problems," Sanders says. "The idea was right, [but] manufacturing did not come. What's important is not just raising the educational level but directly applying the research to the specific challenges of this region." Whether it's on soybean cyst nematodes, which infest 70 percent of the fields in southern Illinois, or peaches or aquaculture or what have you, it's important to this remaining a productive agricultural region, says Sanders. "If we don't do this kind of research, no one else will. I think SIU is really, truly unique in Illinois. It's the center of economic and social well-being of all southern Illinois. I want to fulfill its responsibility."

Q.In what specific ways can SIU enhance southern Illinois and help address its needs?

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There's not a single problem we don't have an obligation to play a role in, including health care and development.

A. In almost every facet. For one thing, SIU is the 21st largest employer in the state of Illinois and the largest employer south of Springfield. So it's a major economic engine. Its educational mission, if met, helps to drive both economic and social improvements in this part of the state.

There's not a single problem we don't have an obligation to play a role in. Take rural health care, which is a major problem in southern and western Illinois. As a result, we're bringing on two new programs — one that will prepare physicians' assistants, and one that will train nurse practitioners. Both of these medical personnel play important roles in improving the health care situation here.

Then there's economic development. We've got a business incubator in Carbondale and we work with various communities in southern Illinois to promote economic development to the point of establishing and starting up a business. In agriculture, we've developed new varieties of soybeans that are resistant to the cyst nematode. On every front there is a challenge, the university has a role to play.

Q.Does the larger southern Illinois community recognize or appreciate this role? Or do people in the region see the university as an elite institution without much relevance to their lives?

A. I don't know that we've done as good a job as we should relating our relevance. A lot of people who benefit have no idea what the university contributes. A farmer goes to buy soybeans, and nowhere on the label does he read that this variety is brought to him by researchers at SIU. We've not done a good job communicating the role we play in the lives of the people around us, and that's clearly a challenge.

There was a time in the history of SIU when we could afford to have 25 people doing nothing but community development: going out into the communities around here and building relationships based on how we could help them. We don't have the money to put university staff out there now. But I think we have to figure out a new approach to establishing a productive relationship with communities. We have to work at improving the quality of life for people. Job creation could be one area we're involved in. Another could be in helping to improve elementary and secondary schools in the region. There are vast human and intellectual resources here [at SIU] that could be tapped.

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DIALOGUE

We're not an elitist institution. Our board [of trustees] has made it clear we've got to be a quality school but one that's accessible to individuals that would likely have a difficult time — financially or otherwise — going to college. So we've kept our tuition below that of our peer institutions.

Q.Along those lines, how do you feel about SlU's reputation among some as a "party school"?

A. I've heard that enough times while traveling to meetings with community leaders and parents. That's something we have to combat in two ways. First, we manage the major problem that causes us to have that image, which is the Halloween situation that has become an annual event. [Traditionally, thousands of young people were drawn to a Halloween street party at SIU that often turned violent. Now, a community ban on alcohol sales during that weekend has trimmed the "celebration" considerably] This year the university and the city cooperated, and we got through this Halloween without any incident.

But we can't find an answer in just this. We have to get better at projecting an image of the university so people can understand there are really significant options if you come to Carbondale and Edwardsville for an education. We actually have nationally recognized rankings in many of our programs, which is not generally known. Our medical school ranks seventh in the country in the preparation of family practitioners. Our dentists are among the best-prepared to move into rural settings. Our finance program ranks in the low 40s out of 300 programs nationally. We have to get this message out and hopefully overpower an image that this is a "party school." What I hope to see — and I want to state this very carefully — is an image where people feel they can come to SIU, get a value for their money and still have fun.

After years of filling a wide variety of roles in education, Sanders says he'd like to make his current job his final one. But not because it's an easy one. SIU faces many challenges in the years ahead as it tries to fulfill the changing role of higher education in people's lives.

For one thing, the school must meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student body. Many who attend classes there have spent years in the workplace since leaving high school or taking previous college courses. The student body includes people from the most rural to the most urban parts of Illinois, as well thousands from across the United States and around the world. The bulk of foreign students travel from mainland China and Taiwan, Japan, India, Malaysia and South Korea; smaller numbers represent such varied countries as Zambia, Madagascar and Iceland.

One of the biggest challenges SIU faces is retaining Illinois students through graduation, Sanders says. For a

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variety of reasons, many students leave the university before graduating — a trend Sanders wants to analyze and reverse. So while he sees Southern Illinois University as a good place to settle in his own career, he wants to improve its role as a place that helps others begin theirs.

Q. How can SIU better serve its students?

A. I think the external forces that are working on us will suggest more and more of our education, and its delivery will be distributed in very different ways, based upon the changing needs of the students that we serve. Probably fewer and fewer of our students will be drawn from the population that's just completing high school. [We should be] making learning opportunities available at different times that are more convenient for students. We will actually be doing more distributing learning out to other locations electronically in terms of distance-learning classrooms.

We will probably see work-based learning become an integral part of almost every undergraduate experience. It gets really exciting with what I see happening over in mass communications, where if you're interested in cinematography you could actually have some learning experiences that are Hollywood-based, or over in Nashville. That's very important both in terms of the learning networking and the sense of what that real world is like. That's missing in a lot of programs.

My guess is that we'll be more of an international university than we are today. There will probably be more international students coming here, or at least a large number will come here, but there will probably be more that we will actually distribute learning out to, like we're doing in Nakajo, Japan, on our campus there.

We've got a group of Lithuanian journalists that are here right now in Mass Communications in a learning experience that asks at its core, "How do you secure an Eastern bloc country as a democracy, and how do you ensure an independent and private press — which is so important to a democracy's working?" I think we will do more of that as the globe shrinks.

Gary Hart is a free-lance writer who lives in Murphysboro. Jennifer Halperin is Illinois Issues' Statehouse bureau chief.

Paul Simon to launch institute at SIU Southern Illinois University — and Ted Sanders — scored a major coup last year when retiring U.S. Sen. Paul Simon announced he would teach at the school and head an institute to study public policy issues. "Hopefully we'll have a situation where Simon actually convenes groups of leaders and scholars to educate students and the media about policy issues," says Sanders. "If the institute were up and running today, it would probably be in the middle of the health care debate." In fact, Simon outlines a wide range of issues he'd like the center to address — from those with a regional focus to those of international scope. "I hope we can bring together people from different sides on issues to discuss their various views," Simon says. "For example, the whole issue of poverty in our country is something I think has not been addressed. Twenty-four percent of the children in our country live in poverty — no other Western country has anything close to that. That's something that we could and should be talking about. "My goal is to bring different factions into the debate on an issue," he says. "I don't want to limit things in terms of subjects with a national focus only. They could be regional. Southern Illinois has some economic problems that we may want to take a look at more carefully. On the other hand, I've talked to Jimmy Carter and [the U.S. ambassador] to South Korea about the need to have some dialogue established between North and South Korea. There's the largest concentration of military in the world there but no talking between them. Maybe the center is the sort of place we could bring representatives of both sides together." The role of political student and watchdog won't be a new one for Simon. Before he ever held public office, he kept a close eye on those who did. As editor-publisher of a chain of weekly newspapers, including the downstate Troy Tribune, Simon investigated gambling connections among public officials in Madison County. Then-Gov. Adiai Stevenson ordered police raids that shut down several establishments, and Simon ended up testifying before the U.S. Senate's Kefauver Commission investigating organized crime. His crusading continued after he was elected to the Illinois legislature at age 25. When he failed to interest Springfield reporters in a story about legislative corruption in Illinois, Simon made national headlines by teaming up with a free-lance reporter to write the story himself for Harper's magazine. He served 14 years in the legislature before being elected lieutenant governor in 1968. Simon's move to SIU will mark his second foray into the academic world. After losing the 1972 gubernatorial primary, he spent a year lecturing at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and founded the Public Affairs Reporting program at what is now the University of Illinois at Springfield. He returned to politics, serving 10 years in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1984, he upset three-term incumbent Charles Percy to win his U.S. Senate seat. When Simon announced in late 1994 he would not seek a third term, he told Illinois Issues he was turned off by a "meanness in spirit" that pervades politics. "I am concerned," he said at the time. "It's too negative. The key word politicians should remember is 'trust.' People may not even agree with everything you feel, but they want to have faith in you." - Jennifer Halperin

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