Before PQP burst on the scene in the early 1990s, the board was a small, little-known state agency that labored mostly in the murky caverns of higher education finance. The 15-member board, including representatives of the state's public and private colleges and universities, as well as the general public seldom made news. The last chairman was a pleasant fellow who spent part of the year in California.
But when Arthur F. Quern, a Chicago insurance executive, was named BHE chairman by Republican Governor Jim Edgar in 1991, all that changed. The board and its staff found themselves embroiled in highly visible controversies as the drive to make Illinois higher education more cost-effective gathered steam.
Quern, now 53, was not a blustering businessman with little knowledge of state government. He had worked as an aide to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller in the 1970s, and later served as chief of staff for former Illinois Governor James Thompson for four years.
As BHE chairman, Quern's job was to maintain or increase the quality of Illinois public higher education while at the same time holding budgets down to a level that Governor Edgar could support without raising taxes. Quern pressed the BHE staff for a plan to reallocate money from lower priorities to higher ones. The PQP initiative was the result.
Robert Wallhaus, who was the board's executive deputy director at the time, recalled that the first staff discussions with Quern were "a little bumpy."
"He would ask, 'What do you propose to do to carry this out?' We would start to talk vaguely about some 'process' thing and he would say, 'No, I'm not talking about a long-range project, I'm talking about right now. I want to come to the next board meeting and see that something has happened.'
"But after a few meetings, everybody agreed on the approach and things went pretty smoothly after that," Wallhaus added.
The BHE is responsible for making budget recommendations to the governor and the Legislature, for approving new academic programs and for higher education master planning. The staff now began to apply budget and academic program review procedures that had been developed over 20 years to the new PQP initiative.
The staff is small--35 people, working with a $2.3 million annual budget--and Executive Director Richard D. Wagner did not expand it, despite the demands of PQP. Wagner, who has worked for the BHE since 1969 and has headed the agency since 1980, maintains the lowest of profiles.
The staff offices, five blocks from the State Capitol in Springfield, are, to be polite, drab. For many years, the office car was a battered old Ford known as "the beast." When this relic finally gave out, after 125,000 miles or so, it was replaced by a Dodge Aries with the temperament of a film star. Now Wagner, somewhat embarrassed to be living so high on the hog, has purchased a Ford Taurus.
"Dick has an absolutely 'no frills' philosophy," Wallhaus said. "That's his personal style and it's also very practical. We were doing things the institutions didn't always like and it was essential for us to be honest and efficient and not give anybody an opportunity to criticize our lifestyle."
The staff began to turn out lengthy reviews of academic programs on the 12 senior Illinois campuses. As always, these reports were printed in small type on both sides of recycled paper, without summaries, testing the stamina of those who would read them.
At first, many campus administrators did not take PQP very seriously. But when the board published its October 1992 "hit list" of 192 academic programs that should be eliminated or restructured, there were howls of protest. Many of these came from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where 11 of 29 doctoral programs were marked for extinction.
"The BHE staff is simply a bureaucracy that could run any state agency," said Jack Parker, dean of the College of Science at Carbondale. "Most of them haven't had any campus experience and they have little expertise in science."
Other administrators echoed these criticisms, though usually off the record. "I have serious problems with people who hold master's degrees in education telling us whether or not to start a doctoral program," said one University of Illinois official.
Ross Hodel, deputy director for public affairs, said nine of BHE's 25 professional staff members have doctorates, another is a lawyer, still another a certified public accountant. Eleven have had campus experience.
Quern dismissed the criticism as "academic snobbery." He said PQP "has been good" for Illinois colleges and universities. "If higher education does this well, it will be better able to resist outside would-be budget cutters and it will be better able to face the competition that is coming from non-traditional sources."
"PQP is not over," Dick Wagner said. "In my opinion, Illinois still has more capacity than it needs, and we'll continue to look at that very carefully. The challenges higher education is going to face in the future will require even greater initiatives."
--William Trombley