Eastern President Lou Hencken began his State of the University Address at the faculty luncheon Wednesday with depressing news.

“This is the fourth year in a row where we have not received any additional dollars from the State of Illinois,” he said.

Eastern is not the only university the state refused to fund this year. Despite the Illinois Board of Higher Education’s recommendation that Eastern receive an additional 1.6 percent in its funding, the legislative voted to not increase funding for higher education for all state universities, Hencken said after the luncheon.

After four years of no additional state support, Eastern has continued to remain a successful institution-as evident by the recent renewal of the university’s ten-year North Central re-accreditation-by effectively allocating its resources, Hencken said.

“We have been able to operate by increasing efficiencies on the campus by not filling a number of non-teaching positions, by increasing enrollment and by unfortunately implementing a higher than normal tuition increase,” Hencken said.

To maintain and improve Eastern as one of the state’s best universities, Blair Lord, provost and vice president for academic affairs, proposed six initiatives in his remarks. Among his goals were improving student participation in the Study Abroad program and having the most active and highly regarded student research and student scholarship program in the state.

“It is my aspiration, however, that we will hear faculty at a sibling institution say to a colleague, ‘we need to find out what they are doing at Eastern that we can emulate,'” Lord said.

If the faculty thought that his initiatives were “cockamamie,” Lord said that he is the one to blame as they are solely his ideas. However, Faculty Senate Chair Haile Mariam Assegedetch was pleased with what she heard.

“The six initiatives he talked about seemed to be really something we need,” she said. “This is a good university. They both emphasized that, but to make it a showcase is an ideal thing.”