Jeff Cooley lightened the mood while speaking in front of representatives from the Illinois General Assembly Friday.

Cooley was giving a speech on Eastern’s deferred maintenance costs – which hover around $90 million – when he brought up the Blair Hall fire of 2004.

He joked that Eastern purposely set fire to old Blair Hall so deferred maintenance costs would decrease.

“We burnt down Blair Hall,” Cooley said.

The vice president for business affairs said the new Blair Hall reduced around $13 million in Eastern’s deferred maintenance costs.

The steam plant takes up 20 percent of the $90 million in deferred maintenance, Cooley said. He added that the steam plant basically is running on 1928 technology.

“We have some critical issues,” Cooley said, speaking about Eastern’s campus.

Cooley and Blair Lord, who is provost and vice president for academic affairs, spoke in front of the House Higher Education Task Force during an open meeting Friday in the Arcola/Tuscola Room in the Martin Luther King Jr. University Union.

Rep. Chapin Rose, R-Mahomet, developed the task force, which plans to tour Illinois colleges and universities to acquire a sense of what needs to be improved with colleges in the state.

The task force toured Eastern’s steam plant, the Biological Sciences Building and Doudna Fine Arts Center.

In attendance with Rose were: Representatives Kevin McCarthy, D-Orland Park; Bill Mitchell, R-Forsyth; William Davis, D-East Hazel Crest; and Ron Stephens, R-Highland.

“The tour we had to today was a little bit troubling, but informative,” McCarthy said.

Cooley said the deferred maintenance costs is the money Eastern needs to spend to fix general revenue buildings around campus, but the administration is not spending this money.

“That number is so big, and that is why that deferred maintenance will continue to grow because we can’t fix everything,” Cooley said.

The steam plant had a few renovations done to it in the 1980s, but those renovations did not address the boilers in the plant, Cooley said.

The gas boilers are around 1968 vintage and the coal boilers around 1920 vintage, Cooley added.

“We’ve gone in and cleaned some of the tubes and refractories, but that really has been about it,” Cooley said. “We did upgrade some of the control mechanisms.”

Doudna will have a similar effect on deferred maintenance costs once it is complete like the new Blair Hall did, Cooley added.

Lord spoke about teacher preparation, the new nursing program, the study abroad program, faculty recruitment and retention, and academic technology.

Lord said Coles County is ranked number five in terms of students employed in Illinois public schools after they graduate.

“We are one of the top producers in teachers in the state,” Lord added.

Lord said on average 33 faculty members leave Eastern a year. He added the high for tenure-tracked faculty working at Eastern was in the early 1990s.

He said problems could occur with growing enrollment numbers and declining tenure-track faculty numbers.

“We have a challenge in that, but we are trying to make the best use of what we have,” Lord said.

The student to teacher ratio, however, has changed little as enrollment numbers have increased, Lord added.

Eastern’s study abroad program offers study in 44 countries including Japan, England and South Africa, Lord said.

He said the priorities for study abroad in the future is to increase external support for grants and scholarships that enable students to study abroad and to increase student awareness of study abroad programs earlier because it will allow the student more time to prepare for studying overseas.

Technology-enhanced classrooms have increased slightly from 2003 to 2007. There are currently 157 technology-enriched classrooms compared to 102 in 2003, Lord said.

He said Eastern has also focused on acquiring new technology for teaching like the Turnitin program, which offers suggestions for students on how to improve their papers and helps teachers catch plagiarism.

Cooley was impressed with the representatives who visited the campus.

“They didn’t have to do that,” Cooley said. “They did that because they have a passion about their jobs and higher education.”

The task force visited University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s campus and Lakeland Community College’s work force training center Thursday, and plans to visit other Illinois colleges and universities in the future.

“It helps to see, touch and feel,” Cooley said. “I think it does help them to get a sense of what we are talking about when we come to Springfield to talk about those issues.”

-To see a previous article about the task force, click here.