* Background is here. SIUC folks are breathing a sigh of relief today…

* The transfer would’ve hit Carbondale hard…

The Carbondale Chamber of Commerce opposes the idea. Interim director Jennifer Olson says it could stifle the city’s efforts to grow.

The chamber sent an opposition letter to the board of trustees citing a 2011 study, that said for every dollar of state funding, seven dollars would be spent annually. Olson says a cut over $5 million dollars could damage the local economy by nearly $39 million in revenue. […]

SIUC Chancellor Carlo Montemagno said in a blog post that the university had already cut over $31 million in funding since 2014 and more than $5 million in additional cuts would be equal to 110 layoffs.

* But SIU President Randy Dunn insisted this week that the shift was appropriate…

During a meeting with The Southern Illinoisan’s editorial board Tuesday, Dunn said that the operating policy for the two campuses has dictated a 60/40 percent split in appropriation distribution between SIUC and SIUE since at least as far back as 1979.

Over the years, that split has gotten skewed by virtue of state cuts and loss of certain programs, Dunn said.

According to figures provided by Dunn, the appropriation distribution for Fiscal Year 2018 was $91,287,400 (63.9 percent) to SIUC and $51,565,000 (36.1 percent) to SIUE. […]

To reflect a 60/40 percent split, the adjustment would be about $5.6 million.

* Meanwhile, speaking of SIUC…

Nine months after Carlo Montemagno left a position as director of Ingenuity Lab to assume the chancellorship at SIU’s Carbondale campus, some members of the Alberta community are still picking up the pieces of what they call a failed project brought to life and then abandoned by its director. […]

Some individuals who worked closely with Montemagno said the employment of his family members, combined with poor leadership, may have contributed to the early downfall of what was intended to be a 10-year-long $100 million project to bolster innovation within Alberta’s oil-reliant economy. […]

“How could we blow this so bad when it looked so good?” a former research associate said. “How could it become so controversial, so dominated by hostility toward others? It became the thing that it was supposed to break. It became this extremely siloed, extremely closed environment that is exactly what that thing was designed to bust up in the broader context of the university.”

That does not bode well for SIUC.