To All Members of the Campus Community:

I am excited to announce that, following an extremely productive and collaborative all-night negotiation session, the Graduate Employee Organization and the university administration have reached a tentative agreement on a new contract that will be put up for a ratification vote by the full GEO membership today and tomorrow. The full details of the agreement will be released after the ratification process has been completed.

While there have been differences at the bargaining table throughout this process, we firmly believe that the first and shared goal of everyone involved in these negotiations was to ensure continued excellence here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The contributions of our graduate employees at Illinois are essential to every aspect of the educational and scholarly missions of one of the world’s best public research universities. We appreciate their sustained effort and commitment during this week’s bargaining sessions that led to today’s agreement.

This tentative agreement finds common ground built on those goals to ensure graduate employees at Illinois will have the financial and personal security to focus fully on the academic pursuits and aspirations that brought them here. And this agreement also guarantees our faculty the flexibility to ensure the future quality and competitiveness of our academic programs in the rapidly shifting landscape of global higher education.

This university has a 150-year legacy of attracting the brightest, most creative and most talented students and scholars. We hope the GEO membership will vote to approve this agreement in the coming days and add a significant new chapter to that story.  

Sincerely,

Andreas C. Cangellaris
Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost