WORST CASE. I'm doing my preparations for our search on the expectation that there will be a search. There is a scary worst-case scenario.

At the Board of Trustees meeting, President John Peters said NIU has already had to use its own local funds in large part to maintain operations such as payroll.

“We have been working on this for several months,” he said. “We have in place a series of financial contingency plans that hopefully protect educational quality and jobs.”

The plans consist of NIU freezing all but the most crucial new hires, reducing expenditures on travel and equipment and scaling back on operations.

We're currently working on the anticipation of a 2.5 percent rescission, but the article suggests a gubernatorial holdback of up to 8 percent. Yikes.