URBANA -- The chairman of the House higher education appropriations committee says it's unlikely that the state's public universities will get as much money as Gov. Pat Quinn's budget proposes.

"I've been looking at the numbers for the last several weeks, and I'm going to be having a very intimate meeting with the members, saying this is where we are, this is where we have to be. I'm going to put it out there," said state Rep. Ken Dunkin, D-Chicago. "I've asked every president, every budget officer, to be brutally honest with themselves in terms of their best and worst case scenarios to the point where if they don't help get us to a cost reduction, that means that someone like myself will have to make the decision for them."

Dunkin and most of the rest of the House panel held an unusual appropriations hearing outside of Springfield on Monday, questioning University of Illinois President Michael Hogan and Illinois State University President Al Bowman at the Illini Union.

Following the more than 4-hour-long hearing, Hogan said the university could survive another budget cut next year.

"Well yeah, we can live with it. But will we live as well? Would we be able to do as well? Would we be able to admit as many students and graduate the same number of students in a timely way? Those are the questions," Hogan said. "Can we live with less and accept a deterioration in the quality? I hope we don't have to do that."

But Dunkin said more cuts are inevitable.

"I met with the president here and others, and I will continue to encourage them to do the fiscally responsible thing. If not, you're going to have legislators making the decisions for them," he said.

The minority spokesman on the panel, state Rep. Chapin Rose, R-Mahomet, said even if universities get less money next year than this year, they'll at least get all the money they're owed. The University of Illinois is still owed $475 million -- more than half of this year's appropriation by the state -- with less than three months remaining in the fiscal year.

"For three years now they've been promised x, but they've gotten y. My foremost goal is truth and transparency," Rose said. "If we're going to say we're giving you 10 dollars, we give you 10 dollars. We're not going to tell you, you're getting 12 and then have you wait around and wonder."

Both presidents also said they hoped legislators would continue to permit them to retain their tuition revenue instead of routing it through Springfield first, as some lawmakers have proposed.

"If the appropriations came at the same schedule that our operating revenue is coming in, we wouldn't be able to meet payroll. We are covering our operating expenses with tuition revenue," Bowman said. "As we've gotten into this environment where state payments are anywhere from six to eight months delayed, we've needed control of local tuition revenue in order to meet day-to-day operating payroll and to pay our vendors in a timely fashion."

Hogan said it was "absolutely essential" that universities be allowed to keep their tuition revenue.

"I don't know how many of our students and their parents will want to come here to the university if they thought their tuition dollars were going to go back to the state. I think it would wreak havoc on all our recruitment efforts," Hogan said. "The state owes us $475 million. We're covering, we're bridging that now partly with our own savings and partly with tuition revenue."

In his opening remarks, Hogan said he had three budget priorities: increasing compensation for faculty and staff, honoring the state's pension obligations to university employees, and filling some of the approximately 500 vacant faculty and staff positions university-wide.

"We've not had a general salary program at the university since August 2008, and this has to be a top priority for the coming year," Hogan said. "We're already at risk for losing our best and brightest faculty to other institutions, and each time one of them leaves they can take with them millions in existing and future grants, along with our brightest students and other colleagues."

The president came under criticism from legislators for spending as much as $375,000 on the search process for a new chancellor at the Urbana campus.

"I think it is highly inappropriate at this time," Rose said, "to spend this kind of money on search firms."

Rep. Daniel Biss, D-Skokie, said "with the extraordinary free flow of information here in 2011," he didn't think an expensive search for a successor to interim Chancellor Robert Easter was necessary.

But Hogan defended the expenditure.

"You use a search firm because they have a database of people who are or might be enticed into the market," Hogan said. "And it takes a lot of enticement to get people into the market for positions like that ... and there aren't that many of them. And they're sitting on very, very good jobs. You've got to have almost continuous contact with them, and you need somebody who's experienced in recruiting these kinds of people."