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Register Guard Editors endorse faculty raises!

9/7/2011: From the Register Guard editorial page:

Bottom of the heap: UO rates dead last in faculty salaries

In a time of 12.1 percent unemployment, Oregonians may have a hard time mustering much sympathy for University of Oregon faculty members whose pay averages a mere $73,300 a year. But by national, even regional, standards, faculty pay at the UO is scandalously low. And there is a connection between low faculty pay and high joblessness: Higher education is the engine of the economy, and Oregon is running on low-octane fuel.

Faculty salaries at the University of Oregon and other state universities aren’t just low. By some important measures, they’re the lowest.  …

The market for academic talent is national, even global. From a salary standpoint, Oregon has dropped out of the competition. The state is fortunate in having universities that continue to meet high standards, but Oregon’s advantages — a relatively low cost of living and a high quality of life — can only be relied upon to make up part of the salary deficit.

Richard Lariviere, who will become president of the UO in July, comes to Eugene from the University of Kansas, an AAU university with an average faculty salary of $91,400 — 25 percent higher than at the UO. He’s no doubt aware that higher education claimed 15.1 percent of Oregon’s general fund budget in 1987-89, but received only 6.4 percent in 2007-09. One of Lariviere’s continuing challenges will be to persuade Oregon’s governor and Legislature that underfunding higher education has consequences.

The new president might begin by asking whether it’s a coincidence that the unemployment rate in Kansas is 6.1 percent.

Oh wait, they wrote that editorial back in June, 2009. Now they are saying this. Never mind.

3 Comments

  1. Anonymous 09/07/2011

    They didn’t exactly come out against the faculty salary raises in that editorial, did they? Seems it’s the administrators that are getting dumped on. If administrator salaries really are at “parity” then that might not be so bad.

    The UO faculty — I’ll let the administrators fend for themselves — could make the case that the money for their raises has come from their success in attracting out of state and foreign students — not from screwing (figuratively) in-state students.

    After all, UO in-state tuition increases were not out of line with the rest of the OUS “system” — which supposedly (I’d like to see some facts) didn’t give out raises. And of course, those out of staters are subsidizing the whole system, not just UO.

  2. Anonymous 09/08/2011

    The purpose of the salary increases, as it was explained to me, was that they were needed to make faculty salaries more competitive. It doesn’t matter that the R-G didn’t come out against increases for faculty. They completely missed the point by making the story all about raises for administrators. Reading their crap, you’d think the whole campus was teeming with the foul breed when, in fact, they represented a relatively small percentage of the raises. It’s bad reporting. Also, administrators do a lot of recruiting!

  3. Anonymous 09/08/2011

    It’s not just bad reporting, it is willfully dishonest reporting. They are lumping promotions with the regular raises when they calculate their average salary increase. All they did is find the delta between salaries in the first quarter and the second quarter and calculate the % change. They didn’t bother to look to see if the job had changed.

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