UO Matters

Back in 1972, when I was 13, I heard about a similar event sponsored by the UVa engineering school. Every lab had an open house – wind tunnels, oscilloscopes, soil liquefaction, CNC machining with paper tapes. I still remember it all. My parents weren’t interested so I got to go by myself. I spent the next year going into the labs after school and driving the grad students crazy with dumb questions. I have no idea who runs this at UO but thank you!

The UO SPICE Science Open House is tomorrow (Wednesday October 9^th, 6:30-8:30pm, Willamette Hall Atrium). Each year we welcome hundreds of children and community members to come explore hands-on science with SPICE, campus groups, and community partners.  We would love for you to join us. Please find our flyer attached. The event is free to the public.

We hope to see you there!

https://www.spicescience.org/open-haus

The official UO obituary is here: Lillis was one of the rich businesspeople who worked with Phil Knight in the wake of the firing of President Richard Lariviere to transform UO from a poorly funded public university with a so-so sports program into a well funded sports program with a…

Letter to campus from President Scholz and his PR flacks here:

Daily Emerald report on what happened when people pushed him on what he meant here:

The protestors marched to Johnson Hall where Smith, Urbancic, O’Neal and Tuten attempted to make the delivery to President Scholz, but Mark Schmelz, chief human resources and vice president, “intercepted,” according to O’Neal.

… “These measures include but are not limited to the University’s requests that students report their instructors’ political course content and targeting peaceful student protests using video recordings from the Board of Trustees public meetings. The CLC interprets these measures as threats to free speech on campus and the practice of academic freedom for educators at UO,” the media advisory said.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education gives UO a yellow rating for Free Speech, noting:

University of Oregon has been given the speech code rating Yellow. Yellow light colleges and universities are those institutions with at least one ambiguous policy that too easily encourages administrative abuse and arbitrary application.

From the Senate website here. It’s disappointing that this motion does not endorse the union salary proposal and does not call on President Scholz to accept it. Scholz’s bargaining team has already claimed that faculty are currently paid “fairly”.

You can find your Senator here and ask them to support an amendment to change 2.3 below to:

2.3  BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the University Senate advocates for prompt negotiations and fair resolutions between the university administration and United Academics to avert any potential academic disruption resulting from a strike and calls on President Scholz to accept the United Academics proposal for raises of 8.5% for each of 3 years, to get faculty compensation to a fair level compared to our AAU public comparator universities. 

I expect the motion will come up for a vote at the Senate meeting on Oct 9th.

I remember when President Lariviere would talk bemusedly about “the athletic entertainment enterprise across the river”. Our new Pres is all in, despite the evidence that the hype is just not bringing in the out-of-state tuition money: Dear University of Oregon community,  It is with great pleasure that I welcome…

Bargaining started in February. The union put out a 3-year plan to get UO salaries from 86% of the average of our AAU Public comparators to 100% – a publicly stated goal of UO administrators going back to Pres Richard Lariviere and Provost Jim Bean.

President Scholz’s bargaining team countered with the offer of 3 years of 3% raises – not even enough to make up for recent inflation, much less move us up from the bottom of the AAU, PAC-12, Big-10, etc. Scholz’s bargaining team justified this by arguing they did not have the money – meaning they had other priorities for spending their ~$1 billion budget. The union responded by proposing they just get faculty salaries up to the level of Johnson Hall’s senior academic administrators – who are paying themselves 99% of the AAU average, plus bennies such as Provost Long’s $130K startup and alcohol budget.

The administration responded by refusing to increase their 3-for-3 offer. They did however switch their logic from “we don’t have the money” to “you are already overpaid” – arguing the cost of UO’s benefit package was high enough, and the cost of living in Eugene low enough, that in terms of total compensation faculty are already at 98.3% of the AAU average. I expect the union will disagree with the assumptions behind this number.

Here’s the union’s statement asking faculty to show up to hear their union’s response:

Our Fight for Fair Salaries

Your bargaining team meets with administration again this week on Thursday, September 26th, from 12:30 to 3:30pm. Please note that we will gather in Lillis 112 – right down the hall from the room we typically meet in.

We will present several articles, including Article 26: Salary. We have poured over the data underpinning the administration’s most recent proposal and have developed our counterproposal based on, and in response to their data. We anticipate a robust conversation about compensation during the session. We will also present our counterproposals on review processes for tenure-related and Career faculty.

Come to bargaining for as long as possible. If we are to avoid a future job action (such as a strike), it is imperative that faculty show up and remain engaged in bargaining throughout the coming term.

Here.

The overpaid and undereducated JH administrator who approved this hideous abomination should be charged with incitement to riot:

Thanks of sorts to a friend for reminding me of everything that drove me crazy about UO. Old post on the Pioneer Father here.

This would be the University of Washington. Many other of our AAU public and private peers have various plans to help faculty with the cost of housing, ranging from university owned apartments and condos rented at subsidized rates to schemes where the university shares the cost of a house purchase, but also the equity. The Admin Bargaining Team’s Hal Sadofsky has conveniently omitted these, and their absence at UO, from his analysis of the cost of living at different AAU schools. Link here, please post links to other programs you know of in the comments:

over 4 years. 95% of them voted to strike. President Scholz is offering the UO faculty 9% over 3 years, and no goat. From the NYT: The proposed deal would have delivered raises of 25 percent over the life of the four-year contract; the unions started the talks by asking…

From Physics Prof Raghu Parthasarathy’s excellent blog. Read the whole thing here, this is just an excerpt from his response to the email President Scholz had his flunky Provost what’s his name send to the faculty explaining why, at ~84% of the AAU average, we’re actually overpaid:

Let’s plot the president’s salary per undergraduate student for the AAU publics. (Of course, the proper scaling need not be linear in student number.) We’ll consider total undergraduate enrollment; the residents and non-resident take the same amount of supervision! Here’s the graph;

We’re not near the bottom. In fact, we’re near the top: #8 out of 38! Purdue’s president is the lowest (or, most sensibly) paid, and I’ll also note that Purdue has done a wonderful job freezing tuition rather than following every other school’s policy of sustained, exorbitant increases. But that’s another topic…

One could therefore make a solid case that the University of Oregon’s president is overpaid, relative to our state funding, or especially relative to the scale of the university. Of course, this isn’t the way presidential salaries are set. Moreover, this is irrelevant to UO faculty salary negotiations. But, if the administration wishes to emphasize the (poor) argument is that UO doesn’t have much money and so we can’t have the salary of our peers, or that “The cost of living in Eugene is lower than average at our AAU public peers” justifies low faculty salaries (from an email from our provost), I’d be more likely to buy these claims if they applied to administrative salaries as well. From what I can tell, they do not.

There are frustrating parts of the union proposals as well — I strongly dislike their focus on across-the-board raises rather than merit-based raises — but especially in recent, fascinating, data-driven statements, their arguments are clearer. At least, they haven’t driven me to spend hours making my own graphs.

That would of course be Oregon State University. From their VP for Enrollment Jon Boeckenstedt’s blog. That’s right, OSU’s VP for Enrollment runs a very interesting blog on the side. Here at UO, the faculty can’t even get enrollment projections from the administration.

Orange (of course) for increases, blue for decreases:

What about Oregon’s other top-tier university? Not so good:

Why the difference? Maybe because OSU focuses on education (including online), while UO has become a football mill – a scheme which our administrators embraced while claiming it would boost enrollment.

What does our new President think of this? I don’t know, but there is no evidence he’s got a plan to deal with this except, of course, more football. Which is presumably what Uncle Phil’s Board hired him for.

Today the faculty union had a bargaining session with the administration, but nothing happened on salaries because the administration still has not provided the union with the analysis discussed in the email sent out to the faculty under Provost Long’s name 2 weeks ago. As an aside, I can understand…

Under the UO policy students could discuss incidents of sexual harassment confidentially with faculty, without fear that the faculty would be required to report their names and details against the students’ wishes. Now faculty must report these conversations or face discipline. I spent a good year or two of my…