Last updated on 12/08/2015
6/5/2009: UO’s Under-represented Minority Recruitment Plan or UMRP gives $90,000 to departments that hire faculty who self-report as racial or ethnic minorities. What do those faculty spend this money on? Here is a link to the accounting statement for one history professor’s UMRP account. He took $62,000 as supplemental summer salary, and spent the rest on things ranging from moving expenses to research support to dining at the Excelsior. We hear most new history professors are lucky to get $6,000 in summer pay.
Affirmative action law (in our view appropriately) allows employers to make certain specific extra efforts to recruit minorities – but it is completely illegal to use race, ethnicity, or gender when determining pay, benefits, or working conditions. OK, the UMRP is illegal – but is it effective? Well, the professor in question (who has given permission to make his accounting statement public) left UO for another job the same year he spent the last of his $90,000. (A reader has told us this professor left because UO wouldn’t give his partner – who may also have been paid out of this $90K – a permanent job.)
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