11/26/2011: Public meetings complaint on Lariviere firing here.
In the Oregonian Kitzhaber finally explains why he fired Lariviere: Kitzhaber is the CEO, and the rest of us are his employees:
In my opinion, should the Board of Higher Education decide to terminate Dr. Lariviere’s contract on this basis, it would be fully justified from an executive management standpoint. Any private sector CEO, faced with a division manager who was totally dedicated to his or her specific department but willfully and repeatedly undermined the needs and goals of the overall company would, I expect, fire the manager – and probably after the first instance of such behavior; not the second.
Funny, I thought Oregon was a democracy, and we had elected Kitzhaber governor of it – with a few checks and balances like the public meetings law. If the state is going to be run by a CEO, I would have voted for Phil Knight – a man who knows how to make things and create jobs in Oregon.
In his Sunday column Steve Duin of the Oregonian rips into Governor Kitzhaber for autocratic decisions and mentions this ethics complaint. Jeff Wright of the RG posts notice of a story coming tomorrow on it.
A good CEO would have shut down the losing enterprises (Southern and Eastern) long ago. Just sayin’.
I think we need to be careful about putting Phil on a pedestal. He made his millions exploiting women and children in the developing world. He withdrew his money from the university when students wanted worker standards for their team regalia. If he takes the school private, as some are suggesting/hoping, I don’t think he is going to like talk of unions, honoring tenure, or faculty who make a lot of FIA requests.
Whatever, Governor. So you’ve got a better plan? A better President? Don’t CEO’s get paid to think ahead? Where have you been for the past 2 years?
Has Kitzhaber ever been a CEO of anything? Who would hire this megalomaniacal ass-clown for anything?
The corporate model of management: bad for governments AND for universities: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2001/MJ/Feat/gerb.htm
Kitzhubris is not, in the business analogy, the CEO. He’s a 5% minority stockholder.
No one listens to us nogoodnik professors. Probably because we are constant complainers, and while others around the state are struggling, we can’t seem to stop whining that we don’t make enough. It seems therefore that protesting directly to the governor and the state board is useless. What we should be doing is taking our case to people around the state that the governor and board do actually listen to from time to time — perhaps business leaders, the legislature, and voters. Indeed, the recent statement from Kitz indeed shows his total disregard for campus outrage. And while I agree with and enjoy all the letters to the governor and the board to which I have been cc’ed calling them idiots, etc., I believe that name-calling and simple outrage have little chance of actually reversing this decision. In fact, they probably act to firm up the governor and the board’s current position. So, let’s spend some time lobbying folks who have their ear, and try to put forward well-reasoned arguments rather than name calling.
Equity raises are a noble goal, but the timing and execution left something to be desired. In the sample I looked at, nearly all the raises went to faculty retiring within a couple years and already at the high end of the department pay scale. Needed for retention? I don’t think so. If the governor looked at this sample, no wonder he is giving no support.
That is a good point on the raises. For example, why did new business school dean get a raise less than a year after he was presumably hired at market value? Where was he going to go? And who would care if he did leave – his record so far is terrible. Ask around and you will find that he has destroyed morale, pissed off the very donors he was brought in to get money from and put forth a “strategic plan” that is neither strategic or a plan. And he got a raise?
Here’s a proposal for showing how much the faculty and administration support Lariviere: they could all volunteer to reduce their FTE by the amount of the raise. I believe there is already a mechanism in place (from when faculty were asked to share the sacrifice of the furloughs forced on the classified staff). Folks with an offer in hand who would actually leave without the raise would not be expected to participate, but for everyone else, it would be a good exercise in putting their money where their mouths are and take the discussion to a higher moral ground.
I think there was wide variation in how the raises were distributed. Some might have been as you say, I’ve heard similar stories. I know other units where they corrected massive compression (new asst profs getting basically what 20-year veterans were) and inversion. The longer you were here, the worse it got, and the fix was always just around the corner, in the next biennium. Or not. I’m not even sure what the last suggestion means. Why would anyone volunteer to reduce their pay? One way of looking at these raises is that they’re the accumulated raises you never got under Frohnmayer, who always claimed raising faculty pay was his number one priority, but somehow never got around to doing anything about it.