3/18/2013: Help VPFA Jamie Moffitt find the money to get UO’s faculty salaries to the AAU peers, and provide similar raises for NTTFs. A rough guess is she needs $20 million recurring, or about 2.5% of UO’s total projected $813 million in revenue for 2012-13.
To play, log in to duckweb, go to employee information, then go to the Financial Transparency Tool. Nathan Tublitz and I fought long and hard for this, now’s the time to use it.
Check the drop down box and compare, say, 2007-08 with 2012-13 budgets. These are crude numbers, they often underestimate the true amount of cost increases because they net out dedicated revenues, e.g. from foundation gifts. For a benchmark, over this period IR reports that total UO expenditures increased by roughly 45%. The “adjusted budget” numbers are negatives because they are net costs. Here are some easy pickings:
Academic Affairs: 100% increase or $3.5 million, and they can’t even find the faculty handbook any more:
Police: 150% increase, or $3.1 million:
LCB: Gotta love these guys: Instructional salaries up about 45%, administrative costs up 200%.
College of Ed: Overall budget up 40%, Dean and Central admin costs have more than doubled, to $5.4 million.
Enrollment Management. Roger Thompson’s shop. Overall budget up only about 50%, but administrative costs are up 600%.
General Counsel’s office: Randy’s now hiding all the money he’s paying Sharon Rudnick and her friends, but his un-top-secret budget has doubled anyway.
Provost’s Office: Up 130%. An extra $1.1 million for the jock box. $1.2 million for “Provost Reserve”.
Portland: Most of these costs are hidden in colleges, but general fund subsidies are up by 200% or $1 million.
University Relations: Michael Redding more than tripled his office’s budget. An extra $2.2 million a year. Impressive.
VPSA Robin Holmes: Succeeded in almost doubling her administrative costs. Bowl junkets not included.
Institutional Research: Knowledge is at the heart of any modern, well-run organization. And sure enough, UO’s IR budget has increased by 5% over the past 5 years. Total.
Awesome stuff, UOM. These clearly reveal the choice JH has made and the value they place in so many other line items before getting to faculty salaries.
Gottfredson et al. You’ve become rich at out expense… time to pay up.
WOW! I’m speechless. This is so damning. Well timed, UOM: tomorrow they will explain again that the coffers are too low to give any but the piddliest raises. Now we know they’ve just been pissing it away.
What we need next are some nice columns of comparator salaries for all the admin, top and middle-management both.
Development up over 100%
Most of the Development staff make more than most faculty. Quite a few in the $100,000 – $220,000 range. I know they are a high-demand, highly mobile profession, but it is still a bit shocking.
Of course even though they are trying to piss it away as fast as they can, we still have reserves so high we have to justify to the state why they are so high. And then the admin are surprised the state doesn’t help fund more capital projects on campus?? We have in essence reserves 200 percent higher than they need to be. That’s not a cushion. That’s just plain dumb.
He left Jamie in charge? Oh well.
You gotta remember: During the DF/JTM/FD years the UO was “under administrated…” Thus the big jumps!
Are you serious?
Don’t think he/she is serious, this quote comes from Frohnmayer or Bean at the furlough meeting – when Frohnmayer tried to get us to take pay cuts while he was negotiating his own sweet retirement deal with Pernsteiner.
Anyone that can say that these big jumps are all because we were “underadministrated” with a straight face is getting a fat paycheck for being an administrator.
No, I couldn’t resist a little facetious humor. :=)
What is missing in all this data is the value. What we have seen for far too long on this campus is egregious increases in administrative expenses with little or no oversight or accountability for the value provided by those administrators. Faculty are held to standards for their work (I know, it isn’t perfect) and presumably their salaries are somewhat tied to those standards.
What are the standards for administrators? Who evaluates them? (Hint: other administrators who have incentives to keep from looking bad so are hesitant to give poor evaluations to those they hire).
One argument for high administrative salaries is that you have to pay to get the best administrators. Hmmmm…doesn’t seem to be working.
Academic Affairs – 1.45 million increase (700%) in “Special Programs”? Let’s start by making a “transparency” tool that doesn’t hide a bunch of money in “special programs” or “other” categories.
State support eroding everywhere
http://chronicle.com/article/State-Spending-on-Higher/136745/
Yet we’ve managed $100 million in reserves and 3 years of positive cash flow with eroding state funding. Where is that money going?
How many associated deans in your department are getting a fat salary for adding no value?
How many years have we increased low-paying adjunct positions instead of investing in professional and stable teaching and research positions – both TTF and NTTF?
Why are we subsidizing the jock box to the tune of close to $1+ million a year?
How many “special assistants to the provost” do we have making $300,000 plus?
What are these “special programs” in Academic Affairs that have grown in one year from $242,000 to $1.7 million?
Why does athletics give nothing back to academics?
Why can’t the development folks, who have increased their budgets over 100%, do a better job diverting donors toward academics?
Why do we pay these administrators so much if they can’t do the tough work we need them to do of finding the money in the budget to adequately compensate those that are central to the teaching and research mission of the university – the faculty? Why did they give themselves fat raises during the last round of raises but not to all faculty? What value did administrators add to deserve those?
Each one of these seemingly isolated and minor decisions adds up to a pattern of neglecting faculty. Maybe there are legitimate answers to these questions but all you hear from administrators is there is no money and how dare you question our commitment. Bullshit – it’s time for some real transparency. For a real accounting of where the money is going and is that where it should be going. It’s time to drop the feigned outrage and defensiveness and answer the tough questions. The administration has a reputation with the faculty that it can’t be trusted to make these decisions wisely and defensiveness won’t repair that.
They can say that is a priority all they want. Until it actually shows up in their actions, it’s just empty rhetoric. It’s time faculty call bullshit on the claims that the money isn’t there – that is just the latest in a long line of excuses as to why they can’t competitively compensate faculty.