Sharon Rudnick, when delivering the administration’s counter-offer last week:
“You can argue whatever you want. This is what it is. This is our best offer. You can make all the accusations you want.”
The union’s slightly more temperate response:
Our proposal would redirect 2% of the university’s total operating budget by fiscal year 2015. Their proposal would equate to around 1% of the total operating budget for the same period. The difference is not monumental. Yet the administration’s bargaining team was stubborn in its insistence that our proposal is too expensive.
Vice-President Moffitt explained at great length the university’s revenue streams, its expenses, and its unrestricted net assets. What she did not explain specifically is what the fixed expenses cover; what the administration’s spending priorities are; and what principles guide the university’s budget policies. The information she provided gave no evidence that the administration has been rethinking the way it distributes funds. Instead, she and her colleagues propose to raise tuition in order to raise salaries. Well, tuition has been rising every year for many years, and it hasn’t resulted in increases to the instructional budget in general or faculty salaries in particular.
We believe that a re-examination of how funds are presently distributed within the university would lead to different solutions. Finding these solutions together would be a much more productive way to spend our time at the bargaining table than having to listen to reasons why, for example, the administration finds it hard to create one printed copy of the Faculty Handbook (to which they finally agreed) or why they think defining “University” as “University of Oregon” solves our (and the Senate’s) objection to their calling themselves the “University.” But since the administration isn’t having that conversation, the union will start collating the many ideas we’ve been hearing from across the UO community—NTTF, TTF, ORs, OAs, staff, and students—for saving money and rethinking the budget. …
The University of Oregon is ranked 9th out of 9 AAU comparator universities in salaries, and the administration’s meager proposal will not change this fact. We acknowledge their team’s willingness to discuss adding back compression/equity and salary floors, but we do not accept their assertion that they have no other resources to put towards our proposal. We reject their premises and methodology. We will be pushing them to take seriously the need to rethink their spending priorities and to work with us to make faculty what they say we are: the top priority. We welcome your support and encourage you to attend our next sessions on Tuesday, May 7, and Thursday, May 9.
4/29/2013: The guy that Jamie Moffitt sent to the Thursday bargaining session to answer questions about how UO couldn’t afford to pay its faculty? He got an 18% raise over the past 2 years:
Nov 2010:
I’m sure he’s earning it. Probably more than Moffitt earned her own 75% raise – which she got after a failed search for an outside VPFA. She was on the search committee that made the call. No conflict of interest there!
Nov 2010:
Nov 2010:
While President Gottfredson came in at a $540K salary. For comparison, the chancellor of UCLA gets $425K, after 6 years in the job.
Sickening. How do these people justify this to themselves? Meanwhile, most science faculty (grant PIs) now have to meet individually with inquisitors and promise that they’re not committing fraud. Has anyone pointed out that our administrators’ quest for personal enrichment is vastly worse, ethically and monetarily?
Exactly. Science PIs are told to follow NIH and University rules by budgeting for raises for underpaid lab staff when they apply for grants, but it is immoral to give those budgeted raises to them. Meanwhile, admins consider themselves so special they manage to justify raises and extra staff every time.
Clearly, the faculty should attach furutre increases to administrator increases.
They should be embarrassed. Assholes.
This almost too painful to read. Does JH really not understand how offensive and divisive this stuff is?
They understand completely. They just care more about their money than they do about the divisiveness. That said they do have to pay reasonable salaries to attract and keep administrators, and it’s only fair that the good ones get rewarded for their efforts. Sort of like with faculty …
Dog to UOmatters
I feel incredibly fettered by your one cuss word limitation per post.
If there is any topic you have ever posted that deserves a veritable
shitload of cuss words in response, this is the one …!
Go for it.
Need I remind everyone of the official University line? The Administration is the University.
Please write it on the chalk board 100 times so that lesson may sink in. “The Administration is the University. The Administration is the University.”
Dog response
I am still articulating the go for it document.
However, in the meantime, someone should put this
at an appropriate place on campus:
http://i639.photobucket.com/albums/uu113/pvol/fucktard.jpg
And let’s not forget why we would, in a rational world, pay administrators these high salaries – to fulfill the promise of making us a top-tier university. What is at the core of this? A top-tier faculty. How do we get there? Paying competitively for starters.
So, have these administrators earned their high salaries when their only response to doing the very thing they need to be doing is “That’s all the money we have – take it or leave it.”
The conceit is that they’ll head for the doors absent these outrageous raises. I’d rather take the chance and have them walk. My guess is that very few have anywhere else to go.
What would be a permissible response to If I hearing JH once more justify their salaries by them having to attract and keep administrators. That always makes me cringe.
It has yet to be established that we want to keep many of them anyway.
Our failed searches are not due to money falling short, either.
I would pay much more attention to the United Academics if they approached us as faculty as objective thinkers instead of primarily trying to appeal to our emotions. Here is a paragraph from the email they sent today that is completely pedantic and ineffective:
This week the university administration finally presented its response to our proposal for salary increases. Was it worth the 5-week wait? Their 6 economic counter-proposals (salary, fringe benefits, leaves, retirement, sabbaticals, and health insurance) are, in a word, insulting.
Fair enough but is it not also fair to call their offers insulting if they actually are? They are insulting exactly because they are objectively antithetical to the administration’s stated values and goals.
and they were five weeks in the waiting. Seems legit to call them on it to me. People don’t call each other out enough around here, which is part of the problem.
I completely agree that faculty salaries are not high enough comparatively to other universities. There is data to back that up.
A fact that many people don’t acknowledge is that administrators get paid more than faculty in general. Their jobs yield higher salaries in all institutions, not just at the UO.
I understand complaining about conflicts of interest for getting a raise. That is not fair and it deserves critical attention. But I do not understand why people continue to complain that administrators get paid more than faculty. Yes, they do. That isn’t going to change.
The problem isn’t so much that administrators get paid more. The problem is that they get paid more relative to UO peers, and faculty get paid less relative to UO peers.
And, arguably, that they are responsible for much less (budgets, students, faculty #) than comparators and do a worse job in many areas.
Moreover, even UOMatters isn’t bitching that administrators get paid more than faculty, it’s that they are getting raises when faculty are not, and getting higher percentage raises than those offered to faculty (by a long shot!).
To be fair, moving into a new position for a higher salary isn’t really a “raise.” And maybe Mr. Stripp had a whole bunch of new responsibilities added to his job to justify his salary bump? But in both cases, as the examples given show, the salary increases are dramatic–and can hardly reflect a shift from one kind of full-time work to another kind of full-time work. I doubt very much that Doug Blandy is working 94% longer or harder, or bearing 94% more responsibility for the running of the institution than he was before his appointment as SVPAA.
Meanwhile, many faculty–especially NTTF–are teaching more students, being asked to produce more research (in line with those “peers” whose salaries cannot be our comparative benchmark because they are richer than us–as Rudnick said just last week), and shoulder more service in exchange for no raises, or infinitessimal ones.
That is what sticks in one’s craw.
Not top mention that they have not alway been paid more. The president, yes, but the depth of the highly paid administrators is a new and growing trend. Moreover, they arguably do less and less, choosing instead to farm out their work to consultants. See Randy Geller for a lesson on that front.
Have the administrators even thanked the students for their salary increases, which have contributed to driving tuition upward. No. Our local admins have even tried to attach future tuition increases to paying faculty.
I’m sending out for a consultant to do my service from now on. I’m thinking India, too, as I can’t afford much more.
Altmann gets that kind of raise, and can’t even keep her UOM fact checking up to date. Pathetic. (Last post… 2 April.)
Not up to date? I’ve been assuming “the university” believes everything I’ve posted since 4/2/2013 is a fact!
I’m good with that. You do a better job at posting corrections than they do anyway.
Actually, I would argue that the Admins don’t use consultants when they should (hello, terrible compensation “plan” — it’s painful to even call it that). And for the work the admins SHOULD be doing, they use the department heads, directors, and PIs to do their work. I wouldn’t begrudge them one cent if they were competent and did the work they were so supposed to do. And furthermore, why are they always multiplying in number?
Well put.
Would somebody please explain to me which administrators you are referring to? They clearly are the root of all evil, so let’s get specific. The Cleaner says, “…for the work the admins SHOULD be doing, they use the department heads, directors, and PIs to do their work.” If not department heads, directors or PI’s, are you talking about the “Executive Officers” listed on the President’s page? The Deans? The Senior Vice Provost or Vice Provosts? How about the AVP’s? All of the above? A few here and there? If you “wouldn’t begrudge them one cent if they were competent and did the work they were so supposed to do,” please tell me who fits this category and who doesn’t.
It looks like it’s time for a poll.
It seems elementary to me that the longer these arguments continue — whether Admin has funding or whether faculty should just believe they don’t and move on in the negotiation process — the more Union support is growing.
Some of us have already left. Some of us were repeatedly denied raises (even COLAs) despite excellent work, and despite our peers (some of them within the UO!) being paid 30-40% more (with the same benefits). Some of us have found better-paying, more rewarding work, away from the BS of the UO.
Submitted anonymously this time, as some of us do not wish to be triangulated from previous posts.
We’re logging campus traffic to (anti) UO Matters anyway, so The University (see what I did there?) already knows who you are.
That’s why some of us use public, unlocked wi-fi connections instead of wired/fixed ip addresses Mr. RJB :-)