Diane Dietz reports the sad news on Ed Awh and Ed Vogel, two top “cluster of excellence” professors who are leaving UO for the University of Chicago, in the RG here.
The report on our newly appointed and overpaid Interim VP for Research Brad Shelton is here. UO Today video interview with Shelton about his job, here.
More on the increasing gap between the underpaid UO faculty and the overpaid UO administrators, from UO’s increasingly transparent and subversive Institutional Research website, here:
And a snapshot from last year:
Very bad news about the Eds. Everyone hoped the retention offer would be enough to keep at least one. It’s going to cost $5-$10M and several years to replace them both, if it can be done.
Shelton had many problems making his budget model work, so VP for Research must have seemed like a safe place to park him during a search for a competent BRP person. But he has no big-science research experience and no grant funding. He had a hard time even getting promoted to full (10 years?). Not a good fit even as interim VPR, and his salary is about $100K too high for what I hope is a temporary position.
Thanks for posting the video, I cringed through a few minutes of it.
I wonder if Steve Hsu misses Eugene?
I made it about halfway through the Shelton interview before I abandoned all hope of seeing any content.
How does a guy with a sheaf of crib notes in front of him manage to have absolutely nothing interesting or informative to say about his own portfolio?
Saying Chicago poached them is a bit misleading. It has been widely known they were on the market for over a year, including contacting universities without job postings. They were actively searching to get out. It was not the case that someone at Chicago went looking at faculty members at Oregon trying to find someone to make an offer to. In addition, there are other stars at Oregon doing the same thing, actively making contact to get out. A domino effect is likely to occur over the next 12 months unless something stops it.
That doesn’t mean they were for sure going to leave. It’s been the case here for years that the only way to get a raise is to get an outside offer. (The merit raises we just got do not come anywhere close enough to making up for years of neglect.) Why would they have put so much effort into the neuro cluster proposal (and many other things) if they were on their way out?
These two perspectives (Mich. duck and Anon) aren’t mutually exclusive. You can be looking for options elsewhere, while at the same time trying to improve the situation at UO for your possible future self, for your colleagues, and for students.
All the comments on this post are really very good.
Here is something worth pondering…is UO on a vicious cycle with regard to administrator salary? It is widely known there is dysfunction in the administration at UO and that the faculty and administration don’t get along. Has UO reached a point that to lure an administrator to Eugene would require even higher salaries to deal with the dumpster fire that exists when good people will have options elsewhere at universities without such dire current situations?
The ones getting these large paychecks are almost all internal hires.
The two Eds are excellent colleagues who read the UO tea leaves. There is NO internal support for research on this campus and that has our history for at least 15 yrs. Linton poured buckets of money into a very few pet projects and left the research office in administrative disarray and millions in the red. Espy was, well, we know how that turned out. And Shelton is a self-proclaimed know-it-all who knows little or nothing about research and cares only about himself. The UO is in a free fall academically and that will not change until Johnson Hall administrators stop focusing on their wallets and start focusing on implementing plans to increase academic quality. Until then, the UO brain drain will continue. You can be sure that the Eds are not the only ION faculty on the job market.
JH doesn’t care if they lose quality faculty. As far as they’re concerned, if foreign students keep on coming, admins are happy as pigs in mud…..