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Eugene Weekly reports on UO adjuncts and faculty union

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The Eugene Weekly has an excellent, lengthy story by Camilla Mortensen on “contingent faculty” at UO, the faculty union’s efforts to get them better pay and job security, and some of the consequences in the Journalism school, which responded by accelerating its efforts to replace adjuncts with tenured faculty. All well worth reading, here.

22 Comments

  1. that effing Dog again 04/23/2015

    I read the article

    this struck me:

    “He adds, “The dean refuses to allow English the flexibility to define the standard load as eight within English for faculty like myself.” He says tenure-track faculty in English and his supervisors agreed “that applying the CBA in this bizarre way, balancing the CAS [College of Arts and Sciences] budget on the backs of the most vulnerable and underpaid and overworked faculty at the university, is unjust.””

  2. anonymous 04/23/2015

    More pay for the adjuncts will have to come from somewhere. More tenure track faculty and fewer opportunities for adjuncts? Less pay for TTF? Maybe higher teaching loads for TTF? Less money for professional staff, aka administrators? Even less dough for the library? Less for diversity, sustainability, etc? Or there’s always higher tuition if it can be squeezed out of the students. As John Moseley liked to say, everything is a tradeoff.

    • New Year Cat 04/23/2015

      My vote is less money for coaches. I don’t think anyone really has to have $3 million if their school’s academic side is struggling…they could probably manage make do on $2 million in Eugene. Remember our lovely quality of life which is meant to be such a draw and make up for the inadequacies of salaries for other classes of UO employees?

    • Hen 04/23/2015

      How about less pay for football coaches?

      • anonymous 04/23/2015

        How would that help adjuncts? You don’t seriously think the backers’ of the coaches salaries would just turn over their money to the adjunct account, do you?

        • charlie 04/23/2015

          That’s the problem when a uni has been colonized by outside interests that could care less for academics. The athletic Moloch has to be placated, even if it means student tuition gets jacked up, with no attending increase in academic rigor or excellence. Hell of a situation….

          • anonymous 04/24/2015

            charlie,that makes no sense at all. How does accepting donations from Phil Knight for football raise tuition? If anything, it has the opposite effect, because the subsidy to athletics at UO is much smaller than at most schools.

            With all due respect, your reasoning is not worthy of a center of higher learning.

          • charlie 04/24/2015

            With all due respect, you seem to have been asleep for the past decade. The massive increase in capital debt for non- academic buildings, including the Matt Knight Arena, hasn’t been done to increase the academic standing of the U of Owe. (You may be interested in knowing UOwe is on the verge of losing it’s AAU standing.) It was done for the benefit of the interests that funded it, namely Wall Street bond houses, and the contractors that received the bids. The result is that the university, as are many others, hires temp profs, with no intention of using resources in order to make them tenured experts in their fields, while paying the bond service for athletic venues. Maybe you cannot see the paradox, but others can.

            In any case, what you posted whiffs of bullshit. The question isn’t Phil Knight’s donations, which in the case of the Arena, wasn’t what got the white elephant built. It was the over $200 million in bonds that will be serviced for over the next two decades. U of Owe has the most expensive bball arena in the US, while hiring ever more adjuncts. If you think that is a situation which is going to make U of Owe a better academic institution, then you have no business being near any college campus. I mean that in a good way….

          • anonymous 04/24/2015

            Charlie, your beef seems to be with the Oregon Legislature, which voted to back the arena bonds; and with the late departed Dave Frohnmayer, who judged that on the whole, the arena was a good deal for UO. (A very good deal, in his opinion, actually).

            I think Dave was right. In any case, it seems beyond moronic to me to blame the situation of adjuncts on the arena.

            • uomatters Post author | 04/24/2015

              please try to avoid hyperbole such as ‘beyond moronic”

          • Hyperbolic? 04/24/2015

            “whiffs of bullshit” vs. “beyond moronic”

    • Jack Straw Man 04/23/2015

      Anonymous, I think it’s pretty revealing that you can list all sorts of ways to cut costs that also undercut the educational mission of the university, but the idea of reducing sports-related expenditures doesn’t seem to have occurred to you. It’s almost as if your sole purpose is to make the faculty feel guilty for unionizing. Which makes me suspect that, despite what you pretend, you don’t actually care about any of it.

      • anonymous 04/23/2015

        UO could spend less on athletics by turning down Phil Knight’s (and others’) money and selling fewer or less expensive tickets. Is that what you want? It won’t bring in more for academics, from what I can see, and may bring in less. Is that what you want?

        Your “reasoning” is no unserious that I wonder whether YOU really care. Really.

        • The Truth 04/23/2015

          How about no academic budget subsidies for athletic-only subsidies like the Jock Box, less money for coaches in non-revenue sports where the worry about “market demand” (i.e. paying the football coaches more so they don’t get poached by other schools, etc.) doesn’t exist, and so on?

          • anonymous 04/24/2015

            As long as the overall athletic budget is paying the coaches salaries, I don’t mind much. And those other coaches work in a market, too.

            It might be worth considering ending the overall subsidy to athletics at UO, though I am not convinced that there really is one (because UO makes money on the out of state tuition paid for the out of state athletes — I’ll bet it’s full tuition, too).

            Suppose UO stopped paying for the tutoring of the jocks, and the AD decided it would run its own tutoring program. Would that me satisfactory?

    • Anonymous 04/23/2015

      “More tenure track faculty and fewer opportunities for adjuncts?” What does it say about your opinion of adjuncts that you don’t think a tenure-track line is an opportunity for them?

      I for one would be delighted if an outcome of unionization is that NTTF positions become so expensive that the university creates more TTF lines and only uses adjunct positions when they actually make sense for our mission, not as a cost-cutting device.

      • anonymous 04/23/2015

        More TTF faculty might be a good tradeoff for UO.

        But don’t count on it being good for adjuncts. Most of them may find that they will not have a job. The new TTF positions may — probably will — go to people hired in the national market, like the TTF hires are now.

  3. Outsider 04/23/2015

    Less branding, less legal and less admin, it won’t take much to boost instructors and help this flailing institution.

  4. Perry 04/23/2015

    I wish folks would take the adjunct challenge seriously. It’s a fact that we have enrollment flux and that in large undergraduate programs we have employment needs that come and go but for unpredictable durations. Adjunct positions are natural ways to address the issue.

    However, in our current situation, they have become backdoor entries to permanent faculty positions–career track instructors. No search needed. Also their numbers grow without any strategic planning. No one ever decided to have large numbers of temporary hires, and yet lo and behold! And yes, this is part of the pool of money available for faculty, and yes adjuncts become career instructors, and yes the University’s strength in research declines. And yes a University faculty has come to be without the usual careful deliberation.

    And there are other forces at work here. Adjuncts are often known to the people who hire them. After three years, they have colleagues and friends. Loyalties develop. Pressures mount.

    There’s no simple solution, and it must be said clearly that some adjunct faculty make incredible contributions. And loyalty is a virtue!

    Minimally: The Union needs to be realistic about the flexibility needed by large undergraduate programs, and the departments that run those programs need to be vigilant in conducting true and fair national searches for career positions. There should be no back door career appointments. Every career appointment should by inviolable policy require a search. The salary for any position should be humane and decent and the contract should be perfectly clear about salary and the duration of the appointment and whether re-appointment is possible.

    • Buzz 04/23/2015

      From what I have seen, the union is the only institution taking the issue seriously, though now with some commitment from serious people in Academic Affairs. The CBA contains all kinds of flex for department needs as well as paths to stability. And it will only get better.

    • anonymous 04/23/2015

      very well said!

  5. charlie 04/23/2015

    Hard cheese, adjuncts (read temp) professors are used in order to free up money for admin bloat and capital construction debt service. This is the business model used by nearly all public unis, but has it made unis sustainable? Nope.

    america.aljazeera.com

    LSU considers bankruptcy, I don’t believe they went bankrupt during The Great Depression. But here we are, and so it begins….

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