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Provost announces latest vision of UO’s future in form of 22-23 faculty hiring scheme

I missed the part where Provost Phillips and President Schill consulted with shared governance in these decisions. Rumor has it that the Deans also feel a bit left out. In any case here is Johnson Hall’s latest:

43 Comments

  1. thedude 04/26/2022

    Marketing for a better world?

    I wanna read those dissertations……

  2. Disappointed in Johnson Hall 04/26/2022

    Why the hell are we hiring more TT faculty? Why are we hiring more at all?

    The people at the bottom of the payscale (student workers, GEs, classified workers, etc) are choking in the face of unrelenting inflation and an unaffordable housing market.

    And UO is hiring full speed ahead like all is fine and dandy? What a slap in the face to UO’s hundreds of employees that are struggling to get by. The money earmarked for these TTF positions should be used to bolster the paychecks of the current workforce, not spent on new hires.

    I wonder how the climate survey turned out. I’m more sour by the day — but maybe I’m an outlier.

    • thedude 04/28/2022

      So you’re upset a research university who’s primary objective is to teach students and do research, mostly undergraduates, is hiring more professors who will all teach and do research?

      We can debate the focus on teaching/research of new faculty, we can debate paying staff more (which I support), we can debate which areas should be areas of growth and how the university markets departments or majors with it’s career advising and the role of provost hiring initiatives and forcing depts to bend to the Provost’s vision for what are university is to be over the next 5 years.

      But upset we’re hiring more professors? That I don’t get.

      • Anonymous 04/28/2022

        I would argue that the UO is not primarily a research university given its low per capita PHD production and general research funding. OSU is about twice the UO. I would also argue that the
        primary objective for a research university lies in graduate education and PHD production (along with patents and other tech transfer). The UO does not fit the profile of a research University by AAU standards. We definitely need to hire more professors that are committed to a better undergraduate program that can produce more relevant degrees to the real world.

        • Townie 04/29/2022

          UO should have left the AAU in the 90s in response to Measure 5 and gutted unnecessary or weak graduate and research programs.

          UO’s brain trust attempted to preserve UO’s research cred at the expense of undergraduate education.

          Now Oregonians have $15K/yr tuition, 27% Californian enrollment (50% OOS enrollment), childish and flashy branding (for OOS target market) and corporate control of the university.

          UO now has to bribe teenage Oregonians with scholarship $$$ in order to lure them to Eugene. Most prefer OSU from what I hear.

          UO is a disgrace.

      • Disappointed in Johnson Hall 04/28/2022

        That’s my point: GEs, student workers, and staff are not paid enough. Since money is limited, Johnson Hall has to make values decisions on where they spend it.

        It would be wonderful for there to be more faculty. Particularly career instructors, since they seem to have higher quality teaching and non-academic employment networking connections for undergraduate students than TTF imho — which, as an aside, makes JH’s apparent lack of respect for them in UAUO bargaining all the more audacious. (Pulling teeth to just get the word “professor” in their title? It would be comical if it weren’t so sad.)

        However, since all I ever hear from JH & deans is whining about how tight the budgets are, it’s disappointing that JH has decided to make a values decision to spend a lot of money ((~$100,000+/TTF) * 57 positions) on new hires, instead of allocating that money to cost of living adjustments.

        I want more faculty/employees AND a paycheck that keeps my purchasing power whole. But, if I can only have one, I’ll take the {higher nominal paycheck / same paycheck in real terms} every day of the week.

        I love education. But I don’t love seeing my pay degrade in real terms while simultaneously witnessing JH going on a hiring spree.

        • just different 04/29/2022

          Exactly. Even if more TT hiring is the “right” decision for the institution from a business standpoint, it reinforces the caste system by reminding everyone who is and isn’t important.

          • just classified 05/11/2022

            @just different — mind you, the only interest that faculty has in the CAS shared service project in the fear that they’ll have to do more work, particularly work that classified do that faculty should be doing (including keeping tracking of what faculty need to be doing). So, classified are only important to faculty when it comes to taking care of particular faculty stuff.

            • Nope 05/11/2022

              Oh for heaven’s sake, that’s just not true. The very large number of faculty I’ve talked with are mainly concerned about the loss of their department staff members who are important members of the community. They (faculty) see zero advantage of a shared services model but do see the damage in terms of stress to current staff and already some losses, and likely future confusion for everyone including and most importantly, students. And yes, uncertainty as to how things are supposed to work in the future, which is a valid concern because they understand and value what the dept staff do! The shared services model as described shows no advantages to either staff or faculty, or to students, or for that matter to the university budget. It’s just absurd.

  3. Townie 04/26/2022

    The FY (fiscal year) and AY (academic year) nomenclature confuses me because they don’t line up.

  4. Environmental necessity 04/27/2022

    tl;dr: To hell with social sciences or humanities, apart from some token commitments that will be splashed all over the promotional materials.

  5. Jane Rock 04/28/2022

    It’s been a long time unwinding and sucking all the power and loose money into the Provostial/upper admin centers, but it is fascinating to witness the physical/monetary/ gravitational power at play. There’s no real goal to it in the traditional sense of a university, but its mechanics seem sound. It distributes progressive social policies economically. It also milks governmental and corporate wealth fairly effectively. The machine brings in plenty of undergraduates (loan money) through competent “enrollment management,” though college continues to be more attractive to females than to males. Of course the ideas/politics are all necessarily and rationally pre-ordained.

  6. honest Uncle Bernie 04/30/2022

    So much going wrong at UO. Let me mention just one: the centralization of administrative services in CAS. Apparently enthusiastically embraced by Blonigen at the directive of the provost and above. Everyone — administrative stafff, faculty — says an absolute disaster. The experienced staff seem to be plotting departure/retirement. Nobody will know how to get the job done, nobody will want to do the work. All in the name of “efficiency” that will be anything but. Whatever problems there are currently could be solved with shared services for those small departments that are currently underserved.

    I could go on and on and on and on — about the hiring plans, about the death of shared governance, about the absurdities in the name of diversity, about how the Knight Campus is sucking the life out of the real university, and on and on and on — enough for many days. Nobody seems to be talking publicly or trying to do anything about this stuff. It’s a completely different mindset from the UO of old.

    • ScienceDuck 04/30/2022

      Oh c’mon, they have introduced several important new acronyms. Isn’t bringing ASUs and CBOs into your lexicon worth a little extra hassle? I’m sure this will be as efficient and seamless as using Concur.

    • Jane Rock 04/30/2022

      This is not really under anyone’s control. It looks rational because the rationality is mostly defined by centralization. It looks rational because we receive somewhere in the realm of scores of emails each month proving that everyone in the endless ranks of administrative employees is ultimately doing something important that has to do with the historic mission of the university. Speaking of which, how many campus surveys are we expected to complete each month? How many low-information but distractingly high visibility campus emails are we expected to read? How many more department meetings must we attend at which there are no real discussions or votes–because there is no longer sufficient power in the Heads or in the departments themselves? Will power ever again flow back to the professoriate? That is very hard to imagine.

      • Dog 04/30/2022

        The professoriate once had power?

        hmm, I guess I missed that time …

        what did they do with it ?

      • Treeluvr 04/30/2022

        Concur is awful, another example of centralization run amok. And word is, responses to the last CAS survey were so awful, the Steering Committee was shocked down to their boots. They should have posted results online by now.

        • Seeking names and faces 05/09/2022

          OK. It’s worth repeating. Futile but worth repeating. Concur was one of the main irrational turns from highly efficient and humane face-to-face work with office support people (human beings) to time-consuming and error-ridden entanglement with a Vendor from Hell who now shapes the work of those human beings. It took a few minutes to fill out an old form and get it cleared by departmental support. The work with agents was always relatively smooth. Concur is like a wall in which you are searching for holes and levers and figuring out symbols. Nothing is intuitive. So you have to “correspond” with support that often carries on for many weeks. I suppose this is what it looks like from the bottom up. People on top have this work done for them. In the end I guess that all these support people will be centrally assembled in an electronic corral. I doubt that we will know their names.

      • whatever, uo sucks 05/11/2022

        Well, classified who moved to shared service can now be abused by crappy managers that haven’t been dealt with by admin instead of being abused by faculty… though, hopefully, abuse by crappy managers will be more visible and perhaps force admin to deal with them.

    • Unexcellent. 05/02/2022

      Agree with all of this.

      One of the main problems with the proliferation of deanlets and associate Vice Presidents etc is that each needs to prove that that they are needed. They do this by implementing “reform”, which is change in search of a need. The bottom line is then everyone below them has a pile of work to do in the name of these measures. The deanlets put it down on their CV that they did this or that, then move on to the next pile of shit which will ultimately be a burden for the rest of us.

    • Heraclitus 05/02/2022

      Dear potential senior admin: I am interested in how to innovate to elevate. Do you have a 1-800 number? Even a 1-900? Would also like to know how to dismantle racism from our disciplines and from higher education working with stakeholders. Sounds like good stuff.
      Also: FFS

  7. Slowly Boiled IT Duck 05/02/2022

    I count four. Also, for gawd’s sake, use the Oxford comma or don’t, but don’t wander back and forth.

    Special mention for “w” end of line “hile”.

    This reads rather like one of those freshman compositions that has to be at least 2000 words and that said freshman started the night before. At least she didn’t use huge fonts to make it seem longer.

    Nice: “We achieved this internally with College Executive Committee approval to repurpose an open faculty line for the equity funds in order to start to repair the damaged earning trajectories of our Associate Professors and make up the deficit to the median salaries at our peer institutions.”

    She writes like Dr. Jill Biden. Have a handle nearby while reading: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/20407226/bidens-dissertation.pdf

    • Fishwrapper 05/02/2022

      And fer pity’s sake – you’re not using a typewriter, so STOP putting two spaces after a period. Word (along with virtually every other modern text system for on- and offline use) spaces text correctly for you, which, if I recall, was one of the selling points of the then-newfangled “word processors” they were pushing on us forty years ago. The ONLY people who should and/or need to hit the space bar twice at the end of a sentence use an Underwood, Royal, Selectric…or a Linotype.

      • More useless griping about writing style. 05/03/2022

        I am sorry. I love my two spaces after a sentence. Those fancy word processors can just as easily set the proper space regardless of if there are one or two spaces… at least in theory. And while I am at it you can start a sentence with and, and just say ‘yes’ to the oxford comma.

      • Canard 05/04/2022

        With the proliferation of meaningless, run-on sentences that simply serve as vessels to deliver a series of random buzzwords, the use of two spaces between sentences is more important than ever. In a paragraph inevitably packed with cliches and new acronyms, the visual gaps between sentences provide the only vestigial structure that our brains can follow. We used to depend upon the logic of the argument or the flow of the narrative, but one now must expend too much effort (usually in vain) searching for those. Perhaps sentences and paragraphs as we used to understand them have become obsolete, as the disconnected, sound-biting, list-driven communications of the Twitter and Powerpoint era have taken over. So when you see a double-space, just think of it as an archaic convention being repurposed for the modern age, by a writer who hasn’t figured out how to format bullet points in Word.

        • uomatters Post author | 05/04/2022

          Bullet points? That’s a loaded term. The preferred term is “thought droppings”. Careful readers, Canard is trying to trigger you.

          • Dog 05/04/2022

            don’t know about the rest of you but this particular dog could
            really use a period of good thought droppings …

    • just different 05/02/2022

      Who’s Jill Biden and what does she have to do with the CAS search?
      ___
      She’d probably be very flattered that you made a point of reading her dissertation, though. Usually those things don’t get read by anyone other than the diss committee, and sometimes not even by them. Doesn’t look any worse than most of the academic writing I’ve seen.

      • ScienceDuck 05/03/2022

        For some reason the same MAGA crowd that loved Trump’s word salads and call Lauren Boebert a clear thinker found Dr. Jill Biden’s dissertation and honorific worthy of derision.

        • just different 05/03/2022

          What struck me is just how many sleazy hate forums–oops, I mean “conservative online communities”–posted this exact link to her dissertation. The right-wing echo chamber is amazingly efficient.

          • Heraclitus 05/03/2022

            I hate to break it to you all, but there are a lot of low grade, badly written PhD dissertations out there. Like, most of them. Really. But yeah, Dr. Biden’s contribution to the genre is hardly relevant here. This digression is about someone who claims to be qualified to lead the humanities school at a major university. Oh, yeah, sciences too, but we all know those guys can’t spell, let alone use a subjunctive. Sheesh.

        • moss defender 05/04/2022

          perhaps it was her willingness to knowingly subject this planet to the whims and shenanigans of her zombie-ish weekend at bernies like husband ? oh well now with the zombie kicking off WW3 is suppose it matters not…she could do a kids book someday with Joe ? adventures of Corn Pop

    • On the Lam 05/04/2022

      Can this have its own thread? A lot of us are curious.

      • tenureandpromotion 05/04/2022

        Whenever you want to know what the administration really thinks of you, just remember, they would rather leave you in the lurch than get you the most important decision of your career when they said they would.

        • Dog 05/04/2022

          well once upon a time in the recent past, tenure decisions
          were not announced until June 14, 1 -day before contractual requirements; of course at that time, all cases were granted
          tenure – all of them ….

    • LemonCrisp 05/04/2022

      May 1 is the old schedule. The “new” schedule is June 1, as indicated by this slightly differently named page: https://provost.uoregon.edu/ttf-promotion-tenure . Why they couldn’t be bothered to take down the out of date information is beyond me. Perhaps we need a project to “Transform IT”?

      • uomatters Post author | 05/04/2022

        The Senate is considering legislation requiring that Provost Phillips adopt the Gregorian Calendar, but President Schill insists this is “not an academic matter as commonly understood in America higher education” and is therefore sticking with Brad Shelton and Julian dates.

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