Have Jamie Moffitt and Brian Fox found the money to pay the faculty like they pay JH administrators? Will the union demand $130K research and alcohol budgets for faculty too? How late will the administration team be this time?
Show up and find out. From the faculty union:
Bargaining
Join us tomorrow, Tuesday, July 2, for our first bargaining session of the summer. We’ll meet in Chiles 125 from 1:30-4:30pm. If you can’t make it in person, Zoom in here. Please note the change in timing from our usual schedule.
Will the administration team bring a counterproposal on Article 26: Salary? Only one way to find out! Your team will bring counters that touch on Career faculty job security, pro tem employment, unit policies, and leaves.
Let’s keep up the momentum we built during the academic year! And make sure your calendar is marked for these upcoming sessions:
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- Monday, July 15 – 12:30-3:30pm in Lillis 440
- Tuesday, August 13 – 1:30-4:30pm in Chiles 125
- Monday, August 26 – 12:30-3:30pm in Chiles 125
President Scholz still has no response to the union’s Article 26 salary proposals. Strategery or incompetence?
Assumption: Admin is waiting to see how this year’s cluster of an admission cycle plays out before committing to salary increases for faculty. Awkward look to agree to salary increases then turn around and have to cut jobs due to students not showing up after Biden’s FAFSA disaster. Also: shout out to our enrollment management team for making the best out of a horrible situation that wasn’t their fault.
That’s the strategy? Put off deciding if you can pay your faculty market wages 4 years from now until you find out just how big this year’s transient enrollment hit is? Did you consider adjusting on other margins instead? I see admin hiring is still going full tilt: https://careers.uoregon.edu/en-us/listing/
That’s an interesting assumption, and I can see why it might not make for very good conversations at the table given the stated skepticism about projections. If that’s the main force though, it wouldn’t preclude responses on other salary-related issues. My bet is that it might play a role but there are other factors driving the process too.
Assumption: The administration has no new ideas about how to confront a fiscal reality of thirty years in the making, other than business as usual. Sure, just focus on student enrollment as sole source of revenue (buckets), without considering spending priorities in order to make up for runaway inflation and ever-languishing salaries compared to AAU institutions. Meanwhile – https://www.opb.org/article/2024/06/25/university-oregon-fundraising-eugene-portland-campus/
I wonder why they are being so quiet about their fundraising triumphs? To paraphrase Joe Buck here, “Can we expect anything bigger from UO come 2026?” Not for faculty, but surely for ego-driven capital projects. Go Ducks! We are flourishing, well below the average of our peers.
I don’t claim to know what they’re thinking. But they have a lot to be cautious about. Not just the FAFSA fiasco. The Demographic Cliff. The sharp dropoff in the fraction of high school grads going to college. There have been big stories on this about states like Iowa. Maybe Oregon is different, I don’t know. A lot of people have become very distrustful about higher education, not just the product, but the payoff too. UO was fairly prominent in the “encampments.” This might have an impact on enrollment.
They may simply not have much respect for the UO faculty. Scholz reportedly was very sympathetic to UWisc faculty pay. Not in evidence here.
Brian Fox? The legacy of Jay Kenton lives on….