Last updated on 02/03/2025
What’s happened to salaries since President Scholz took charge in July 2023 and the Nov 2024 salary data that was just posted (late of course) at https://ir.uoregon.edu/employees/salary-reports ?
In Jan 2023 faculty had just got a 2% across-the-board raise, and were eligible for a 3% merit pool in Jan 2024. Let’s compound and include an allowance for promotion raises and round it up to 7% over two years.
Of course things were a little different for the friends of President Scholz. Here are the Nov 2022 and Nov 2024 salaries for Jamie and Michael Moffitt:
Jamie Moffit got a 15% raise to $501,010, her husband got 12% to $317,520, plus a $25K Knight chair. He’s listed as Law faculty but from what I can tell really teaches undergrads in the Honors College with no research expectations.
This was on top of 8% and 7% raises the previous year when regular faculty got 5%. And of course Jamie Moffit has a second job at Summit Bank – thanks to UO Foundation President Paul Weinhold, who’s their Chairman of the Board on the side. No info on what he pays her, it’s not a public corporation.
Feel free to dig through the UO salary reports to find other examples of President Scholz’s generosity. Pro tip: search for “EEO CATEGORY Senior Administrators” or “EEO CATEGORY Executive Admins”.
Usually those kind of bumps are the result of retention. The Moffitts threatened to leave.
Should’ve called their bluff.
Can someone help me understand why there’s such a collective hate bonner for the Moffitts? I mean, it’s been years (~decade?) since Michael was the law dean. As for Jamie, yeah there’s some history, but I also think we could also be doing a lot worse. Whatever her flaws, which all leaders have, she’s certainly not a failure.
I am curious though, what are the concrete, actionable things given UO’s financial situation that you’d like Jamie to do going forward to get back in the community’s good graces?
I wonder, too, about how much of the complaints are due to Jamie’s decisions vs decisions of the president vs board of trustees?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for accountability, and there’s definitely room for improvement in the CFO/VPFA’s massive portfolio. The buck does stop with Jamie in a lot of cases. But I also want to make sure that we’re focusing our pitchforks at the right person/entity, and giving actionable feedback to the correct person/entity about how to improve.
Jamie herself works hard for the university, but her office has a lock on operations that affect the whole place and there seems to be no feedback loop or accountability.
Here’s some actionable feedback on things governed by VPFA. https://vpfa.uoregon.edu/
These are from the perspective of a lowly academic department member just trying to do things for their job.
CPFM. You can build a small house for the charges they put forward for a little bit of plumbing or painting. Do an assessment of their cost structure and reign them in like everyone else, or let us contract out for cheaper prices.
Shared services, as administered by CAS but they claim was required by VPFA. Action item – do an assessment of services provided at this stage, fix them, and next time, don’t be so cruel.
Travel Action item – get a dashboard of time to reimbursement (separate by category, like students, staff, faculty, admin) and create goals, like reimbursements in less than 3 months for most and yesterday for students.
HR. Hiring processes at all levels had ground nearly to a halt, not sure if it’s getting better.
Safety and Risk Management – get a real cost estimate for all the new rules and regs that you pass down because you’re terrified of being sued. When you pass down a set of new rules that will take hours to deal with, provide a cost-benefit estimate like ‘we are doing this because there is a 0.35% of being sued, but that suit could cost 1000x your salary-hours in filling out these 19 forms and we anticipate it taking only 100, so works for us.’
I don’t hate the Moffitts but they are a vestige of the corrupt old guard including Lorraine Davis and John Moseley. Being bright and capable does not prevent you from being a toady. Additionally, I find them both incredibly risk adverse and uncreative to the point where they avoid anything that smacks of innovation.