Those are the numbers from UO’s official IR page here, from 2017 to 2024. They’ve removed the earlier data they used to show, sorry. Measured in Full Time Equivalents (FTE):
OA’s: 257 new FTE from a base of 1396.
TTF: 13 new FTE from a base of 740.
No mystery to this – the President decides where to spend the budget and while OA’s make the job easier for him and his pals, tenured profs just make trouble.
(FWIW over this same period classified FTE is up by 18%, career faculty are up 12%, pro-tems are way up from a small base, student headcounts are down then up and end pretty flat. Top admin positions went from 29 to 31.)
Do you really mean to imply that TTF are the primary victims at UO? And that all OAs exist just to make university leadership’s jobs easier? Every single OA I work with supports TTF all day, every day, to make their jobs easier. If anything, the vast majority of OAs are hired to do the work that TTF have neither the expertise nor the will to do.
No one would disagree that TTF are stretched too thin and, traditionally, bring the most value to a university. But higher education is rapidly changing and posts like this just come off as tone deaf and pompous.
Hold on. Teaching faculty (actual classrooms? and instruction? and learning, and stuff?) bringing the most value to a university is (wait for it) relegated to being the traditional way of university-ing? And what, we’re moving from that are we? Higher ed is changing and we just need to get with the program? Well, never mind then.
Let’s officer of administration the hell out of this fall, then, yeah? (What a place, this.)
You think TTF are the ones doing all the teaching at UO? NTTF instructors and GEs would beg to differ.
GEs are learning to teach and NTTFs certainly teach, but an institution is built by and upon its tenured faculty. TTFs drive innovation, status, and culture. Whenever layoffs hit they are bad news, but for a university to even think about touching TTFs is shocking. You can have a university without janitors and secretaries but you can’t have a university without tenured staff.
I’m sorry, how do you propose having a university without “janitors and secretaries”? Who’s going to take out your garbage? Mow the lawns? Who’s going to execute payroll?
There is nuance to this conversation, to be sure, but insinuating that ANY large organization can run without these kinds of jobs is narrow-minded, classist, and downright unintelligent.
I think there’s a very real misunderstanding here of what OAs actually DO. They are project managers, executive assistants, academic advisors, grant administrators, etc. A huge chunk of that increase is due to changes in classifications – for example, a career instructor who is now the “undergraduate success coordinator” or whatever now holds an OA role. Executive assistants used to be largely classified and are now OAs.
While I don’t disagree that faculty should be the highest priority of the university (although career faculty do the VAST majority of the teaching, not TTFs), if all the OAs disappeared tomorrow, you’d very much notice. Most of us are regular, working-class people who make less money than your average teaching faculty member. We’re also not unionized, so our jobs are the most in jeopardy during these layoffs.
I normally like this blog very much, but this feels somewhat distasteful. I am a skilled worker and I don’t deserve to lose my job any more than anyone else does.
Well put. I agree 100%.
For what it’s worth, half of my OA staff make less than GEs. The idea that OAs are the problem is profoundly misguided. Sure, there may be some OA positions that should be less of a priority in light of budget cuts. But then again look at the salary of some full professors who hardly teach anymore and haven’t published in a decade.
Or all OA’s are alike. Many OA’s should be classified staff. A number of those positions USED to be classified, but UO came up with bullshit excuses to un-classified staff them. Handy for UO.
The. There are the OA’s that have supervisory duties… how many classified staff do they supervise? Two? Four? We have classified staff supervising over a dozen student workers in the past. Probably still do.
It’s not low-end OA’s that are problematic. It is the higher paid OA’s that are problematic. Many getting stipends for doing their damn job. While classified staff work out of class for months and years which HR holds their ass in their hands not dealing with paying those working out of class classified staff properly/readonably. No stipend for classified staff taking on extra work when others are laid off. Or supervisor unavailable.
Grant administrator is an OA position? Since when? Hmmm.
It varies by department, but yeah, I know of many “grant administrator” type positions that are OAs.
I absolutely agree with you that it’s the higher-paid OAs that are the problem, but my issue with this post lies in the overgeneralization of the category. I like being an OA – while I would love to be represented by a union, being asked to log hours at this point in my career would feel demeaning. I like being paid a salary. I’m of the opinion that MOST staff should be OAs, and we should be represented by a union.
There’s value in all of the positions in a university. One could have left out the implied criticism of OA’s and focus instead on why this admin finds TTF undesirable and problematic and is very eager to get around the CBA and tenure agreements to fire them quickly. This administration, from CAS to Johnson Hall, does not like TTF – ask anyone in private. They really do not. They don’t like or respect faculty who ask critical questions, propose creative solutions, and who don’t just go along with the spreadsheets. Prior administrators were interested and engaged. The admins we happen to have at this moment would rather be in a hierarchical commercial company, or perhaps the military, with chain of command and consequences for not following orders. We’re facing a set of termination spreadsheets created in secrecy by a cabal of uncaring bureaucrats. The lack of consultation is shameful. A good administrator would be using all the talent at the institution to ask – what are ideas to get out of this fiscal crisis while setting up for future success? They wasted god knows how many $$ and hours on ‘inclusive strategic planning’ but couldn’t put together a few committees and workshops to address this ‘fiscal emergency’?
Exactly. I don’t see why layoffs to TTF—which is unequivocally bad—necessarily leads to blaming OAs for existing. That 1) TTF layoffs are bad and 2) OAs do necessary work can coexist.
This is exactly right. All of those pesky procedures in the CBA about how, if an administrator doesn’t like what a TTF member is doing, they can’t simply punish them, there are academic freedom protections and long, drawn-out, grievable procedures that must be followed, and so forth — the administration hates all of that, which is why it pushes back on it in every new contract. Here, with Article 25, they think they’ve found a way to circumvent all of it, to simply disregard the rest of the CBA and fire TTF at will.
The problem for them is, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. They might — might — be able to pull this off legally, but they’ll be breaking academia’s biggest taboo, and taboos once broken stay broken. Nobody is going to fully believe that tenure exists at the University of Oregon after this, and everyone will be reminded of this fact in each new contract when Article 25 is renegotiated.
This was meant to be a reply to They just don’t like TTF. I posted it the wrong way.
Would be nice if we were unionized and could strike so they see what happens when payroll doesn’t get executed on time or when students aren’t enrolled in their classes.
The semi-hidden core problem for posts like this, and in arguments over categories of workers like those already made, is that “OA” is a bit of a catch-all. OA includes upper admin and our rapidly multiplying flocks of deanlets, whose overlapping and redundant operations are a problem, but the majority of OAs are as others have said: all the people facilitating room scheduling, resources, student requests, and so forth. In effect, it includes anyone to whom someone else reports (OAs, correct me if I’m in error), and that characteristic has grown with Shared Services so some classified folks became OAs and gained a little pay but lost union representation. Those OAs have taken the brunt of cuts and freezes first. Upper admin not so much (if ever), despite their position within the OA galaxy. So it’s a problem to toss those into the same category of employees, because it obfuscates the scale and distribution of the actual situation.
I’m tenured faculty, but I know we are running without half of our engine as a University already because of the gaps and consolidation in OA-dominated units, and we are plagued with unfilled positions that are essential and whose work must be done by others. The OAs (and many classified staff under them) who remain therefore truly bust their humps for us. As our department’s primary advisor for majors and its scheduling officer, I can affirm how vital their work is across the University while recognizing that there’s a lot I didn’t see going on. It therefore annoys me even more that the overpaid executive bloat is somehow lumped in with them, and effectively are hiding behind those OAs. If you took everyone at the highest three OA bands out of the reckoning, both parts would look a lot different.
This was also a reason I was so annoyed with the not-really-a-town-hall response of the whole ‘why not senior administration cuts, ‘ being ‘it’s because market forces, we need to have the best assistant vice associate provost for graduate future education recruitment legacy enrollment experience.’ Yes, hyperbole, but only slightly. The grand high viziers sure don’t act that same way where ‘lower-level’ OAs, even nigh-irreplaceable ones, are concerned. It is hard I think for faculty (even NTT!) to understand how so many people in the category of OA face a double hazard, with no union to aid them and nothing remotely like a fair wage for their work. I’d bet that all of us know someone in that position, but not that they’re technically an OA. So yeah, there’s bloat, and it’s a problem, but the artificial category of “OA” has always felt like a deceptive ruse–and TTF fall for it too easily I think.
I’d prefer to see numbers in the original post that explain growth of NTT FTE, GE FTE, and if possible a breakdown by salary bands for growth of OA posts. But somehow I don’t imagine the numbers for that last are made readily available and would need to be compiled based on the public data.
This is largely correct and a great sentiment. I’ll add that many OAs (myself included) don’t have any direct reports. The only difference between my job and that of a classified employee is that I don’t have to log my hours and I’m not represented by a union.
Positions like your *should* be classified. It’s in the best interest of the UO OA’s who run the place from the top to screw people like you over.
As I mentioned in another comment, having a salary is very important to me. I would like to be represented by a union, sure, but I don’t want to go back to logging my hours.
Former classified whose position was converted from OA. I still didn’t “log” hours. My job was too fluid. My dept heads didn’t expect me to. I did like not having to work 10-20 hours of OT per week and not get compensated for it as OA. I liked the protection of a union, from moody and retaliatory upper level OA’s. Also, having steps prevented from as much wage squeeze. And a way to get reclassified.
I never felt “lesser” as a “professional” classified. What, exactly, does “professional” mean anyway.
I’ve watched upper level OA squash lower level OA’s who were supportive of the classified staff they supervised.
OA’s that do not supervise and are not *directly* involved with union contract bargaining should be classified.
Logging hours is much stricter now with the use of UKG
We can argue employment categories until the cows come home, as academics and their friends will.
However, let’s come together and focus on what’s happening here. The University administration has decided they are in a budget crisis that must be resolved immediately. They have secretly developed a set of termination spreadsheets that target tenured and untenured faculty, OAs and other staff. They are informing unit heads about their cuts now, and plan to enact them in two weeks. They are purposefully doing this very fast and over the summer when fewer people are around. There is no informed consultation, and it’s likely illegal.
Even if some of it gets reversed, folks will know their names were on the list and that their administrators want to get rid of them. Irreversible harm.
I wanted to hop in here, because there is a lot more to this, than what was presented.
Overall, using FTEs, ALL staff went up by 7.04%, ALL faculty went up 13.10%, number of students went up 6.45%, Student Credit Hours went up 8.75%, and Student FTE went up 8.35%.
Note: this is with GE being counted under Staff, and Post Doc under Faculty.
OAs went up 17.7% and Classified went up 17.05%, but student worker FTE went DOWN 19.81%. They went from 21.89% of all staff FTE to 16.4%. The work that the student workers were doing, representing 205 FTE positions, nominally got pushed into Classified staff, and their work got pushed onto OAs.
For Faculty, TTF went up only 1.8%, NTTF went up 11.55%, but ProTem/Visiting went up 81.07%. ProTem made up over half of all faculty FTE increases over that time period; 107.1 vs 102.6 for all others. Note: when excluding Retired, which went down by 7.9 FTE, ProTem makes up just under half of the FTE increase: 107.1 vs 110.5.
The statement that “UO Administration” went up 18% (actually 17.7%), is “sorta true”, but in reality, overall staff only went up 7.04%.
The real problem is that of the increases in Faculty from 2017 to 2024, the largest segment, by far, was ProTem/Visiting, followed by NTTF, then by PostDoc, with TTF only doing better than Retired (it went down 7.9 FTE).
Did I miss the part with not just Percentages but Actual numbers: Hours, FTE, or even better dollars? An 81% increase sounds impressive but if it went from 10 to 18… Not so much. And if this is actually a proxy for Money, would it be better to show % increase (or decrease) in dollars? Again, how much of that 80% in pro-tem affect the finances?
Sorry, you may have missed the part right after that, where I mentioned that ProTem/Visiting went up by 107.1 FTE. All others, not including retired, went up by 110.5, and retired went down 7.9.
For comparison, change by FTE:
Retired -7.9
TTF 13.3
PostDoc 25.1
NTTF 72.1
PT/V 107.1
Change by headcount:
Retired -23
TTF 14
PostDoc 27
NTTF 24
PT/V 177
You may notice that NTTF increased by 24 people, but 72.1 FTE. That’s because, in 2017 they averaged .80 FTE per person, but by 2024 they averaged .87 FTE per person. When you started with 779 people at 80%, and then bring up the average to 87%, That’s about 54.5 FTE right there.
The important information regarding contributions to the deficit has to be tied to FTE supported by E&G or other central funds.
Postdocs are grant-funded. Many NTTF’s are research faculty, also tied to grants. There has been growth of research centers at UO over the last few years (a good thing for an R1 institution). To my understanding most Knight Campus hiring (all in this timeframe) is not centrally supported.
The pro-tem increase is interesting! Pro-tem instruction is really inexpensive compared to all other options. We see pro-tem hiring used to fill in for sabbatical leaves and oversubscribed courses that need additional sections, which is happening more frequently since enrollment has been increasing and also the recent push towards increasing 4-yr graduation rates has filled classes more quickly.
Net TTF hiring (new hires vs retirement) seems basically flat or decreasing for many existing departments as the university grows in new areas.
Speaking of which, I sure would like to see university leadership acknowledge that they’ve chosen some strategic growth areas when they give background on a structural deficit.
UO Foundation just posted thhe tax form. All good news salary wise there.