Clusters of excellence start with $245K for Jim Bean

6/28/2014 update: Slow Saturday, thought I’d repost this classic. President Gottfredson and Provost Coltrane have now given former Provost Jim Bean a new job – directing UO’s new “Sports Product” cluster of excellence. We’ve been paying him $245K a year for putting the proposal together:

4/16/2012: Bean and Davis rehire John Moseley

Johnson Hall has two simple hiring rules:

1. When UO has money to hire either a professor or an administrator, hire an administrator.
2. When choosing between an open search for a new administrator and hiring one of your old friends with no search at twice the pay, hire the old friend.

John Moseley was Dave Frohnmayer’s longtime Provost and Lorraine Davis was his VP for Academic Affairs. Back in 2004 Frohnmayer wrote them both special golden parachute retirement contracts. The Oregonian wrote a story about the questionable deals in 2008. OUS audited Moseley in 2009 and required Jim Bean to write him a new, clean contract, here. The Oregonian wrote another story, here on the audit. In the summer of 2010 Pres Lariviere announced he was killing the UO-Bend program that had served as the justification for Moseley’s pay check. Greg Bolt had this to say in the RG on July 19, 2010:

… Some faculty members who reviewed the budget concluded that the program was costing the university more than $1 million a year beyond what it brought in, draining revenue from the Eugene campus as it struggles with steep cuts in state funding.

But Bean maintains that at least in the program’s most recent years the UO’s Bend efforts were breaking even. “We have gone to minute detail and passed the spreadsheets around, and some people believe them and some people don’t,” he said.

The Bend program also is tied up with another sore spot among some faculty: the post­retirement contract the UO made with former provost John Moseley. After retiring from his full-time provost position at the UO in Eugene, Moseley since 2007 has been working half time as a special assistant to the provost, acting as the liaison for the Bend program on a contract that pays him $124,000 a year.

The large paycheck for part-time work has drawn the ire of many professors. Moseley will continue in his post through next year, which also is when the UO expects to wind down the undergraduate program in Bend.

So by the original Frohnmayer deal and by this report it sure seemed that we would pay Moseley his last paycheck summer 2011. More than enough money to hire one of the 100 new professors that academic plan has been promising.

But nope. He’s still pulling down $10,372 a month in UO salary – plus another $10,095 in PERS. So how is it Moseley is still on the UO books a year after Lariviere said he’d be gone?  Easy: Jim Bean and Lorraine Davis rehired him:

The contract and other emails are here. More on Moseley’s other adventures here.