3/31/2012: A reader asks:
What should an appropriate system of retention at UO look like? What is the current policy? Should the UO adopt a preemptive retention offer policy for certain categories of faculty? Does it have one now?
Obviously more productive faculty with better outside options should get paid more. But at UO productivity doesn’t translate into pay unless you have an outside offer. In many departments you will need a written offer from a department with close to equal or better rank than UO to take to your chair and then the dean to get a raise. Typically this will get you some fraction of the outside offer – say 20% to 40%. But I’ve heard talk of cases where just going to give a talk at another school and making the right noises can pay off. It’s looking more and more like we will have a faculty union and this is presumably the sort of thing that will be part of the CBA. Any comments on current practice and on what a sensible policy would look like?
I hate this policy of needing an outside offer. It is stupid for faculty, but especially stupid for post-docs. Post-docs are paid by grants, and PIs have to budget salary increases each year (according to ORSA). But then we cannot give them the budgeted raises. Instead, we are supposed to encourage our post-docs to try to get an offer elsewhere so we can then give them a raise. But if they get a great offer elsewhere, they are likely to leave! Why force this risk on a research program when the money is budgeted and coming from the lab grants? Every time I am confronted with this I have the urge to bolt to some place where this particular stupidity is not.
From personal experience (being a grant funded RA), I’m not sure if these “retention raises” are available in all departments. A couple of years ago the above was true in my subset of campus, but now my PI has been told that all raises of any sort have been entirely frozen for Officers of Research.
I don’t know about anonymous, but my PI has seen nearly 4 years of money budgeted for my raises either vanish into the ether or go elsewhere because of this policy.
The system of practically requiring faculty to get outside offers is problematic. But it has the advantage that an strong offer from a prestigious competitor is a pretty good signal of high merit. (One of the many problems, of course, is that the absence of such a signal does not mean the opposite — it could just mean that someone has not chosen to play the outside-offer game.)
If we’re not going to rely exclusively on that signal, and I agree that we shouldn’t, then the next best piece of information is the expert judgment of professional peers. So if the union is serious about promoting excellence, its focus should be on increasing the total pool of money available, not on standardizing decisions. I hope a lot of flexibility is given to departments to make informed evaluations about their colleagues (and deans to make informed decisions about which are the better-performing departments and programs, as well as other strategic considerations).
Wishful thinking. The union will be run by the non-productive, as the productive scholars will be off in their labs and studies being productive. My bet is that they will be making sure that the stars don’t get too far ahead of those who haven’t published a thing in the last 20 years.
All in the name of equity, my friend.
While I think that productive professors should be given the right raises and incentives, so they remain at UO, the current system is opaque. I know of cases where people have gotten retention raises WITHOUT a job offer, and sometimes not even a campus visit. What if your chair does not want to advocate for you, what then? How about getting my friend at an Ivy League school to send an email to the effect, “We strongly urge you to apply for the advertised position.” Will that suffice for a chair and the Deans to make a counter offer?
Shouldn’t it be a transparent policy that states when a retention offer can be sought so that all faculty know what they have to do? Please note that I am not saying the retention packages should be standardized. Sorry, I do not know the situation for postdocs and cannot comment on that.
“this is presumably the sort of thing that will be part of the CBA” What will be part of the CBA? Retention raises? Or formulas tying productivity to some pay scale? Quantifying productivity across the university will be quite the exercise.
Didn’t Lariviere’s firing make it clear why this “system” is in place? There are no raises on this campus, in case you haven’t noticed, and this is from the governor down. The only raises that are politically OK are to retain people. As has been seen on other campuses (and in general) – the union isn’t going to solve any problems in this arena.
I’m no economist (really), but I’ve always wondered whether the institution of tenure crimps mobility so much that a functioning labor market effectively doesn’t exist for senior/lateral moves in very many fields. In our hyperspecialized profession, years may go by before even one comparable senior position is advertised in any given field, so market competition does not really act to ferret out quality/productivity. There is simply not enough movement. Salary compression/inversion and loss of morale are the natural result.
One of the better arguments for unionization, about which I am otherwise skeptical, is that it can help to neutralize this oddity of the academic labor market. The equity principle followed by the Lariviere administration — attempting to bring salaries up to comparators’ across the board, by field and rank — is not a bad idea for a CBA. As long as I could reasonably expect some kind of regular raise based on cost of living and on meritorious service as a researcher and teacher (measured by criteria that respected differences among fields, including salary inequalities), I would be happy to see the existing ad hoc system for special retention cases continue — opacity, arbitrariness, and all.
to anon on would a letter suffice? There are different issues mixed up. the current outside offer only rule is imposed externally by the state. It is a stupid rule, but it is not one imposed by anyone at the UO. however, to address the question of would a letter suffice, who knows? one could try. aside from the stupid external rule, if any faculty member believes his or her pay is inappropriate relative to peers in their dept, tey could appeal to dept head and/or their relevant dept committee. If there is a consensus that an adjustment is appropriate, that recommendation could then be conveyed to their dean or associate dean.,along ,with an offer to share inthecostof the adjustment.
A state rule? An OAR? Citation/source please?