Last updated on 08/13/2015
2PM: The faculty are having a great time, hanging out on the Group W bench and waiting for the admin team:
2:25 PM: The admin team is back, with counterproposals. See the live-blog below, and see the Union facebook blog here. Chris Sinclair’s got more details on the proposals, but I’ve got more snark. Disclaimer: My opinion of what people said, thought, should have said or should have thought. Nothing is a quote unless in quotes.
Highlights:
- Union puts down a raise proposal of 9.75% over 3.5 years. Enough to keep faculty from losing ground relative to peers.
- Union files unfair labor complaint against administration over public records fees, etc.
Lowlights:
- Administration wants to charge faculty to look at their own personnel files – with billing through the Public Records Office. And they’re going to put Penny Daugherty in charge of deciding what’s relevant for AA. You’re fucking kidding me.
- Admin’s 3PM lowball salary offer: 7% over 3.5 years. That’s 2% a year, the same as the Fed’s inflation target and below recent inflation in the Portland Salem MSA. See below for details. Even with promotion raises this will probably mean UO faculty pay will slide back relative to AAU average, which is currently increasing at about 3.4% a year. And the administration is offering $0.00 to address the external equity problems. Gottfredson’s opening offer was 5% over 2 years.
The next UO Trustees meeting is September 10-11. VPFA Jamie Moffitt is on the agenda to present some financial data and a budget. Which would be nice. The union has already filed an unfair labor practice complaint about the UO administration’s financial murkiness and refusal to document discipline against tenured faculty.
Speaking of murk, it’s been more than seven months since IR has updated the quarterly salary reports that show the details on JH’s latest administrative bloat and the various athletic department raises. I’ve got an email in to IR Director JP Monroe asking what’s up with that.
Live-blog:
Dave Cecil kicks off. Ready to go til 1AM Thursday if admins will really negotiate, but if they continue to pretend they’re not exercising their monopsony hiring power, we’ll wait and come back in the fall.
Union puts down new economic proposal: 9.75% over 3.5 years:
FY16: 2% ATB
FY17: 1% ATB, 1.25% equity pool, 2% merit pool
FY18: 1% ATB, 2.5% merit pool
Cecil: equity pool is not enough to deal with UO’s problems, but it’s a start:
The union proposal also includes salary floors for RAs and pro-tem faculty, and the NIH rate for all 9 month contracts.
Brady: Your proposal says that the admin can’t increase workload without increasing FTE. Is this just about courseload increases, or any workload increases, e.g. research.
Cecil: I’ve heard lots of complaints about this. All have been instructional, none about research. Willing to talk about language.
[Sorry, I skipped over a bunch of union counterproposals]
11:17 AM: Brady has a few things.
Art 8, personnel files. UO wants to charge faculty for access to their personnel files. WTF? And they’re going to put the Public Records Office in charge of the work and the fees. And Penny Daugherty will decide what’s relevant for AA.
And Brady thinks this is “reasonable”. Wow.
Article 32, Leaves. Aah yes, remember Randy Geller’s bitter 2013 Christmas email to the faculty?
This is a reminder that under Article 32, Section 21, of the United Academics Collective Bargaining Agreement, bargaining unit officers of instruction who do not earn vacation will be considered to be on paid leave during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day (and during the week of Spring Break).
Christmas Day and New Year’s Day are paid holidays. However, bargaining unit faculty members (typically some officers of research) may be required to work on these holidays if necessary to maintain or operate critical facilities or operations. If a bargaining unit faculty member is required to work on a holiday for that reason, he or she may take an equivalent amount of time off with pay at a later date, as approved by the bargaining unit faculty member’s supervisor.
Otherwise, as provided in Article 17, Section 7, of the CBA, each bargaining unit faculty member must be fully engaged in teaching, research, and service work for the university to the extent of his or her appointment, and must be engaged in work or reasonably available for work for the entirety of the term for which the bargaining unit member is employed unless on approved leave. There is no blanket leave for the period between fall and winter terms.
You previously received information about the Governor’s Day.
Faculty members who are not subject to the United Academics CBA may make individual arrangements with their supervisors regarding work schedules.
Randy Geller
General Counsel
University of Oregon
University wants the right to assign work during spring break and winter break.
Brady: Issue is when we have to assign faculty to student advising over weekends. We are not willing to pay for that. [Which is weird, since they used to.]
Article 18, Summer:
Brady: We don’t want the joint admin/union committee with faculty union membership involved in approving policies for summer session appointments. They can review and edit, but Dean approves.
Cecil: We’ll take a look at this.
Article 16, Notices of Appointment:
Brady: We refuse to accept restrictions on our ability to not renew NTTF’s. We want to be able to fire career NTTFs and search for a replacement, even if the NTTF meets expectations in performance reviews, and we don’t want the union to be able to appeal those decisions to an arbitrator by arguing that shifts in budget priorities are a matter of academic judgement. [I love this argument. Let’s remember it when the administration tries to tell the the Senate that budgets are not academic matters.]
Cecil and Blonigen discuss what would happen if a department needs to cut a NTTF member. How do they pick which one? Cecil: That’s Article 25, financial exigency.
Speaking of budget priorities, no sign of Around the 0’s strategic communicator Tobin Klinger, who gets paid more than a full professor of physics:
Cecil: Why do you say the administration needs protection from the possibility that you’ve hired, promoted, and repeatedly reviewed and passed an NTTF, and then want to fire them? You say you want rigorous academic standards. So does the faculty union. So the administration should do serious reviews of NTTF’s on the basis of their teaching effectiveness, and don’t promote and pass them on reviews. This is on you. But this new language just gives you an easy out when the administration doesn’t do its job.
Brady: OK, I get it. Not sure how we can resolve this though.
3:00 PM: Article 26, salary. Administration puts out another lowball offer, 7% over 3.5 years.
FY16: 1.5% ATB, 0% merit, 0% equity.
FY17: 0% ATB, 2.5% merit, 0% equity.
FY18: 0% ATB, 3% merit, 0% equity.
Provost holds 10% back from merit pools.
No equity? No Chevy Van? And no movement on adding workload without increasing FTE. Cecil: You’re not helping us get to an agreement with this offer.
Deb Green to Bruce Blonigen: As a CAS Assoc Dean, Are you happy turning over the merit money to the provost? [What if Coltrane gives it all to sport product design?]
Blonigen: This won’t be a problem so long as we have a good provost.
Article 21, Appeal of Denial of Promotion or Tenure:
Brady: We agree to let the PTRAC meet without the General Counsel if they want, but don’t understand why you care.
Cecil: Because while we are hoping for positive changes, the UO General Counsel’s office has a long history of incompetence and hostility to the faculty. Are you familiar with Randy Geller’s memo about dissolving the UO Senate?
Caucus break. Cecil: We’ll get back to you on the FAC part of this.
Article 35, Professional Development.
Brady: We’re taking power to approve these policies away from the joint admin/union committee and giving it to the Dean’s office.
Cecil: We said we would move on job security in return for money. So where’s the money?
Brady: We’ll have to see.
Cecil: Cut the crap. The day’s almost over. Show your cards.
Brady waffles. Apparently President Schill hasn’t given him the authority to cut a deal.
Cecil: So are we wasting our time here, pretending to negotiate?
Union presents counter on Art 8, personnel files. UO wants to charge faculty for access to their personnel files. WTF? And they’re going to put the Public Records Office in charge of the work and the fees. And Penny Daugherty will decide what’s relevant for AA.
Cecil: We made a few changes to account for UO’s intransigence on releasing documents. Brady: We’ll look at it.
4:04 PM, Caucus Break.
7:27 PM, they’re back:
Cecil: We’ll give you economics and NTTF job security tomorrow (Articles 16 and 26).
Some clean-up and Temporary Agreements. Snoozers, Cecil’s got it covered.
8/3/2015: “Around the O” retracts claim UO faculty pay meets Senate target, admits it’s really 6% behind
Presumably this correction means Bill Brady will kick off Bargaining Session by adding 6% to the administration’s current lowball offer of 6.5% over 3.5 years.
Around the O didn’t mention it in their weekly spam email, but there it is way down at the bottom of the original post:
A previous version of the story incorrectly stated the recommendation of a 2008 white paper. That paper, authored by Marie Vitulli, Peter Keyes, Mike Kellman, David Frank, Suzanne Clark, John Chalmers and Gordon Sayre, called “to bring our faculty’s salaries up to the average (mean) relative to our comparators.” To make the goal of the paper, UO faculty salaries would need to be at 100 percent of AAU peers. In 2015, UO faculty salaries averaged 94 percent of AAU peers.
The headline is still “UO faculty compensation competitive with other public AAUs, reaches target Set by senate [sic]”.
Meanwhile it seems that Julie Brown is no longer the Around the O editor – no word on who will replace her. I don’t know the backstory on that. And still no word on who wrote the anonymous post. This from an administration which criticizes me for allowing anonymous comments?
7/27/2014: Will “Around the O” retract claims re Senate Salary White Paper?
The administration’s economic counterproposals are due at Bargaining Session XVII, Tuesday at 9AM in the Knight Library. This probably explains the anonymous blog post on “Around the O” about salaries. The full post is at the bottom. The gist is that the official organ of the UO administration is claiming UO has exceeded the Senate goals, right before their bargaining team makes the administration’s economic counter-proposal:
The UO Senate Budget Committee outlined in 2000 and 2008 white papers a specific goal of having average faculty compensation be at 95 percent of AAU peers. In 2014-15, full professors were at 95.4 percent of AAU public peers, while associate professors were at 101.6 percent and assistant professors at 104.1 percent. Adjusted for cost-of-living factors, the figures are 101.0, 109.8 and 112.7 percent, respectively.
… It’s important to look at total compensation when it comes to making comparisons to our AAU peers,” Moffitt said. “The UO picks up 95 percent of our employees’ healthcare premiums and makes generous contributions to retirement accounts. When those numbers are factored in, it shows a more holistic and accurate view of total faculty compensation.”
That’s quite a bit less than the whole truth. So I’m writing Around the O Editor Julie Brown and her boss Tim Clevenger asking for a correction:
Dear Ms Brown and Mr. Clevenger:
I am writing to Ms Brown in her capacity as editor of the “Around the O” blog, and to Mr. Clevenger as her boss, regarding the July 23rd post on the UO Around the O blog titled “UO faculty compensation competitive with other public AAUs, reaches target set by senate”.
This article is posted at https://around.uoregon.edu/content/uo-faculty-compensation-competitive-other-public-aaus-reaches-target-set-senate. The article misreports two important and easily verifiable facts about the 2008 UO Senate White Paper update, and it ignores an important economic distinction between the cost and the value of benefits. Quoting from the story, with emphasis added:
The UO Senate Budget Committee outlined in 2000 and 2008 white papers a specific goal of having average faculty compensation be at 95 percent of AAU peers. In 2014-15, full professors were at 95.4 percent of AAU public peers, while associate professors were at 101.6 percent and assistant professors at 104.1 percent. Adjusted for cost-of-living factors, the figures are 101.0, 109.8 and 112.7 percent, respectively.
This part is correct. The goal for the 2000 White Paper was indeed to get UO salary + benefits to 95% of our comparators. Quoting from the report, here: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~uosenate/dirsen990/SBCfinal.html:
Average instructional faculty compensation (salary + benefits) will be brought to 95% of parity to our comparator institutions. To accomplish this goal, we recommend that average faculty compensation be increased a minimum of 2.5% per year over and above the performance of our comparators until we achieve the 95% goal. We estimate that it will take 5-7 years to reach 95% parity.
However this is not true of the 2008 Senate Budget Committee update, as the article claims. That report, which the author of the Around the O article references and links to, but apparently didn’t read, had a goal of getting UO faculty salaries to 100% of comparators. Quoting from http://pages.uoregon.edu/uosenate/dircom/0708WhitePaperUpdate.html:
The 2007-08 Senate Budget Committee (Marie Vitulli (chair), Peter Keyes, Mike Kellman, David Frank, Suzanne Clark, John Chalmers, Gordon Sayre (ex officio)) calls for the university to take immediate steps to bring our faculty’s salaries up to the average (mean) relative to our comparators.
The average would mean 100% of AAU peers, not 95%. Both Around the O errors, about the percentile target and the inclusion of benefit costs, matter. The significance of the difference between 95% and 100% is obvious. The difference between salary + benefits and salary alone matters because, as the story points out, if we count the cost of benefits UO faculty are not doing that badly. If we look at salary alone, we are relatively worse off. The 2008 White Paper update addresses the distinction, in explaining why they set a salary rather than salary + benefits target:
We recognize that there have been many mitigating circumstances in this period, that the cost (while not necessarily the benefit) of the benefits package has increased, that state salaries have been frozen, that the administration has labored mightily to keep the university afloat in what are (seemingly always) tough times. But this does not change the fact that the faculty have actually lost ground. If the percentage growth in faculty salaries had simply matched the percentage growth of 59.8% in the university base budget, we would already be at 95% of our comparators’ salaries.
At UO, the cost of benefits is considerably higher than their value. For example, the state has insisted that universities stay in the health insurance pool for other state workers, despite the fact we could get a much cheaper rate if we split off. VPFA Jaime Moffitt counts the cost of this subsidy for the state as a valuable benefit to faculty. It’s not. Similarly with PERS: a good part of the current cost is to make up for the years of underfunding and loopholes that let people retire at pensions of 100% of salary and more. Those loopholes have been fixed, and recent and future retirees will get far smaller retirements, even if in Tiers 1 and 2. (ORP is another matter.) PERS is still underfunded because of past problems and things like Mike Bellotti’s $500K a year PERS deal, and PERS costs are indeed high. However, the costs of paying the inflated pensions of others are not a benefit of value to current faculty. This is presumably part of the reason why President Lariviere and CAS Dean Scott Coltrane reacted to the 2009 news that UO faculty salaries were at the bottom of the AAU by instituting a plan to get salaries up to the comparator average by 2011.
In short, in addition to the two factual errors identifed above, the quote from VPFA Jamie Moffitt claiming that including benefit costs “shows a more holistic and accurate view of total faculty compensation” deserves some explanation and qualification along the lines explained above.
I would appreciate it if you would have the author of this “Around the O” article write a correction addressing these factual errors and the distinction between benefit costs and value.
You might also consider requiring your authors put their names to this and future Around the O articles, as an effort to build some credibility for your blog.
Yours,
Bill Harbaugh, UO professor of Economics, and editor and author of https://uomatters.com
The entire “Around the O” blog post:
UO faculty compensation competitive with other public AAUs, reaches target set by senate
July 23, 2015 – 3:41pm
The University of Oregon has achieved an ambitious goal set by the University Senate to bring total faculty salary and benefits in line with average faculty compensation at similar top public research universities.
Recent data released by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) shows that average UO compensation for tenure-related faculty is 99.3 percent of the average compensation of public Association of American Universities (AAU) peers in 2015. The number is 106.4 percent when adjusted for cost of living.
“The UO has significantly invested in faculty salaries over the last few years,” said Jamie Moffitt, vice president for finance and administration. “When combined with our very generous compensation package, including health care and retirement, total compensation is in line with our peer AAU public institutions.”
The UO Senate Budget Committee outlined in 2000 and 2008 white papers a specific goal of having average faculty compensation be at 95 percent of AAU peers. In 2014-15, full professors were at 95.4 percent of AAU public peers, while associate professors were at 101.6 percent and assistant professors at 104.1 percent. Adjusted for cost-of-living factors, the figures are 101.0, 109.8 and 112.7 percent, respectively.
David Frank, UO professor and former dean of the Clark Honors College, was a member of the Senate Budget Committee in 2000 with Nathan Tublitz, Mike Kellman and Wayne Westling.
“John Mosley, who was then provost, proposed to the Senate Budget Committee that it work with him on a white paper to outline the problem we saw with UO faculty salary and compensation and to suggest how we might move both to parity with our peer institutions, “Frank said. “At that time, average faculty compensation was 82.1 percent of the mean compensation of UO peers. Fifteen years later the data suggests the UO is now at 99.3 percent of the mean compensation paid to our American Association of University faculty peers. We have to make data-based decisions and judgments.”
The recent data was published in the AAUP’s “The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession.” The AAUP is an organization with the “purpose to advance academic freedom and shared governance, to define fundamental professional values and standards for higher education, and to ensure higher education’s contribution to the common good.”
The AAU Data Exchange recently reported that the UO has continued to make significant progress on faculty salaries when compared to AAU peers. The data, however, did not include benefits.
“It’s important to look at total compensation when it comes to making comparisons to our AAU peers,” Moffitt said. “The UO picks up 95 percent of our employees’ healthcare premiums and makes generous contributions to retirement accounts. When those numbers are factored in, it shows a more holistic and accurate view of total faculty compensation.”
At virtually all levels in my experience or perhaps experiment at the UO, revisionist history tends to dominate a lot of future decision making. This is just another woeful example and despite documented correction to this revisionist history, it will likely perpetuate.
Can anyone explain how aroundtheo gets the averages they list in the original salary survey (http://around.uoregon.edu/content/new-aau-salary-survey-data-shows-uo-compares-well)?
First, they use a ratio of 35% full/30% assoc/30% assistant (which doesn’t add to 100%). Second, I can’t figure out how the reported weighted average of 2015 UO salaries as a % of AAU average (88.7, 97.8, 95.1, respectively, in last column) comes out to 94.2%…
These two concerns make me even less confident that the numbers reported for total compensation actually mean anything.
You mean someone actually reads “Around the O”?
Don’t underestimate the penetration power of the voice of authority wrapped in nice packaging–just look at the quantity of misinformation the university was able to spread during GTFF bargaining last year.
The fact is, there has been a vast improvement since the 2000 white paper, look at the numbers on both salary and total compensation. In fact, it is a stunning achievement! We should all be grateful to Westling, Frank, Kellman, Tublitz plus Moseley plus Frances Dyke plus Frohnmayer plus The Hat and others who made it happen, with some fits and starts and delays.
And if UO really is at 94% on salaries (weighted across ranks), there is no way that we are not close to or greater than 100% on total compensation — taking into account pension benefits, especially, with the 6% pickup for all of us, and the super-high benefits for currently employed Tier 1 people, whether in PERS or ORP. Tier 2 also. I’m talking about the ACTUAL worth of the benefits to each tier — not the COST of a faculty member to the university (which indeed is greater than the average value of the benefits, mainly because some of the money is going to fund already-retired pensions that are underfunded due to the market instability of the past 15 years).
As for the 2008 white paper “update” — as far as I know, there was no buy-in from the administration, unlike the 2000 original white paper, which was a vastly different situation. So the faculty expressed the opinion in 2008 that they would like to have salaries at 100% of their “peers” (which actually are not so peer-like, e.g. Michigan and North Carolina are not exactly in the same league with UO, hate to say it). Well, good for them.
If UO did reach 100% parity on salaries, we would be significantly above the AAU in real compensation, after an honest accounting of the worth of the benefits.
I have to think about people outside the University and what they must think or would think if they heard UO tenured faculty whining — no other word for it — about their “plight,” the lack of worth of their pension benefits (this is especially rich coming from Tier 1 people), the injustice of being shoved in with ordinary schlubs in the state medical pool — what do they think this is, socialized medicine or something? (while having to pay 5% of their premium!), the lack of housing allowances (compared to those lucky faculty who get to shop for housing in LA, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, etc. etc.) The poor tenure reduction benefits — we don’t get a year’s pay to induce us to leave, we actually have to work until we retire! (Gee, we actually have enough money to retire, and Oregon’s pension plan is actually fairly well funded, so we probably won’t get screwed down the line.)
There was excellent buy in from the administration for the 2008 Senate White Paper Update. In fact, the goal of 100% of AAU publics was adopted by CAS in 2011, under then Dean Scott Coltrane, although the path to get there was still a draft: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/971644/uomatters/Salaries/2011CASSalaryEquityPlanProposal.pdf
And I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a person to expect their earnings to increase at a rate higher than inflation, as they gain experience and seniority. In fact that’s a standard part of every economic life-time earnings model and empirical estimate.
“And I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a person to expect their earnings to increase at a rate higher than inflation, as they gain experience and seniority.”
Did I ever say anything contrary to this?
As for the admin buy-in i 2008 — if the top administrators — Frohnmayer on down — bought into it, I sure didn’t hear about it. There was nothing like the 2000 situation, where there was genuine enthusiasm on the part of Dave F. As I recall — could be wrong on the timeline on this — salaries were practically frozen back in 2008, due to the state. The Hat came along and defied the state, and we all know what happened to him.
I don’t see the justification for a relatively poor state university having significantly higher total real compensation than the average of either our old OUS peer list or the AAU public list.
I think we’re getting pretty close to where we need to be, with some notably exceptions specific to some departments.
The main place the UO is lagging is research support. And that’s where surprise budget model shifts and subsidies to the law school will really hurt.
Althought the couterpoint to your argument is that if the UO really wants to keep or hire top notch talent they can either do so with better research support or higher salaries. Higher salaries is probably a cheaper way to keep or attract high quality talent than non-salary benefits like research support. So if the university wants to get BETTER, and not just keep the status quo, paying above the AAU total compensation is the quickest and easiest way to get there.
I get your point, but I have to disagree, beyond a certain level (that we have already reached, in most cases) better research support (including infrastructure) is more important, in my view.
“I have to think about people outside the University and what they must think or would think if they heard UO tenured faculty whining — no other word for it — about their “plight, ..”
Whining? Really? This outsider thinks you are way off track, Bernie.
Honest uncle is dead on. The admin proposals are grossly inadequate, but this stuff is an embarrassment to intellectual honesty ,for all the reasons honest uncle reminds us of. Even if we accepted the 2008 unilateral paper as more legit than the 2000 shared governance paper, can we really argue with a straight face that the average oregon program is on par with quality of the average AAU program? Clearly, no. Sorry, no we are fooling no one else on this point, so why fool ourselves
Daffy duck missed the corollary: our administrators are so much more competent than the average AAU’s!
I have to call out the ‘honest’ uncle Bernie’s conflated and revisioniast history. He writes:
“We should all be grateful to Westling, Frank, Kellman, Tublitz plus Moseley plus Frances Dyke plus Frohnmayer plus The Hat and others who made it happen.”
Are you saying this group is who brought our salaries up? Talk about revisionist history.
yeah, I think the original “white paper” gang + Frohnmayer + Moseley buy-in is what got it going, and a boost from the Hat reinvigorated it. You don’t think so? Well, I’d say you are the revisionist.
Wasn’t there a union organizing at UO at that time? And a union contract to move salaries forward?
If you mean in 2000 when the original white paper was put forth, there was no union negotiating on behalf of the faculty. There was union organizing. While I don’t think it had gotten very far, it’s possible that the cooperation and buy-in of the administration was partly influenced by the possibility of a union. Probably nobody will ever know now, Dave F being gone. John Moseley might know something.
The backloaded union proposal is still disappointing.
Why not do the equity pool in the first year so the contract is closer to 3 percent per year. Lets just fix equity and get into longer run contracts that are 1 percent ATB 2 merit each year.