10/9/2011: Moira Kiltie of the VP for Research and Faculty Development office announces UO’s 2012 Summer research award program:
The purpose of the SRA program is to stimulate research by providing
faculty with sustained time for scholarly and academic endeavor.
Proposals may be submitted by faculty who meet the eligibility criteria.
Up to twenty awards in the amount of $5,500 each will be granted.
Awardees will be notified on or about February 15, 2012.
This could be as much as $110,000 – for a faculty that numbers 660. Wow, that’s more than $150 each! Meanwhile UO has increased spending on police by about $1 million a year. We are paying $150,000 for the NCAA investigation. The athletic department spends $120,000 on free cars for the assistant coaches. Etcetera, ad nauseam, gag me.
For many years past these awards were for $4500. Now they have raised it to $5500. Should we be grateful? Other flagship state universities award $7500 or more, and the proof is that our very own “new faculty awards” given to new assistant professors, pay $7500. The numbers tell the story. Oregon likes to compete for the best new talent, but once that talent is on campus, they are treated as second-class.
Dog has commented on this before but that was
more than a year ago and now we have new administrators lurking on UOMatters.
The single biggest thing that the UO has control of with respect to “faculty salaries” is the ability to have internal research funds available,
usually in the form of summer salary. The ancient ED Tech process was relatively decent at giving faculty a competitive chance at earning summer salary but that process went kaput with the arrival of Don Harris.
The second venue, the summer research awards, while great in principle, completely sucks in quantitative magnitude. At my former Research University, which was of comparable size to the UO, the summer research fund was 10 times bigger and was a direct component of ICC money.
I have always thought that the UO SRA programs shows how little the UO thinks of faculty.
Professor Sayre has it completely right – once the talent gets here, the talent gets screwed.
Much of that talent then leaves later.