5/2/2011: The most recent draft (2009) of UO’s Academic plan is posted on Provost Bean’s website. There are pages and pages of yada-yada, but the meat is on page 9:
Institution Size. We intend to increase the size of the incoming freshman class and to grow the campus to a total of 24,000 students (from 20,300 students). … we seek to reverse the decline in doctoral student enrollment (down by eight percent since 2003) and reach a stable enrollment of 1500 doctoral students within five years (in Fall 2007 there were approximately 1100 doctoral students).
Faculty Size and Quality. Any increase in student numbers must be met by an increase in faculty if we are to preserve our core educational mission — especially because UO faculty/student ratios are already low, relative to our AAU peers. We seek to increase the number of faculty by 100 to 125 tenure-track faculty lines to accommodate the growth in the number of students …
As of fall 2010, we were teaching (and collecting tuition from) 23,400 students. That’s a 15% increase over the 20,300 in 2007. This fall we are predicting 24,500 students. A 20% increase, and above the plan’s target.
So have we hired the 100-125 new faculty the Provost’s plan calls for? From 2007 to 2009 the number of tenure-track faculty increased from 642 to 660. That’s 18 faculty, not 18%. In the past year, maybe another 10 or 20? Nowhere close to keeping up with student growth.
So where did our administration spend all that tuition money? $2 million here. Any guesses on the rest?
The union organizer’s Bunsis report from February has far more info than anything I’ve seen from the UO administration on this question. You’ve got to love the tagline on the Provost’s web-page though: “Thank you for your continued investment in our Academic Plan.” Uh, you’re welcome Jim, I guess.
Dog says
UOMatters has it exactly right –
for whatever reason there has been
virtually no commensurate increase in actual faculty and that can be seen in black and white at ir.uoregon.edu. What BEAN has done is put us on the Community College Model. Do people not understand this. Do our Deans not understand this? Do the Deans really think they have hired significantly more faculty?
The provost does not gave a rat’s ass about educational quality here. This is obvious. In addition, the last collective faculty raise was in Nov 2008. Faculty are treated as worms here.
Is there a single reader of UOmatters that would like to defend the proposition that overall educational quality has increased since Bean became provost? Shouldn’t this situation piss you off or do you just not care?
If you look at the document on Faculty Counts you will see that the number of tenure-related faculty is the same as it was in the mid-90s. So we haven’t expanded the faculty at all while the student population has grown very substantially.
Dog says
yes this point was made by some of us about 1 year go. To say the least, our provost is disingenuous. To say the most, our provost is intent on moving the UO to a Community College Model.
He’s also making sure that his wife is overcompensated for a mediocre job at Knight Library.