Comments and news tips:

Posted by the Editors, from a reader:“.. the bizarre, paranoid and problematic culture of secrecy at the University of Oregon …”

And who is hiding behind their anonymity? Unfortunately, you’ve taken a lot of your credibility and flushed it by peddling rumors and innuendo from behind your anonymous blog. The President and Provost make a lot of money. So what? Just because you don’t think you get paid enough, it doesn’t mean they don’t deserve their pay. It’s interesting that you purport to care about the UO, but you fail to see how your vendetta laced sniveling only reflects poorly on you–not the administrators

UO Matters reply:I hope the attached newspaper article about Jean Stockard, a former UO professor who was hounded into retirement by the UO administration for daring to take the side of two foreign students in a financial dispute will give you some idea for why we are trying to stay anonymous.

The quote you mention is not from a disgruntled professor – it is from Steve Duin, a longtime columnist at the Oregonian, with a lot of experience dealing with Dave Frohnmayer and other UO administrators.

The problems we describe in this blog are very serious. We apologize if the language offends you. For years we have tried more polite and discreet approaches to dealing with UO’s problems – with no effect.

Making detailed information on exactly how excessive salaries for Frohnmayer and his associates have become, on their golden parachute contracts, and their efforts to hide how wastefully public money has spent has been very embarassing to them, and has already produced substantial changes here at UO – and we believe will soon bring more.

That said, we take your point on the “vendetta laced sniveling” and will try to clean up our style – but not at the expense of the content.

UO Matters.

The Reader replies:Thank you for the response. I didn’t expect one in the first place and certainly not something so polite. Now that your blog on has appeared on the local scene (I read about it in EW), I will keep an eye on it and try to understand the issues. My initial take was that this was a sad example of biting the hand that feeds, but I will keep an open mind. For outsiders who have a positive impression of President Frohnmayer and his accomplishments, this type of information creates quite a dissonance. Again, thank you for the gracious response to my rather angry reaction.

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

My impression of what Jim Bean is saying when he says that UO’s administrative costs are 38% of comparators is not that he is comparing salaries of individuals, but that he is comparing total costs for administrative structures.

Re Moseley travel reimbursements: I’m no friend of JTM,but the attached spreadsheet is for 2005 and 2006, not for 2008-09. At least get your facts straught if you’re going to manufacture irresponsible conclusions.

So, let’s see

between June and Sept 08 JTM racked up

$4441.75 reimbursable dollars for mileage

at about 50 cents per mile that’s

8800 miles

its about 125 miles one way from JTM (Eugene) to
JTM (Bend)

so that’s about 35 round trips in a 4 month period or

9 round trips a month …

on 5/8/2009 you said:
[quote]A little UO history – email us if there are any errors. Until 2006 John Moseley was Provost and Vice President for Finance and Lorraine Davis was Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs. In 2006 Lorraine retired and her job was split in two – Russ Tomlin took the Academic Affairs part, and Robin Holmes the Student Affairs part. That same year Moseley retired and his job was also split in two. Jim Bean is now Provost and Frances Dyke is VP for Finance. [end quote]

This is a very carefully sliced history. A more balanced view with a baseline from a few years ago: We had Moseley (Provost), Davis (VP Acad. Affairs), Anne Leavitt (VP, Student Affairs), and Dan Williams (VP, Administration), plus the other VPs for Development and for Research. They were replaced by Bean, Tomlin, Holmes, and Dyke. Lorraine only had the Student Affairs portfolio for a fairly short time, and Frances was mostly a replacement for Dan Williams, with the addition of some of JTM’s financial responsibilities. this sure looks like a one-for-one replacement, distracting us from the more serious issues of the huge growth in Associate VPs, support staff, and so on.

Your stretching of facts (or is it bullshit?) puts into doubt some of your other sleuthing, which is sad, as much of it seems right: funny figures on salaries, lack of reality with regard to Bend and, to a smaller extent, Portland, and so forth.

Yes, I have known about the IR site for years
and often go there to get the actual facts – not that having real facts actually does any good around here. People hear only what they want to hear – helluva of a way to plan.

In any event. To me one of the most striking features of the raw data, and one which most faculty and adminstrators don’t realize is true is that the actual number of tenure and tenure-track faculty has been essentially constant (631 +/- 17) over the last 15 years.

Thus despite claims of “new programs” and more
favorable faculty to student ratios, the plain truth as that has been no growth in these kind
of faculty positions for the past 15 years.

That defines institutional stagnation!

We don’t want this blog to be a place for this these sorts of posts. But this commenter did give the pass phrase: “But you won’t print this anyway!”

No, it is not unproductive. If Nathan was at all ethical, he would have told Paul that he was going to be nominated. He knew it. He set it up. Then Paul could have asked Andrea to also prepare a “spontaneous” comment. Then there could have been a real discussion of two different viewpoints. But that is not what Nathan did. He pulled a fast one, an end run. While that may be “Academic Politics” so is this. And it doesn’t mean we have to like it or live with it. Or respect the person who did it. Whether you agree with Nathan’s viewpoint or not, it was not a honorable way to get himself elected.

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

We’ve deleted a few comments that were just too much like personal attacks.

That’s UO faculty governance for you! A sneak candidacy meant to upend the traditional process, a botched election with a very questionable procedure, then a questionable reversal. Makes the hapless Administration look like a well-oiled machine! Perhaps the UO Senate should get some PR lessons from Nike. Just call up the Athletic Director!

Terrific! The senate is as deeply divided as it is possible to be (12-11 vote), Gilkey’s credibility for next year is shot, he and Tublitz will be sniping at each other instead of trying to balance the administration. Tublitz will be under a shadow the year after next, as if he were not polarizing and divisive enough already. Dave F must be enjoying a good last laugh! If that’s too personal, so be it, but I’m just describing the way it looks out here.

Anonymous said “The lights go out in Johnson hall at 5.” Well, if were really on campus after 5 and looked more carefully, you’d know that this is not so. And Saturday and Sunday too. We may have comlaints, but most of those folks work very hard, and do not punch a clock either. Wrong accusations do not help anyone’s case.

We agree. We are making a real effort to focus this blog on serious issues regarding UO. Almost all the material we post is carefully documented from public records and that is a huge amount of work. Of course, none of this work would get done without the motivating emotion of our utter outrage over the total incompetence, criminal venality, and pathological ly…

Wait, must get control of emotions… OK.

Everyone need to vent a little and we don’t mind posting some of that. It would be nice to have more substantive comments too though.

Uh, whatever, dude.

Our response to “some decent…”

We agree about transparency vs. stone-throwing. But UO Matters doesn’t have an IR department, we do the best we can anyway.

It used to be the case that UO had great benefits relative to other places. I haven’t seen that quantified recently. If you have, please point me to it.

I find the concept of “under-paid” faculty to be one that very much depends on definition. Yes,
I am a faculty member at the UO (woof), but am I underpaid. How do I measure this?

a) Am I underpaid with respect to my faculty peers in my department?

b) Am I underpaid with respect to average salary of my rank within the UO?

c) Am I underpaid with my respect to raise a familty in Eugene?

d) Am I underpaid with respect to my Market Peers (obviously yes)

e) Am I underpaid with respect to working in the private sector (maybe, maybe not – depends on benefits)

f) Can I easy my AY underpayment by generating sufficient summer salary (this is a big deal that’s left out of all salary comparisons)

So, yes, we are all statisically underpaid in comparison to our Market Peers. Will collectively faculty complaints ever change this in the hick state of Oregon. NO.

Focus your energy on things that we can control (like salary compression) – higher ed will never be value in Oregon and the only way we ever make the statisical correction to “normal” salaries is when the State gives us sufficient money to do this. This did not happen in my past lifetime and its not gonna happen in the present one either.

Frohnmayer’s comments about faculty members in Alex Tomchak Scott’s article are, to put it mildly, vicious in tone. Perhaps even worse, they demonstrate the extent to which he interjects his own views and raw power into what should be faculty governance. If I’m recalling the Charter correctly, the president is just another member of the faculty.

In addition, empirical data are needed to assess his claim that there are only “a couple [of people] who don’t like my leadership style.” Have others tried to fill out the recent UO marketing survey and been tosssed out and/or had other strange things happen when you express negative views. Several people have told me of this experience.

If anyone knows the source of funding for this marketing survey or how to get the data it would be interesting.

I started this survey thinking maybe that Provost Bean had actually decided to get some honest input about faculty concerns. I gave up after two pages of bullshit leading questions.

A reader writes regarding the $90K UMRP post:

Regarding your 6/5 post on the effectiveness of UMRP, you seem to want to make the claim that the professor in question left because he no longer had access to the extra funds. While salary inequity is always an issue when someone talented leaves UO for another better paying institution (like UT Austin), the primary reason this faculty member left was because UO was unwilling to offer his partner a reasonable position on campus, something the other institution was happy to do.

This blog has the potential to be very productive, but if you don’t want to be known as just the crazy xxx prof who hates Frohnmeyer, it’s important to recognize that issues of retention, etc. are complex and to do your due diligence when making such claims.

We’ve added an explanatory note to the post.

It’s too early to tell about the provost. He seems to be on board with the overpaid administrator syndrome at Oregon. On the other hand, he has had to work under Frohnmayer. What will it be like with the new president?

As regards revenue, the thing to focus on is not mainly total revenue, but how it is apportioned. For academic purposes, especially the money actually available to run departments? (“Instruction” in the world of academic accounting standards.) Or for ever-growing administrative and professional “services” — Diversity, Sustainability, Student Life, the list goes on and on.

This is the kind of stuff the UO senate and its budget committee should be focused on; instead they seem to concentrate on internecine warfare — the recent senate VP election a wonderful case in point — obsessing about the admittedly obscene athletic program situation — and by the way, supporting expanded diversity and sustainability-type initiatives, without any thought to the costs to the academic program.

Perhaps the new president himself will refocus priorities on academics. I won’t be holding my breath, though.

Brief Woof:

In the above, this

“A) adding students (and faculty to teach them”

is crucial.

Some of us believe that such a strategy is counter to Academic Integrity and Scholarship in the sense that we are now creating even larger classes and its unclear *what* kind of faculty are actually gonna be hired. See my earlier comment about the data fact that the number of faculty over the last 15 years here is constant.
We add instructors and adjuncts to deal with increased enrollment.

I want to see three things from the new administration.

1. A committment to improving and expanding graduate education so that we become a Carnegie I Research institution again (which qualifies us for certain kinds of grants).

2. A committment to fostering real interdisicplinarity in undergraduate degree programs so we can move away from legacy based curricula.

3. A consistent voice that the academic mission of UO is paramount to its secondary missions.

Let’s see where we stand on these 3 issues one year from now.

At the moment we are trying to get copies of Frohnmayer’s retirement contract and Lariviere’s contract. OUS is trying very hard to keep both secret as long as they can.

If Bean hasn’t come clean about the administrative expense issues by then, on July 1 we will start pressing Lariviere to release the data. Might as well find out right away whether he is going to deal honestly with the faculty’s concerns,

I have to laugh at the suggestion that Tublitz is the right person to lead the senate to address budgeting issues. At the end of the day, his agenda is to use identify areas which can garner attention and outrage – some rightly and some not – so he can wield some power on campus and get his name in the papers. If he really cared about faculty governance, he would not aid and abet the time-wasting non-academic agenda of Frank Stahl, nor would he have breached senate protocol by staging his little coup. Such theatrics distract from serious issues such as budget transparency – it will be easier for the administration to ignore information requests from a Tublitz-led senate.

The Dog Barks Again:

(why doesn’t cut and paste work here more easily?)

http://oira.unc.edu/faculty-salaries-at-research-and-aau-universities.html

Gives a full report as of 2008-2009.

Notes:

Missouri ranks 74th on this list of 92
Oregon State ranks 91st

The University of Oregon no longer qualifies as
a Very High Research Activity Univesity because we have not paid attention to our grad enrollment and just let this slide.

From previous data its clear that the UO is
obviously between 74 and 91 on this list.

Note that the University of Kansas is number 61
here.

Okay fine, the UO Senate starts to act like non-sheep. That’s gonna inspire me? That’s gonna
change our direction? So yes, the Senate can start issuing bolder proclamations but how is it in a position to actually implement new policy other than by indirect suggestion?

The choice is: develop a significantly better and more extensive working relationship with the administration, or take some extraordinary action to force them out. Maybe with Frohnmayer leaving we can focus more on the former and less on delusions of the latter.

In regards to salary data, we need to see so much more than at the link if we want to have any shot at understanding beyond a vague “we need more money.” First, total compensation with benefits (I do think the contributions we get to retirement are relatively good) needs to be included. Secondly, both raw numbers and cost-of-living adjusted numbers should be listed (there are classic outliers such as UCSB which make sense once one does cost-of-living adjustments). Third, comparisons need to be finer than just asst/assoc/professor, especially at the professor level where it depends on whether you have more senior full professors or more recently promoted ones. Fourth of course is some break-down by school or better yet department.

Finally, and this might be out of our reach but who knows what the AAU has, is some understanding of correlation between salaries (adjusted in various ways) and various measures/rankings of department quality. Such correlation should be compared to correlation with other factors (probably limited in accuracy of measurement) such as perceived level of support, number of graduate students, teaching load, etc.

Looking at this list, it is clear that pay isn’t everything – WashU in StL is 14th but they aren’t even close to that in my field. Looking at state politics and the current economic situation, we aren’t having across-the-board 10% raises soon. So while we should rightly ask for those raises, we should also understand what works for attracting talent for departments – both on campus and elsewhere – who have done so without necessarily the most cash. That’s our job, and it is especially the provost’s job. Let’s see the full picture.

Good points. All this is the job of the IR people. They know what’s going on – but no one in administration wants to hear what they have to say. At this point we really just have to wait to see what Lariviere does. The alternative is to go union, which is looking better and better.

Ah, the selected “Big Ideas” just got posted.

Typical.

The selected things have almost nothing to do with our academic infrastructure and they all look like marketing gimmicks to me so that the UO can say they are investing in green. Greenwashing is more like it.

While many of the Big Ideas might have been difficult to implement, at least some of them had to do with improving our core academic progams, infrastructure, and quality.

Those were ignored.

I am particularly displeased that the Library proposal to scale up undergraduate research was not chosen. These seems like a no brainer at the
Research University.

In any even, once again, we are pilot project obsessed but will do nothing to address our current academic deficienies. For instance, one common thread to many proposals was the need to improve General Education.

While I guess all you need to do is to make it Green …

I can just envision the Newscast/Press Release:

UO Committed to Becoming Greener (and I assume
they are not referring to the ever accumulating
mold in our ancient classrooms …)

I am also disappointed that scaling up research as part of our undergraduate curriculum was not chosen. I thought it was a shoe-in. Plus, with the Library’s take, it would have been a pretty unique approach spanning both humanities and sciences and very timely. We are now awash in information, so the value of university as repository is much different than in the past (though still of course crucial in any sense). Our value is more in generating, evaluating, navigating and synthesizing – and our undergraduate curriculum should reflect this.

Who was on the committee choosing ideas, anyways?

In praise of UOMATTERS

Don’tlet this go to your head.

Ever since I pointed out this blog I have received a wide variety of faculty reactions. They typically fall in to the following 4 categories.

1. The maintainers of the Blog are hate-mongers sesrving their own agenda

2. By academic definition, everything that is in a blog is bullshit

3. Oh joy, this is my opportunity to dump anonymous dirt on someone or some topic

4. Finally, an open form where some real feelings, opinions and data can be expressed in regards to the current state of the UO.

Number 4 matters and in all my time here at the UO, no such forum has been present before – and don’t tell me the UO senate is the right forum for this.

Numbers 1-3 go along with territory of trying to make number 4 possible.

So thanks for making number 4 possible and don’t let those in the 1-3 camp discourage you or others from sticking to number 4 as the mission.

Okay, I’ve had it. It is amazing to read faculty members talk about sustainability as ‘fluff.’ Oh, I forgot, they’re into the 19th century model of academia — ivory towers divorced from any problems out there! They probably would have said that about computers, felt-tip pens, and those of us who don’t where academic robes to class very day. This blog has gone beyond irrelevance !

Sustainability is worse than fluff. It is not an academic discipline, rather it’s a collection of fashionable (in some circles) political and social dispositions. The UO sustainability website explicitly says that the Office of Sustainability was established (in part) “to provide an official stance on such an important issue”. This is pure advocacy and propaganda — not scholarly and research activity. It is doubtful whether the University should be engaged in this kind of social and political advocacy at all (any more than it should be advocating for the War on Terror, or against embryonic stem cell research, or myriad political causes). It is certainly not worth $5 million per year (or whatever the current or future budget may be).

“Sustainability” should certainly not dominate the so-called “Big Ideas” that the University is going to promote for its intellectual future. Nor should it be making big incursions into the University’s science programs. But that is exactly what is happening, largely with good-sized inputs of pork barrel money from the state and federal governments, arranged through lobbying of politicians by UO officials and faculty.

The University should not be spending significant amounts of money on these kinds of enterprises. If it does, and the faculty acquiesces, then they have nobody to blame but themselves if their salaries are at the bottom of the heap, and if the overall academic reputation of the University continues to plummet.

There is only so much money at UO, heaven knows. The University cannot afford to squander it on social crusades masking as academic programs, like Sustainability and Diversity.

woof woof
the dog types again

I think the characterization of “easy” as an explanation for our low faculty salaries and the blame on the president is a bit misguided and overstated.

Let’s take a longer historical perspective.

In the 1980s faculty salaries at the UO were exceptionally low for starting assistant professors. At that time, Eugene was a cheap place to live. Much of one’s salary 20 years after the fact is determined by your starting salary.

In 1990 measure 5 hit. The university or OSSHE (now OUS) was not prepared for this. Lots got frozen. Most long time faculty members here probably don’t remember the period from May 1993 to September 1995 – your salary was frozen then.

(since then we have been through similar binennium freezes).

These freezes are really beyond the control of the President.

Hence, starting in 1993 there has been no such thing as consistent annual raises for faculty pay. Raises have come in fits and stars.

In the year 2000 there was a serious attempt at correct this and many faculty got raises in the range of 8 – 12% then.

Additionaly, for many many years, rasises associated with promotion and tenure were pitiful and laughable (this was since corected a few years ago). When I got promoted to full professor way back in the mid 90’s I was given a whopping $1800 increase in pay. That was insulting – I tried to give it back.

So to sum up:

1. We are state employees and therefore subject to these intermittent biennium freezes.

2. I would say up until the late 1990’s starting pay for Assistant Professors was poor. Now I think that has been corrected and I think most faculty that have been hired since 2000 have a decent academic salary (of course, this has created an unaddressed salary compression problem).

These two things combine to produce general low salaries for those of us that have been here for more than 15 years.

However, I also strongly agree with the sentiment that various “pet projects” have gotten in the way of improved salaries and that the President has not cared about the overall academic mission of the University for sometime.

The “upgrade of facutly offices” was a low agenda item of Brady when she first got here. This was her attempt at “connecting” with the faculty.

Its not at all clear that there was any real intent that the upgrade money was to be targetted towards faculty offices.

Its also unclear if this $3M is real money or COPS money (I suspect some of it is the latter) and COPS money is paid back (although sometimes other funds are raided to pay this back)

I think COPS stands for certificate of participation funds

these are loans made by the state to various
state agencies (including campus’s) that usually are needed for short term infrastructure projects or in some cases they are emergency funds.

I believe there is a 3 year payback time for these funds.

In the past, on the UO campus, COPS money has been used to help address the fact that we have no classroom equipment media budget.

Upgrade of faculty offices would certainly qualify for COPS monies.

Is this going to become a union site? I hope not. I can tell you, a lot of us faculty are not happy with how things have gone with the administration, but if it comes to a choice between them and a union, we’ll be with the administration.

You want boondoggles? Try finding out how much is being spent on “diversity” and “sustainability”. A few years ago, they admitted to $4million+ for diversity. That was before the new, expanded diversity program got going. Who knows how much they’re spending now? Same for “sustainability”.

The Portland Programs: While I don’t think this counts as a boondoogle yet – it would be nice to have firm figures published on the total instructional cost of the programs, the tuition revenue that is brought in and some indication of expected program growth.

Re faculty salaries: I can categorically say that UO has the money to raise the salaries to competitive levels, and make UO more competitive academically in other ways. All it takes is the will, plus some focus and smarts — the latter at the level, say, of the famous Math 111. (Perhaps senate president Gilkey could elaborate on the last point.)

Let me just talk about faculty salaries:

About 10 years ago there was a plan to bring faculty salaries up to where they should be, i.e. high enough to compete with mid-level AAU public universities. It got stalled out, partly because of state-imposed salary freezes for a couple of years, but mainly because Frohnmayer lost interest, or became actively opposed — what difference does it make? — and because the faculty senate lost focus and the will to make a fight of it.

A poster elsewhere makes a good point about watching the budget to keep priorities on track. Another, comlementary piece of it is the “tabloid” exposure of various boondoggles, such as this website is doing pretty well at.

As I say, the money is there. $10 million dollars really is about what is needed. The discretionary budget of UO is something like $300 million, + or -. Reallocate $2 million a year for 5 years and you’ll be there. That’s less than 1% per year.

Hell, raise $250 million over 5 years in endowment money specifically earmarked for educational purposes (faculty salaries), and there wouldn’t have to be any reallocation.

It ain’t rocket science, and it ain’t like doing the Normandy invasion.

But it requires better than what UO has had in the way of leadership the last decade.

It’s too bad, Frohnmayer did a great job for about 5 years, then something happened. It all seemed to start around the time of the Phil Knight fiasco. Maybe that was the turning point.

opps small mistake in the above
the extra 1M a year figure is wrong
as I taxed the increment not the total

So

1. Reaching the average of our peers at the same OPE rate means increasing the Prof/Assoc Prof/Ass. Prof from the current 73M to 91M

2. Subsequent annual 5% raises therefore require an addition 4.5-5 Million per year

sorry not to have made this clearer in the first post.

I liked the woofer’s historical perspective above – in particular explaining the wage compression problem we’re facing. And I agree that we could at least make a big step (say half of the 10% increase we need) by trimming some administrative and other fat. I have my doubts about our “focus in the Senate” though. While all these troubles have been facing us, the senate has taken up issues such as the WRC, Iraq, setting up procedures so that we could make motions about Iraq in the future, diversity… Even when we were dealing with something as serious as the arena, we had good numbers from our subcommittee and the athletic department but then some absurd cooked-up numbers on parking as well as a motion explicitly designed to tell Phil Knight that we didn’t want his Legacy Fund gift under the terms agreed. The materials the senate has produced on salaries has been first-rate, but it has been drowned out in a wash of ****.

Membership in the Senate and on committees has plummeted over the past few years. There are a number of factors, but I think that many capable faculty look on their “left” and “right” and see agendas – by certain colleagues and by administrators respectively – which have little to do with academic excellence and more to do with wielding power and pleasing external audiences. The recent coup in the senate makes this dynamic even more clear.

A key question about the reorganization is how much will it expand or contract the administrative bureaucracy, along with administrative budgets.

The VP for Advancement will now become two VP’s, if I read correctly. Each, I’m sure, with their own separate staffs.

It’s hard to imagine that this will not constitute an increase in Administration. At the expense of what?

It sounds like Charles Martinez (Diversity) will have a higher profile than ever. So, I doubt that Diversity will absorb the costs.

Library Acquisitions, perhaps?

Faculty salaries?

Tenure-track faculty lines?

I hope our UO senate will be right on top of this.

If not, I guess we’ll have to rely on uomatters!

There have been some constructive suggestions offered here.

Don’t proliferate the number of administrative positions (as by making two VP’s out of one, as is apparently happening in the latest reorganization). Somehow the campus managed to run with fewer administrators in the past.

Don’t pay top administrators bloated salaries (as indicated by market comparators), especially when the University has failed to bring faculty salaries up to market standards.

Most of all, watch the budget and the share going to Administration, Instruction, etc. and how this is changing over time.

Everything mentioned above is simple to do if the people in charge want to.

If not — probably not — a good push from the faculty is needed. There’s the rub.

I am pretty ignorant about the proposed changes in the medical benefits, but it’s clear that there is a problem with continuing with Regence (Blue Cross). My recollection is that they are raising their rates again next year, by 14.7%.

That simply can’t go on year after year. Or if it does, it has to limit the funds available for faculty (and other staff) salaries. Remember salaries?

Total compensation (salary + benefits) is basically a given worker costs UO.

If medical costs keep exploding, as with Regence, it has to come out of something else — basically, salary increases.

Will “advocacy for diversity” become a requirement for tenure and promotion? Look here:

Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Richard Lariviere

“The community of KU reveres individual worth and dignity, and believes that advocacy for diversity and inclusion is a major responsibility entrusted to all campus community members.”

The question of Regence vs. Providence for PEBB is of course more of a state-level question rather than one that we can do anything about at the UO or even OUS level. The good news is that it almost always makes sense to self-insure if you have a large enough pool, and I haven’t heard anyone question whether the UO state employee pool is large enough. Because the state is taking on risk, we should save money. It is doubtful this will do much to the rate at which costs are rising. Those costs are driven by a number of things (better care; expensive new hospitals; end-of-life care; medicare reimbursing at lower (comparative) rates; more uninsured whose costs get passed along to the insured; “defensive medicine” leading to unnecessary tests and procedures; other perverse care incentives) which insurance has little-to-no control over. Maybe the state can negotiate with providers better than Regence could, but that’s doubtful since Regence has been by far the biggest player in the state for a long time. The funny part – more of amusement rather than directly relevant to uomatters – is that this switch happened not too long after the CEO of Regence campaigned for Kulongoski’s opponent in the governor’s race. Politicians prize loyalty first, competence (usually a distant) second…

To the previous Anonymous, who favors the split of the VP for Advancement into two VPs — Advancement and University Relations — I would ask: How much will this cost? Say, $300K/year (after all the add-ons)? Then from where will this be procured? Faculty salaries? Library acquisitions? Maintenance?

Perhaps it will be procured from cuts elsewehre in central Administration — VP Dyke’s office, perhaps? — but somehow I doubt it.

But this highlights the importance of the point made elsewhere here, that it’s important to keep a focus on the proportions of the budget going to the various large aggregates — i.e. Administration vs. Instruction, and so forth.

Hey UO Matters … hope you took a break from watchdog activities to enjoy some sun and ice cream yesterday afternoon. Got to admit the new Prez has made a nice start by making the rounds.

I have to admit, he has a nice smile and looks good with his natty hat. He’s from Iowa, worked at Kansas? Maybe a nice honest guy for a change.

He says he wants to deal, soon, with the faculty salary problem. We’ll see. Does he have the number smarts to figure out how to pay for it? Does he know how badly funded UO is? Or is he going to end up slack-jawed like Linda Brady when he wakes up to reality? As former Dean at Texas and provost at Kansas, he would seem to have the mental mojo to understand budgets.

If not, we’ll have to rely on Frances to give him the prompts.

End of comment!

Ah, come on. Dave is going to figure out how to get more money for Oregon higher education. After all, he’s done a great job of that at UO, right?

Wait a minute, doesn’t the current provost complain that UO has the lowest state subsidy per student of any campus in OUS?

Is there something wrong with this picture?

Re the Golden Parachute: This is absolutely necessary to keep this man’s vast talent working for the good UO. He needs a secretary and a GTF — what if he wants to write his memoirs, like Henry Kissinger, Al Gore, or Sarah Palin? And we need him teaching at UO. Do we want OSU or PSU to hire him away? Don’t you know, he could be an adjunct somewhere else, if UO is too chintzy. If you want quality, you have to pay for it. Can’t you guys see this?

while the previous post is likely in jest – one can never be sure. What one can be sure of is that, while Frohnmayer is an accomplished Orator, this is not the same as effective teaching, but on the other hand, this is the UO and the UO doesn’t know what effective teaching is anyway – they value style over substance – because substance, creates tension, requires effort and ultimately is devalued.

When you all get your marching orders you may end up nostalgic for the days when Martinez was just an expensive drone. I looked up an earlier post, found it, a quote from our supreme dear leader I mean pres when he was KU Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Richard Lariviere. The cultural competency plan returning with a swell hat?

“The community of KU reveres individual worth and dignity, and believes that advocacy for diversity and inclusion is a major responsibility entrusted to all campus community members.”

The best I can say is that he speaks with a somewhat forked tongue. “advocacy for diversity a major responsibility entrusted to all campus community members” very creepy sounding.

Maybe he hasn’t yet laid on the div/qual BS, but the RG (3/11/09) did report the following:

“Lariviere also spoke about his support for diversity and sustainability, two topics that often generate the most support and the most demands from students. He called sustainability the same kind of transformative issue that civil rights was when he was an undergraduate.”

Sustainability really going to be like the civil rights movement? With Freedom Rides, mass marches, urban riots, perhaps?

Please, let this be a misreading of the tea leaves.

Today is Saturday. There is a great letter in the Register Guard about how Frohnmayer should stop ripping off the people of Oregon today.

It is highly likely that the NCAA will be moving
the date for the national championships back
to the previous week as a result of streamling
the regional quals. I don’t believe the decision
for the UO to reverse itself has anything to do
with athletics vs academics, but everything to
do with logistics.

It is physically impossible, in the downbeat town of Eugene, to accomodate out of town
visitors for both graduation and a national championship in the same weekend.

If Dan Lawton wanted to talk to conservative professors, he could have found some — not in the departments he mentions, to be sure — but among the faculty who bravely, and very publicly, fought against the draconian UO “Diversity” plan. I don’t know how long he has been a student, but that was only three years ago, it ended at the end of spring term 2006. A little research on his part — is he supposed to be a competent journalist someday? — would have been very informative.

Furthermore, the claims about journalism “professors” in the CSM piece sound a little fishy to me. He says they were sharing an office. Are there real tenure-track professors in journalism who don’t have their own offices?

Aside from this, they are unnamed. Perhaps the story is completely on the level, but how is anyone to know?

I sort of agree with the dog. It’s not controversial to say an open mind is good. But groupthink sets in pretty easily and I’m not sure we even know when it happens. We need the crazies on both sides to keep challenging us in the middle.

In any case, my read on Lawton’s piece is that he is claiming some faculty minds at UO are not that open, and that this is most true in the disciplines where it’s most relevant, social sciences and journalism.

Interesting, two emails relevant to posts came across just a few minutes ago.

One an announcement from Coltrane’s office about a female-only internship in DC.

The other about Brad Shelton’s appointment as Vice Provost. I don’t think he is any fan of Frances Dyke. It will be interesting to see how those two get along.

I doubt that Dyke has any fans among the faculty and, while there clearly is need for extra competence in Dyke’s office, its not at all clear that such competence needs to come from a 1/2 time faculty person. Brad is a capable person, but this position just may be death and I may or may not be the dog, depends on the bark.

A point about Brad Shelton’s appointment — is this a further example of administrative bloat? i.e. 3/4 (according to the papers, not 1/2) of a full professor converted into a new (I believe) vice-provost?

For the record, the professor Dan was talking about is an adjunct (whose name Dan doesn’t include in his column, but does include on his blog, danlawton.com) who does indeed share his office with other adjuncts and at least one associate professor.

This website is getting interesting!

Interesting that the person — faculty member? — who defends the party registration discrepancy does so exclusively on the basis of facutly self-interest. Very telling!

What about the interests of the students and taxpayers and donors who actually provide for the salaries (in return for honest labor)? Do those interests not count for anything?

Or is the claim that only liberal/left voices are worth hearing?

Is this what is meant by “diversity” at UO?

Exactly what “exorbitant packages that the unionized staff get” are you referring to? Because I want one.

I am a mid-career professional in a classified administrative position on campus, in the middle of the salary range for my classification. A cursory search shows that a person entering a comparable position at Ohio State would make a minimum of 10% more than I do currently, in a city with a cost of living that is 18% lower than that of Eugene. In Lawrence, I would start out making about 13% less than my current UO salary, but in a city where the cost of living is 17% lower. I’d still come out ahead, but then I wouldn’t get the privilege of working for y’all.

To respond to the next commenter in the thread (we could use threads here on this blog) – as for whether “liberal/left voices” are the only ones worth hearing – it depends on what you mean. It is worth having a diversity of voices on questions such as abortion/euthanasia, affirmative action, the history of colonialism, the history of war, the study of gender roles, etc. The question – for people of all stripes – is how good you are at stepping out from your own point of view, as needed for scholarship.

But there are other kinds of issues which are sometimes framed politically as well. Is evolution left/liberal? Is studying the effects of climate change and/or human land use on biodiversity liberal? Is researching thorough comparisons between our health care system and those of other countries liberal? If your answer is yes, they are liberal, so we should offer an opposing viewpoint (the world was created in seven days; there is no such thing as climate change and man has dominion over the animal world, so we shouldn’t study these kinds of questions; who cares what other countries do – our system must be the best because America is the best) then I would say that in such cases only the liberal viewpoint is worth hearing. There might be two sides to any issue, but in some cases one side is stupid, and doesn’t deserve to be represented at a university.

Look, I disagree just as strongly with tripe such as the idea that our primary role as a university is to effect social change. But I’ve heard this tired politics of faculty argument way too many times (back in 2005, faculty were supposedly a marginalized minority, one of the last pockets of a dying liberalism). Both the “a university is supposed to bring about social change” and the “universities must be administering ideological litmus tests” points of view are old-school culture warrior fodder. Let’s move on.

About the “exorbitant packages”: it’s salary plus benefits, not just salary, relative to the local/state labor market. Medical and especially pension benefits in Oregon are way higher than elsewhere. (True for faculty and professional staff too.) There are studies that show that Oregon public workers generally — not faculty, who are way low — are overcompensated (salaries plus benefits) relative to other states. In a state with below-average per capita income.

About Columbus and Lawrence: there are reasons why the cost of living is lower in those places. Ever tried to the mountains or oceans?

There are also reasons why e.g. housing is more expensive in Oregon, a lot of it is deliberate choices made by the electorate. We have to live with it.

I have nothing against the classified workers getting a good deal, but fact is they are getting well above market, above what the rest of Oregon gets in comparable jobs. WAY above Lane County. Why should the rest of us support it?

A long time ago when us dogs were primitive – we too thought there were two sides to any issue: 1) the correct side and 2) the stupid side. However,
over time, we came to realize that the stupid side was usually the manifestation of our own biases and instantaneous judgements; therefore, to be more fair, we developed a system of education to prove that the stupid side, was indeed the stupid side. In some cases, we fond that our initial judgement was wrong and the stupid side, in fact, was not all that stupid.

Then we educated the younger dogs in this concept and methodology of proof and balance and then we evolved collectively to become more enligthened dogs.

Oh yah, we called our system a University.

President Lariviere is undoubedly facing numerous “messes” left by his predecessor, but there is one that he could quickly address and which would go a long way towards developing confidence in his commitment to fairness and equity. This is the upcoming trial in the race discrimination suit filed by former Professor Paula Rogers.

A lengthy article in the Eugene Weekly described this case a few months ago (see the March 19 issue), and it is now scheduled for trial in late August. The Bureau of Labor and Industries already found in Professor Rogers’ favor, and those in the know suggest that this provides a strong indication that she will prevail in court. However, the University has persisted in fighting tooth and nail, harassing Professor Rogers and her family at every turn. As documented in the EW story, this reaction to those who dare challenge the administration has typified the UO administration throughout Frohnmayer’s tenure.

President Lariviere (and the University) would be well served if he took an independent look at this case and others that are pending. Given the role that Melinda Grier has played in previous cases, we’d strongly suggest that she not be involved in these reviews (and should, in fact, be high on the list of those to leave the administration). Failure to address these issues will undoubtedly lead to even worse feelings regarding the administration as well as continuing waste of money and resources.

Not absolutely true that the success rate has been 100%, I know it wasn’t last year.

But the point is well taken, tenure has become routine at UO. A lot of possible reasons, I won’t speculate here. But once you get into that mode, hard to escape.

One of the major arguments for tenure is that it gives an opportunity to “cull the herd” — let perfectly decent people go because they just don’t measure up to certain aspirations — thereby improving the overall quality. With virtually certain tenure, however, that rationale disappears. It begins to look like just another form of featherbedding. Not cool when universities, like UO, are increasingly using adjuncts.

It may be that tenure will come under increasing attack, it already is, as more and more a “peculiar institution”. Aside from helping to ward off the evident creeping mediocrity at UO, tougher tenure standards would make it possible to have a credible argument for continuation of the practice.

Maybe jumping the gun a bit on tuition and fees for 2009-20?

The OUS press release of UO costs for next year is about $500 less than the UO estimate. Check out the websites

http://www.ous.edu/news_and_information/news/071009.php

and

http://admissions.uoregon.edu/expense/estexp.htm

if these transfer.

Confusing and easy to see how someone could jump to alarming conclusions. Maybe the UO website just shows their avaricious wishful thinking?

re Requirement for Tenure: Since tenure is intended to protect scholars from retribution for pursuing or pronouncing controversial ideas, a requirement for tenure (and for retention of tenure) should include a demonstrated ability and propensity for the public utterance of discomforting positions.

as previously established above – the requirement for tenure at the UO recently is having a pulse;
nothing more or less seems to matter.

I heard Charles Martinez was up for tenure this year – did he get it?

I had heard that the tenure rate was very high during the Brady years. I have no data on 2009. However, I’ve heard that the “turnback” rate in CAS for promotion to full professor was very high. But again, I don’t know.

If we’re going to talk about tenure and promotion rates, we should at least know what we’re talking about. Things like the 3 year dismissal rate mentioned by someone else, and also cases that get withdrawn during the tenure-year process, need to be taken into account.

On the other hand, there seems to be a lot of union agitating going on at UO. (And what’s with this website referring to “the Union”? There may be a “proposed union”, or “would-be union”, but there certainly isn’t anything that I would call “the Union”, not that I’ve heard about.

And if UO does get unionized, there will effectively be a 100% tenure rate. The distinction between tenure-track and non-tenure-track will probably blur into indistinction.

The Foundation and Development gave a loan to something or someone or spent some money it needs to keep hidden or secret and it has to be replaced before the Oct 15th deadline for their 990 IRS report.

I do believe it is time to do some serious digging…This administration may messing with University funds in a manner that is not appropriate and “legal?”. A forenic team of CPA’s should do the trick.

This institution has survived over a 150 years with very little problems…why are there problems now? Think about it. A letter of concern to the Governor should start something..if not that a collective group of concerned should talk to our Legslative body.