Check your January paystub – there should be an extra 4 hours in there. Why? UO had shorted 9 month faculty on their pay for September, with some strange calendrical calculations that had been going on for years. In some half-months faculty were underpaid, in some overpaid. Looking forward there were going to be more underpayments than overpayments, so the union filed a grievance and the Administration eventually had to make faculty whole. Apparently OSU had been making the same mistake – but it only took their administration a month to fix it.
This works out to about $250 for the average faculty member, or almost enough to buy a Nigerian Dwarf Goat – get em while they last! https://eugene.craigslist.org/grd/d/myrtle-creek-adga-nigerian-dwarf-kids/7702201873.html
Don’t forget the Wandering Goat in the Whiteacker neighborhood, and the Wild Goat on Franklin.
It’s not even enough to buy a billy, much less a fecund nanny. And who needs another billy? So thanks for trying union but please get us nanny goat money next time.
Meanwhile our candidates for our open tenured position are getting preemptive retention offers while our admins won’t do retention raises or equity raises to deal with salary inversions.
They won’t or they can’t? I’m told recent state regulations hamper them. Any truth to that?
The state pay equity law requires employers to pay people doing similar work the same. There are differential factors like experience and training you can use, but you can’t pay someone differently because they threaten to go somewhere else.
There is absolutely nothing in state regulations that hampers them from paying everyone more and thus retaining a high quality faculty.
I have worked as a faculty at several different Universities, including 1 in Europe. I received tenure at one of those Universities and took a 30% pay cut when I came to the UO. My experience strongly suggests that salary is the LEAST likely factor in retaining a high quality faculty.
n=1
Cool. Let’s cut your salary to $1 so we can spend some money on external consultants to tell us that we need to invest our IT infrastructure to enhance and embrace a nimble perspective on service delivery while building out a compassionate institutional culture.
(Sorry, IT folks that read this. I feel your pain.)
While we’re on IT, can anyone explain why they now lock down my laptop with spyware that prevents me from installing software, while still letting me use the same 10-year-old 6 digit password to log onto duckweb and enter student grades, change direct deposit instructions etc?
Yes, I can explain that.
But, better question: What should you do?
Buy your own laptop and manage it yourself, if you can. Not that expensive in itself, but painful if you need a UO site license for something. Use the guest network and web interfaces. Might work.
Need more firepower? Go to the cloud. Not cheap, but it’s not under IT’s thumb, which is worth a lot. I know people doing this.
Basically, if UO computing isn’t cutting it, take your ball and go home.
Perhaps Dog could explain WHY UO was attractive to him in spite of a 30% salary cut. What else did UO offer, and did it work out as planned/estimated?
My 40 yrs of experience at 2 R1 state universities, both with fast promotions & tenure in my case, is that salary is a very important part of the mix that defines support for one’s own program. It certainly greatly affects one’s close colleagues, and their happiness is important. It certainly affects the departmental culture.
kind of a long story here but will be brief:
1. Geography was the main driver here. I want to live in
the PNW.
2. The UO at the time, offered me the potential of having
a more diverse teaching portfolio (Honors College, various
Interdisciplinary programs) than my previous appointments.
Having a broad and varied teaching portfolio was and is quite
important to me in my professional development. And this potential was realized.
3. In contrast to point 2; The overall quality and ability of graduate students would likely be lower at the UO than my
previous situations. This did turn out to be the case and I have some regrets over this, but such regrets pale in comparison to point 1.
4. As a long aside and in response to N=1…
I am a researcher with a good track record of obtaining external grants (NSF,NOAA) and this is what “defines support for one’s own program” – not my faculty salary. Now the research support environment at the UO is definitely inferior to previous employment so that did become a limiting factor and I basically had to fund my own such environment (e.g. programmers and short term technicians) and I was successful in doing so.
Now back to salary: The one thing the UO did allow, contrary to
previous, to pay 3 months (instead of 2) so that lessened the 30% pay cut over time. Now I was fortunate enough to get 3 months of summer salary for 25 years in a row. Because that salary did count towards my PERS retirement – in effect I had 25/3 years more “service” than a 9-month academic employee.
Now I am not saying this is fair -it just a fact of the system- but
it did allow for my early retirement- so this was the hidden benefit of the UO.
Now on the original issue of retaining a high quality faculty:
From my perspective it is a) the overall quality of research facilities (e.g. CamCor at the UO), infrastructure and support
and b) opportunities for professional growth and development
that help maintain high quality faculty and not the 9 month academic salary.
Although I did have PHD students at the UO-my overall production rate on a year-by-year basis was about 1/2 of what
I experienced elsewhere and this is my lingering regret about
coming to the UO- but I am certainly glad to be living here instead of Southern California or the flat Midwest or the noisy East Coast. But if trump gets re-elected I may well move back to Europe!
Thanks Dog!
I was curious about the mix of support/opportunities that went into your decision.
I think they use pay equity laws as an excuse to cost minimize but get around it whenever they want. Otherwise, how could they legally have a recently hired associate making more than fulls in the same department?
The sad truth is that unionization has definitely made the admins perspective switch to one of complete cost minimization everywhere possible. But perhaps, perhaps, the new administration headed by economist would recognize all else equal, higher pay will attract better faculty and retain them.
There are provisions for differences in merit, which they use when it suits them.
Yes. the overall level of salary inversions in various departments (particularly CAS) would seem to be the exact opposite of the pay equity law…
What gives you confidence to make that causal assessment (faculty union causes administration viewpoint change)? Sounds a bit like a version of Murc’s Law to me.