5/24/2013: The OUS F&A committee has unanimously voted to endorse the tuition increase proposals and send them to the full OUS board for approval in June.
Meanwhile Zillow has just increased it’s estimate of the market value of Pernsteiner’s soon to be vacant Treetops mansion to $1.3M. No word on recent maintenance costs.
5/23/2013: Students gotta pay for Pernsteiner’s severance, Bean’s sabbatical, and the Jock Box tutoring. Betsy Hammond has the latest in the Oregonian.
154 page OUS F&A committee docket here. Jamie Moffitt’s big idea for saving money? Merge the UO kitchen and wood-shop. Sounds tasty, but I think I’ll stick with the Noodle Head.
Some data: Over the past 5 years UO has added
- 21% more students
- 28% more administrators
- only 14% more staff
- only 10% more tenure track faculty
Why isn’t President Gottfredson having discussions with the faculty and the Senate on how to get UO’s spending priorities back in balance?
UO is about to cut a massive Ponderosa Pine on Moss Street. It is right next to the daycare center at 17th and Moss. When we filed a appeal against the UO daycare center permit that was granted by the City of Eugene planning department it was one of the issues we raised. We predicted that the center project would kill the tree. Now the tree is posted for removal. The posting on the tree states that the reason for the tree dying is unknown. Well, if the arborist put down the crack pipe maybe he could figure it out. I watched those sutaino-ghouls tear out most of the tree root systems. Hope you can help inform campus and others of this crime by the City of Eugene and certain goose-stepping UO planners.
Eugene is a valley floor and in its natural state would be a grassland, maybe with a little help from fires set by the natives. Look at the pictures from the early days. The trees don’t belong here, they were planted by indian killer immigrants, nostalgic for their New England landscape. Chop them, chainsaw them, burn them, poison them with roundup. Whatever it takes to put our once fair city back to the way evolution intended it to be.
Dog says
1. The valley’s natural state is one of Oak Savannah mixed in with prairie
grasses.
2. Ponderosa Pine is native in the interior hills starting around 44
degrees latitude and continuing on South. It is not uncommon to have such
trees near the hills.
3. That particular tree likely predates the coming of the killer immigrants.
Dog doesn’t know much about the trees he pees on. The campus area has no tree that “predates the coming” of white settlement. Urban trees do not live as long as their wild counterparts, with average lifespans in the city of several decades.
Thanks for your insights on the noble Ponderosa Pine. How does that relate to the OUS committee docket?
So the Doug fir trees in Hendricks park are only a few decades old?
Dog replies to A. Stahl
only the first 5 words of your rebuttal are necessary
Hendricks Park is not within “the campus area,” at least not to someone who used to walk to school through the Park most every day in the late 60s and early 70s. The oldest Douglas-firs in the Park are about 200 years. Street-side urban trees fare not nearly so well.
The figures on staff hiring are pretty damning. It doesn’t look like the situation has improved since the departure of Frohnmayer.
This is stuff the UO senate and the senate budget committee should be analyzing, reporting on, and responding to with the administration. Hardly a peep, though.
They wonder why the troops voted for a union and continue to agitate. The troops may not have all the statistics handy, but maybe they know something isn’t right?
The FTE number is not a good comparator. It looks fairly even; however, the dollars behind those FTE are probably very unevenly distributed as the admin average salary is probably around 10 times that of staff especially if you take out IT staff (assuming police are not in staff).
Dog agrees
FTE numbers really can hide dirt and undervalue various trends. This is
particularly true in terms of the category “All Other Faculty” since that
integrates over a large amount of fractional FTE. Its unclear to me if
two faculty at 0.5 FTE represent and investment that is the same as 1.0 FTE –
personally I think not and that two faculty at 1/2 time are greater then
1 faculty at full time.
However, once again, the major indicator is to divide Student FTE by TTF FTE
and that’s our trajectory.
The FTE numbers may be a crude measure, but they are so off-balance that they cry out for investigation and explanation — if the administration doesn’t want to explain them, the various faculty representatives should.
Again, Officers of Administration is a big catch-all group. It is not just Johnson Hall upper admns. It includes your office manager, all the football, basketball, cheer squad etc, coaches, laboratory managers, IT professionals, program directors, advisors, etc. many making very average type salaries.