3/20/2013 update. Seems like a good time to repost this classic on raises for UO administrators and the efforts JH has made to keep the process secret. You can read the WSJ on UO’s administrative bloat and listen to Bean and Frohnmayer bloviate about UO’s lean administration here.
4/3/2012: More than four months after his initial public records request, Nathan Tublitz has finally been able to obtain documents showing how the most recent raises for a few top UO administrators were determined. The file is here. It includes Jim Bartko, Jim Bean, Frances Dyke, Don Harris, Wendy Larson, Jamie Moffitt, and Russ Tomlin.
Tublitz tried to get more info, but the university told him he’d have to pay them $4,328.63 to see the records. This is the price for asking too many tough questions. These documents were for the summer 2011 round of raises. The RG editorialized about this back in November, just before the Lariviere firing, noting that fully 40% of the money was going to administrators:
“Bad Politics, Good Policy: The UO invests its tuition money in (some) people”
… The documents list “special equity raises” of $3.1 million for 743 faculty members and $1.8 million for 417 administrators. The faculty raises averaged 6.98 percent; administrators’ increases averaged 7.68 percent. …
To pick a name at random, the result of this process is that UO’s provost Jim Bean is now paid $322,140 plus a BMW and sabbatical. For comparison UC-Berkeley’s provost George Breslauer is paid $306,000. Berkeley has, roughly, four times the budget and staff of UO, and provost at Berkeley is a much more difficult job – who knows, it might even involve a competitive search and performance reviews.
For a better comparison, here are (a bit dated) salaries from the Chronicle database for schools with budgets and size similar to UO. You can get the data on UO salaries here (big file).
It’s funny how much work JH is willing to do to attempt to justify their own raises – or did they make a staff person do it for them?
How do their pay gaps compare (probably positive) to our AAU comparators?
I did like how the retrenchment became about faculty only as an afterthought when it became a PR issue in the RG giving admin raises. How many expensive administrators are in the org chart to do the job that JM used to do alone?
Great bargaining tool for the union. Present data on AAU campuses and that should be all that is needed to guarantee salary increases for faculty. UO will save money on their hired negotiators.