Tag Archives: administrative bloat

Central / executive admins and regular OA’s

By | | Uncategorized
2 Comments

3/25/2013. It’s been brought to my attention that I’ve been a bit too loose with the “UO’s administrators are overpaid” meme. There are a lot of UO OA’s that are certainly not fattening up at the Johnson Hall trough, and I apologize for lumping them together. Today the Chronicle published new data on salaries for university professionals. Full database here, and a snippet, just to remind people that we depend on the work lot of OAs who are not getting rich off UO:

For comparison, the file on comparator pay for the types on interim Provost Bean’s org chart is here. I’ll put together a comparison with UO pay in a week or so, meanwhile here’s a snippet:

Beangram and UO admin salary comparison

By | | Uncategorized
15 Comments
Updated with latest (last?) Beangram:

March 20, 2013 

TO:                  Officers of instruction, research and administration
FROM:            Provost Jim Bean
SUBJECT:      Multi-year salary adjustment program update 

I am writing to provide an update regarding the multi-year salary adjustment program announced in my email of March 4, 2013. 

The University is moving forward with its plan to give unrepresented Officers of Instruction and unrepresented Officers of Research a 1.5 percent across-the-board salary increase retroactive to January 2013. We are also moving forward with a 1.5 percent across-the-board increase for FY2014 and a 2 percent merit/equity pool for eligible Officers of Administration and unrepresented Officers of Instruction and unrepresented Officers of Research. The FY 2014 increases will take effect July 1. 

The University made the same offer to United Academics.  It has not been accepted at this time.  The same increases will remain available to United Academics while we negotiate economic issues with the union.

3/20/2013: I took the Chronicle data on median 2009 administrator pay at doctoral public universities from here, and matched it to the UO IR salary data for 2012, here. There’s some guess work in matching titles – seems like a fair amount of title inflation going on, and probably not just at UO. When in doubt I gave the JH folks the benefit of the doubt and put them in the higher paying comparator bin.

Keep in mind that administrators we are hiring deal with a *much* smaller budget than most of the AAU’s, since we’ve got no medical school or engineering to worry about. I think the median for PhD granting institutions is a reasonable comparator for most of these people.

You’d be hard-pressed to claim that UO is underpaying our admins – quite the opposite. From what I can tell generally the high pay extends down to the AVPs and Deans, etc. But I didn’t look at them that carefully. Comments welcome:

(A commenter pointed me to more recent data, I’m updating the spreadsheet that was here, I’ll post it tonight. (OK, never got around to that, sorry.) Meanwhile, I’ll point out that the Chancellor of UCLA is paid $409K, while President Gottfredson gets $540K.)

Update: Administrative raise documents

By | | Uncategorized
4 Comments

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).

UO administrative bloat makes the Wall Street Journal

By | | Uncategorized
25 Comments

We’re the 4th highest of 72 public “high research category” universities in the percentage of total spending that goes to administration. See the data here, story here. “Administrative spending includes management of the university including human resources, legal, financial, purchasing and marketing operations, among others.”

UO spends 12% on this, the median university spends 7%. On the other hand, if you rank by dollars spent, we’re close to the median. See the Bunsis report for the time-series view. It’s increasing at a faster rate than instructional spending. And don’t get me started about research spending.

In a nutshell, we’re a poor university with a bloated administration. Bloated and in denial – click below to see our interim provost Jim Bean in 2009, claiming we spend 38% of what our peers spend on administration:


When I asked Bean for documentation for his claims, he ignored me. When I made a public records request, he tried to charge me to see his data:

The University of Oregon has received your public records request for a copy of memos, budget statements, and or forecasts that Provost Bean used as background for statements he made at the April 14, 2009 Town Hall meeting and at the May 13, 2009 Senate meeting.  The University is now providing an estimate.

The University estimates the actual cost of providing the documents responsive to your request to be $45.63.   Upon receipt of a check made payable to the University of Oregon in the amount of $45.63, the University will proceed to locate, copy, and provide the records you have requested that are not exempt from disclosure.  Your check may be sent to the attention of the General Counsel’s office at 1226 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1226.  Your request for a fee waiver is respectfully denied. 

According to the WSJ data, we spend about $8 million more on administration than OSU does. That’s enough to fund 8% raises for the faculty. Thanks to several anon readers for the links, and the memories. 1/2/2013.

University branding and administrative bloat

By | | Uncategorized
10 Comments

The RG reprints a Bloomberg report on the growing pushback from faculty, students, and parents angry at how universities are wasting their money:

U.S. universities employed more than 230,000 administrators in 2009, up 60 percent from 1993, or 10 times the rate of growth of the tenured faculty, those with permanent positions and job security, according to U.S. Education Department data.

Not clear how Interim Provost Jim Bean and his claims that UO spends 38% of what our peers do on central administration managed to avoid special mention. Thanks to anon for the tip, your gift certificate for a free scotch at the faculty club bar is in campus mail. 11/14/2012.

And in response to an obviously well informed commenter – thanks – I’m posting this from the Bunsis report this Feb – do you think it is an accurate reflection? Note that almost none of the faculty growth is TTF. They went from 635 to 683 over these 5 years.

UO finances and student debt

By | | Uncategorized
14 Comments

9/25/2012: The RG’s Diane Dietz digs into the student debt situation, with a focus on UO. Some tidbits:

The prisons’ share is $1.36 billion in the current two-year budget, compared with the $691 million for the entire, seven-school Oregon University System. 

Not clear if that includes direct state aid to students, a common way of understating higher ed spending.

Eckstein, formerly the UO student body president, said it’s too easy for universities to turn to students and require them to make up the shortfall. “What is the university doing as an institution to shoulder the burden of some of the state funding cuts? There were no specific answers on how the university made an effort to reduce costs before turning to tuition increases,” he said.

Jock Box, Mac court payments, rigged overhead rates, UO Police, administrative bloat have all been problems, here PERS gets its share of the blame for costs:

Mike Bellotti, former UO football coach and athletic director, is the top PERS beneficiary, receiving $496,000 annually. Former UO President Dave Frohnmayer; Frank Anderson, a longtime UO mathematics professor; and Peter Von Hippel, a UO professor of biophysical chemistry and molecular biology for 36 years, rank among the state’s top 10 PERS beneficiaries, each receiving well over $200,000 a year. [Much of these payments are essentially paid by PERS out of current contributions from state agencies like UO.]

Faculty and administrators got raises, too:

Last year, Lariviere handed out $5 million in special raises to 1,100 faculty members and administrators. “It was an effort to close the gap between where we were and our comparator institutions. We are now at 88 percent of the average,” said Berdahl, who temporarily took over after the state fired Lariviere, in part, because the raises flew in the face of Gov. John Kitzhaber’s directive that state agencies curb personnel costs. Again, this July, the university spent $2.6 million in a 3.5 percent across-the-board salary increase for 900 administrators, mostly middle managers and professional staff.

This is a long article covering many contentious issues. It’s good to see the RG taking a skeptical look at UO’s decisions.

Oregon universities are hiring (administrators).

By | | Uncategorized
5 Comments

From a very good piece by Hannah Hoffman in the Statesman Journal (She also had a recent story on PERS, and is now running the excellent “State Worker’s Blog“).

The boom is consistent with enrollment growth. So, how much of the hiring is new faculty? You could ask our clueless provost Jim Bean, but the best data I’ve seen is from the AAUP’s Howard Bunsis and his February report to the UO faculty union organizers. Bean and Berdahl’s failure to give a credible response – or any response – to this report is a big part of the reason we are now unionized. (Whoops –  as a comment notes, Bean was actually on “sabbatical” when the vote occurred. Lorraine Davis was acting provost.)

The increase in FT Faculty is largely adjuncts. There’s been very little increase in tenure track numbers at UO:
From 1992 to 2012 the number of students has increased by more than 50% (data here) and the number of tenure track faculty by less than 20%.
Since 2008 the number of students has increased about 20%, the number of tenure track faculty about 10%. 

New president to hire 300 new faculty

By | | Uncategorized
23 Comments

That would be Susan Herbst, the new President of the University of Connecticut. From the Chronicle, which also describes similar plans by Iowa and Minnesota:

Our power is always going to be in the faculty,” she says. “They’re the people with the ideas. I feel sometimes in higher education we’re forgetting that.”

Student enrollment at Connecticut has more than doubled since 1995, while the number of faculty has increased by only 16 percent, raising the student-to-faculty ratio from 14-to-1 to 18-to-1. Ms. Herbst wanted to reverse the trend and hired a consulting firm to help identify ways the university could find money for hiring. University officials estimate that the plan to create 300 faculty positions will cost about $50-million.

The consultants, McKinsey & Company, made suggests including revamping information-technologies services and centralizing purchasing, an area in which the consultants said the university could generate more than $20-million in savings. The consultants also recommended ways to increase revenue, such as by raising Connecticut’s relatively low parking fees and increasing ticket prices for athletics events.

Maybe our new president Mike Gottfredson will take a skeptical look at the bloated Johnson Hall budget and the ever increasing central administration tax rate in Brad Shelton’s budget model, and do something similar. Or maybe Provost Jim Bean – appointed without a search – will convince Gottfredson that the money’s better spent on hidden athletic subsidies like the Jock Box, BMWs and administrative sabbaticals, campus police 4×4’s, Rose Bowl junkets, and more “special assistants” like his friend John Moseley. Post on UO’s lack of a serious academic plan to hire faculty to teach all our new students is here. Berdahl’s surprise announcement that we will have 25,000 students this fall rather than the 24,000 planned for, is here.

Beavs sweep Ducks on public records access

By | | Uncategorized
5 Comments

5/28/2012: Back in November the RG editors criticized President Lariviere for the raises that brought down the Governor’s wrath, 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. …

How did the administration go about justifying raises for each other and benefits like cars and family Rose Bowl trips? The documents and thin rationalizations are here.

It took Nathan Tublitz more than three months to get this info via the public records process. Initially UO told him he’d have to pay $4,328.63 to see the records for all administrators. Tublitz narrowed his request to a few top administrators. Even after that it took more than a month, many emails, and a meeting of the Senate Transparency Committee to get UO to release this information.

Some faculty at Oregon State tried to get the same info for some of their top administrators, who also got some hefty raises. They sent the OSU public records officer an email, got a $35 estimate (should have asked for a fee waiver, this should be a slam dunk with their DA) and a week later they had the documents. Full dump here, warning 9MB file.

It’s the coverup that destroys trust. In a few short months Bob Berdahl has managed to do some major damage to the improvements in public records transparency initiated by Lariviere. It’s shameful. But I hadn’t realized we were this far behind.

Goodbye to all that academic planning

By | | Uncategorized
3 Comments

6/17/2012 update.

Latest rumors say we will have ~25,200 students on campus next fall, that doctoral enrollment is flat at less than 1200 instead of the 1500 in the plan, and that there will be ~30 more tenure-track faculty, for a total of about 725 instead of the ~796 in the plan.

To get back to the 1995 student/faculty ratio would take 961 tenure track faculty.

5/11/2012: Jim Bean’s 2009 academic plan is supposed to be UO’s working plan for our academic future. It’s mostly the usual JH yada-yada, but it does have a few numbers, all of which have been subsequently ignored:

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). This managed and marginal growth …

Graduate Students. We intend to increase the proportion of graduate students (excluding law) from 15 percent to above 19 percent, which is more reflective of our AAU peers. …  Even more importantly for our viability as a world-class research institution, 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 …

The baseline year was 07-8. All numbers are for fall of the AY, from UO Institutional Research. Rumor has it that the administration is now planning on 25,200 students for 2012. If the student rumor is correct, we will need to have 97 new TT faculty hires, net of retirements and departures, coming to campus fall 2012 to return the Student/TTF ratio to its 2007 baseline, or a total of 795.

Year Students TT Faculty Student/TTF ratio
2007-08 20,376 642 31.7
2011-12 24,447 696 35.1
2012-13 25,200(?) ? ?
  

That’s not going to happen – our provosts have already spent too much money on guns, lawyers, their Johnson Hall renovations, raises, sabbaticals, cars, and sports junkets and subsidies. Here’s the plot of the number of students per TTF, through fall 2010:

UO’s finances

By | | Uncategorized
16 Comments

2/17/2012: I wish that UO’s CFO would give the faculty a honest talk about UO’s current spending and that our Provost would give a consult with the faculty about UO’s future budgeting priorities. But Jim Bean and Frances Dyke have never given us a clear data-based presentation of where they are spending our money, and what they think UO’s future spending priorities should be. It’s almost like they’ve got something to hide.

Information abhors a vacuum. So yesterday Howard Bunsis of the AAUP came and did our administration’s job for them. His slides are here. Here’s one particularly damning one.

I assume the faculty union organizers will post a video of this presentation soon. Howard Bunsis’s talk is the best argument I’ve seen for signing the union card, aside from the pandering nonsense Jim Bean delivers, here.

Update: A commenter posts a link to the 2008 Senate Budget Committee report on faculty salaries, here, with this figure:

Which side are you on?

By | | Uncategorized
Comments Off on Which side are you on?

2/16/2012: From the union organizer’s website here:

How can faculty have a real voice in setting priorities?

Thursday, February 16th
4:00-5:30pm
115 Lawrence

Hear speakers address these critical areas:

Howard Bunsis, a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan University and Secretary-Treasurer of the AAUP

Dr. Bunsis, an expert in the analysis of university budgets, previously presented his analysis of the UO’s financial condition in February 2011 (http://uauoregon.org). This new presentation extends his analysis to budgetary developments during 2011-2012, some of which may have implications for the current legislative session. …

Or you can listen to our once and future beamer driving Provost Jim Bean brag about how UO spends only 38% of what our peers do on administration, here:

But don’t ask to see the public records – he’ll make you pay.

Administrative bloat, Delta Cost, Howard Bunsis

By | | Uncategorized
1 Comment

2/8/2012: Excellent story in the Chronicle on the Delta Cost Project on higher education, and their influence in the Obama administration and Congress.

I started this blog back in 2009, after the furlough town hall where the administration tried to convince the faculty to take voluntary pay cuts. (They took the cuts themselves too – but then offset them with raises. Provost Bean started 2009 with an annual salary of $295,000, took a few unpaid furlough days, then got a raise to $306,800. This was almost exactly enough to offset his furlough days. Actually it left him with an overall *gain* of some $246 for the year.) One striking part of the meeting was when Bean claimed UO’s administrative expenses were just 38% of our peers:

When I tried to get Bean to show me the documents supporting this assertion, I got the runaround for months. They eventually tried to charge me $75 to see the public records. Then it turned out Bean was using the wrong numbers. I got the right ones from The Delta Project and their online database of the federally required reports to IPEDS. Looking at UO’s spending per student FTE compared to Carnegie Public Research university averages, for 2008, they show UO spent:

  • $2,347 on Central administration. 96% of the average
  • $8,850 on Instruction. 91% of the average
  • $1,937 on Academic support: 70% of the average
  • $3,521 on Research. 63% of the average

Definitions here. These are the result of long trends. Since 2001 UO enrollment is up 26%, TT faculty up 9%, and administrators up 36%.

Now the faculty Union organizers will be staging a town hall of their own, Th Feb 16, 4-5:30 in 115 Lawrence. The first presenter:

Howard Bunsis, Ph.D., CPA, JD, an expert in the analysis of university budgets, previously presented his analysis of the UO’s financial condition in February 2011 (available online at http://uauoregon.org/financial–analysis-of-uo). This new presentation extends his analysis to budgetary developments during 2011-2012, some of which may have implications for the current legislative session.

His analysis from last year relied heavily on the Delta Cost data and was a welcome contrast to the distortions and confusion that our administration has put out on these issues. I’m looking forward to his update.

New Budget Model revisited

By | | Uncategorized
4 Comments

1/25/2012: Back in Feb 2010 – almost 2 years ago – I wrote the overly optimistic post below, about Brad Shelton’s “New Budget Model”. The idea was that money should follow students – except for a tax for central admin expenditures. At the time the tax rate for Johnson Hall was 28%. How’s this working out?

Not so good. Read Shelton’s web site here. The September 2011 tax rate had been raised to 35%. And it turns out even this is not enough to pay the $2 million in raises for administrators like Frances Dyke and de Kluyver, Jim Bean’s beamer and 5 big pet ideas, Police, the $1.83 million Bean and Frances Dyke have had us paying for Jock Box tutoring, subsidized overheads rates for athletics, etc. Forget about legitimate basic central administration functions like IT support, research startup, accounting, classrooms, etc.

So, word down at the faculty club is that the central administration is now organizing another raid on the money that is supposed to support our academic mission. Either another tax increase, or possibly new CFO Jamie Moffitt will abandon the whole thing, and go back to budgeting a la Moseley. Comments welcome.

2/11/2010: Brad Shelton, UO’s new VP for Budgeting, has been working on a new budget model for UO. This model will specify how UO’s money is allocated to the schools and the administration. I think this budget model will do three important things besides answering the big question of why is budgeting important when it comes to the school and administration.

First, it will provide some basic transparency about where our money comes from and where it goes. Many of the newly available public resources on UO expenditures derive from Shelton’s need for the information to complete this process. Until he got involved, this information was deliberately hidden away from the faculty and even the colleges, and there was no prospect for open debate on UO spending priorities.

Second, the model will, for the first time, impose a hard budget constraint on the administration. In the past, when Frances Dyke and Linda Brady wanted to spend a few million remodeling Johnson Hall, or Frohnmayer wanted to give Moseley a fat retirement deal, or Moseley needed to spend a million on a new Diversity office quick to cover up a lawsuit, or Jim Bean wanted to give his friends a raise on the sly, they simply did it. Then they figured out later who to take the money from. Under the new model, the administration will get a cut of the gross, and they will have to live within it. How radical – education comes before administration.

Third, the model will make clear the extent to which student tuition money from CAS, Business and Journalism goes to support the other colleges and the such administrative adventures as Bend, Portland, Sustainability, OIED, and Bean’s “big ideas”. No comment on whether or not these are good ideas, but if they are good, why hide the numbers?

The basic plan is simple: Colleges will keep the tuition they collect, but pay a 28% tax to the administration for central services. The administration will also get the state allocations. (This seems odd – it would be more politic to allocate them to instruction.) The details are already getting ugly however. The biggest issue – after the tax rate – is what gets grandfathered in. The administration has been on a splurge for the past 5 years – does this go into their base? Similarly, some colleges are subsidized by others. In particular, CAS and to a lesser extent Business subsidize Law, Music, Bend and now Portland. According to some calculations CAS gives up $23 million to the other schools, Business give up $9 million, and Journalism also is in a hole. Are these arrangements going to continue, or will more money go to CAS? From what I hear the new model will lock in the current subsidies. But since new tuition money will be allocated to where the students are, over 5 or 10 years the percent going to administrative bloat, and the extent of the cross-subsidies, will gradually decrease.

Importantly, this model will be applied at the college level – not at the department level. But obviously it will make it easier to think about allocation issues between departments as well, and it’s hard to imagine that won’t have some impact before long

One critical part of this plan is improved financial transparency. As I said, developing this plan has required the preparation of much more information than has previously been available about UO expenditures, and Shelton has been great about making it public, along with Kelly Wolf, and Laura Hubbard. But once the system is in place, the games will begin. Administrators will try to put their pet projects onto the instructional side. So it will be important for the ongoing expenditures to be transparent too.

As it happens, because of a motion Nathan Tublitz got through the Senate last year, the UO Senate Financial Transparency Working Group is developing a solution to this now, in collaboration with UO Controller Kelly Wolf. Soon any UO employee will be able to access transaction level details from UO’s accounting system, via a link on your duckweb page. So next time the administration decides to give one (or three) of their own $750,000 golden parachute buyouts, everyone will be able to see that the money comes from a fund that was established for retiring tenured teaching faculty. We still might not be able to do anything about it, but at least it will be common knowledge.

Bottom line, the administrators will keep their current loot. Music, Law and AAA will still be subsidized by CAS. But the sort of thing that Moseley is (still) doing with Bend will not happen again. And if UO continues to grow, over time more of the new tuition money will go to CAS for instructional purposes than has been true in the past.