Tag Archives: UO Administration

6/9/2011: Last July we wrote:

While ORSA has been in complete disarray, the Human Subjects Protection office has been very well run. I hope they can find a worthy replacement for Juliana (Kyrk). Given what I’ve seen of other university’s IRB offices it won’t be easy. Rumor is that the general disarray at the top of ORSA led to her retirement. Don’t know how this is related to the Rich Linton resignation if at all.

Two months ago, Rich Linton wrote:

and now Christina Booth is suddenly gone. The website just says “Director – position vacant”. That explains why I never got a call back on that protocol question.

If you know the inside scoop on what happened here, and who is to blame, please don’t send an email to [email protected] And please don’t leave an anonymous comment. I don’t want to know. Please – just fix this, Provost Bean. Get down on your knees and beg Juliana to come back, hire some consultants, or whatever it is you do over there in Johnson Hall.

This is bush-league stuff. Over and over again. We pay you $295,000 for this? And Rich, don’t you think you might want to email the PI’s and at least tell us to forget about getting approvals for the summer?

6/8/2011: The Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For by WSJ editor Naomi Schaefer Riley is currently getting a lot of attention. Insidehighered.com has a interesting summary and interview, by Dan Berrett. The discussion is pretty lively too.

Q: The title and subtitle together imply that the faculty is the chief force driving up the cost of college. But you also cite research by the Delta Project that shows that colleges have increased their non-instructional spending more than their instructional spending — and you acknowledge that professors were not the ones choosing to spend the money this way. If you had to assign rough percentages or rankings to the various reasons that, as your subtitle says, students don’t get the college education they paid for, what would they be?

A: I don’t mean to nitpick but in the title I’m blaming the faculty for not giving the students a good education, not for driving up the costs of that education. I’d say the bulk of the blame for the cost (let’s say more than half) goes to our third-party payer system of financial aid. Every time the federal government adds money to what they will kick in for student tuition, colleges jack up their prices. Administrative bloat probably accounts for another quarter of the blame. …

Do any UO departments still have faculty lounges? Graduate student common rooms? Undergraduate common rooms? Or has that all been contracted out to Cafe Roma?

The Delta Project data on costs should have the data for 2009-2010 posted in a few weeks, that will give us an update on Provost Bean’s efforts to promote administrative bloat. Last time we looked, bloat was doing fabulously:

7/30/2010: More from “The Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability” 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. We spend:

• $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

So UO spends about $70 million on research. (The measure excludes research funded by departments – e.g. when faculty spend time on research on regular pay.) The internal “big ideas” initiative that Provost Bean announced last year was an internal competition for a total of $250,000:

Colleagues:
The 2009 Academic Plan created the Phased Focus process implemented by a series of Big Ideas to power the University to the next level.  In Spring, 2009, a 15 person faculty committee chose the first set of Big Ideas from 28 submissions.  These five interdisciplinary teams were each funded with $50,000 from carryover in the Provost’s Office budget from FY09, and launched in July, 2009. …

This moves us from 63% to 63.25% of what the average public research university spends per student. Well, it would if it were recurring, actually it’s one-shot. In comparison, here’s what has happened to administrative spending in just one administrative office, Institutional Equity and Diversity:

2006   $429,000
2008   $596,000
2010   $743,000

The $314,000 increase that went to OIED (and this is before their recent hiring increase) is more than the $250,000 for research “big ideas”. And this is just one administrative office. And this happened when the administration was already receiving proportionally far more money than research.

The UO administration talks about wanting to be a top tier, flagship institution and wanting to stay in the AAU. But that is not where they are spending our money.

UO Administrators still believe that UO is “under-administrated”. WTF?

5/25/2011: (reposted, original lost in the blogger reboot).

Oregon’s unemployment rate is 10.5%, but UO is doing what it can to put people to work in key sectors of the American economy of the future. First there’s the mission critical “Cheer Advisor” job. The ad calls for:

Proven ability to manage and advise a cheerleading group of 30+
college students required.

Down at the faculty club they say the inside candidate is Pat Kilkenny. Then there’s this new position:

Dr. Dan Close, Family and Human Services Program Director and John Duncan, Director of the Holden Leadership Center wish to announce the direct interim appointment of Keri Bellotti in a 1.0 FTE position as the Coordinator of Global Services and Volunteerism …

No search, no competitive hiring process, they don’t even post the job description, and then poof – a 12 month appointment as an Officer of Administration. Wait, where have I heard that Bellotti name before, sounds familiar. Well, here’s hoping our General Counsel gets a written contract this time.

Speaking of which, Randy Geller is still searching for an Assistant General Counsel. It’s been a year now Randy, give it up, the word is out, nobody wants to work for you. Your only chance is finding someone who’s never used google.

Two more serious jobs have also been posted. Brad Shelton’s job is going from 0.5 to 1.0 FTE. Good. (But a commenter points out that Brad’s already been working 0.75 time at it. But what’s $30K between administrators?) And then there’s the announcement for the Frances Dyke replacement. I’d like to know who led the transition team that recommended Lariviere keep Ms Dyke on for his first two years, but this ad is real progress:

In 2010, in response to decreases in state funding, President Richard
Lariviere proposed a new governance and funding structure to allow for
increased autonomy in making institutional decisions. …

Reporting to the President, the new CFO will play a critical role in
positioning the UO for the future. S/he will provide counsel to the
Provost and the President regarding all financial issues and will be
expected to leverage this new market landscape, through innovative
financial strategy and management. The CFO will be expected to forge a
financial vision and strategy for the UO; enhance organizational and
operational capacity and efficiency; enhance institutional systems,
policies, and processes to support creative decision making and
responsibility centered management; increase and leverage new and
existing sources of revenue; and partner across the University and State
to make a new governance and funding vision a reality.

This is an exciting job. Lariviere is going to pay plenty and he will have his pick of candidates. And maybe Huron Consulting will hire Ms Dyke, and spare UO the 1039 hours golden parachute contract. They sure owe her.

The work would be financed using $13.5 million the university previously set aside for the project, $35 million in private donations and the rest through bonds repaid with the new student fee. The fee would start at $30 per term in 2011-12, rise to $60 per term in 2012-13 and after that would remain at $100 per term — that’s $300 for an academic year — until the bonds were repaid.

But the university system has never before allowed a school to begin collecting fees for a student building project before the building opens. The university system has figured that the students who will graduate before the project is done shouldn’t have to help pay for it. …

2/2/2011: UO now has an online “official organ”, Inside Oregon. It’s OK. They’ve even got blogs on the hot topics: Francis Dyke’s plan for an armed UO police force,

and President Lariviere’s new partnership plan. I gave their comments a test and the editor, Joe Moseley, is approving the critical stuff – though his posts are a bit obsequious. You’re spending students’ tuition money here Joe, no reason to toady to Frances. And you might want to widen the main text columns a bit.

1/25/2011: This is really bad news for UO’s future. IU press release here. UO Pres Lariviere should be firing his current top administrators and promoting people like Associate Dean Singell. Instead he has decided to keep the deadwood while focusing on his new partnership plan, and now one of our best potential replacements is leaving.

Meanwhile, rumor is that Provost Bean asked the people doing Russ Tomlin’s performance review to go easy on him, because he didn’t want to have to replace him for another 2 years. Yes, they apparently are doing performance reviews of administrators now – not that they will admit this to the faculty. How do you review the VP for Academic Affairs without asking the faculty what they think of his performance?

I’m sorry, I know this is a rude post. But I’ve put my professional career into UO. I deserve to have some input and get some minimal level of competence from the administration. We all do. And we all would even if Provost Bean’s claim that we are only spending 38% of what our peers do on administration was actually true:

12/27/2010: A Law Dean at the University of Maryland. From the Chronicle and the Sun:

Former Maryland law dean agrees to return more than $300,000

Rothenberg reaches settlement with attorney general, will return to full-time faculty duties in January 

December 22, 2010|By Childs Walker, The Baltimore Sun 

The former dean of the University of Maryland School of Law has agreed to return more than $300,000 of a $350,000 bonus questioned in a state legislative audit earlier this year, the attorney general’s office announced Wednesday.

The legislative audit, released in February, revealed that former dean Karen Rothenberg received $410,000 in “questionable” payments between fiscal 2007 and fiscal 2009. The audit embarrassed the state university system and hastened the retirement of Rothenberg’s former boss, University of Maryland, Baltimore President David Ramsay.

Rothenberg had agreed to return $60,000 earlier in the year, and she agreed to return the rest, minus taxes she has already paid on it, as part of the settlement. She will repay $311,398 in two installments, due at the end of this year and next June. She cannot face state prosecution for her actions in accepting the payments.

Here in Oregon this sort of thing was endemic under President Frohnmayer – see Moseley and of course Bellotti. OUS Chancellor Pernsteiner has done his best to keep up the tradition, with the golden parachute he gave Frohnmayer.

The UO Foundation did the same when Karen Kreft left – a huge benefits add on, and another $296,000 of retirement pay on top, if we read the IRS 990 correctly. And we assume Pernsteiner will get a similar buyout, if Kitzhaber gives him the boot.

7/23/2010: One discussion at the recent Provost’s retreat was on building trust between the administration and the faculty. Or so we heard, on the hush-hush from a visibly nervous admin type, as he looked around the room to see if the boss was listening. The Provost won’t tell the faculty much about what happens at these retreats, of course. Did you even know they were having one? Did they ask for your input on UO problems? Get a clue, people.

Speaking of transparency, good article by Audrey Williams June in the Chronicle about raising faculty salaries at Minot State:

… For institutions looking to overhaul compensation, support from the very top is key, says Ms. Fedje. Others involved in the Minot State effort strongly agree. “I think the president’s buy-in with this task force has really funnelled through the university,” says Nathan Anderson, a task-force member who builds and manages databases for the College of Education and Health Sciences. “When we first started, I think there were a lot of unknowns. But I think people have bought into what we’re doing at this point.”

A Visible Process

One reason is openness. The group has widely circulated documents about its work, held open forums, and met with the faculty and staff senates to take questions and concerns. In addition, salary-notification letters detail how a person’s pay was calculated and puts it up against the market rate, Mr. Matthews says.

“The transparency has to be there, or otherwise people aren’t going to trust what’s going on at all,” Ms. Fedje says.