These comments on the President's Salary Policy revisions were sent to FACULTY ISSUES AND CONCERNS listserve and are used with the permission of authors. To subscribe to the listserve send a message to aaup@u.washington.edu
James Gregory assessment May 27, 2010:
As I read President Emmert's proposed Executive Order, it effectively guts the salary policy.
The key to the new version is that the administration will now be free to allocate salary funds in any way they see fit at any time, subject only to the meaningless requirement that the Provost provide an explanation to the Senate Planning and Budget Committee. This means that general merit increases can be suspended even in times of healthy budgets. Where the current salary policy says that priority must go to merit increases (at a minimum of 2%) before funds are put to other uses, the new policy removes the mandate and leaves everything at the discretion of the administration. Despite retaining much of the language of the original policy, we are losing all of the leverage, all of the guarantees that made it work.
For 11 years we have had a contract that established certain procedures for allocating salary funds and established a very minimal (less than cost-of-living) 2% increase guarantee for all meritorious faculty. Now we will have no contract. Now we return to the old system in which everything is discretionary.
It is easy to see why the Regents insist that the salary policy needs to be changed to provide more flexibility in times of budget restraint, but the President hasn't just added flexibility. He has robbed it of all of its guarantees.
Notice that merit increases can be abandoned even when there is no budget crisis. Why not specify certain criteria for suspending the rule?
Notice that there is nothing to prevent the administration from spending all salary funds on targeted raises for prized faculty while everyone else receives not even a cost-of-living adjustment. Why not specify some minimal balance between merit and other allocations?
Notice that nothing is specified. There are no clear criteria that put any substantive restraints on administrative discretion.
I will leave it to others to recall the old regime of arbitrary and unfair salary distributions, where some faculty thrived while many very productive colleagues seemed to go from year to year with minuscule and unpredictable raises. The salary policy negotiated in 1999 has helped us to bring up salaries and become a little bit fairer and a little bit more colleagial. How long before things slip back into the old pattern?
--James N. Gregory, Professor, History
----------------------------------------------
Janelle Taylor assessment May 28, 2010:
With this Executive Order, Emmert is giving the Board of Regents a parting gift. They have found the faculty salary policy irksome, and do not want to be beholden to it. Nor do they want to have to actually negotiate with faculty about suspending it again. So Emmert, on their behalf, is simply reneging on a longstanding commitment to the faculty -- taking the financial crisis as an opportunity to grab new powers for the Board of Regents. For all his flowery professions, Emmert is giving UW faculty a big kick in the teeth on his way out the door. Thanks a lot.
Recall that this stunning move comes *after* the Faculty Senate agreed to a suspension of the policy during this biennium, in recognition of the dire financial situation of the university. The idea (in retrospect, it looks like a misplaced hope) was that in exchange for this accommodation, the administration would preserve its commitment to the faculty salary policy over the longer term. So much for that.
Let us also not forget that at this moment the administration is also negotiating with the TA union over their next contract, and has inserted language specifying that the Academic Student Employees will get raises only if faculty get raises. In other words, the screws are being applied to us partly as a way of keeping the TAs down.
This is it, folks: we must stand up for ourselves now.
--Janelle Taylor, Anthropology
-------------------------------------------
Duane Storti assessment May 28, 2010:
Dear colleagues,
Indeed, recent developments indicate that while the Regents and/or administration can bear some ongoing financial commitments (increasing utility bills or payments on bonds to finance various real estate acquistions or construction projects), for some reason they cannot manage to bear any ongoing commitment to loyal UW faculty. The proposed revised executive order aims to eradicate any real commitment to the faculty, effectively erase the list of priorities for resource allocation that everyone (including the adminsitration and Regents) agreed was in the best interest of the university, and send us back to the bad old days when expediency (rather than equity and rationality) was the guiding principle.
There are numerous other details that people are legitimately concerned about (responsibility for post-tenure reviews outliving the rewards for meritorious service that are an essential part of the agreed upon package, faculty being used as a bargaining chip against the graduate student employees that they value and support, the habit of sneaking in major issues after the final faculty senate meeting of the year in an attempt to bypass careful consideration under our system of shared governance, etc.), but I just cannot get by the fact that the administration/Regents are making it clear that they simply cannot be trusted to abide by any commitment to the faculty whose efforts are essential to the success of the institution.
This salary policy issue is all about choices, and the administration/Regents are making it clear that they want to be free to choose to spend resources on other things at the expense of the loyal faculty. We've been there before, and we all saw that such an approach did not really work out well for the UW.
Finally, let me conclude with a plea to the administration: President Emmert, if you wish to maintain a positive legacy based on your stay at the UW, please do not enact this proposed executive order. Head gracefully for the exit door, and let your successor deal with the situation when more is known about the realities of future budgets.
-- Duane Storti Seriously disappointed faculty senator
----------------------------------------------------
Stephen Hauschka assessment May 28, 2010:
President Emmert's revision of Executive Order-64 should send a chilling message to all UW Faculty. Importantly, we can be certain that the revisions were not solely his doing. Rather, they represent a concerted effort of the UW Administration, Regents and their Attorneys who are busily laying the groundwork for their vision of a centralized authority with total power over all University decisions.
If the UW faculty blandly accepts this royal edict they'll pay for it decades into the future. Not just monetarily, but in terms of true consultative governance -- that will be the real and tragic loss.
Accept these revisions and one can only imagine the authoritarian Administrative team the Regents will be all too happy to assemble the moment President Emmert departs.
And why wouldn't they? After all, consulting and negotiating with the Faculty is a very tiresome process, so if the the Faculty wasn't even willing to stand up when their negotiated salary increases were abolished (even though the Faculty had ALREADY AGREED to a voluntary suspension of merit raises during the current biennium), just think of the many other cost savings and reorganizations of the UW that could be promulgated.
Wouldn't logical next steps be quarterly contract renewals and a switch from yearly salaries to hourly pay solely for time spent lecturing? Why not? And how about dismissing 80% of the Faculty because canned video lectures from Stanford would be so much more cost-effective -- to say nothing about the opportunity of then converting lecture halls to Administrative office space?
And how about abolishing all TA positions? Wouldn't that also benefit undergraduate education by ensuring greater Professor-student interactions?
And what about all those wasteful undergraduate science labs, and writing workshops and tutorials? And who really needs libraries these days when everything is on the Web?
And shouldn't Art really just be in museums, Music on CDs, and Languages in foreign countries? Just think of all the money that could be saved by eliminating these wasteful courses.
Oh, and by the way, even though the Faculty think they have the freedom to lecture about concepts that will challenge student thinking, that may no longer be the way Faculty teaching prerogatives are interpreted in the new dawn of total Administrative control. After all, there are some very disturbing possibilities out there whose solutions might even benefit from reducing pollution and raising taxes, but wouldn't discussion of those concepts risk breaking all those new rules about not politicizing one's lectures?
And if a Faculty member is fired for breaking Rule 23A, subsection Q49, Paragraph 18, there may no longer be any opportunity for Faculty Committees to review the dismissal; because, of course, there's no longer a Faculty Code, and the Faculty has no jurisdiction in such matters.
We better wake up and start talking things over with our Faculty Senate Representatives NOW. By next Thursday, if our Senators don't stand up, Revised Executive Order-64 could be a done deal, and the beginning of a long and painful downward spiral toward a progressively more defunct university will follow.
Great universities are not products of their Administrators and Regents, but of their Faculty and Students. This concept is worth protecting.
--Stephen D. Hauschka, Professor of Biochemistry
---------------------------------------------------
Vandra Huber assessment May 30, 2010:
By way of background, I was chair of the faculty Council on Faculty Affairs when the current coding regarding wages was inserted in the faculty code. I was also a member of the president's appointed committee on rewards established at the time and headed by Huntsman. At the time this important wording was inserted into the code, we had, to some degree, a runaway system where deans were free to use the money at will to appoint and give 15-20% or more retention raises to anyone they chose. The faculty really had little say in the compensation/raise process. Performance evaluations with due process were also not required for senior faculty members so the code was modified to include evaluations for all levels of tenure track faculty. With no documentation, there was no protection of one’s record.
The solid citizen was not appreciated in the university at all. The raises went to new hires, faculty playing the competitive offer game, and favored sons and daughters. As a result, we had a runaway system. There was horrendous pay inversion where senior faculty (full professors made far less than junior faculty fresh out of school), where the floors for pay in arts & science were below what a new hire in a high school might receive. In many departments there was no merit at all, no collegial feedback for junior (except for tenure reviews), or senior faculty performance. Without a written paper trail, one has nothing to fall back on during an administrative discharge.
During the years I chaired the faculty council, we worked very hard to build in a contractual arrangement that recognized the value and importance of the "solid citizen" faculty has in this great university. These are the colleagues who teach an overload class because a colleague is sick, who take on independent studies on an unpaid overload basis) because a student wants to learn more. These are your colleagues who start a service project in the community because it’s the right thing to do. These are the individuals who serve in faculty senate roles. These are your colleagues, the gal next door who served as your wing gal when you presented a critical issue to the dean and the guy you bounced a research idea off of. They are you, the faculty who are here for the long haul, who love this university and who have chosen to devote their lives to the UW.
The goal was establish a “pecking order” in terms of raises. The solid citizen who was deemed meritorious had greater standing in regards to raises than hiring new faculty or faculty with competitive offers that an administrator wished to retain (with or without faculty concurrence of the importance of that person).. I still have the charts and analysis to prove what a mess things were in.
Underlying the code system was the thinking that over the life a faculty member's career salary might conservatively increase minimally 2.5 times. So what does a 2% raise floor give a meritorious faculty member over a 20 year career? The answer is still not much in purchase power but a great deal symbolically, namely the meritorious “solid citizen “faculty members has value and is the heart of this University.
Assume a starting salary of $45,000, 20 year tenure with the University, two promotions with 7.5% raises for each promotion and 2% merit increases each year. A quick back of the envelope calculation would indicate that your salary would likely double to $90,000. Translating this to what you might see in your pay check we can divide the $90,000 by 20 years, 9 months contract, X 4 weeks. You get $25 a week. Take out the taxes of 30%, you get $17.5. Divide that by a 40 hour work week and we get 43 cents in your pocket per hour.
The point being, aren't we worth more than that? I have not heard the university president or the board of regents advocate for us. We must advocate for ourselves.
In exchange for this 2% raise, Steve Olswang and team encouraged we give the administration “something back in the code”. This was a labor negotiation. We added into the faculty code the clauses that any non-meritorious faculty member who was deemed not meritorious for two periods in a row could be put on notice for eventual firing for whatever reasons the dean in a colleague thought appropriate. It has been used several times by the dean of the business school (I do not know about other colleagues) in an attempt to”older" faculty on notice. In one case a person was placed on notice and a committee formed to help improve the individual's performance without any due process. The committee never met with the individual. This was the trade we made. Unfortunately, the meritorious clause regarding performance review has been used to punish rather than help faculty improve. The intent was to establish a process where faculty members who were not meeting expectations could receive collegial help. Unfortunately, that is not how it has been implemented. Now it is nothing more than a stick, a fearful one at that.
BWI the FCFA did get a second concession. For the tenure process, we got inserted in the code, a minimal amount of voice for the faculty member going up for tenure. That is before a final vote on someone’s tenure, our junior colleagues had a chance to respond to any questions raised by tenured faculty about the individual’s record.
This past year, the administration "let go" a 20 plus year veteran lecturer/lawyer who used the code to get raises for lecturers. His teacher ratings were well above 4.0. When I asked about his removal I was told the president's office told the business school to not issue him a contract.
My point being that Office of President is not playing nice. This is not a time of equity and fairness. This is a time of take away and they plan to continue taking away. It’s a time of scarcity. I see threats rather than problem solving. I see claiming value rather than creating value by working together.
In sum, Management (the Administration) may we must change the code “or they can’t survive” We do not have to change the faculty code. It is not in our best interests to do so. And we may not survive if we do.
While 43 cents is not much in dollars, it is a very important as a symbol that we have value. If raises are not to be given, then let it be on the backs of the legislature and administration, not on our backs. I don’t want us to be a herd of lambs that willingly go off to slaughter house.
We know the current contract has clout. Why should we change it? We shouldn't. Just because a "lame duck" president is attempting to convince us we must modify and clarify the code, we do not need to follow his advice. While I had great respect for our current president, his words no longer have the credibility they once did. Remember this is the same president who refused lower his outrageously high salary in the time of crisis. He did not model leadership from the top. He did not establish positive relations with the legislature. He is leaving us in a time of crisis. He IS doing what is best for him.
It's time we did what is best for us.
The faculty code is our only contract with the university. Wise union officials say don't mess with clauses that protect your employees. Don't open a contract up to modifications when you see no benefit to your members, no equality for all parties. It is political suicide.
That's it folks. Do NOT vote to add "greater clarity." Leave our contract the way it is. We have precedence under it for raises. It has helped to protect the "average faculty member." If pay raises need to be deferred then let the Board of Regents be the fall guys for that. Let us not be willing lambs going off to slaughter.
Tell the current president to finish his other business such as cleaning out his office. I encourage the Board of Regents to send him on his way NOW. He is not needed. With a salary of $906,500 a year plus retirement fund matching @15% to TIAA CREF ($135,975), other perks and benefits of approximately $200,000, two board memberships (Expeditors & Weyerhaeuser) valued at $350,000, he has been taken care of well The loyal, hard working faculty member has not fared as well. . Five months worth of this salary is well over half a million dollars. We can use that money to retain lectures, teaching assistants.
Keep the faculty code as is. It has been carefully crafted with the wisdom of many generations of proud UW faculty members. It symbolizes who we are and IS our contract with the university.
For 20 plus years I have been proud to be part of this University. But I am not right now. I'm angry and so very disappointed and sad.
I will be sending in my dues to AAUP. Given the current environment of take aways, scare tatics of what will happen if we do not comply, firings of good people, we need collective action.
“Just Say NO. No more ”
--Vandra Huber,
Professor of Human Resources, Foster Business School
Adjunct Professor of Pharmacy
Former Chair, Faculty Council on Faculty Affairs
|
University
of Washington chapter