REJECTS

Who would think that AAUP-OU and the Board of Trustees would agree over faculty compensation? But even the board was dumbfounded when administrators recommended delaying faculty and staff raises, i.e. their own "Objective 1" in their own five-year plan. "I really struggle with delaying compensation increases when we have identified those as top priorities," Board Chair DeLawder rightfully complained, then he and his colleagues rejected the plan McDavis, Krendl, Decatur, and the rest had only just endorsed.

But everyone was on board, our administrators cried, our constituencies were all in agreement. Really? Look at Outlook to see who was on board: HTC Dean Ann Fidler rallied to her own cause by claiming "the rationale...is sound" (Fidler was promoted into the Provost's office the same day trustees found the plan unsound and irrational). College of Business Dean Hugh Sherman felt " this move could help reduce pain later because you're proceeding in a thoughtful way." Whose pain did he mean, administrators with fat salaries and the privilege of shared governance?

Director of Budget Planning and Analysis Rebecca Vazquez Skillings seemed the happiest messing with people's livelihood, if we are to take her words seriously. "It provides me with a measure of peace that we can move forward doing the business of the university with wisdom." Who is the Budget Planning Council to be talking about pain, peace and wisdom? No wonder the trustees weren't impressed. We don't want to see jobs cut anymore than these administrators do. Instead, we hope DeLawder takes to heart what he said in Faculty Senate: that, based on comparison of OU to our peer institutions, "we obviously have too many administrators."

NOT EVERYONE IS COMPLAINING

Earlier this week faculty and staff members were being prepared to have their wages frozen, despite the promise Kathy Krendl made to bring Ohio University salaries in line with our peers (Objective 1 in Year One 5VOIP), a promise that was just beginning to show results. But more than one year's raises are at stake, as Post reporter Emily Grannis explained this past Monday. She highlighted the local implications of this year's national AAUP report, which shows how average faculty raises barely keep pace with inflation, if at all. Our administration has contributed to that national trend but seemed ready to make amends – until last week, when we saw how flimsy its promises are.

But let's consider a group whose raises weren't on the chopping. According to the Outlook report on the proposed raise freeze, it "would include annual salary increases for faculty and staff who are not bargaining-unit members." Who are these "bargaining-unit members"? At O.U., they belong either to the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees or to the Fraternal Order of Police. They are the electricians, dining-hall staff, custodians, plumbers, delivery persons, and the campus security. And they belong to unions.

Who still thinks this faculty is better off without collective bargaining?

True, not everyone at O.U. needs collective bargaining to do well for themselves. Despite repeated failures of confidence expressed by every constituency on campus, President McDavis will negotiate a new contract, including his salary, once he is reappointed. Coach Solich will get a fresh contract, too (he already makes $30,687 more than the mean salary for MAC Division football coaches). New administrators won't notice the tough economic times, either. Next year's athletic director will enjoy over $25,000 more in salary than his predecessor. The premier Director of Shared Services will draw $155,000 plus the paid services of a consultant to help him do his job. Even the brand new $60 million Baker Center will get a $722,000 boost, because someone forgot to install enough refrigeration in the food court.

"Where are the Priorities?" asks the AAUP's current report on our profession's economic status. All of us who teach, study, and work at O.U. are aware of the pressures affecting universities across the state and the nation. The problems and mismanagement that combine to make us worry about the future of O.U. also make us worry about education in America. That doesn't excuse local administrators or the Board of Trustees. AAUP-OU is important, not just for our local voice, but because the stakes are bigger than what we see in front of us. We are a professional organization, not a union, but maybe that should change.

Less of Us

The following report was posted on Inside Higher Ed today.  The data now confirms what our eyes tell us: administration is growing and faculty is shrinking.  This at the same time that the student body is growing: certainly at OU, where our leaders not only would like to grow the number of students on our campuses, but are seducing departments into teaching a virtual (but real cash paying) student body online.  This also at the same time that we strive for national research prominence by feathering a new nest for, you guessed it, administrators in the form of a graduate college.  If we have more full-time faculty than average universities, because our remote status cuts us off from the usual pools of urban adjuncts, and thus a more favorable balance of full-time faculty to administrators, give it time.  We may still need associate provosts and deans to staff the Online College of Virtual Learning.

The Shrinking Professoriate

Every other year, data released by the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics provide a snapshot of the growth of part-time positions in the professoriate. This year — an off-year for that data — the federal statistics provide evidence for another shift, in which the majority of full-time professional employees in higher education are in administrative rather than faculty jobs.
In the fall of 2004, 50.6 of professional full-time employees in higher education (excluding medical schools) were faculty members. In the fall of 2006, for which data were released Tuesday, 48.6 percent of professional, full-time jobs in higher education were held by faculty members.

Faculty jobs remain the majority among full-time positions at two-year colleges and in public higher education, but because there are far more full-time jobs at four-year institutions than at two-year institutions, the balance has tilted away from professorial positions. (Adding part-time positions would of course also swell the faculty ranks across sectors, but this data set focuses on full-time positions.)

Full-Time Professional Positions in Higher Education, Fall 2004 and Fall 2006

Category	2004 Faculty	2004 Administrators	2006 Faculty	2006 Administrators
Total	50.6%	49.4%	48.6%	51.4%
Public	53.1%	46.9%	51.1%	48.9%
Private nonprofit	45.6%	54.4%	44.0%	56.0%
Private for-profit	48.0%	52.0%	44.1%	55.9%
4-year colleges	47.3%	52.7%	45.5%	54.5%
2-year colleges	63.6%	36.4%	61.4%	38.6%

A Step Backwards

The American Association of University Professors at Ohio University condemns the Board of Trustees' new procedure for evaluating university presidents.  By eliminating student, staff and faculty input in annual evaluations, the decision reverses direction from the good faith attempt by former trustee Gregory Browning and others to promote input and accountability across the university community.  The Board demonstrates lack of respect for students, staff, and faculty by shutting them out of an annual process that might build trust between constituencies, instead encouraging cynicism and isolation.  In addition, its aversion to written documents and public disclosure, which has begun to affect other high offices, runs counter to the principles this institution cherishes.  We commend those students, staff, and faculty who have been more true proponents of these principles than our trustees.   Perhaps, because most of us are exposed to various forms of productive and critical evaluation throughout the year, we have a higher esteem for meaningful assessment.  As professors, moreover, we demand that our students learn the value of critical discussion and opposing opinions.  We can hope the Board finds the courage to hold the president and itself to the same expectations.  Meanwhile, AAUP-OU will plan again to conduct its own evaluation of top administrators this spring,  adding a vote of confidence in the Board of Trustees.

Thanks for Sharing, Senators

We'd like to thank Ohio University senators for their hard work this quarter.  Faculty, Graduate Student, and Undergraduate Student Senates made it clear that the Five-Year Academic Plan deserves a much more grisly death than Vision Ohio's quiet passage into oblivion.  It's an offensive document particularly because it pretends to build upon shared governance.

Millions of dollars flow into university development and marketing, according to this latest planning document, while recruiting a diverse body of high-quality faculty members is reckoned at no cost.  Concrete academic programs are few and far between, yet we find tutoring services dedicated to intercollegiate athletes.  The language of Vision Ohio reemerges here and there, but where do we find the detailed recommendations made by academic deans, departments and programs, and all those implementation teams from Vision Ohio's heyday?

Faculty, students, and staff work hard to keep their share in governance alongside people who don't want to share.  That's admirable, as are the eleven resolutions Faculty Senate recently passed.  The O.U. chapter of the AAUP supports shared governance.

Indeed, the AAUP defined what most of us understand as shared governance in 1966 (available online).  More than half the executive members of our local AAUP chapter are current or very recent faculty senators themselves.

Our colleagues have worked hard and in good faith.  We hope the provost does more than point to their criticisms as evidence of dialogue, an end in itself.  We hope she signs their eleven resolutions over break.  We hope, if these things don't happen, that all those deserving senators treat themselves to an extended winter vacation from all university service.  Why not all faculty members? We deserve it.  Happy Thanksgiving.

Executive Committee

Family Matters

The following letter was first published online by The Post (9/19/07) .

Five months before my son was born, he went on the infants' waiting list at Ohio University's Child Development Center.  Twenty-two months later, he's still on the list, now near the top.  Come November, though, he'll transfer to a much longer waiting list for toddlers.  My wife and I, both full-time faculty members, aren't surprised.  Everyone who has children or thinks about having children knows inadequate childcare makes working and raising a family in Athens hard.  We all talk, give each other advice, and share stories of our experiences—what the Executive Vice President & Provost's Child Care Task Force (CCTF) distrustfully calls "anecdotes."

The current, incomplete draft of CCTF's report tells us that task force members were familiar with "anecdotal information" about the lack of sufficient childcare in Athens.  But a task force is a serious thing, with a mission and a budget, unable to rely on "anecdotal evidence," so this one conducted a survey.   Now survey evidence confirms anecdotal evidence: There's not enough childcare.

CCTF plans to run the survey again, at additional expense, seeking evidence from a broader sample of the Athens community.  It also recommends spending $40,000 on a new website (with a link to another website) and reprints of an existing brochure in order "to provide better information to faculty, staff, and students on the current availability of child care and to provide assistance on how to be an informed consumer of child care services."  How can information be better when the facts (there's not enough childcare) are the same?  Human Resources, drawing on unspecified resources, will help "ensure" that parents "remain aware of services and support."  But we're well aware of the services and support lacking in our community.  Maybe the forty-grand could go somewhere other than a website.

Here's an anecdote.  Last year, top O.U. brass jumped a brand new hire, Howard Lipman, to the top of that long Child Development Center waiting list, so that his child started daycare immediately.  Lipman, a highly paid administrator (he rented out Baker Center for a private party) was unapologetic: childcare was "very, very important" for him, he explained to The Post (1/25/07).  You'd think it was equally important for the parents of the couple hundred other children left behind on the list.  But the center's director explained that the waiting list is "a little deceiving."  What's also deceitful is providing daycare when it's advantageous to top-earners and leaving the rest of us to wait, wait, wait.

The most concrete CCTF proposal so far is to direct childcare demand away from the university (given the Lipman debacle, that's understandable) and toward a "home-based child care network."  Well, one exists, as most Athens parents already know, with its own lengthy waiting lists.  Good people are providing excellent care in the Athens area, but they can't come close to matching the demand.  If CCTF is aware of this network, then it must be aware that it is stretched to its limits.  That's due to word-of-mouth among parents (i.e. "informed consumers"), which we'll always find more useful and reliable than an expensive website.

This academic year the local chapter of the American Association of
University Professors will organize an independent committee to study problems faculty members face with regard to childcare and family matters generally.  I invite faculty members to join the committee, provide information (including anecdotes), or help in any way they like by contacting me.  This includes full-time or part-time professors, Groups I through IV, and regardless of whether they are dues-paying members of the A.A.U.P. or not.

Once organized, we'll look beyond the faculty and beyond childcare, because families face other challenges.  For example, the only paid leave a faculty member can take after the birth or adoption of a child is in the form of accrued "sick days," and even that's not easy.  We had plenty of sick days accrued but couldn't use them, because our son was born at the wrong time of year.  It was only last year that Faculty Senate voted to bring its own Faculty Handbook in line with the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which became federal law in 1993.  This is moving too slow and asking too little.

We may not have the resources to solve childcare, but we can't do much less than the present task force or indeed other governing groups within the university.   We will value the anecdotes our colleagues share, because they represent real experience, not pretended responses.  And we promise not to give unfair and preferential treatment to select individuals.

Kevin Uhalde
President, AAUP-OU

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