Money Talks

Shared governance is too abstract and bureaucratic sounding to fire up some faculty members.

But everyone's eyes open wide at dollar signs, especially when there are so many in President McDavis' new salary:

$380,000 is fair market price for a president who's never been properly evaluated and lost the confidence of faculty, students, and staff long ago.

So says the Board of Trustees, who gave McDavis a 29% raise to go along with his new five-year contract.

The insult isn't just in the size of the raise, which at $85,000 is more than most people who teach and work at OU make.

The insult is in the blatant disregard Trustees have once again shown toward the university in whose interests they should be working. This is nothing new but the level of outrage we see around campus and increasingly across the state is unprecedented.

Money talks and no one is missing the message. Check out recent coverage by the Columbus Dispatch, the Athens News, the Post, and WOUB.

REAL DIFFERENCES

(The following ran in the Athens News on June 19)

Almost a dozen campuses in Ohio have faculty unions and last week Ohio University considered joining them. The Faculty Senate heard a resolution for organizing full-time faculty members into a collective bargaining unit.

This resolution came in the final meeting of a year in which senators watched the administration disregard or reject one after another of its resolutions. It was a year in which the Board of Trustees violated its own, newly crafted rules for presidential evaluations and added four more years to the contract of Roderick McDavis, a president who has suffered expressions of no-confidence from faculty, staff, and students.

It was a year in which his administration showed itself willing to take back any promise it makes to faculty members, from health care surpluses to salary increases meant to lift the university from the bottom rung among its self-selected peer institutions. It was a demoralizing year for faculty, as more than one senator lamented. The reasons for establishing collective bargaining have never been starker or more urgent.

Executive Vice President and Provost Kathy Krendl responded the way many faculty members have come to expect: she lectured them as if they were ignorant schoolchildren. She began with the basics: "Ohio University faculty have contracts." Professors know this, especially those who teach year-to-year, some of them for decades now, worrying whether their contracts will be renewed.

Krendl then listed a disparate set of "elements" -- from appointment letters to class schedules -- that she claimed "come together to form a legally binding contract." Faculty members who wanted to see what makes a real contract would be wise to look in the Faculty Handbook on their own. Better yet, look at any one of the numerous Collective Bargaining Agreements current in Ohio and available online.

Krendl did not come close to the real reason why faculty senators have called for collective bargaining. By definition, these faculty members are willing to work tirelessly alongside the administration in the interest of shared governance. Most of them have much more experience in their jobs and with their contracts than the provost has with hers.

The contracts that bind individual faculty members were not what angered senators. They decried the lack of trust binding the administration to its constituents -- faculty, students, and staff. Faculty members are bound to the university already. It is time for the university to be bound in a contract with the force of law, because its administrators have lost the strength of credibility. Krendl must know what is really going on, because it looks identical to what happened to unionize the faculty at the University of Akron in 2003.

While Krendl assumed the role of impatient parent, other administrators tried scare tactics. According to the Athens News, Associate Vice Provost for Budget and Planning John Day worried that "he doesn't know what form 'shared governance' would take if OU faculty had a union, or if Faculty Senate would even continue to exist in a union environment." His feigned concern is either calculated or ignorant. Faculty Senate would not only continue to exist, it would be stronger.

As for what form of shared governance, that is what the bargaining part of collective bargaining is all about. No prognostication is necessary, just look around Ohio. University of Cincinnati has kept its Faculty Senate along with its American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter as its bargaining representative. This is written into their contract (see Article 27) and helps to refine the respective responsibilities of the two bodies. This is practically boilerplate in all Ohio bargaining agreements, such as the original contract at Wright State. Day does not need to worry whether the faculty share of university governance would benefit from a "union environment."

Some faculty members may not be moved by talk of governance and process, but everyone will care whether the new University System of Ohio makes their jobs better or worse. Here again, collective bargaining makes a great difference. Take the decision of switching from quarters to semesters, which both Ohio University and University of Cincinnati are dealing with simultaneously. Last year, some faculty senators at OU were put on a committee where they collectively spent hundreds of hours investigating, debating, and finally offering their careful considerations to the administration. That document gathered dust for most of the academic year, until the president made his own recommendation in the last week of classes, just four days before the final senate meeting. That is how OU shares governance.

What a difference the combination of collective bargaining and real shared governance makes. While OU watched and waited, in Cincinnati every constituency on campus, including over a hundred faculty members, was invested in the productive work of projecting costs, weighing different calendars, and ensuring quality education, whatever the outcome of the quarter-semester decision. As bargaining representatives, the AAUP deferred to Faculty Senate to ensure shared governance, while contractual issues would be handled if and when the decision was made. So by last week, in their June meeting, senators at UC were deep into the substantive nitty-gritty of preparing for change.

Presidents at OU and UC both sometimes attend senate meetings. As a rule, President McDavis delivers lectures and soundbites. Last week, President Zimpher asked her faculty members for guidance, sharing with them a draft letter to Chancellor Fingerhut outlining four major concerns about changing to semesters. The letter had been written by three university presidents besides Zimpher, including Roderick McDavis.

It is telling that the President of Ohio University was not so open with his faculty. The Board of Trustees has endorsed this administration's persistent disregard of faculty, student, and staff concerns. They have recognized no obligation to trust, respect, and accountability, except when convenient. That is what finally wore faculty senators down and what has faculty members across campus fed up and angry.

The time has come to hand in false governance for collective bargaining. Ohio University will be stronger and the people of Ohio better served when faculty members have a meaningful role in how this institution is run.

Strong Ending

Faculty Senate closed the academic year frustrated, even demoralized, but also resolved.  Here's the text of Ken Brown's resolution, which will get second reading in September.  There are good descriptions of the meeting in the Athens Messenger, and some ridiculous comments by Associate Vice Provost for Budget and Planning John Day in the Athens News.

Resolution on Collective Bargaining

Brought to the Faculty Senate of Ohio University on June 9, 2008

for First Reading

Whereas continued functioning of the university requires a reasonable degree of cooperation between the faculty and the central administration, and

Whereas such cooperation depends upon a relationship of mutual trust and respect between the university administration and the faculty, and

Whereas the Ohio University administration stands ready to abrogate a previous agreement with the Faculty Senate regarding health care benefit surpluses, and

Whereas such disregard for a written agreement between the Senate and the administration represents a breach of said trust and betrays a lack of respect for the faculty on the part of the administration;

Be it resolved that the Faculty Senate of Ohio University calls upon the faculty to organize themselves into a collective bargaining unit for the purpose of negotiating a contractual agreement with the university to which the university administration would be bound by law.

SEE FOR YOURSELVES

(A version of this email message was sent to all faculty on June 10, the same day local papers reported on a motion in Faculty Senate to organize into a collective bargaining unit.)

During the past two spring quarters, in 2006 and 2007, OU-AAUP has conducted an evaluation of top Ohio University administrators. This year, the chapter planned to conduct the same evaluation as well as a simple confidence vote on the OU Board of Trustees. The evaluation will happen but only in the beginning of Fall Quarter. Here's why.

We kept waiting to send out the evaluations, wondering whether the administration had more surprises to announce in the waning days of the academic year. They have not disappointed. The trustees reappointed the president in violation of their own new evaluation procedures. Then Kathy Krendl blatantly ignored the unanimous resolution of Faculty Senate to give across-the-board, cost-of-living increases to all faculty members. But even that is now old news.

Our purpose in delaying the evaluation until the fall is to allow faculty the opportunity to find out more about issues that may affect us all greatly in the near future. Some of these matters are not yet resolved, for example the administration's plan to grab up faculty and staff healthcare surpluses that President McDavis had promised would always be returned to employees or preserved as a rainy-day healthcare fund. This is no bonus to give or take at whim but a real part of our compensation, which OU regularly states when reporting total faculty compensation statistics every year.

We also need much more information about the announcement that came during the last week of classes regarding the move from quarters to semesters. What kind of workload will the administration promote under their plan for semesters? What compensation will faculty receive for revamping curriculum and classes? We should worry when and how these decisions will be made, beginning with the selection of the proposed committee to examine different semester scenarios. Meanwhile, pay attention to how the same changeover may proceed at University of Cincinnati, where the faculty has a union.

Finally, faculty members have yet to see how raises, including the money promised in Vision Ohio, will be distributed this year, an inflationary year in which little movement in the ranking of OU faculty salaries occurred, even with the additional merit-based bump received by some faculty members last year. For your information, the spring OU-AAUP Chapter analysis of the effect of the 2007 raise is attached below.

No doubt, more important news will seep out during the summer, while most of us are pursuing the scholarly projects and summer programs that help make our profession rewarding. When we all return in the fall, however, this AAUP chapter will try to help sort out what matters most and conduct the evaluation of the president and provost and the confidence vote on the trustees.

Best wishes for the summer,

Kevin Uhalde, President

AAUP Salary Data for 2007-08.pdf

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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