By no means a complete list, but stuff that caught my eye.
- UC Davis asks instructors to teach freshmen writing seminars for free
- UCD library budget, static over the last decade while the student population increased, now to fall
- UC-wide Academic Senate opposes fee increases for graduate students—“fee increases will result in fewer graduate students at UC. Aside from disappointing would-be graduate students, reductions will affect undergraduates and faculty by shrinking the number of teaching assistants, leading to fewer small discussion sections and negative impacts on faculty research.”
30 comments
November 5, 2009 at 12:16 pm
zunguzungu
This, from the first article:
“The university grants me the privilege to explore another side of my brain,” Risbud said. “The stipend is almost irrelevant.”
made me throw up a little in my mouth. One of the things that this whole fiasco has made me think very clearly about is how necessary a career in academia actually is to the kinds of intellectual work I want to do in my life. And I think it’s going to be clear to a lot of people that, if they are actually committed to a “life of the mind” or whatever, “the university” is increasingly becoming the place where you get the “privilege” to contribute your teaching labor but get less and less in return. I’m still in the belly of the beast, but at a certain point the calculation flips over and many of us are getting close to — or past — that point. I get paid so little to teach, and do the research work I do in such a solitary manner, that the notion of leaving the university for a while and working as a waiter while I finish my dissertation makes a disturbing amount of sense. I don’t want it to, but if I’m denied a teaching appointment next year (as is a possibility), that is probably what I’ll do.
November 5, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Spiny Norman
@2zunggu: Disgusting. Yes, indeedy. $358,000 could be rustled up by firing any one of a number of useless overpaid administrators.
Torches! Pitchforks! Pikes! Yay, I say!
Srsly.
November 5, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Anderson
“negative impacts on faculty research”
“… as faculty are increasingly called upon to teach courses themselves, rather than delegating this duty to grad students cynically hired for this sole purpose and out of all proportion to the job market.”
That’s not a rhetorical game-winner, IMHO.
November 5, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Vance
Yeah, that Risbud line bugged me. For all I know, he knows a lot about Indian music and is good at teaching it. But there are plenty of people who have made that their life work, and that comment makes it clear he’s not one of them (he’s just “explor[ing]“). So why can’t the Finest “Public” University in the Land staff that class with someone who’s dedicated to it?
November 5, 2009 at 2:17 pm
bitchphd
OMG we are so fucked.
Last week I spent a couple days up north with some friends, both recent students. One is PK’s former teacher; his wife is getting her MA in education now at CS Humboldt. She talked about the “furlough days” when class is cancelled and being annoyed by less teaching for more money. I told her y’all had recently had to vote on whether to take furlough days out of research or teaching. She and her husband both initially said they hoped it came out of research, if the profs cared about the students, but quickly understood and were convinced by my explanation that no, it has to come out of teaching b/c otherwise it’s invisible and just means working for free.
It kind of seems to me like hating on admin salaries is a little bit like their initial feeling that if profs “cared,” they’d teach for free. It’s easy to go there, but…
November 5, 2009 at 3:07 pm
nick
“It kind of seems to me like hating on admin salaries is a little bit like their initial feeling that if profs “cared,” they’d teach for free. It’s easy to go there, but…”
but what if gains in adminstration # and salaries are going on at the same time as reductions in TT faculty # and salaries? as, eg, Marc Bosquet has argued (see his The University in Ruins site)
as for the hatin’, I think in a real sense it’s NOT easy to go “there” with respect to administration–because the “there” in question is a strange psychological place! everybody wants other people to work for free; what’s unusual about academics is they seem inclined to view that demand as somehow reasonable……the ideology of the calling/vocation, working for the love of it, is not something you find much evidence of reading the discourse of administrators. Yudoff has not been quoted as saying “I’d run this large organization for free if I had to…..”
November 5, 2009 at 3:16 pm
dana
Yeah. Or, look: it’s possible to love one’s work and think that one should be compensated for doing it, even if by teaching one gets to expand one’s own horizons. Plenty of people like their jobs and think they can still take home a paycheck. Moreover, it’s possible to have a life of the mind and do other things to put bread on the table. The UC is not doing anyone any favors by asking them to teach classes for free, for fuck’s sake (and pace B, I will think the situations are parallel when the administrators first have stagnant wages and then are asked to give up ten percent of their pay and then are asked if they really needed to be paid, with the expectation being that they’d do it out of joy.)
November 5, 2009 at 3:37 pm
max
“… as faculty are increasingly called upon to teach courses themselves, rather than delegating this duty to grad students cynically hired for this sole purpose and out of all proportion to the job market.”
I read this as:
Aside from disappointing would-be graduate students, reductions will affect undergraduates and faculty by shrinking the number of teaching assistants, leading to fewer small discussion sections and negative impacts on faculty research.”
‘NOOOOO! You can’t take our FLUNKIES! NEVER!’
OMG we are so fucked.
The way they’re going to eventually do this, is the hard and nasty way: they’re going to have to cut everyone’s (and I mean everybody, top to bottom, if they only want a little revolt instead of an all out one) wages by 10-20%. It’s either that, or they’re going to be closing a lot of facilities. Since the Assembly, as far as I can tell from my remote location, appears to have done zip to rebalance budgeting and they sure as hell haven’t raised taxes or reduced prison outlays.
This is almost like for line identical to what in Texas, circa 1987 or so. Everyone agreed: education was the future of the state, and you couldn’t relie on oil and the prisons were massively overcrowded and needed to be trimmed and the mental health system was under court order so no cutting there, and of course, the tax system was crapped out and not bringing in revenue.
So basically, they didn’t raise taxes and they cut education across the board.
max
['Sans a constitutional change, that's what's going to happen here.']
November 5, 2009 at 3:48 pm
bitchphd
what if gains in adminstration # and salaries are going on at the same time as reductions in TT faculty # and salaries?
Up front admission: I’m not sure if we’re talking here about, say, college presidents and other administrators who come from outside academia and therefore the “competitive salary” issue comes in or whether we’re talking about people who’ve been promoted from w/in academia, but look: the problem is that state funding has been evaporating, yes? Or at least that’s a major part of the problem at hand, and (I think) also the larger problem of “overproducing” phds. There aren’t “too many” PhDs; there are too few t-t jobs–hence the frank admission in link #3 that universities need grad students to teach courses.
I think it’s part of the idea that academic work should be done out of love, rather than for money, that makes us think academic administrators should be paid significantly less than their peers in other fields. My husband isn’t an administrator, but he makes over six figures for doing a job that’s not unlike what a professor would do: going to conferences, collecting and crunching data, coming up with new ways to look at it, etc. His boss gets paid more than he does.
I mean, if you think administrators *generally* should be paid less than the people under them, then okay. But if the argument is that professors and grad students are paid shit, so their bosses should be too, that seems to me to be kind of missing the point, which is that academics shouldn’t be paid shit because their work is important.
Basically I think it’s unrealistic to expect people with status to give up money before those “below” them do–I mean, we can gripe about it being unfair, which it is, but it’s sort of the way things work. And if you were an administrator, and were facing the problem of not enough money to keep up academic quality at Davis, what would you do? I suspect (maybe I’m wrong) that the shortfall is bigger than taking, say, a 20% pay cut. I don’t think that the idea is that it’s reasonable to ask ppl to work for free; I think it’s that we are in crisis mode (which we are) and that we’re starting to cut bone, and the admins are trying to put off impacting undergrad education as much as they possibly can.
(Which I think is a bad move, politically, but it’s the kind of move you need to make if you want to keep your job.)
November 5, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Don
The bosses always get their cut of the pie. Rarely, do they take a cut in pay. Take our fine mayor as an example. She cut all kinds of programs. Got the unions to accept furlough days. Then she took a pair of city paid police officers with her on a vacation to Florida. Perk of the office.
November 5, 2009 at 4:24 pm
ari
Surely you realize, max, that there are actually many ways, other than the maximally draconian ones you identify, to skin this particular cat: raising student fees through the roof, cutting financial aid, admitting more foreign or out-of-state students, strengthening the flagship campuses while allowing the satellites to rot, massive reorganizations of the staff, rejiggering teaching loads, etc. Stacked against such options, the idea that there will be permanent 10-20% salary cuts is pretty far-fetched.
November 5, 2009 at 6:09 pm
jim
What I find depressing about the freshman seminar story is that the maximal amount of savings from it would have been derisory. It’s the drunk looking for his car keys under the lamppost because the light is better there.
November 5, 2009 at 7:33 pm
dana
But if the argument is that professors and grad students are paid shit, so their bosses should be too, that seems to me to be kind of missing the point, which is that academics shouldn’t be paid shit because their work is important.
There’s a gigantic middle ground between “head of school makes $800,000 a year and asks instructors making $40K to forgo $1000 to make ends meet” and “head of school should be paid shit.”
November 5, 2009 at 7:35 pm
bitchphd
Yes, obviously. My main point is that administrator salaries aren’t really the problem.
November 5, 2009 at 7:51 pm
andrew
Professor salaries aren’t really the problem either, though. If it’s the case that they’re being frozen or cut and administrator salaries aren’t, that seems like a genuine issue. It is possible to keep professor salaries the same relative to administrator salaries – rather than invert the relationship between them – while doing the exact same thing to both sets of salaries. There might even be some mathematical relationship that requires it.
November 5, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Leslie M-B
Remember one of the reasons the first-year seminars are there in the first place: they provide a very inexpensive way for the university to lower its instructor : student ratio–even more cheaply than having grad students teach might.
I get a little bit antsy when people start talking about reducing “administrator” salaries, both because my own salary may or may not fall under that category and because after three years in the staff trenches, I’m keenly aware of the faculty-staff caste system.
Yes, there are many administrators whose salaries seem inflated. But the line between “administrator” and, oh, “program coordinator” (ahem) can be a blurry one. Staff like me have already had our salaries frozen for years, even as we support faculty who have continued to receive merit increases. With the furloughs, I’m now making less than when I started working at UC Davis, and 14% less than I would have made had I received my merit increases. It’s incredibly demoralizing, especially since these slights are coming from the exact university that supposedly readied me for an academic career.
I sat in a meeting w/a top HR admin at UCOP a few weeks ago, and I asked him point-blank if there would be any relief for staff soon, or if things would continue to deteriorate. His response was that “faculty attract people and resources, while staff don’t”; ergo, staff are dispensable. His remark about resources is a gross generalization, of course–it assumes, for example, staff aren’t writing grants, raising funds, or otherwise helping to recruit, support, and retain faculty.
Today a Staff Assembly e-mail claimed it’s not fair to compare staff and faculty salaries, that it’s like comparing doctors’ pay with lawyers’. But when you have countless lecturers, postdocs, and staff with similar credentials to faculty (PhDs, research agenda, publications, etc.), I don’t think that’s a fair analogy.
I work in the teaching center that administers the first-year seminars. My insider thoughts on the whole issue are in a comment on Tenured Radical’s post.
November 5, 2009 at 10:21 pm
Jonathan Dresner
My institution is seriously considering cutting administrative salaries. In this case, what that means is dropping department chair positions (which are considered administrative, here) and consolidating programs in meta-departments like Social Sciences (which used to be a catch-all for a few departments too small to have a chair of their own). The disciplines will still have independent program coordinators — uncompensated administrative “service” — but this clearly shifts power away from faculty.
I’m not aware of any other administrative cuts being considered, though plans to add a level to the organization were scrapped.
November 5, 2009 at 10:22 pm
North
Issues we ought to look at separately, rather than together, at least some of the time:
- whether people in academia (staff/faculty/admin) are paid below market for their expertise
- the differential between faculty and admin salaries
- general respect for staff within the university
- what the actual job of professors is, especially at R1s. why do we consider teaching 19-year-olds a core part of the job of a researcher? (it’s bizarrely convenient for me, since I like both parts of what may someday be my gig, but I still think it’s strange)
- the mission of a public university
Please note that I’m not including ‘whether people should do their jobs for free’ in there. That’s a pernicious theme in non-profit work, which I used to do, and has an obvious answer: no. maybe hell no. It’s work – that’s why they pay you.
November 6, 2009 at 10:08 am
redfoxtailshrub
Remember one of the reasons the first-year seminars are there in the first place: they provide a very inexpensive way for the university to lower its instructor : student ratio–even more cheaply than having grad students teach might.
Absolutely. I notice that these seminar “stipends” are not only very small but that galling variety of compensation that arrives in the form of research funds only — that is, money you can spend only on certain things in certain ways. I’m currently teaching a four-credit general ed. course that comes with a lot of extra advising work, and has an extra stipend of this sort as a sweetener. You almost always end up with at least a little left over that you can’t make come out even. It doesn’t roll over indefinitely, and if you buy durable objects with it, they belong to the university rather than to you. Great!
November 6, 2009 at 2:36 pm
nick
Bitch, I don’t have data at hand–all I can say is it’s not about paying anybody shit; it’s about a long period where the faculty, those who teach, have done worse and worse (and here I’m talking about everybody who teaches, about the loss of autonomy and deprofessionalization of higher ed teachers) and the administration, those who manage labor, has done better and better (by admin I don’t mean support staff; support staff, at least anecdotally, seem to me to be suffering in the same way faculty are).
–Here’s a link to a piece from Bousquet’s site:
http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/archives/167
November 7, 2009 at 8:02 pm
max
Surely you realize, max, that there are actually many ways, other than the maximally draconian ones you identify, to skin this particular cat:
Yes.
raising student fees through the roof,
They’ll do it.
cutting financial aid,
They’ll do it.
admitting more foreign or out-of-state students,
They’ll do that.
strengthening the flagship campuses while allowing the satellites to rot,
Yep.
massive reorganizations of the staff, rejiggering teaching loads, etc.
Yep.
Stacked against such options, the idea that there will be permanent 10-20% salary cuts is pretty far-fetched.
I have seen this before. They did all that stuff in Texas and they rolled salaries back 5% each year for either two or three years in a row.
And your situation is worse, due to the big hole in the budget, the constitual flakery and whatnot. The only things they can slice are poor people and colleges. (Since they won’t slice prisons and they won’t cut prisons.) California is in an epic deflation spiral.
I’m just tellin’ ya: cover your ass, if you can.
max
['Have a backup plan.']
November 8, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Not Prince Hamlet
What I find depressing about the freshman seminar story is that the maximal amount of savings from it would have been derisory.
But it’s probably a large portion of the savings that the person who runs those programs has been required to find. When cuts are spread “fairly” across a whole institution, lower-level management types have to figure out where they can cut the programs they control. Finding a more sensible cut somewhere else in the institution doesn’t do any good, because that’s not within the power of the person who has to translate an x% budget cut into which particular ox gets gored. And while cutting across the board is a chickenshit move on the higher-ups’ part, it’s not like they can solve their problems by stepping up and cutting vertically. That just gets you a smaller number of people who are even more unhappy, most of the rest making sympathetic noises about “the gutting of the university”, and maybe some bonus unhappiness about inadequate efforts at shared governance.
And B’s right on. Yes, there is waste in administration, as in every other part of any organization as complicated as a university, especially a public university. But the number of dollars that could be saved are peanuts compared to the magnitude of the budget holes, and it’s mildly comical to watch faculty demonize administrators as coddled, overpaid, and out of touch while the general public is busy saying the same things about faculty. The infighting doesn’t do much for prospects of prying more money out of legislators, though.
November 8, 2009 at 9:20 pm
Dave
I don’t expect university administrators to take voluntary pay cuts whenever they decide that faculty and grad students can do with a little less, but then, complaints about U. presidents’ million dollar salaries aren’t really about the money, are they. They’re about the way a group of people which is invisible to most of the university decides with seeming perfect caprice who takes the hit this time. I’m sure deans and administrators work very hard doing thankless jobs, but when they are so unaccountable in such consequential areas, I’d like to see them justify their positions for a change.
Case in point: the administration at my institution was recently shocked, shocked to find that over the years, a funding stream was being used “illegally” to pay grad students for non-teaching work. So, naturally, they abolished the work, and half the grad students in my department saw a third of their funding dry up. Whoops!
IMHO it is a great sham that people who add no material or symbolic value to the university get paid a good deal of money to allocate resources in ways that often cut against the interests of the people who actually use them. If only there was some way to disincentivize their doing that…
November 9, 2009 at 10:40 am
Jeremy
Eric, thanks for the links to the Aggie articles. They were our most viewed content for the past few days because of referrals from this post. :)
- Jeremy Ogul
Managing Editor, The California Aggie
November 10, 2009 at 5:25 am
zunguzungu
This just came out (with a link to commenters on this thread!):
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/11/10/stipends
November 10, 2009 at 8:57 am
eric
Wow, this statement lacks the salient fact, doesn’t it?
“More than two dozen instructors have responded to her with e-mail messages committing to give up all, some or none of their stipends.”
November 10, 2009 at 9:28 am
dana
On the other hand, actually getting faculty to respond to e-mail is in and of itself impressive.
November 10, 2009 at 10:13 am
eric
Taking your glib comment semi-seriously for a moment, not really. People who will teach a freshman writing seminar over and above their regular teaching load for $1500 or $2000 are dedicated people, much more so than the average faculty member. So they’re much more likely than the average faculty member to respond, even with regret, to requests that they forgo what is already a pretty small stipend.
November 10, 2009 at 10:45 am
TF Smith
Not to get all master planner and all, but is it worth considering whether the CCs, CSUs, and UCs should all have, for example, the mission of offering English 101 or the equivalent?
Within a half hour of my home, for example, a bright 18-year-old high school graduate could, in a sense, take freshman english comp and lit at a UC, two CSUs, and a half dozen or more CCs, in multiple different CC districts….
Is it within reason to consider whether the CCs – at least in parts of the state that are served by the CSU – should move out of the “academic” realm entirely, and re-focus their mission entirely on vocational and technical education/training?
Or should all the freshmen and sophomores go to CCs for their 100- and 200-level courses, and the time/resources of the CSUs and UCs be given over to juniors, seniors, and graduate students?
Or should some or all of the UCs all be consolidated/converted into the CSU system? Or some or all of the CSUs into the UCs?
November 10, 2009 at 6:02 pm
zunguzungu
Note the difference between the Aggie article and the inside higher ed with respect to Subhash Risbud. In the original article, he sounds happy to work for free, regarding it as a privilege. In the IHE piece, he’s careful to emphasize the whole story, and the problem with it as precedent:
“One faculty member who’s agreed to give up his stipend this fall is Subhash Risbud, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science, who said he won’t do so again when he teaches a seminar next spring. He sees the giveback as “a short-term, Band-Aid solution” he’s willing to be a part of, but won’t allow to become the norm.
““By giving up my stipend now, I hope I’ll be part of making it possible for more students to take these seminars in the longer term,” he said. “But this is not something that should be continuously done on a constant basis.””