A Significant Investment In The Future
Barbara Altmann, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Professor of French
May 1, 2013
University of Oregon leaders have spent recent weeks discussing and researching how best to invest in UO faculty while balancing competing financial demands and finite resources.
Those discussions led to last week’s counterproposal designating the majority of available dollars for faculty salaries in across-the-board and merit raises. The package would provide an average increase of approximately 10 percent to all faculty members, and is deliberately structured to produce the most immediate and meaningful impact for individual faculty members and for the institution.
The Union proposed that, in addition to salary increases, the University provide significant pools of dollars to set floors for career NTTF and to address equity issues. We agree that these are important issues. In the University’s judgment, however, the first place to spend available dollars is in increasing salary for all faculty, and to reward their many accomplishments since the last merit raise.
United Academics’ response is to dismiss the offer of a 10 percent pay increase as “insulting.” That response is very disappointing.
The Union also says the University’s counterproposals “demonstrate that faculty are a low priority.” That’s just not true.
The University’s salary proposal represents $11.5 million in recurring new investment in bargaining unit faculty salaries through June 2015. Extending these raises to all faculty would bring that investment to $14.5 million. To give some context, the University expects about $25 million in total new revenue to be available during that same period for all of the University’s operating needs. More than half of the expected new revenue will go toward salary increases for 41 percent of the UO workforce, which does not include student workers or more than 1,400 graduate teaching or research fellows.
The Union faults the University for refusing to address salary floors or compression/equity in this contract, although the University’s bargaining team has been clear that these issues are important. As the bargaining team explained at the table, the current situation took years to develop, and cannot realistically be corrected in a single, two-year agreement. The University bargaining team also made clear that they are open to the discussion, and to considering a final package that reorders priorities, such as shifting funds earmarked for merit raises to setting salary floors for non-tenure-track faculty. The University remains committed to resolving salary floor issues. The counterproposal currently includes a Joint University-Union Committee on NTTF Compensation to develop policy and reach consensus before the next faculty union contract negotiations in fiscal year 2016.
The Union also challenges data brought to the table by the University finance team as “faulty” and “inaccurate,” but does not specify what it finds wrong with the numbers.
To be clear, the University’s financial team devoted much time to assembling the latest and most accurate data and information available. It is posted on this website for everyone to review and discuss. The data unmistakably shows that the University of Oregon is significantly underfunded and has considerably fewer resources than our AAU public peers to invest in faculty raises or many other priorities. Unlike the Union—whose proposal for salary increases alone would cost $24 million in recurring revenue just for bargaining-unit faculty–we cannot ignore the financial realities of the University.
Negotiations to arrive at the first UO faculty contract have reached a critical stage. We all care deeply about reaching a good agreement. It is, after all, a significant investment in the future of the University of Oregon.
