Akron-AAUP - The American Association of University Professors at The University of Akron: Protecting Academic Freedom For a Free Society
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Something Akron-AAUP Has Been Pointing Out For Years–The Cost of Administrative Bloat.

Saturday, April 6, 2013

 “The Troubling Dean-to-Professor Ratio”  by  John Hechinger  from Bloomberg Businessweek, Politics and Policy, online.

“The number of Purdue administrators has jumped 54 percent in the past decade—almost eight times the growth rate of tenured and tenure-track faculty. “We’re here to deliver a high-quality education at as low a price as possible,” says Robinson. “Why is it that we can’t find any money for more faculty, but there seems to be an almost unlimited budget for administrators?…”

“…“Administrative bloat is clearly contributing to the overall cost of higher education,” says Jay Greene, an education professor at the University of Arkansas.”

Read the entire article on the Bloomberg Businessweek Website HERE.

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How does the University of Akron respond to budgetary pitfalls? Last year the administration manufactured three NEW administrative vice-presidential positions at a salary cost of 500,000 dollars.  This year, teaching loads on productive faculty are being increased arbitrarily — which WILL decrease research productivity, which will in turn reduce success in securing research grant money, which will in turn reduce income for the university as well as reduce the quality of education for our students, already beleaguered by continually rising tuition costs. And now the administration is severely limiting the teaching hours available to the large population of part-time faculty who already work, and work hard, for lousy pay, no benefits, and no job security of any kind…just to keep dedicated employees who actually contribute to student education from securing health care.

We’ll ask again: what evidence is there that the administration is imposing limits on its own spectacular growth and accepting cuts and making the sacrifices it demands of all others? What have the athletics programs been forced to give up?

We see no evidence whatsoever of anything but continued and profligate spending on administrative pet-projects and growth.

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Spring 2013 Chapter Meeting and Election

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

The Akron-AAUP will hold it’s annual Spring meeting –for dues-paying members only–Wednesday, April 10 at NOON in room 312 at the student union.  Lunch will be provided IF you RSVP by Monday, April 8, 3:00 PM.

RSVP to: russ.davis@akronaaup.org

This annual meeting is for full dues-paying members only.  However, if you are a member of the bargaining unit (and if you pay the fair share fee, then you are one) you may join the chapter as a full chapter member now or at the door. Noone who is not a full dues-paying chapter member will be permitted to attend the meeting. We remind you that paying the fair share fee alone does not constitute membership in the chapter.

One of the items for the meeting will be to announce the results of the election for chapter President and Vice-President.  Dues-paying members will be receiving electronic ballots.

The candidates for chapter office are:

For President: Stephen Weeks;  For Vice-President: Ira Sasowsky and Kathryn Feltey.  Statements from the candidates may be found HERE.

 

 

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Chapter Election: President and Vice-President of Akron-AAUP

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Dues-paying members of the chapter will soon be receiving a notice of the election for the offices of Chapter President and Vice-President. We anticipate that this notice will be sent out Wednsesday evening.  We apologize to Steve and Ira–we misspelled Steve’s first and Ira’s last names in our original notice.

Only full dues-paying members will receive a notice via e-mail, and only full dues-paying members are eligible to cast votes in this election. If you are not on the list of full dues-paying members at this time you will not have a vote and you will not receive a notice.

The candidates for chapter office are:

For President: Dr. Stephen C Weeks (Professor, Biology)

For Vice-President: Dr. Kathryn Feltey (Associate Professor, Sociology) and Dr. Ira Sasowsky (Professor, Geosciences)

The online ballot will provide spaces for write-in candidates.

The chapter constitution calls for a full 7 day period of balloting. The balloting will close Tuesday night (specific time to be announced) and the results of the election will be announced at the chapter meeting Wednesday, April 10.

Statements from the candidates can be found on this page.

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This is Shared Governance? Good Faith Bargaining?

Friday, March 29, 2013

The Akron-AAUP’s contract with the university administration provides for a negotiation “re-opener” on salary for AY 2013-14, the final year of the contract. Akron-AAUP has asked the university to begin these negotiations. The administration has deflected our request, ostensibly until after completion of the Higher Learning Commission visit. Following this contractually mandated re-opener, the Akron-AAUP and the university administration will have to negotiate the full terms of the next agreement. The HLC has come and gone and there’s still no word from the administration about beginning negotiations to complete current contractual obligations, nor to begin negotiations on the next agreement.

We were surprised, then, to find:

  • that President Proenza announced publicly that faculty and staff will see a salary freeze for the next two years. This announcement occurred prior to, in fact without, negotiations, and well after the chapter had made informal and formal requests to begin legally mandated negotiations on the salary re-opener.

  • that after the administration had announced an approximate $25 million budget deficit, it was renovating Infocision Stadium to the cost of 5 or 6 million dollars out of the general fund. This would include a new kitchen, and new facilities for the Development and Alumni offices.

  • in the Beacon Journal (March 22) that the university is planning “behind the scenes” either to renovate the James A. Rhodes Arena or build a new arena for the basketball team. How many millions would this cost, and will these millions will be added into the alleged deficit for 2013-2014?

The university administration has asked that everyone in the academic community tighten their belts, and that full time faculty “work to full capacity” to get the university beyond this suggested – though not fully explained, nor particularly obvious– budget “deficit.”

Akron-AAUP fully agrees that all university employees ought to work to full capacity, which is why we negotiated (Continued)

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Akron-AAUP Will Have a Table in the Student Union April 1 and 2: Stop by!

Friday, March 29, 2013

The Akron-AAUP will have a table in the UA Student Union Monday and Tuesday, April 1 and 2. Members will be staffing the tables from 10:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m.  Come by to say hello, ask questions, find out about the current status of negotiations (that one will be a brief update–there aren’t any talks scheduled yet.)

Most importantly, come by to sign up for full membership.  We’ve had a lot of membership forms downloaded from this site, but….Downloading the membership form doesn’t make you a member of the chapter–you have to fill it out and submit it!  And you can do so right there, at the table.

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What’s Needed to Keep College Costs Reasonable? Empowered faculty!

Friday, March 22, 2013

From commentary by Mr. Robert Martin in the online edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“Reason and data alike suggest that the largest part of the problem is that it is administrators and members of governing boards who have too much influence over how resources are used.”

“…the pursuit of self-interest by administrators and boards will lead to the same destructive effects on cost and quality we have observed over the past three decades.”

“A common theme among higher education’s critics is that shared governance is to blame for colleges’ profligate ways, because faculty have too much influence over how money is spent. And the critics are right: Shared governance does play a role. But it is not the “shared” part of “shared governance” that has failed; quite the opposite. The fault lies in the withering away of the shared part. Reason and data alike suggest that the largest part of the problem is that it is administrators and members of governing boards who have too much influence over how resources are used…In academe, shared governance is the only natural constraint on the pursuit of self-interest. It is past time for a new campus contract among faculty, administrators, and governing boards to affirm that fact. Communication among those three groups must be open and outside the control of any one of them. Faculty members should independently choose their own representatives, through whom they can speak to the administration or the board…If the administration controls that communication, or if the board considers it a violation of the chain of command, then the new contract will not work—and the pursuit of self-interest by administrators and boards will lead to the same destructive effects on cost and quality we have observed over the past three decades.”

Read the entire piece by Mr. Martin on The Chronicle’s website HERE.

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MOOC’s: A Massively Bad Idea

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Here’s an opinion from the online edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education on a new bill in California that would allow students to enroll in MOOC’s for credit.  The author, Mr. Rob Jenkins, gives his reasoning for declaring acceptance of MOOC credit to be a “massively bad idea.”

From the piece: “…California’s plan (or to be fair, one senator’s plan) is basically to dump hundreds of thousands of the state’s least-prepared and least-motivated students into a learning environment that requires the greatest amount of preparation and motivation, where they will take courses that may or may not be effective in that format.

Here’s a prediction: Those students will fail and drop out at astronomical rates. Then the hand-wringing will begin anew, the system will pour millions more dollars into “retention” efforts, and the state will be in an even deeper fix than it is now. (Virtual cheating will probably run rampant, too, followed by expensive anticheating measures, but that’s another blog post.)”

Read the entire article on The Chronicle’s website here.

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From A Roundtable Discussion That Could Have Taken Place at The University of Akron

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

“Where do I begin? I spent the last thirty minutes listening to a group of arrogant and condescending noneducators disrespect my colleagues and profession. I listened to a group of disingenuous people whose own self-interests guide their policies rather than the interests of children. I listened to a cabal of people who sit on national education committees that will have a profound impact on classroom teaching practices. And I heard nothing of value.”

–Mr. Anthony Mullen, 2009 National Teacher of The Year

Read Mr. Mullen’s commentary in its entirety here:

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teacher_of_the_year/2010/01/teachers_should_be_seen_and_no.html

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The Future of Faculty at UA – What We Know About Workload

Monday, March 4, 2013

Everyone knows by now that faculty workload is the hot topic on campus. Changes are being discussed, proposed, and most importantly, implemented already. Here is what we think about this, what we know, what we don’t know and what we have done. In the meantime, join the chapter as a full dues-paying member if you wish to become a meaningful part of the solution to the problems that now plague higher education and The University of Akron.

We See the Current Implementations as a Violation of the Collective Bargaining Agreement.

Imposing a change in workload without discussing it with the Akron-AAUP is clearly a violation of the contract. While Ohio state law prohibits unionized faculties from negotiating over workload, our contract mandates that changes in workload must be discussed with Akron-AAUP. This has not happened. The chapter has filed an “informal” grievance over this matter to get the administration’s attention. We will pursue this grievance legally if the informal approach fails. Furthermore, faculty plan and coordinate their work based on university approved merit guidelines, RTP guidelines, and workload expectations that have been carefully developed over the years and are part of the collective bargaining agreement. These elements presuppose existing workload distributions. Mandatory workload changes effectively negate the premise of those merit guidelines.

What is the evidence that faculty are not working to capacity? (Continued)

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Here’s a Simple Formula For You To Consider

Friday, March 1, 2013

The number of higher-level administrators at the University of Akron has continued to increase.  Recall last year there were THREE more administrative positions created at one or the other vice-presidential ranks at a salary cost of half-a-million dollars.  We have no way to estimate the affiliated costs of benefits, office staff, office accoutrements, the inevitable expense accounts, etc.  We’ve also seen the numbers of full-time faculty diminish.  

The result:

Student enrollment is down. Income from tuition and state support is down. And UA’s response is to pile on more and evermore administrators while demanding more and evermore from shrinking faculty numbers.

Is there an educator anywhere in this country, an educator actually trained and well-experienced in the actual practice of teaching that believes that more classes per faculty and more students in these classes is anything but ineffective, and even harmful to learning?  The only ones around here that seem to think this is the way to do things are highly-paid administrators, few of whom, it would seem, have spent any time at all recently–if ever–in a classroom.

Administrator numbers increase.   Faculty numbers decrease.  Student enrollment declines.  Yeah, we think it really is that simple. In the context of a struggling economy students and their parents must be more selective and, clearly, they are not impressed with what they see as the results of the University of Akron administration’s policies.

One suggestion: Cut upper level adminstration by half (and we’re not talking about Department Chairs and Deans, positions which are–or should be–empowered to facilitate teaching and research, not simply charged with carrying Buchtel Hall’s water; nor are we suggesting further reorganization melding colleges, departments and programs that have no intrinsic or historical academic ties with one another in order to save the cost of one or two administrative stipends). Cut the upper administration and invest the millions of dollars that would be saved in more faculty charged with leading smaller classes.  Then sit back and watch as UA’s reputation improves in both the education and business communities.

If high quality education is our primary purpose–and it ought to be–it would be worth a try to do this.  But as long as the principal concern is some ill-defined notion of  “efficiency in resource utilization” and the almighty dollar…well, the results seem to be clear:

Our community, thoroughly unimpressed with the actions of the university administration, will send their tuition dollars elsewhere.

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