It has been a difficult year at the University of Illinois. Faculty were forced to take mandatory furlough days (a nice way of saying that there was a 5 per cent pay cut) and students will have to pay higher tuition in September. But today Crain's Chicago Business tells us that the University of Illinois system is actually in the black, being a comfy $16 million under budget. In addition to Illinois faculty and students, California and other state university systems have faced and are facing similar difficulties.
What's a professor to do? Faculty do the work of the university, but often have only advisory input into the decisions of the administrators who run the institution. When a financial crisis arises, real or not, the administration tends to balance the budget by cutting salaries or new hires and raising student tuition. Rarely will the administration cut its own excess, and even rarer will it dramatically reorganize the university to cut costs and improve efficiency. When faculty salaries are cut, faculty has no recourse. So the obvious answer to the problem is that faculty need to unionize.
But things aren't so obvious in academia. University professors are notoriously unwilling to organize. Seeing themselves as professionals rather than workers (or worse, mere "teachers"), they don't want to be associated with trade unions like the teamsters or autoworkers. The New York state and city universities are unionized along with California state universities and Rutgers in New Jersey, but the overwhelming majority of top-tier research institutions are not. In universities with unions in Illinois there have been no enforced furloughs, no pay cuts, and consistent cost-of-living raises. In places like the University of Illinois at Chicago where I teach, all of the above has happened.
Without unionization there can be only the appearance of faculty representation in major decisions affecting faculty and students. My university used town-hall meetings to hear faculty and student complaints, said they felt our pain, and then went on to make the decisions they deemed necessary. It's obvious now that the pay cuts and tuition raises imposed on my system were not necessary, at least for now. In fact, faculty commissioned an independent audit analysis that predicted exactly what Crains reported today. If faculty could have been involved, we might have prevented these kinds of errors of judgment.
After all, who rules the university? Hired administrators or the teachers and students whose lives and thoughts make up the daily work of each institution?
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Here's what they did: they cut full tuition wavers for the school of Fine Arts (only the music, theater, and dance people - somehow the visual artists got off free this round). So out of state students (99% of the grad students in music) will now have to cover a $14,000 tuition difference with there puny 6,000 dollar a year stipends. They get these stipends for teaching all of the sections and some of the lectures in the music school. This effectively destroys the competitiveness of the music school to draw real talent from out of state. Our music composition department is currently forced to operate a a $0 budget from the U. Compare this to Engineering grads who pull in $20,000/year stipends and whose tuition wavers aren't being cut at all! Bull.
Oh, and UIUC approved 10 million in building projects, and is paying White and Herman $250,000 dollars a year to teach one class a year in their respective departments. Faculty are not the ones suffering here. To say so is ridiculous. The situation at UIUC is ridiculous and I can't be the only one to doubt the goodwill of the administration, or its choices and tactics.
However, considering the large number of tax dollars that universities receive, they are quasi-governmental institutions in a sense, so they SHOULD be held accountable to the taxpayer. Perhaps you would be better off illuminating the "administration excess" for us than promoting another union that handcuffs taxpayers.
I'd love to see many educational institutions audited and forced to account for their spending. What I am now seeing with my own children is a college that keeps moving the bar, or somehow can't find a teacher for that last outstanding class before an associate's degree can be bestowed. It keeps the student in limbo, and hopefully coming back for another semester to the same place in an attempt to complete a degree plan. Grrrrrr! I am so irritated at this institution I am ready to contact the media.
Accountability would be a great thing for all involved in the educational system. Just like AIG, I imagine we'd find layers of bloated salaries and perks that could be done away with, increasing the overall function of the school.
This statement is a severe understatement: "Rarely will the administration cut its own excess, and even rarer will it dramatically reorganize the university to cut costs and improve efficiency." The University of Illinois recently hired a new president with a 37% salary increase over the previous president. What could account for such reckless behavior other than severe structural corruption?
http://www.news-gazette.com/news/university-illinois/2010-05-13/substantial-salary-new-ui-president-sends-e-mails-opinions-flyin