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UO data shows huge raises for top admins, not faculty, OA’s, or staff

From UO’s own increasingly transparent and subversive Institutional Research website, here:

Screen Shot 2014-11-17 at 11.00.05 PM

As one admittedly extreme example of our top end bloat problem, look at provosts. Last year UC-Berkeley was paying Provost George Breslauer $322K (now retired). He had seven years experience in that job, and a budget of about $2.5B. In comparison, UO is paying Interim Provost Frances Bronet $360K. She has no experience in the job, and has a budget of about $850M.

Here’s some more data:

19 Comments

  1. Anonymous 11/17/2014

    Johnson Hall cronyism crushes the SEIU union. Sad but true.

    The OAs have done better without a union than the staff have done with SEIU. Why?

    The jury on the UAUO faculty union is still out. The next contract will need some big numbers.

    • anonymous 11/18/2014

      That’s a huge leap in logic. Pay for administrative staff is generally low in Lane County, and the fact that the SEIU did a crappy job negotiating for UO classified staff doesn’t mean that unions are bad for salaries.

  2. GTFatLarge 11/18/2014

    Over the last decade:
    Senior Administrator salaries grew by 87%.
    Faculty salaries grew by 38%
    OA salaries grew by 49%
    Classified staff salaries grew by 31%

    How do those compare to other things?
    Undergrad resident tuition/fees (from ous.edu) grew by 93%
    Undergrad non-resident tuition/fees grew by 75%
    Total Inflation rate (from bls.gov) of 27%

    Classified staff salaries just barely bested inflation, while the only thing that grows anywhere near as fast as administrator salaries is tuition? Gross.

  3. underpaid and subversive 11/18/2014

    “UO is paying Interim Provost Frances Bronet $360K. She has no experience in the job . . . ”

    and she doesn’t have a PhD!

  4. Working GTF 11/18/2014

    Curious as to why there’s no salary data for GTFs on here.

    Oh, right. We’re “just students.” Our stipend is a gift from our generous patrons, for whom we perform no significant labor.

    • anonymous 11/18/2014

      Individual GTF contracts are considered to be “education records” under FERPA, hence are not included in the Institutional Research statistics. There is of course no reason the aggregate data couldn’t be made public, though.

      Although the FPCO is (correctly) interpreting the four-decade-old language of FERPA to put graduate teaching fellowships in the same category as undergraduate work-study, it was probably not the intention of FERPA to specifically exempt GTF contracts from public records laws.

      The GTFF actually contacted FPCO about this about a decade ago in order to obtain data about its members. Their request was denied by the FPCO Director, although he was sympathetic to their position and allowed the possibility that “GTF status” could be made public information. Unfortunately, no one has made the effort to get FERPA amended in order to regard GTFs as public employees rather than “primarily students” for the purpose of disclosure.

      I personally think the GTFF and other graduate student unions should work on getting this changed. If you want to be considered to be public employees when negotiating, you can’t have it both ways.

      • Working GTF 11/18/2014

        Thanks, anon!

        Here’s the aggregate data (with bonus graph!): http://imgur.com/a/Ho24j

        Long story short, for GTFs, a real increase of 3.5% in take-home (because despite the admins’ over-protesting, a tuition hike is not a de facto raise for GTFs) wages over the last decade.

        In the same timeframe, a real increase of 47% for top-level admins.

        • anon 11/18/2014

          By “real” you mean after normalizing for inflation or something? The pay rate on the table looks to have increased by ~25%.

          A funny thing about comparing GTFs and admins. GTFs are always coming in at Level I, and Level III GTFs leave. Whereas in the admin world the new admin comes in at the same salary level as the previous one, it seems like, so they are “standing on the shoulders of salary giants” without having to gain the experience themselves to command that salary!

          • Working GTF 11/18/2014

            Yep, adjusted for inflation.

          • Standing on the shoulders of giants, and on the heads of faculty and staff. 11/19/2014

            Brad Shelton:
            1. hired to direct ALL research on campus despite zero years of real admin experience, and NO major grants of his own.

            2. relieved of ALL responsibilities for grad education that were held by his pathetic and destructive predecessor, Kimberly Espy….

            Granted a sizable RAISE over the above market salary wasted on Espy.

            The rest of you can just SUCK it.

  5. Trickortreat 11/18/2014

    When you have the keys to the kingdom you can get into any room you want and that includes the treasure room where these self proclaimed kings and queens can stuff their pockets at the expense of the kingdom.

  6. Dog 11/18/2014

    A comment on the faculty salary data because there are some nuances that are important given that that 10 years of data includes two salary freeze periods.

    Aggregate faculty average salary can increase for two reasons other than faculty raises.

    1. Promotion and Tenure will still carry raises independent of salary freezes.

    2. In general, we now pay newly hired assistant professors competitive salaries (which is why some of them in CAS did not get a raise in May 2011) so the average always goes up with new hires.

    This is why the faculty average increases even though raises were banned in 2009-2010 (and frozen in 2004-2005).

    So the aggregate 38% raise is an overestimate of actual aggregate pay raises.

  7. Anon 11/18/2014

    Wow. And this doesn’t even count what we paid Frohnmayer and Gottfredson to leave!

  8. uomatters Post author | 11/18/2014

    Gottfredson’s $940K should show up in the 2014-15 data, when released. Or maybe they’ll claim that was part of his sociology faculty pay.

  9. Anonymous 1 11/19/2014

    It’s all just too depressing to think about. The admin salaries are even worse if they included themselves in the July 1 raises. We need the new first quarter fiscal 2015 numbers. Since the equity raises were totally messed up in CAS (and I suspect everywhere else), the situation may have gotten even worse, in relative terms, for some faculty.

  10. Trickortreat 11/20/2014

    What school was it that had the president take a pay cut so he could pay those at the bottom of the scale more? Seriously, this really happened.

    • uomatters Post author | 12/01/2014

      Is there some reason you can’t just make a regular comment with a link?

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