Posts
Student preferences for tertiary online courses
-
The latest article from our Transition Study has been published in the American
Journal of Distance Education. I co-authored the article, titled Student
Pe...
6 days ago
Questions! What a wonderful thing . . . .
ReplyDeleteCan we start another petition to review the performance of senior administrators?
ReplyDeleteTechnically, I suspect that is possible. After all, you can make a petition to have any Dean reviewed. The problem is, would enough people agree to have their names be known for having signed it?
ReplyDeleteI'm wondering what the Faculty of Arts total operating budget (or any Faculty, really) was 5 years ago compared to today. My educated guess would be it has increased significantly. Isn't the issue here that you can continue to raise salaries and benefits for existing faculty and staff so you retain your best teachers or you can hire new faculty and staff but you can't do both across the board for all? There has to be a choice somewhere. So if we who teach here already continue to see our salaries and benefits go up year after year, isn't it us who are actually the root of the issue? Perhaps I don't understand this clearly?
ReplyDeleteAnon @ 08:27 AM: But it's not up to the "employees" to make this decision. In industry, it's up to the employer to offer a reasonable salary to its workforce (if it wants to retain good workers), and to ensure that product sales provide sufficient profit to pay those salaries. Unless the factory is going bust, you don't see workers volunteering to take lower salaries to keep the price of its widgets down.
DeleteHere, salaries are the major cost of the enterprise (we make and sell no widgets), but the concept of paying competitive salaries to good workers is the same. It's up to administration to ensure it can pay those competitive salaries, not up to us to bail them out. We did that once with furloughs, and much good that did us.
I agree but to be air to our admin the typical way industry ensures it can pay competitive salaries when there is not enough money coming in is to lay-off people. Tenure makes that very hard to so in a university - or at least do it in a sensible way. However I fail to see how we can cut any more support staff without significantly impairing the functionality of the institute so perhaps we should start looking at program cuts if the government refuses to raise the grant.
DeleteTrue, Anon @ 01:50 AM; but layoffs don't play well on the stockmarket (and CEOs tend to be shuffled along). I think administration will soon have to admit defeat on funding, and invoke article 32 or even 33 in the Faculty Agreement.
DeleteThe government's poor handling of the economy is indeed not the "fault" of administration. But it is nevertheless the job of our administrators (and the basis for their high salaries) to ensure sustainable funding for the University. They are the captains of the ship, and they set the course we are now on. They have sailed us perilously close to the rocks with the now-unsustainable expansionist policies of the last few years, and I would argue that there must be some accountability for this.
Not to put too fine a line on it, Jeremy, but I think layoffs often play _quite_ well on the stock market. I hope that we don't find out first-hand how such a major shake-up will play out for our "CEO."
DeleteTrue, Blither. And if the equivalent of the stock market here is the GoA, then she might just get another medal. Funny old world.
DeleteThat's exactly the position that the Administration is taking. For them to do so is for them to forget that professors, in their interactions with students, are the university. The university grows and flourishes to the extent that it invests in us. Our salaries are not the problem. What I think we need to ask is this: on what basis have administrative costs "doubled since 2000-01 and . . . quadrupled since 1994-95?
ReplyDelete(Quote is from Erin Millar's Maclean's article at http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2010/04/01/the-high-cost-of-status/.)
It may help to look at other numbers. Here are the unrestricted grants from the Provincial Government in (in 000's).
Delete576,918 2011 Operating fund grants
581,445 2010 Unrestricted grants
549,362 2009 Unrestricted grants
492,881 2008 Unrestricted grants
449,295 2007 Unrestricted grants
402,635 2006 Unrestricted grants
351,430 2005 Unrestricted grants
323,609 2004 Unrestricted grants
295,589 2003 Unrestricted grants
285,273 2002 Unrestricted grants
249,278 2001 Unrestricted grants
(There were substantial dedicated grants from the Provincial Government too.)
There is some justification for increased administrative costs over the years as the institution has been growing. However, any hopes for maintaining such growth in governmental grants have been rather naive and it was the task of senior administration to prepare the institution for a reversal of fortune. Signing salary agreements which cannot be kept is inexcusable. There is a honorable solution for the current administration. Let it remain unnamed.
Numbers relating to the finances of all Canadian universities, including their central administration costs, are published annually. For what it's worth, central admin costs at U of A increased by another 11.5% in the two years since that piece was written.
DeleteSee "Tories eye public sector salaries" at http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Tories+public+sector+salaries/6053557/story.html
ReplyDeleteCovert Agent, would you kindly clarify what you're trying to get to with your question.
ReplyDelete@Anon at 8:27 am (Professor Richards -- could an issue here be not so much cowardice as people finding "select profile" confusing? Because unlike other blogs, people don't even post pseudonymously here, which would at least simplify conversation threads)
ReplyDeleteAnyway. Back to my response to your query. With very few exceptions, *everything* is more expensive now than it was 5 years ago, from houses to (I'm guessing) bananas. Your query supposes that the task of the university administration is to keep costs flat across time by whatever means necessary. That's an unreasonable task, and -- quite rightly -- not one that they set themselves.
What is bothersome is the way the fact of "rising costs" is used to justify priority-setting *without additional explanation*. It's *not* self-explanatory; repeating the fact that it's more expensive to run the university than it was 5 years ago does NOT explain on its own why position X must go while position Y doesn't (or gets a raise).
"Things are more expensive than they used to be" is a general truism, not an explanation of particulars. It's the explanation of particulars that the admin hasn't so far been prepared to offer.
Whether in business or in the public sector, the stupid mistake the B of G made was overexpansion beyond what would be sustainable. Both in terms of size and in terms of grandiose 2020 statements. It was bad decision-making pure and simple. I also think its ludicrous to complain about faculty and staff salaries when Indira, Carl et al are making their financial fortunes here. I still can't believe that they sucked so many people into the gamble that if you build a grandiose American-style institution the funding would come. They gambled with our instituion and we lost while they can laugh all the way to their cushy retirement fortunes. And then a really cool move was to p!ss off all the well-heeled citizens of Edmonton (including high-end alumni and other former supporters of the public U) by threatening to bulldoze their neighborhoods (metaphorically). I think the whole of the B of G along with the Senior Admin should be fired.
ReplyDeletea grandiose American-style institution
ReplyDeleteWhat ever is that supposed to mean? This puerile Canadian habit of calling anything they don't like "American-style" is really annoying. The "grandiose" ambitions of the administration could just as well be considered an aspiration to be like the University of Toronto as Harvard. And the UofA in its present circumstances is certainly comparable to any number of large US state schools.
Keeping foolish (and invidious) comparisons out of the discussion would be a good idea.
It's also pretty annoying when people make condescending reference to non-existent "puerile Canadian habits". Some Canadians, I'm sure, talk about "American-style" things they are not fond of, but a lot of us don't.
Delete3 examples, right off the top of my head:
Delete1) discussion of and condemnation of "American-style attack ads" during a recent Canadian election. Not just"attack ads" but "American-style".
2) reference to "two-tiered American style health care" Again, not a reference simply to "two-tiered health care", which should be clear enough, but specifically to "American-style". Why the unnecessary reference to "American style"?
3) the fact that all it took was for Team USA (teenagers, all) to appear on the jumbotron for the crowds at Rexall and at Calgary to start booing loudly and to keep those boos up until the game was over. No other team was booed so mercilessly or so relentlessly or with such glee.
Yeah, it's a Canadian habit. Perhaps you don't notice it because you're not the target.
At least in the second instance I can give you an answer: because the American style of 2-tier health care is different, say, from the British.
DeleteNot to mention that yiur first two examples sound like they are mostly drawn from the media and your third example is not of anyone referring to an "American style" per se, but is simply an example of anti -Americanism.
And yes, I would not deny that many Canadians express anti-Americanism in many different contexts. But you don't help matters when you lash out at all Canadians as though we were an undifferentiated nation of bozos (a common caricature of Canadians in American popular culture...)
SP/LP/EP, your post seems to prove my point, and Huey et al's, about the Canadian trend towards anti-Americanism. Not sure why you claim it's a "non existent" habit.
DeleteOh, and I'm not lashing out at anyone.
Two-tiered American health care needs to be identified as such because it is radically different from other types of two-tiered health care systems (including Canada's own - anyone who says we don't have two tiers of health care has never served in the military or dealt with a WCB issue). Having lived in Europe for many years, I can tell you that European-style two-tired health care (especially the German system) is radically different from the American system, and far superior to anything I've seen either in Canada or the U.S. (And yes, I also lived in the U.S. for a while, so had direct experience with their system.)
DeleteTo Anon Jan. 27:
ReplyDelete1- define over-expansion.
2- who has complained about employee salaries? Provost has very publicly spoken in support of both salary settlements.
3- sr admin deserve salaries appropriate for 24/7, 365 day jobs overseeing a $1.4B enterprise, hours and days largely spent trying to secure resources for us to continue our work
4- we are far, far from a US-style institution (including tuition 1/3 of the cost)
5- what on earth are you talking about? who's bulldozing anything?
It looks that our Prez keeps several 24/7, 365 day jobs.
DeleteRE. American-style institutions. When I made that comment I was referring to the American postsecondary system, which is basically 3-tiered one: community college, state colleges, and elite private institutions. In contrast, in Canada, postsecondary ed is almost all public, but with pretty high quality across the board. Much of the recent discourse here at the U of A has clearly been mean to emulate the Amercian model for elite institutions (just as Toronto did, which is why it has long been called the Harvard of the North) with its emphasis on business partnerships, marketing, endowments for the sake of it, and prestige for the sake of it (ie. the 2020 vision). The deliberate attempt to import this American system can be seen in the fact that the senior admin, including Carl and recent hirees like Jennifer Chesney and the new PR guy (who got Indira that leadership award from the American postsecondary marketing org.) etc. are all imported from those kinds of institutions in the U.S. And having all business people and engineers on the B of G is part of it. Its the U of A aspiring to Ivy League status while retaining public support and funding. It will never work.
ReplyDeleteI believe that to a large extent it is our (ie the entire UofA community) fault that we have not prevented the Prez from putting so much steam into the whistle. I am writing letters to the Prez asking questions to the above effect (some were posted on Colloquy) and I sometimes get replies but no answers.
Delete