On June 4 and 5, and for the third, and, I trust, last time this year, the Interinstitutional Faculty Senate met at Salem. We did so of course because the fate of higher education at that point was very much in the hands of the legislature and the Governor, and we wish to have our concerns be taken into account in the legislative process. But what was news then is old now, so my report on those parts of our meeting will be very brief. It is worth sharing with you, I think, that we were assured by Senator Timms of Burns that the Legislative leadership's commitment to adequate funding of Higher Education remained firm.
We had a presentation by Marilyn Lanier, the Associate Vice Chancellor for Administration, and Loren Stubbert, the Associate Director of the Budget for the Oregon University System. It was a good and enlightening report providing us with specific numbers on how the state funds will be distributed under the new model, along with the appropriate rationales. At the same time, with individual institutions generating and keeping about 80% of their operating budgets, we are anxious to know what degree of autonomy institutions will have over their budgets and thus, by implication, over their programs and over staff and faculty salaries. There are, of course, still larger questions at issue. To what extent do we remain a system? To what extent will institutions be freed from old geographical limitations and concerns about duplication of program? And at what organizational level will these questions be settled?
As you know, the faculties have willingly embraced the new model even though its organizational implications are far from clear. We are aware of the value to the Governor and the Legislature of terms like competition and entrepreneurial , and we genuinely value the ability to see the connection between program and cost and the opportunity to propose new programs without the traditional slow process of approval. On the other hand, we are conscious that paradoxically much of our recent political strength has come from institutions' presenting a united front to the political leadership, and, if for no other reason than that, we see the value of the system's remaining a system.
We also heard from Dawn Billings, who is Coordinator of Curriculum and Instruction for the Department of Education. We invited her because, first, we have an obvious interest in the kind of education our future students are receiving, and also because we have been observing -- impressionistically, to be sure -- what seems like a deterioration among our younger students in the ability to write and reason critically. She spoke to us about progress in applying the CIM, CAM, and PASS standards. It was a very encouraging presentation. Clearly if the goals of all of these standards are met, we can expect a reversal in what seems to us to be a downward trend in student performance. She gave us a great deal of material to study. I suspect that, having studied it, we will invite her or another representative of K-12 education to come to our next IFS meeting.
On Saturday, we met jointly for an hour with members of the Association of Oregon Faculties, the lobbying organization of IFS. Mark Nelson, the AOF lobbyist gave his view of the political situation for Higher Education as it then was. He alerted us to Senate Bill 722, which would have the effect of reducing PERS benefits to state employees hired after January 1, 2000. This bill could have unfortunate implications for our ability to hire new faculty. I have distributed among you the most recent report by Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors on faculty salaries for 1998-9. The number for each rank represents a twentieth-percentile. As you can see, we are holding on to our usual place, the bottom twentieth-percentile for most ranks at most of our institutions, though, when total compensation is considered, that is, salary plus fringe benefits, we do slightly better for a couple of ranks in a couple of institutions. When hiring new faculty, we have always been able to refer to a relatively generous retirement plan. If Senate Bill 722 is passed and signed, our competitive disadvantage in the academic market place will be even worse than it is now. I think that this point needs to be made by representatives of higher education to the political leadership.
Professor Peter Gilkey of the University of Oregon has developed a Web Page for IFS. At our meeting, he joined us, and we discussed what should appear on it. Its address is http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~ifs/ifs.html. We will keep a record of our activities on it.
Finally, almost half-way through my term as President of IFS, I discovered that I could not find an up-to-date copy of the Constitution of IFS, nor, apparently, could anyone else. We have been operating with our original constitution and our institutional memory of various amendments and changes in practice. So we have organized a constitutional committee to present a corrected version to the whole Senate for adoption by our December meeting.
Respectfully submitted,
John R. Cooper
President Interinstitutional Faculty Senate