Remarks to the OUS Board of Higher Education

Mina Carson

April 6, 2007

I love my job. I am 54 and I look forward to working at least to the conventional retirement age of 65 or so. There is certainly no reason to stop. I get to do what I love every day. Sure, there are chores that I donÕt relish doing again and again, and there are daunting challenges to the spirit that come with trying to muster the courage to be creative as well as productive. I will not leave my job because my salary is not competitive, but I do feel the slight to my honor and competence, just about every day. Our job descriptions as academics are different from many job descriptions, and our career paths are different. Most of us count it as a success to stay in the same institution for decades: to achieve tenure, which is institutional permission, or entitlement, to stay on and on and on. And I hasten to add that the vast majority of us do not abuse tenure. Rather, the tenure system not only allows us to be adventurous intellectually, but also lends an academic institution a stability and continuity I challenge you to find in any other institution except by accident. And that stability, when it is healthy, offers a tremendous boon to our students, who can count on having professors who know what their majors need to do to get through their programs of study and hopefully what they need to do to function effectively in their careers.

There is this stability, this tenure. Then there is the fact that most of us donÕt work 40 hours a week in one office Š instead we work 60 or so hours a week, maybe in the office and the classroom and the cafe and the lab and the blessed committee room and on the phone and in our studies in the evening. And we really have a pretty good time. We have a lot of freedom, and with that freedom comes responsibility. We have the responsibility to create new knowledge: to ask and seek answers to questions, answers based on research and scholarship, and not just whimsy and wishful thinking. ThatÕs a huge piece of our job description, and at my university success at research and publication leads to tangible rewardsÉin years when there are rewards. How we take that knowledge into the classroom Š how effectively we package and convey knowledge and the skills that enhance and grow knowledge Š is also a grave and exciting responsibility. That effectiveness can also lead to raises Š in years when there are raises.

I say these things to frame this spreadsheet of salaries in one large, healthy, well run liberal arts department in one OUS institution.

What I want to point out is the very weird salary pattern you see here. I take it that you are our friends Š you have certainly demonstrated that over the last few years Š and so I want to point to hard data for the kinds of arguments you are now making for us, which oddly we are prevented from making for ourselves so we donÕt look like grasping prima donnas. I want to point out the severe salary compression that Oregon revenue and expenditure practices have generated in our public universities. So if you would, please glance at this list, and leave out the chairman and the two endowed chairs, and note the numbers and the hire dates. (This is publicly available information, of course. I didnÕt kill anyone to bring it to you.)

Promotions, external recognition, and research productivity do create some differences or gaps among peers, because appropriately, in the academic world those are the triggers for many significant salary bumps. But much more significant has been the outside marketÕs interaction with a lack of internal system resources. There are no significant salary bumps in Oregon universities. Administrators are doing what they must do to attract new, exciting scholars. They insure our future. They keep us older guys on our toes. We mentor them and they inspire and challenge us. On non-union campuses, getting the best kids straight out of graduate school means putting most of your chips on new hires and praying for a break in the cards in the next deal so you can keep your winnings. Systemic poverty prevents boosting salaries at the upper end, particularly in a liberal arts college where there are few agencies competing for senior professionals, as occurs in engineering and business. ThereÕs no market demand for full professors of sociology. Assigning raises by percentages, and never having a yearÕs largesse to just play catch-up, and not plough more into merit raises to plug the dyke, are both conditions that exacerbate this situation.

Another way in which an academic career is different from many others is that our creative phases are supposed to issue in books, articles, or patents. [And thatÕs very serious. When this mandate is pooh-poohed by the public as a frill or hobby that gets in the way of teaching, the world is ill-served. Both things are important and interlocked. We donÕt always do both things right, or link them effectively, but that is our job.] Like other humans, this process for each of us has fits and starts. But the Oregon universitiesÕ lack of resources has not only allowed private and out of state universities to lure away our professors, but has also failed to remunerate differentially creative people when they are creative. A professor hired in the early seventies or an associate professor hired in the mid-eighties who finally gets his second or third wonderful book out is not going to be Ņcaught upÓ with his peers of earlier productivity, because the money is not there to do it. So you can look at the upper tier of a department and see a raft of people with similar credentials and wildly different compensation packages.

And then if you look at the last few people hired, of course youÕll note that their salaries are just barely lower than the lowest paid associate professors Š and in some cases higher. They may have some chance of catching up with their peers around the country eventually Š but only if Oregon changes its ways. If not, additional salary freezes and robbing Peter to pay Paul are going to sink this ship and weÕll return to wandering the streets like intellectual buskers hoping to attract urchins interested in a bit of learning.

These facts are bad for morale. This is an irrational situation. How many businesses run this way? We werenÕt trained to be business people, but that doesnÕt mean we want to be stooges. Thanks for going to bat for us.