26 January 2000

Dear President Frohnmayer,

Many of the issues that faculty colleagues have highlighted in recent communications have struck a nerve with me; Richard Sundt, Frank Stahl, and Linda Kintz among others have articulated concerns that I care about deeply. I write now to present a slightly different take on the question of faculty compensation.

One reason that the issue of faculty compensation and the university's true priorities have become hot buttons is the accelerating erosion of the quality of the faculty's working lives over the past 10 years. For a very long time the UO has relied on the Oregon "quality of life dividend" to offset faculty salaries, but that quality of life has now been eroded by many factors, among them the following:

• -- the practice of withholding, freezing and cutting replacement lines. Fewer faculty do the work that used to be shared among a larger team.
• -- the demonstrable increase of faculty responsiblity in such areas as recruitment, retention, advising, P.R. (electronic and in-person).
• -- the exponential increase of administrative responsibilities that comes after tenure.
• -- the de facto – soon to be de jure – competition among academic units for enrollments, for lines, and (most distressingly) for simple respect from the administration.
• -- the competition within academic units for salary increases, and the ratcheting-up of expectations for research "productivity" (and hence promotion, tenure, and merit increases), despite a simultaneous reduction in the amount of time and support available to enable research.

I came to the UO in 1989, canceling campus interviews at Emory, Utah and Loyola, for the quality of life dividend. Frankly I don't see my current quality of life as sufficiently high to offset my salary, but I remain more concerned about quality of life than about salary. The deep morale problem I see on this campus is unlikely to be solved by even the most improbably munificent raises.

Very truly yours, F. Regina Psaki Associate Professor, Romance Languages