Hello, Peter: I have followed coverage of the U of O's latest White Paper and the faculty survey of January/February 2000 with some interest and curiosity. A decade ago, when President Brand was conducting strategic planning activities at the U of O, I served as a doctoral student member of the Faculty Recruitment and Retention Task Force. From my research, which included considerable investigation of campus-level and national research on faculty job satisfaction, I completed my dissertation in DEPM in 1992. In case you have not heard about it, it is posted to the web and also available at the U of O library.
http://www.irn.pdx.edu/~kerlinb/td/skerlin/
In particular, it captures the sentiment of faculty on the eve of Measure 5's passage. But most importantly, I believe, it identified a number of "job satisfaction indicators" (34, in total) that our Task Force examined. And, it identified a significant number of faculty who indicated a serious consideration of departing the institution for jobs at other institutions, showing linkages between high levels of dissatisfaction and greater propensity to depart.
A digested version of this study was published in the May/June 1993 issue of the Journal of Higher Education (the top journal in the field of Higher Education studies), entitled "For Richer, for Poorer: Faculty Morale in Periods of Austerity and Retrenchment." Although many of the tables from my dissertation could not be included in the published article, I still have all of the raw data sets (printouts), many of which looked in depth at which faculty were most dissatisfied, over what specific issues, and why they might be inclined to depart the institution for jobs elsewhere.
I have long been aware of the political aspects of my research, and I'm sure my conclusions (about widening gaps between rich and poor segments of the University, for example) were less than popular with a number of people. Nevertheless, I stand behind my conclusions, that there were severe problems with faculty morale at the U of O in the early 1990s. Given that faculty salaries have actually fallen (relative to "comparator" campuses) in the 1990s, I am sure there is still a significant morale situation among campus faculty.
As a specialist in social research and research on faculty job satisfaction and career development trends, and as a manager of institutional research, I am quite conscious of how statistics can either mask or reveal certain trends and politically sensitive issues on campus. It concerns me to see, in the executive summary of the 2000 faculty telephone survey, a conclusion that faculty are "moderately satisfied", based on the answer to just one question "how satisfied are you with your job at the University of Oregon overall?" This conclusion seems based on responses to just one vague notion of "satisfaction" (asked in a telephone survey, when I'm sure many respondents would feel less than comfortable disclosing that they *are* dissatisfied because it's not exactly a safe issue to discuss), and can lead to dangerous conclusions by the public (such as, "if they're moderately satisfied, then salary mustn't be that big an issue...").
Given that the ranks of the faculty seem to have been reduced by almost 25% during the 1990s (based on the numbers of faculty in the 1990 survey--860 full-time instructional faculty--versus the numbers in the last available Fact Book--651 [see http://www.ous.edu/irs/factbook98/WEBfaculty/facrkgd.htm for direct link to these data]), it leads to real questions about whether the most dissatisfied faculty were in fact the ones who ultimately no longer show up in the statistics. I would certainly hope that the written survey, by comparison, has a more complete overview of satisfaction issues/indicators and issues related to faculty propensity to depart the institution. If it does, will this information get to see the light of day?
Sincerely,
Scott Kerlin, Ph.D., 1992, B.S. 1984, M.S. 1985, M.S. 1989, University of Oregon
Manager, Institional Research Malaspina University-College Nanaimo, B.C. CANADA