Bargaining Update for August 13

Your United Academics bargaining team met again with the administration’s team last Tuesday.

While we continue to make progress on several non-economic issues, the administration’s intransigence on faculty salaries is becoming increasingly clear.

The administration returned Article 26 – Salary to us. Once again, they have not moved from their initial offer of 3% raise pools for each of the next three years. Of course, given that inflation has hovered around 3.3% for the past year, their offer represents a pay cut in real terms, on top of the real losses faculty have experienced throughout the pandemic. Despite expressing an openness to address equity issues in earlier conversations, the administration refused to include equity raises in their proposal, instead continuing to insist that the lion’s share of the money should be distributed through annual merit reviews with no opportunity for faculty to contest unfavorable outcomes.

Rather than acknowledging the pain faculty have been feeling or engaging with our proposal to bring faculty salaries closer to our AAU peers, the administration instead argued that after taking into account contributions to health insurance and retirement, our pay is already competitive. This argument is based on calculations which conflict with our own analysis of non-salary benefits and uses non-standard metrics for total compensation to justify their position. We have asked them to show their work, and we will be pressing them to use verifiable, comparable economic metrics so that we may have productive conversations at the table.

Even in the most charitable reading, however, their argument fails to acknowledge the lived experience of faculty: the price of everything from rent to peanut butter has skyrocketed in Eugene over the past several years, and our pay has not kept pace. Indeed, the university’s Office of Institutional Research has reported continued declines in our competitiveness relative to our AAU peers.

In response, we reminded their team that the institution’s budget is a reflection of its priorities. Resources are, of course, finite. The way in which the institution decides to allocate those resources, however, is absolutely a choice, and UO administrators are continuing to choose to disinvest in faculty. Resources have grown faster than inflation (details below), and faculty pay has not. Thus, the percentage of the university’s resources which have been devoted to faculty compensation has declined (from approximately 32% in FY 2019 to an estimated 27% today). At the same time, we have seen a series of apparently record-breaking fundraising campaigns and the University has continued to increase tuition rates to keep up with inflation.

We are left to ask: where is that money going? If there is not enough to fairly compensate the faculty who carry out the university’s teaching and research missions, again, why do top administrators continue to be paid like their peers at universities that have managed to maintain competitive salaries?

Faculty have been asked to do more with less for far too long, as was made plainly clear in the results of the recent climate survey. Faculty at Oregon’s flagship university should not have to contemplate second or third jobs to weather the cost-of-living increases we’ve all experienced. We should know through their actions that those running our institution are invested in our success and wellbeing, not be asked to take it on faith.

Our salary proposals are reasonable and rooted in real data. The administration has an opportunity to demonstrate that faculty – the people who make this university a vibrant place for learning – are among its highest priorities. We hope they will choose to do so, but it is looking increasingly likely that faculty action will be required to ensure that financial resources flow to the academic mission and the people – the faculty and students – who make the University of Oregon a premier institution.

Our next bargaining session is Monday, August 26, from 12:30-3:30pm. Please join us in Chiles 125 or on Zoom. Your presence and ongoing engagement are essential to winning the contract faculty deserve.

Numbers for those who are interested

Over the past decade, revenues in the Education and General Fund (the source of funds from which most faculty compensation flows) have increased over 38%, from $447 million in FY 2014 to $618 million in FY 2023. According to IPEDS (the federal clearinghouse for higher-ed data), over that same time period, the listed tuition for full-time in-state undergraduates increased 82% from $8,280 to $15,054 and the listed tuition for full-time out-of-state undergraduates increased 47% from $28,305 to $41,700. After accounting for scholarships and other financial aid, the average net price increased 44% from $15,362 in 2012-2013 to $22,077 in 2021-2022.

The Consumer Price Index, a measure of inflation, increased only 34% in that same period.

According to our calculations, total spending on Tenure-Track and Career faculty compensation, as a fraction of the Education and General Fund budget, peaked at roughly 32% in FY 2019. We project that this fiscal year, that fraction will fall to roughly 27%.