Our Internal and Public Messaging about Administrative Bloat

Bonuses, both for performance and longevity, have become commonplace for higher-ed administrators at both public and private institutions. Indeed, these bonuses have become so commonplace that they now generally go unnoticed and unquestioned. But when such bonuses continue to be given during periods of great budget constraints, while faculty and staff compensation and/or positions are…

Nelson in the Times

Past president of the AAUP and continuing activist Cary Nelson contributes to the current “Room for Debate” feature in The New York Times, “Lofty Salaries in the Ivory Towers.” He writes: When a college or university president has an annual salary 50 times what some faculty and staff earn, the institution delivers a powerful message about…

How Not to Fire a Higher Ed CEO

One of the most frustrating things about higher education (and the business world, too) is how failed CEOs get golden parachutes. At my institution, Illinois State University, everybody is still fuming that former president Tim Flanagan received a $480,000 golden parachute for being fired after a few months on the job. Although the trustees could…

Administrative Bloat as It Is Reflected in Presidential Compensation: 2013 Ohio Edition

Although the increases in the compensation by college and university presidents represent a negligible percentage of their institutions’ budgets, they do very clearly set a baseline for the compensation received by other administrators—their subordinates and the subordinates of their subordinates–and reflect the continuing corporatization of our institutions as it is manifested in the broader increases…

John McNay, President of the Ohio Conference of AAUP, Addresses a Proposal to Limit Vendors on “Alternative” Retirement Plans to the State Teachers Retirement System

I am posting the following letter to this blog for three reasons: (1) it illustrates the types of complex and specialized issues that state conference leaders are frequently asked to address; (2) in some instances, such as this one, the conference leadership may take the position that there simply was not enough faculty input into…

Addendum to "Adjuncting for Dummies"

This “book” seems very analogous to the sections of the WalMart and McDonald’s websites that are devoted to “career opportunities” with those companies–as if any significant number of those in the corporate management have worked their way up from stocking shelves, working the cash registers, or putting together sandwiches. Of course, adjunct faculty have invested so…

Low-Wage Workers Have No Where Left to Go but into the Streets

Fast food has become a global industry, and now the labor unrest in that industry has gone global. Businessweek has provided a fairly thorough overview of the scope of the protests that occurred yesterday in 33 nations: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-05-15/scenes-from-the-fast-food-worker-protests-spreading-overseas Robert Reich has provided a succinct statement of why these workers deserve broad support: http://fastfoodglobal.org/main/why-support-the-fast-food-strikes/ And the advocacy site Low…