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Ohio University Committee for an Independent Faculty, already well known for spreading cheer and collegiality at OU, has more good news in its most recent circular: for 12 years you've enjoyed 1.2 percent bigger raises than your unionized colleagues at other Ohio universities (see the link below if you haven't yet received the good news). Try not to gloat! Of course you probably aren't gloating, even if 1.2 percent impresses you more than it does me. That 1.2 percent isn't an advantage you're likely to have noticed, because it's the difference between two averages that themselves derive from cumulative raise percentages, not the kind of figures you use to plan a household budget. Still, let's look at the data the OUCIF is using. Try it this way: if you're a full professor at OU, your cumulative raises over the past 12 years rank 9th out of the state (behind OSU, Miami, Bowling Green Toledo, Wright State, Akron, Cleveland, and Kent). If you're an associate professor at OU, 10 other universities in Ohio have given your peers more or higher raises. Cumulative raises for assistant profs rank 9th. Ninth place, 11th place, and 9th place. Remind me why the data doesn't support unionization? Oh, Group 2s and 4s. If you're not tenured or tenure-track faculty and want to know how your raises stack up, sorry. Since OU pretends many such faculty aren't really full time, it's not surprising there's no comparable data. And you also may have never received a raise. But it's worth noticing that unionized schools that do have data show cumulative raise percentages from 37.5 percent to 57 percent. Tell me again what's the downside? OUCIF says OU-American Association of University Professors now is not only misleading faculty but making errors to boot. Akron and Wright State, they say, clearly shouldn't be included in salary studies of unionized schools because they weren't unionized the entire 12-year period. Uh, okay. Akron's raises had flatlined before its faculty unionized. As soon as a union looked like a possibility, the administration showered them with a mid-year raise, followed by a $1 million market adjustment pool. Their first contract was for a 19.4 percent raise pool over four years. Wright State will get 5 percent next year and 5 percent the year after that. By the way, what's our raise pool for next year looking like? Given the heavy representation of business and marketing faculty in the OUCIF, I shouldn't question its salary analysis. I'm a medieval historian, after all. But why remove OSU as a statistical outlier among non-unionized schools, yet include Shawnee State? Shawnee isn't even represented by the AAUP. Ah, but it pulls the unionized raise average down much further than OSU pulls the other group up. I prefer one-to-one comparisons to see how we've been treated compared to our peers (9th place, 11th place, 9th place). And that's where I find that I'm in 11th place at a university that is supposed to be part of the Ohio Ivy. If the averages are more important to you, that's fine. In the end, salary data can be sliced any which way to show what a person wants to show. But 12 years ago is also when our Board of Trustees vowed to move OU faculty pay into the top quartile of Ohio: it still hasn't happened. OUCIF has offered to correct the errors we've made. I'd thank its members and then respectfully ask that they stop fretting over the AAUP long enough to do some work of their own, and then offer faculty a positive plan for improving OU and our place in it that doesn't involve collective bargaining. There's a version of the OUCIF message on their blog: www.oufacultyindependence.blogspot.com/ (Oh, Mark Twain might have been the person to come up with the three types of lies, of which statistics are the third, but I'm not sure about that. Feel free to correct my error.) Kevin Uhalde is a professor of history at Ohio University. |
4 Opinion
Letter to the Editor
