dagblog - Comments for "UVa and Teresa Sullivan: Managing Faculty without Money"

Sorry to hijack your post

Kevin — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 18:08:38 +0000

In reply to Well, Kevin, let's say that

Sorry to hijack your post (which made some great points, especially about how wage disparities can divide the faculty). After reading about how professors don't expect high salaries, my mind leapt immediately to the star professors who do get high salaries, and why this is a problem.

Since you're bored, I won't bother to respond to the rest of the post.

I am actually more familiar

Kevin — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 17:57:01 +0000

In reply to Kevin, you appear not to

I am actually more familiar with funding models than I'd like to be (which makes it all the more embarrassing that I left TAs out of my discussion -- sorry).

Describing professors as small businesspeople similarly glosses over some details. The funding I've seen up close and personal (DHS and DoD) requires results, but failure or slow progress didn't seem to put a real crimp in things. My impression (unsullied by linkable facts, alas) is that the NSF is even less fussy about results.

It's a little bit less about producing salable product and a lot more about the government (and industry, too) giving grants for ideas that might work out. I'm aware of how hard folks work to get those grants, and the rate at which grants are turned down, but it's not like the money in is strictly linked to the results. "We learned what not to do, and educated a bunch of grad students," seems to be an acceptable result. This is not how a small business works, or at least the startups with which I've been associated.

(Not that I think that businesses are this amazing fount of competency that should be always emulated, but I think that's a post for a different day.)

Well, Kevin, let's say that

Doctor Cleveland — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 08:45:00 +0000

In reply to Large sums of public money

Well, Kevin, let's say that your understanding of how higher education is funded is very hazy. Your combination of righteous certainty with lack of actual knowledge isn't persuasive. But it is boring, and I'm not interested in debating someone who's not really arguing in good faith.

Counting non-profit tax status as government support is a clear sign of not arguing in good faith. By that logic, the public should get a say in the finances of every priest, minister, and rabbi, since they "support" those non-profit enterprises. Nobody's BS should be this weak.

Moreover, the fact that academic employment is part of a marketplace is not new. (And yes, that's a University of Virginia link. The book was written in the 1950s.) Your jeremiad about how professors today have become corrupt, blah blah blah, is just nonsense.

But the real give-away that you're not on the level is that these are your responses to a post about how faculty do willingly forgo their full market salary.

I just wrote 1500 words about how faculty choose to make less money than they might, and you come in pontificating about how faculty should never have the choice to make more money. What on earth do you want? Actually, don't tell me. I'm not interested.

Kevin, you appear not to

EliRabett — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 08:19:06 +0000

In reply to Large sums of public money

Kevin, you appear not to understand how graduate student's stipends, research and education are funded. For areas where there is external funding to be had, professors function as small business men, going out and winning contracts (and grants) through competitive proposals, sometimes in areas of their own choosing (NSF) and sometimes in areas of specific interest to the agencies and companies (DOD, DOE).

While the grants are made to the university, and the university takes money for costs such as electricity, accounting, etc (aka facility and administrative costs), the professor as principal investigator (PI) directs how the money will be spent to support graduate students, staff, research expenses, etc.

Among the other things that most do not know is that university professors are only paid for nine months work for the most part. That means that they can, if they can find funding, get three months salary from their grants and contracts, going off elsewhere to do research (summer faculty fellowships) or teaching summer school. It is not clear to Eli whether those numbers for UVa include summer employment. Probably not from the amounts. Medical schools have another model driven by NIH funding and private practice compensation which varies from place to place.

At the better schools STEM faculty are required to find funding to buy out some of their teaching load during the academic year which is a whole other ball of string to unravel, and they are almost always required to do so in medical schools.

The other model for funding grad students is through teaching assistantships where they work under faculty supervision to teach undergrads in recitation sections. This, of course, is the most common way for first year students in STEM areas and the way for humanities departments, where they also often pay their own costs. You can argue that the faculty should do this but then the faculty would have no time for research and you would have to hire a lot more expensive faculty. Such students are attracted by the skill and reputation of the faculty.

So, in the same sense that partners in a law or consulting firm are required to bring in business, so are a considerable portion of the faculty.

Large sums of public money

Kevin — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 01:04:44 +0000

In reply to Which is it? Is taking a

Large sums of public money flow into non-profit institutions of higher education (both public and private) to pay for research (NSF, DoD, DoE, etc.) and as loan guarantees or outright grants. That is definitely public support. Note that non-profit status is also a kind of public support.

My complaint is not with starting salaries for professors (which seem ridiculously low) or pay for adjuncts (which is criminally low), but with the salary for so-called 'stars'. I realize that the "American way," as currently practiced in a variety of fields, is to take whatever you can get with both hands, including generous handouts, then turn around and lecture the world about how hard you worked to get it. I'm just disappointed to find that this practice has spread to academia.

If academia was totally privately supported, and academics paid for their education from the start, then stars would have every right to claim "market wages." In the current model, this just looks like more winner-take-all silliness.

Which is it? Is taking a

Doctor Cleveland — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 20:57:01 +0000

In reply to I'm a little concerned about

Which is it? Is taking a lower salary a favor the employee pays the employer, or that the employer pays the employee? If someone accepts less money than they might have made elsewhere for five or ten or twenty years, and then goes elsewhere, is that a sign of ingratitude or "betrayal?" Someone who's made wage concessions for years isn't obligated to keep making them in the future.

Your position seems to be that professors should be grateful for being employed at all, and they should show their gratitude by staying forever at any wage offered. You also seem to assume that their wages are not market wages, but some kind of generous gift. But all wages are market wages; professors aren't opting out of the employment market. They're just participating in a less lucrative sector of that market. Labor markets that pay poorly are every bit as real as the overpaid ones.

A college offering a professor a low wage isn't giving them a generous gift for labor that has no actual market value. There's no budget for gifts like that. They're simply paying that professor as little as they think the employment market will allow them. to. (If they're wrong, they get turned down for another job at another school.) Some faculty's value increases, through the fruits of their own labor, and they can demand more pay. That's the American way.

Least of all do faculty owe economic loyalty to the public, since the public doesn't actually fund their salaries, or much of anything else at public universities. Virginia taxpayers provide between 8 and 9 percent of the University of Virginia's budget. (And of course, many faculty got their PhDs at private institutions, at private expense. The Virginia taxpayers didn't pay anything to educate the faculty at UVa.) Acting holier-than-thou about how "the public's money" is being spent when it's not the public's money is simply dishonest.

If you're going to talk like you're being a hard-headed realist, deal with reality.

I'm a little concerned about

Kevin — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 20:04:37 +0000

In reply to UVa and Teresa Sullivan: Managing Faculty without Money

I'm a little concerned about faculty compensation already. I thought that the whole point of public funding of academia was to let folks pursue their hearts' delight so that all of society could benefit from it. We provide academic freedom so that useful ideas can be developed without immediate pressure. We subsidize graduate education because it's useful to have academics out there. We provide all sorts of non-market-based support so that these great benefits can accrue.

For faculty super-stars to then turn around and say, "Gee, the market will pay me a whole lot more to teach elsewhere," seems like a betrayal of this model.

If folks want to be rewarded based on the market, then perhaps they ought to dive in with both feet and work out a way to fund their graduate education themselves. Under the current model, faculty seem to want to have the best of both worlds -- public risk in funding of their education, and private reward when they succeed. This is as ugly as the current situation on Wall Street. Until we resolve this, I think we're going to see many more problems.

(I understand how hard academics work, and I understand first hand how mean graduate stipends can be, but I also understand how delightful it can be to have complete control over your research and your teaching. As you point out, that's worth money, and folks need to realize that, or take a different path in life.)

Sure, anonymous. I grant

Doctor Cleveland — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 09:33:00 +0000

In reply to Okay, but money's not

Sure, anonymous. I grant that. And I'm not claiming that faculty aren't motivated by money at all, or that there's an excuse to keep underpaying them. But the person who seems most fixated on getting faculty larger raises to keep them happy has obviously made the faculty very, very unhappy.

Dragas's solution, which is apparently to "reallocate" money that could give raises (at least to stars) by cutting from other places that would also hurt faculty retention. Cutting whole departments in "bold" moves is not going to make the faculty who aren't fired more loyal. Cutting back on financial aid, and therefore by definition taking a more limited and inevitably less talented student body, is not going to help faculty retention.

Underpaying faculty hurts retention and morale. Of course. But there are other ways to hurt retention and morale. The point isn't that money doesn't matter; it's that this is not a single-variable problem, where salary is the only factor in faculty satisfaction.

I've tried to make this clearer by updating my original post with a new final paragraph. Thanks for your comments.

Okay, but money's not

Anonymous — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 01:09:39 +0000

In reply to UVa and Teresa Sullivan: Managing Faculty without Money

Okay, but money's not nothing. UVA profs in Arts & Sciences haven't received even cost of living increases in five years, and that translates into a ten percent decrease in real income. We're not starving; we're making choices more like quitting the gym than like switching from chicken to cat food. But there's a lot of discontent: the A&S faculty petitioned the Board of Visitors for relief just a few weeks before this bigger controversy broke out. The little money available for raises is going to a few stars; richer universities are raiding the faculty, and there's a definite sense that things can't go on this way much longer.