Over the past few years FAU administrators have advertised their holiday good will before faculty and staff through a unilateral exchange that oddly resembles the one that took place between the chiseling Ebenezer Scrooge and his underling Bob Cratchit in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. In what is apparently their sincerest, most heartfelt benevolence administrators are again granting five days off for FAU employees during the forthcoming holiday season. We would agree that this is in fact a well-deserved break for the hard-working 9-to-5 support staff, who often struggle along on $20,000-to-$30,000 annual salaries, and the policy itself is pitched to strike that uncanny chord of open-heartedness, along the lines of when Scrooge awoke on Christmas morn from his soul-cleansing slumber. If only the administration had its much-deserved encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
“As the holiday season approaches,” Interim Senior Vice President for Financial Affairs Dennis Crudele proclaims,
I am very pleased to inform you that the Executive Committee has approved an extended holiday schedule for 2009. The University will be closed for five days in addition to the state holidays of December 25th and January 1st. As such, Florida Atlantic University will be closed on Thursday, December 24, 2009 through Friday, January 1, 2010. These additional days have been provided to recognize the continued dedication of our hard-working faculty and staff.
Horse feathers. What administrators fail to mention is the fact that as a result of their own policy they will proceed to help themselves to some very expensive annual leave time. This is of course in keeping with how administrators continually reward each other by lavishing themselves with more positions and higher salaries. Faculty, on the other hand, will continue to work at home on course preps and research projects regardless of management’s self-proclaimed munificence. In what by the administration’s own loudly proclaimed estimates are very difficult times, where we are told we must reorganize the entire university, layoff tenured faculty, forgo meaningful salary increases and cram more and more students into our classes, we should rest assured that the University will be paying for five days of annual leave for administrators who are already very handsomely paid, thank you very much.
This, mind you, is a way in which administrators can have their cake and eat it too. In other words, it makes for self-serving window dressing where they are able to present themselves to the FAU community as a gracious, holiday-spirited set of overseers while piling up their own annual leave that will cost Florida taxpayers a very tidy sum. On the other hand, one week’s worth of payroll for faculty on 39 week contracts, if redirected toward FAU’s incredibly low faculty salaries, would be enough for the 2.5% across-the-board faculty salary increase–the minimum amount the PERC Special Magistrate recommended in March. Once again, however, administrators would rather masquerade as Santa Claus while they throw up roadblocks to legitimate grievances, send their attorneys to the bargaining table to swindle the faculty, and sharpen their knives for future job cuts.
Assuming that FAU’s payroll constitutes 85% of the University’s overall $542 million operating budget, closing for one week will cost over $8 million in budgeted revenue for salaries. That’s a lot of shekels! And to what degree will administrators disproportionately benefit? The average hard-working support staff employee making $30,000 will be allotted annual leave valued at $576 ($30,000/52) as a result of this policy. However, based on 2008 salary figures (which have since increased substantially for many administrators but barely at all [approximately 1%] for faculty), here is what it will cost for 40 hours of annual leave for some of FAU’s grandest muckamucks.
Dickens would have surely recognized that what FAU administrators make in just one week is far more than most US families will spend over not just one but several holiday seasons, especially during these hard times. That they are obscuring this fact through their phony largess toward faculty and staff makes this story an especially tragic one for the entire FAU community.
Then again, given the amount of grief and woe administrators have visited upon the faculty this year through their assault on tenure, plans to restructure the university, and fight to keep faculty salaries depressed, the idea of paying them to take a short break from their endeavors might not be such a bad idea after all.
For additional information on FAU salary inequities please click here.