How is the Money Spent?

FAU Expenditures on Higher Level Administration in the Period from 2001-02 to 2008-09

This winter, in an effort to better understand the budget priorities of the University, United Faculty of Florida at FAU commissioned a study assessing FAU’s personnel practices. The report, titled, “How is the Money Spent? FAU expenditures on Higher Level Administration in the Period from 2001-02 to 2008-09,” was conducted by the Research Institute on Social and Economic Policy at Florida International University. The researchers used personnel data provided by the FAU administration.

Overall, “How is the Money Spent” belies the administration’s continual assertions that it is acting in the best interest of faculty, students, and the University as a whole. Of particular concern is that over the past seven years administrative positions have grown by over fifty percent. While administrators continually apportion a larger and larger piece of the fiscal pie for themselves, faculty positions and salaries have grown far less vigorously. These developments have all proceeded under the administration’s watch and continued while the state budget crisis deepened. Thus, if there are any cost-saving measures to be enacted to deal with the ensuing fiscal crisis, they should rightly begin with administrative positions and salaries, NOT WITH THOSE OF FACULTY WHO ARE ALREADY PAID LESS WELL THAN COLLEAGUES AT PEER INSTITUTIONS ACROSS THE STATE AND COUNTRY. Moreover, in light of the data presented in “How the Money is Spent” the minimum 2.5% salary increase the PERC Special Magistrate has recommended FAU grant its faculty is modest and justified.

“How is the Money Spent?” coauthor Bruce Nissen responds to the FAU Administration’s critique of his study.

The criticisms were issued by President Frank Brogan Chief of Staff Randy Goin and circulated to the FAU Board of Trustees and FAU faculty on April 16.

(1)  One of the authors is affiliated with the UFF; one is not.  This proves nothing.  Instead of answering the analysis made and showing that the trend is not what the report claims, the FAU administration resorts to an ad hominum attack on one of the authors.

(2)  Our report clearly specifies who is classified as administration and who as faculty in our analysis.  These were perfectly legitimate comparisons and our categories are clear.  Administration arguments that there are different ways of categorizing positions do not invalidate comparisons between the groups we specified.  In fact, the different categorization done by the FAU administration in the FAU factbook shows an even more extreme shift in resources than our categorization does.  Every conceivable way of categorizing “faculty” and “administrators” shows the same results, validating our conclusion rather than refuting it.

(3)  The administration is invited to show different figures that show that the trends outlined in the report are not occurring.  The fact that they fail to do so shows that their complaints about our methodology and conclusions are merely attempts to “muddy the waters” rather than attempts to show the real trends in resource allocation.  Unfortunately for the administration, it appears that any conceivable way of dividing up FAU employees shows the same thing:  resources have been trending toward administrators.  That is exactly what our conclusion is.

UFF-FAU’s Response to the FAU Administration’s 4-16 critique of “How is the Money Spent?

UFF-FAU recently commissioned a study from The Center for Labor Research and Studies at FIU to examine the salary changes for faculty compared to administrators at FAU.  FAU administrators charge that it is full of inaccuracies – primary among them is how employees are classified.

We were interested in what had happened to the salaries of administrators who are generally supervisory to faculty.  Imagine our surprise when Chairs, Directors, Deans, Provosts etc., were not to be found among the ranks of Administrative Managerial Professional (AMP) employees but rather hidden in the ranks of Faculty employees.  So a little investigation of what constitutes Faculty employees was clearly in order.

FAU has three categories of permanent employees, Faculty, AMP and SP (Service Professionals).  Faculty is further classified into Instructional, Administrative, Research and Other.  Instructional faculty are the ones we mostly see in classrooms although most of us are also responsible for conducting research. Chairs, Directors, Deans etc also show up in the faculty ranks, but classified among administrative faculty – a little over 130 people in 2008.  Then we have research faculty – most of whom are recently acquired along with the Harbor Branch and the BioMed programs.  The FIU study includes both instructional and research faculty in its definition of faculty, but appropriately classifies administrative faculty in the ranks of administrators. The categories the study omits from the analysis of faculty salaries are school teachers, librarians and counselors.  The inclusion of those employees would only have skewed faculty salaries lower!

To validate our data, see the table below from the most recent FAU Factbook.  The FIU study includes about 877 FTE faculty, which matches quite well with the Instructional and Research categories of Faculty according to the University’s own numbers.  By any measure, growth in Administrative positions far outstrips the growth of faculty.

* All Personnel include Adjuncts, OPS and Graduate Students.  Source:  FAU Factbook, various years.

How Is the Money Spent?

Factsheet Explaining Revisions to Study