Florida Atlantic University gained national recognition when its football team won back-to-back bowl games. If a competition existed for depressed faculty salaries FAU might be playing for the national championship. In March, a Special Magistrate appointed by the Public Employee Relations Commission recommended FAU administrators grant professors a minimum 2.5% raise. Yet President Frank T. Brogan has moved the goalposts on FAU faculty by rejecting the Magistrate’s decision and putting the process before the Board of Trustees which he essentially controls.
Last year FAU administrators sought to go to an impasse when the faculty union rejected a 1% raise offer. At the impasse hearing, FAU administrators claimed the University didn’t have sufficient resources to sustain more than a 1% salary increase. The faculty’s bargaining team and an independent auditor countered that FAU is actually in a very strong financial position, with over $70 million in the bank and as much as $5 million per year from a deal struck with Clearwire Communications for use of FAU’s digital bandwidth.
With so much cash on hand it’s puzzling how FAU administrators continue pleading poverty and browbeating faculty about potential layoffs. If there’s any personnel area that needs to be scaled back it is the administration itself, according to findings of a recent study by the Research Institute on Social and Economic Policy at Florida International University.
In the end, FAU students and their families bear the burden when administrative ambition trumps academic integrity. The money that students fork over in increased tuition payments often goes toward more positions and higher salaries for administrators who seldom teach classes. Meanwhile students can?t find the classes they need to graduate while existing classes swell in numbers.
The FAU football team will go on to win many more games in coming seasons. But FAU’s academic wherewithal will continue to deteriorate because Brogan and the Board of Trustees still refuse to acknowledge that the faculty is the very heart and soul of the institution they oversee, even after independent authorities tell them they’ve steered far off course.