From Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works Blog
October 27, 2009
Is your administration using “the economy” as an excuse to extort more work for less pay from an already over-burdened faculty?
Buying Howard Bunsis a plane ticket to your campus might be the best investment you can make right now.
Bunsis, a Michigan professor of accounting and treasurer of the AAUP, has been tracking administrator claims of fiscal crisis for several months. His conclusion, published in this issue of the Chronicle, is that at many campuses, there’s no financial crisis at all. At many schools, tuition and other revenue is up, or existing reserves could easily cushion the shortfall.
Furthermore, Bunsis observes after detailed analysis of university financial data, where cuts have to be made, they don’t need to be made to the core education function–they can be made in athletics, construction, services, and other ventures.
“We need administrations to start focusing on the core mission of our colleges and universities: educating our students,” Bunsis says.
He’s been traveling the country, analyzing the financial data of universities and puncturing holes in the fake claims of crisis by administrators. In the powerpoint above, he demonstrates the clear financial health of one state system (Pennsylvania), and paints the big picture:
+faculty pay is typically less than a quarter of spending;
+faculty often earn less than schoolteachers; faculty earn less as a return on education than other professionals;
+faculty quality, education quality, and affirmative hiring are all harmed by converting education work into philanthropy.
Okay, that last part is from me.
So check out his slides, especially those after #25, recording the steep decline in spending on instruction–what he urges you to understand as the instructional spending gap.
Invite him to take a look at your administrators’ books. You might be surprised at the results.
See Related Post: