Unhappy New Year Budget Tidings

The Southern reported today (12/26) that President Poshard believes the SIU system may be in line for a $10 million cut next fiscal year (FY 2013). While the story did not give Poshard's reason for this belief, this sounds like more than the usual vague negative prognostications. SIUC's share of that cut would be "about $6 million". To put that in perspective, it's about as much as we lost when we lost the $7 million in federal stimulus money in FY 2011--the FY of the furloughs.

Of course that year we had a nice long fight about just how bad the budget was. So how bad would this be? The rest of the numbers in the Southern story are difficult to follow (in part because some are for the SIU system rather than solely for SIUC). One quick stab at context: SIUC's total combined revenue for FY 2012, including state appropriations and tuition and fees, but not other sources, is budgeted to be $279 million. This is SIU's estimate from the FY 2012 "Budget Book", but will be accurate enough as a ballpark figure. So a cut of $6 million out of $279 million is about 2% cut to our overall budget. 2% doesn't sound all that bad, but given that many of our costs are fixed or relatively fixed, and given years of small but significant cuts, this cut would hurt.  It would not be  devastating--I can't see how it could possible reach a level anyone would call a "financial exigency". But we could very well hear furlough talk again. I do hope that this time around, should that talk arise, we will have more in the way of genuine conversation & negotiation and less in the way of top-down dictates. If faculty and others are given a real role in helping to determine and understand what their fair share of any cuts may be, and how those cuts are to be assigned, we could emerge from cuts without damage to morale doubling down on the fiscal damage. That would show that SIUC had learned something from 2011.

Happy New Year.

College athletics in the news

The Chronicle has an interesting series of opinion pieces on the following rather frankly worded question: What the Hell Has Happened to College Sports?

Locally, the Southern Illinoisan ran a series of articles recently on the state of athletics:

Small but strong: Reduced staff keeps SIU afloat in academic race
Doing things the Saluki Way: Athletic facilities took priority at SIU
Take a look at the whole picture
The state of Saluki sports

This came before the most recent news, the investigation of a Saluki basketball player accused of sexual assault (though no charges have yet been filed): Police investigating SIU's Bocot. We of course also have the sexual harassment scandal regarding athletics--a problem exacerbated by the administration's unwillingness to bargain a transparent set of procedures for addressing accusations of sexual harassment (which would have made the university's own finding that there was no real violation here more credible).

The series in the Southern asked many of the right questions, but the answers were given, overwhelmingly, by Mario Moccia, who naturally enough defended his programs. Thus the overall result was something of a whitewash. While the recent losing records of the football and basketball teams were duly noted, and there was some attention to the spending for Saluki Way, there was no mention of the fact that SIUC doubled athletics spending in the last five years. Nor did anyone make the argument that our huge investment in athletics was paying off in terms of our wider goals--including increasing enrollment. It seems to me rather clear that SIUC made a huge gamble by pouring most of our disposable revenue into athletics. We've obviously lost this bet.

We've lost not simply because our teams are losing--as many college teams lose as win each and every game, and as the Southern pointed out, SIUC is no exception. We'll have up seasons and down seasons when it comes to the win loss record. And there will be scandals, given the pressures and contradictions between academic, athletic, and business values. The real problems are structural: the idea that a university's success depends on, or can be measured by, how good of a job it does supplying entertainment to its basketball and football fans. Athletics drains resources from academics. That's true even at top of the line big-money academic programs, and it is even more true among mid majors like SIUC.  The last five years were the worst possible time to exacerbate the problem by engaging in a building boom and budget boom for athletics.

Her first 556

The DE ran a rather comprehensive review of Chancellor Cheng's first year and a half in office last week, a story I've just gotten around to reading. The money quote, for me, came early on:

“I think people that are critical either don’t know me, haven’t paid attention, or don’t really want anyone in the chancellor’s office to make the final decision,” Cheng said.

One has to be careful about judging someone's attitude based on a single quote in a newspaper, but, that said, this quote is rather revelatory. The Chancellor did not (at least in this comment, or any from this article) take the obvious opportunity to suggest that she could be fallible, or even that there could be honest differences of opinion about the issues we face.  President Poshard, to his credit, did note that there will be always be "contention" about shared government and academic freedom--though his wording implied that such contention, like the poor, will always be with us, and hence isn't something to take all that seriously.

But has Chancellor Cheng or anyone in her administration, ever apologized for the Facebook screw up--ever walked back from the initial false story that they were only censoring "inflammatory" postings?  In the article even Mike Eichholz, bless his heart, characterizes some of the Chancellor's emails during the strike as "blunders."  But there's no admission of any error, or that there may be honest disagreement, from the Chancellor's side.  Criticism is instead due to the following factors:

More contempt from the Southern

Our colleagues on the civility patrol might want to give Gary Metro a call over at the Southern.  I had managed to avoid comment on his editorial last Saturday, in which he essentially repeated the prior week's editorial, with the confirmation that people giving him a thumb's up in the supermarket showed him that the community was behind him. Oh, he also argued that faculty who support their union are like panhandlers who ask for money for whiskey, only worse.

Today's editorial, though, says that the students who protested yesterday are "obviously brainwashed",  prey to their ditzy emotions and passions, utterly out of touch with the facts, and completely lacking in common sense. (The paper covers the protest, fairly, here.) This editorial, I think, calls out for some comment. The students involved are, at least judging by the rather eloquent piece that I posted the other day, exactly the sorts of students we should be proud of. "We" here means anyone interested in a university that encourages students to get involved and informed about the issues facing them. You can of course disagree with what they are saying or how they are saying it, but when the hometown newspaper of a university town drips with contempt for articulate, engaged, and informed student activists, well, that newspaper is clearly part of the problem.

I'll engage with the rest of the editorial after the break.

Southern Editorial and faculty salaries

Gary Metro, editor of the Southern Illinoisan, has an editorial out today that should help any readers in doubt as to the Southern's editorial stance figure out what we're up against there.

He starts by bashing Obama, irrelevantly. He then goes after the faculty union, arguing that regular working stiffs, whom he apparently represents, are "incensed and insulted" by our strike threat.

Because the economy is bad, he argues, unions cannot strike. A poor economy would thus appear to give employers carte blanche. The fact that many workers have been treated badly by this economy apparently proves to Mr. Metro that all workers should allow themselves to be treated badly by their employers.

Southern Story on Strike Authorization Vote

[Update: A quick story credited to the AP also ran in the Chicago Tribune.]

A quick link to the Southern's story on the strike authorization vote.  The story implies (apparently following Chancellor Cheng's lead) that faculty weren't willing to meet with the administration over the summer.  This is false.  From what I've heard, the administration team vetoed more summer dates than the FA team did.  But Randy Hughes makes the essential point: there have been enough meetings, just not enough genuine give & take.

By the way, anyone wondering if the Southern is going to freeload on our outside marketing firm and switch it's brand from "the Southern" to "the SI"?

On Public Sector Salaries

I woke this morning to another union-busting editorial in the Southern. It seemed rather more clever than the last one, at least as I read it half-awake, as I prefer to read the Southern.  It's passive-aggressive: we poor taxpayers deserve compassion from the overpaid public employees waving high quality signs and making radical demands, including that the governor keep his word. That is, public sector employees and their unions should shut the hell up and take their lumps, contracts be damned.

The story is based on a study by a right wing think tank, the Illinois Policy Institute, whose "Academic Advisors" include our own Jonathan Bean. (Jon, I bet you're reading this: I'd be interested to hear your take on the study under question.)  I am not an economist, but that report strikes me as very shoddy indeed.

Its fundamental finding is that the average state and local government worker in Illinois makes more money than the average worker in the private sector. This factoid tells us absolutely nothing important, for it fails to consider the job mix in the private and public sectors. If more private sector jobs are low-skill tasks, we would expect private sector jobs to pay less. The report recognizes this problem, but despite a misleadingly named "comparable job analysis" it fails to account for it in any way whatsoever.  That so-called "comparable job analysis" is simply a study of trends in compensation over time. But trends in compensation will also depend, for better or worse, on the skill level: salaries at McDonald's may not have not gone up as fast as salaries for professionals.

To compensate for its failure to compare apples to apples, as my trignometry teacher used to warn us to do, the study argues that public sector employees must be overpaid because there is less turnover in the public sector. That is, they don't quit their government jobs because they're overpaid. This is a lousy argument. Rather, public sector employees are willing to be underpaid, in relative terms, because they enjoy more job security. There's less turnover because public sector employees are harder to fire--which in turn makes them less likely to leave their jobs.

More on university salaries and on a competing analysis of public sector salaries after the break. Plus, there's a graph . . .

Letters opposing the Southern's editorial

The usual suspects (yours truly and Kristi Brownfield & Natasha Zaretsky) rushed off letters to the editor opposing the Southern's editorial praising our Chancellor for alienating faculty (already discussed on this blog here & here), and the Southern has now duly published them. You'll need to scroll down just a bit in the rather low-tech manner the Southern has of posting letters online.

My letter contains a stray comma the Southern managed to insert (in the first sentence of the penultimate paragraph). And when I tried to sign it Dr. David M. Johnson, the better to make a medical analogy, they asked me, when confirming my identity over the phone, whether I had a MD or PhD and thus demoted me to the latter. While I'm entirely capable of inserting a stray comma myself, I don't think I've ever tacked Ph.D. on to my name, save on the covers of my line of self-help books.

Good editorials play above the fields of messy sentences

Our View: It’s no time to say “Mission accomplished!” but there are encouraging signs coming out of the Southern Illinoisan.

*

It is not an easy task writing editorials. Arguments must be made in a timely manner based on all available facts. Those arguments about complex organizations, including human resources, labor negotiations, budgetary goals, organizational plans, administrative restructuring, economic growth, governmental regulation, strategic initiatives, and leadership styles, much less education, are certain to please some followers—or … ehh … readers—and ruffle the feathers of others.

*

For editorial writers, it is essential to place the cogency of an argument above all other considerations, including personal desires, monetary goals, and status. It requires a vision for excellence, specific rhetorical goals and a clear-eyed resolve that plays above the fields of messy emotions, empty buzzwords, and basic grammatical errors.

*

These characteristics are true for all opinion leaders, but the complexity of an argument almost infinitely complicates writing tasks. The bigger the claim, the greater the complexities.

*

The Southern Illinoisan’s Sunday, 17 July 2011 editorial is a good example. Because Gary Metro has essentially been composing the same editorial for four and a half years, the page essentially became a rudderless ship, steaming along at full power and frequently launching maladroit metaphors at moving targets. There was sound and fury, signifying something, but diminishing impact over time, because, you see, the missiles missed, or the ship didn’t have a rudder, or both.

Let Us Praise Strong Leaders

The indefatigable Kristi Brown over at Unions United brought my attention to a truly amazing editorial in the Southern on Sunday, which cites faculty and staff resistance as the main reason for supporting Chancellor Cheng. You read that right.  We're dealing with a cult of strong leadership: a leader who incites opposition is strong and therefore good. Follow the corporate recipe, avoid any reference to evidence--including that printed by your own paper (see the last post)--and you can cook up this gruel.  But as I have dashed off a letter to the editor attacking the editorial already, I will not give the Southern a reason to not publish it by commenting more here.  They had the integrity to run a story on athletic spending: let's see if they will also publish a letter damning their editorial stance. I suspect mine will not be the only one.