Association of Oregon Faculties

Still great concern about the finances and cost of new basketball arena; Senate budget committee has sent a letter of several concerns, including parking and revenue generation. $200 million bond issue will finance it.
The Senate budget committee has just received the Uo budget model, and is trying to digest it.
The Provost and the Senate budget committee met. There still has not been a clean announcement on faculty salary increases, but some raises went into effect January 1, 2008 (2% for satisfactory service, 2% for merit, 1% unspecified). The administration claims DAS has shorted them.
A new program is beginning for students who have sufficient need to get free tuition (related to eligibility for Pell grants).
A meeting related to exploring collective bargaining for UO faculty will be happening later this month.

OSU (BB)

Details still very sketchy on faculty salary increases. Faculty Economic Committee presented a report to the OSU Faculty Senate, and this report was shared with us.
Raises will average 4% but will range from 1% to 8%, decided largely by department chairs for first year. Second year raises have still not been announced.
The proposal to combine Colleges of Science and Liberal Arts very controversial, has been pulled off table.

SOU (KY)

APSOU negotiations have been settled. The faculty will get an approximately 14% salary increase across the biennium.
Provost search underway.
“Faculty” Senate is having a Constitutional crisis – only faculty with rank allowed to serve on the senate which is at odds with practice of about a quarter of the senate being administrators. A Constitution amendment specifically putting 4-5 administrators on the Faculty Senate will be proposed and voted upon this quarter.

EOU (GM)

5-5-6-7 % increases this year for Instr./Asst./Assoc./Fulls, and 4-4-5-6% on tap for next year.
Budget cutting plan has been modified – only program losses are Physics major and German minor. Several vacant positions will not be refilled.

The new interim Provost is doing a good job communicating with the faculty.
Enrollments and retention are still important concerns.
Acting President still will have to resign by June 29 without some guarantee of being held harmless by PERS.

OIT (TT)

Raises averaging 7% (at least 3% COLA) this year (retroactive). Plan is for an additional 7% in second year. Salaries will get to 91% of comparitors’ by the end of this year. After COLA, additional dollars are given differentially based on discipline and rank.
Presidential search is underway.
Tim is very concerned about the discussion in some OUS circles of eliminating the “small school subsidy” in the RAM model – a scary proposition for all of the regionals.

PSU (JA)

Presidential search underway.
Senate budget committee exists but hasn’t really been given useful & solid information. The Senate has significantly fewer tenure-track faculty on it now.
A particularly hot issue is how PSU will spend its $1.5 M for faculty lines supposedly dedicated to improving student/faculty ratio. Should be about 22 positions.
Negotiations have stalled and have gone to mediation. Management has tried to pull everything off the table except compensation. Workload is contentious—PSU faculty want a higher percentage of SCH taught by tenure line faculty. Jacqueline shared the administration’s and the union’s last salary proposals.

Executive Director Report (Mark Nelson) --

We continue to work on a letter for the big campuses, discussing the budget situation and what should be going on with faculty salaries.

There will be a February session, supposedly for 30 days. “Test drive for annual sessions.” There will be some tinkering with budgets, e.g. the Oregon Health Plan can add some people. Driver’s licenses rules may float up to a bill. The funding of full-time kindergarten may come up as will.

We still hope/plan to testify at Ways and Means to give the faculty perspective on how legislatively allocated dollars have been spent.

PERS litigation: We have received our share of the Strunk litigation award. No big news here. We’re still paying 1% of the coalition’s ongoing legal bills – averaging about $200 per month.

Other PERS: We’ve begun proactively looking at legislative concepts. One bill would improve the COLA issue for retirees. There are significant issues around rehiring retired employees and the whole 1039 issue. Another potential issue is perhaps steering how reserves are spent. There’s also a glitch in the Tier Two disability allowance that needs to be addressed.

There may have been a new rule restricting or eliminating “catch-up payments” in the new OUS structure for 403b accounts.

Membership: Our fall membership solicitation went out. We’re still compiling the data on how many new members we got from this.
The OFPAC solicitation went out, and we received about $3000 in contributions.
Jacqueline raised the issue that fee remission for faculty designee should be increased from one at a time.

Future meetings: Feb. 9, March 8, April 12, May 10

Meeting adjourned at 12:00 PM

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