At 3:32 p.m. on 29 April 2014, President Thomas began a meeting concerning salaries and benefits at the University of Puget Clowns. Colleagues who could not make the meeting asked me to note what was said.
Who would want Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's version of events?
Then Ron Thom assumed the podium. The faculty's pal thanked everyone for attending. Ron Thom validated the issues as important. He suggested that he and his entire cabinet ask themselves first thing each year how they can increase compensation for faculty. He then allowed that faculty compensation has been his greatest personal disappointment in the presidency of Ronald R. Thomas.
So far, so standard: President Thomas confirmed that he understood faculty concern(s) before he heard them expressed or pressed. Then Ron Thom confessed that, amid President Thomas's myriad successes in raising bricks and mortar and dough, Ron Thom has suffered the personal pain and humiliation of not being able to compensate faculty as much as he wished he could. Faculty must recall that Ron Thom is a good guy who is very trying even as faculty acknowledge that Ronald R. Thomas is a hard-nosed, realistic Chief Executive.
"It's all up to you. I can be a good guy, or I can be one mean son of a bitch. It's all up to you."
Hard-charging University of Puget Sound CEO President Thomas then noted that he had asked his cabinet to attend so that discussion might be as "fulsome" as possible.
"Fulsome?" Surf to dictionary.reference.com/browse/fulsome?s=t, please. Evidently President Thomas meant definitions four or five:
1. offensive to good taste, especially as being excessive; overdone or gross:
fulsome praise that embarrassed her deeply; fulsome décor.
2.
disgusting; sickening; repulsive:
a table heaped with fulsome mounds of greasy foods.
3.
excessively or insincerely lavish:
fulsome admiration.
4.
encompassing all aspects; comprehensive:
a fulsome survey of the political situation in Central America.
5.
abundant or copious.
Denise Despres asked about the bloat of administrative structures across U. S. colleges and universities and its negative consequences for benefits and salaries of faculty. U. P. S. is not good for faculty. How can existing faculty recruit new faculty without lying? Ron Thom asked for specifics. Professor Despres suggested salaries and especially medical benefits have fallen behind. Room-commanding CEO Thomas shouldered faculty pal Ron Thom aside to note that medical benefits were a knotty problem.
Message: Ron Thom cares. President Thomas cannot do anything about Ron Thom's caring, but you gotta love Ron Thom.
President Thomas, by contrast, demands specifics that he knows faculty cannot obtain. Sooner or later faculty will characterize developments in terms that President Thomas can gainsay. Plausible deniability suffices.
CEO Thomas then noted that every employee is still covered under the medical plan. Dependents can be covered, too. Despite national problems, the University of Puget Clowns still covers basic medical matters for its personnel.
Message: It's not CEO Thomas's fault. CEO Thomas and his administration are sailing over minimal expectations that they are striving to lower.
From his first year as CEO, President Thomas intoned, President Thomas had thought that the University of Puget Clowns had too often bootstrapped with next to nothing. Then came the recession.
It's not Ron Thom's fault. It's not President Thomas's fault. It's Dubya's fault! [Unless trustees are present, in which case it's Obama's fault.]
President Thomas then opined that the University of Puget Clowns remains a good place: "I still think that. Maybe you don't."
Ron Thom consoled long-suffering, hard-working, forlorn Denise; President Thomas then invited Professor Despres to reaffirm that she is not a problem but still a loyal member of his extended team.
Doug Cannon said that in 1980 he was offered more from the University of Puget Clowns than he would have been at Yale. He wondered if the trustees could establish an endowment to bump up faculty salaries.
Able was I ere I saw Elba.
Tough-minded CEO Ronald Thomas then allowed that "We cannot continue to escalate tuition enough to compensate faculty well. The times will not permit that." Ron Thom tried to say how much that pained him, but CEO Thomas directed attention from Ron Thom's empathy to President Thomas's fundraiser. Dave Beers observed that $1,000,000 would yield about $50,000 per year, so it would take much endowment to "move the needle" on faculty salaries much
Ron Thom sagged. CEO Thomas swaggered.
At this point my battery began to fail. My computer's, too.
Nick Kontogeorgopoulos complained that administrators' salaries burgeon while faculty salaries have fallen to the bottom of comparison schools. As a result, faculty morale has fallen into the dumper. And a student said tuition was rising to accommodate faculty salaries/wages. What will be done about the disparities?
Are all Puget Clowns equal, but some equaler than others?
Matt Warning, "Rick Brooks said faculty and administrators were not 'in it all together.' "
Ron Thom was sad to think that true; President Thomas wondered what Professor Warning's point might be.Matt Warning wondered why the faculty could pass a graduation requirement regarding inequality but campus cannot talk about inequalities on campus.
Ron Thom saw Warning's point; President Thomas wondered what Professor Warning's point might be.
Lynda Livingston then saw Doug Cannon's gratuitous self-promotion about Yale's considering him and raised it with an anecdote about the Business School that established that administrators were buttheads.
Ron Thom wondered what Professor Livingston was talking about. President Thomas noted that faculty were wasting time in a most agreeable anarchy of special pleading.
Jonathan Stockdale brandished The Trail to the point that tuition increases were being blamed on faculty compensation.
Arches on 25 March? The Trail on 29 April? Is there a source so flimsy that Professor Stockdale will not cite it?
Sherry Mondou then attempted flimflam by noting that she had not talked to anyone at the The Trail but only emailed some remarks and had happened to be considering faculty compensation when she emailed.
Those pesky cub reporters at The Trail! Who would take seriously an email from an administrator? What kind of journalist reproduces what administrators say?
"That's true, isn't it?"
"No. But it's accurate."
Kris Bartanen followed with some detail-quibbling and distinctions that made little difference, at which quibbling Professor Despres channeled Joe Wilson [R SC] and shouted at Bartanen. Bartanen's point was that Puget Clowns is really not the worst in its class.
Good point! Professor Kontogeorgopoulos's point that UPS once led its class and aspired to head its class of schools but now trails was left utterly unrebutted, but ritual demands only that administrators answer, not that their answers make sense or make any difference. "Nick, we may not be alpha these days but one could argue that we are not omega."
Richard Anderson-Connolly suggested that Ron Thom consider Rawlsian budgeting: those paid most get raised least.
Extremely busy CEO & President Thomas then noted the lateness of the hour and so began a filibuster of marketing nostrums and soothing faculty-relations.
Previously bellicose faculty now began to assure Ron Thom that they still loved him and President Thomas that they still feared him.
The Mass is ended. Go and whine no more!
"There's no time to lose," I heard her say /
Catch your dreams before they slip away /
Dying all the time /
Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind /
Ain't life unkind? /
She just can't be chained /
To a life where nothing's gained /
And nothing's lost, at such a cost. /
8 comments:
I was offered less by a construction-job than I was by Puget Sound. Datum = good! My letter from Yale got lost in the mail! I did not know Lou Rawls had published on economics. "You'll never find/we'll be anything but behind.]Our sal'ries are falling/boo-hoo, boo-hoo."
Did Professor Despres actually shout "You lie!" at the dean?
Did the chairman of International Political Economy really refer to salaries as wages?
"You want to talk about trauma? Forget Klan posters."
Your whiteness is showing.
Professor Despres did NOT shout "You lie!"
I'm not the chair of IPE, nor do I own an abacus, and I'm just spit-balling here, but one reason the faculty has no leverage is a critical mass of faculty either could not or would not apply successfully for a job elsewhere. Too many recently minted associate profs. haven't published enough. It's difficult for almost any Full Prof. to find a job elsewhere. Etc. No leverage, no big raise. Hence the admin. may be as haughty as they wish and adjourn for a good chuckle at the Mirano Hotel Bar after the meeting. Should the faculty call the IWW? Sing "Joe Hill"? Besides, salaries are socially constructed, so they're not real, and you'd have to "extraordinarily sensitive" to be upset about salaries.
If the Chair of the International House of Pancakes referred to salaries as wages, then to what extent ought the admin. take the faculty seriously? If the President of the University is quasi-truly semi-concerned about faculty compensation but can't, structurally, do anything about it, then to what extent is this model of education sustainable? Might moderately motivated students get a good liberal education online, for example, without taking out a single loan or being compelled to live in a dorm for two years?
Dear Anonymous, Before I left Tacoma for good, the Mirano Hotel was being sued for discriminating against a person of color by the largest civil rights firm in the city. Scratch drinking there. As for The Trail, not only was I not a suck-up, I was dragged into the Dean's office and told not to write about certain things which I then went back and reported with glee. Now, get a spine and failing that, get a strap on spine. -Whiteperson, 1988
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