Month: November 2016

Blog Post 11/25/16

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We are very much upon the holidays and finding a final meeting for the semester may prove difficult, however, I have been encouraged to try, so look for another reading week announcement. I had to make my annual Thanksgiving pie order so picked up some donuts, cider and few beers for the meeting. We don’t seem to get more than 25 people a meeting, but they are not the same 25, so perhaps we are making progress. Many told me the meeting time was not convenient, but I keep changing the time of the week so we shall see. I thought our conversation on the salary issue was developing and we are now getting more help from the committee. Certainly the faculty report on the salary was useful in moving the conversation along and we are now writing a letter to the committee and the Board urging them to follow through on the Committee report; and not on their plan to mortgage funds from 41 senior faculty members. We have more to do, and once this letter is out, and the official salary committee meets over the Board weekend, we can work more on developing our own plan for moving the “conversation,” onward.

We have also heard again from the Child Care Committee with two members from the group with us and a substantive note from the Committee chair. It was discouraging to hear that in a presentation to President Smith and Provost Stevenson, we learned that they saw no hope in getting a facility on campus and that in the Board of Managers there was no enthusiasm for raising money for such a project. Curious, that on a national level we have a discussion just beginning on child care credits, that in many of the liberal corporations we encourage students to join there is child care and that at many of our comparable schools and aspiring schools, there is some child care program. Yale University, Duke University, the big named universities go as far as providing child care up to 100% of the cost. Surely it has become a major benefit and for Swarthmore to have little more than a web page of information that we had to beg for is not fitting for a college aspiring to such lofty heights. We will continue to encourage our friends on the committee, and we look forward to hearing more suggestions on where to go from here. I suggested that, in the fall we dedicate labor day to having everyone bring their children to school, to bringing them to classes and we make a point of visiting the President and the Provost on the day. And we should not just bring our school age children, some of us have already raised children without any benefits, but ask our grown children to come ahead and remind everyone that the school excluded them from the last summer holiday and then stranded them on campus without any attempt to recognize the sacrifice. Let us hope the administration can come to its senses on this matter before next fall.

On a final matter we revisited the issue of benefits that were taken from the faculty during the 2009 recession. Along these lines we discussed Tuition Reimbursement for Children and the fact that the college has made no attempt to restore those cuts, much less bring them into line with other comparable schools. Ted Fernald will be preparing a statement on this issue for AAUP to pursue in the future and I encourage everyone interested to go ahead and get in touch with him. We also discussed the ad hoc committee on the Provost Search, which we are told has not met, and we are thinking that we ought to decide for ourselves what we would like to see in a Provost and organize a more meaningful discussion. We ran out of time, but we have letters to write and another meeting to plan.

We have some excellent ideas to develop at the next meeting. We will have another report on salaries and more on a plan to help reveal gender gap discrepancies. British companies will be forced to reveal their pay gaps in 2018 and it stands to reason that in the US companies will begin to address the issue. Swarthmore could be encouraged to get ahead of the game by publishing salaries by gender in their annual report on salaries. We already have it in the faculty minutes, perhaps, we can get them to do it this year. We have a committee working on this and welcome more ideas and suggestions to pursue this goal. Finally, Matt Zucker introduced the idea of Swarthmore College becoming a Sanctuary Campus and a letter is being prepared to bring before the Faculty sometime in the next few weeks. We did not have time to really discuss it, but will at the next meeting.

I look forward to meeting more folks at the next meeting and encourage you all to read our regular meeting meetings and plan to attend.

 

mm

Blog Post 9/18/16

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I have always enjoyed a faculty party, a time to relax and catch-up on what is going on, I learn from my colleagues and they are happy to share. Back in the day, Nat Anderson and I used to have Halloween Parties with hundreds of faculty, their spouses and their costumes, yes incognito, it was a requirement. Everyone brought booze and food; the late and loved, George Mosko, my friend and neighbor would set up the smoking-martini bar on the deck and we would dance until late in the night.

Therefore, it was quite natural to begin the AAUP year with a little party, and to respect our colleagues who felt constrained when speaking before senior faculty we tried to wear masks, to have fun and be incognito. Carr Everbach shared some beautiful artful masks made by his very talented children, and some of us were game, however, in the end, the masks did not take off. But the meeting did and I appreciate everyone who came and shared ideas.

This gets me to the first issue I wish to raise. I considered our party an informal gathering, not a meeting but a chance to get a sense of what people are interested in doing. Often the first meeting of AAUP sets the tone for the year and I want everyone to know that I am not done collecting ideas and setting the agenda, what was discussed this week will not determine our work for the year. I hear it as a beginning and a chance for the re-working of old issues.

We had a great report from Bob Weinberg on the continuation of the Child Care Committee and remain optimistic about their progress. We are looking forward to a report at the next faculty meeting. Also I mentioned issues of gender equity in pay and will be working to get that on our years agenda. I mentioned current faculty discussions about tenure requirements and would encourage faculty to come forward to discuss what, if any, role the AAUP should do about it. At our first meeting in November we will set an agenda, so get your ideas to me.

The bulk of our conversation was about the faculty whose salary has been frozen to make up for alleged over pay.   I will not rehash that conversation here, but Matt Zucker has kindly volunteered to be our recording secretary, took some very thorough notes and they will be posted here on our new web site. Please take a look. I want to thank all of the faculty whose wages may have been enhanced in the same pay period, it may have been uncomfortable to hear all of this and I think you can see that none of the 41 wish to make this a wedge issue among faculty. We are solid together, a strike against one is a strike against all, and as I have said: we take the issue very seriously because of the divisive, secretive way it was revealed and if you can do it against one group, nothing prevents a similar action against all.

Lynne Molter has volunteered to lead the group that will be addressing this issue and we expect to have an informational panel as well as meetings with the administration. Contact her if you want to be on her mailing list.

This issue does not get to the main question of salaries, gender equity and the four course load. All of these are concerns of the faculty. Please take a few moments to look over the minutes and keep in touch with your concerns.

Finally, I have election results. For three years faculty have wanted AAUP elections, but let me point this out, it is not clear who to include in our mailing lists. For this year I decided not to just use last years mailing list but to expand us to the first year gathering, maybe it will get more of our membership out to the party. So we had official ballots and we voted. We had about 25 people there, but only about 22 voted, Judy Vogt counted the ballots.

AAUP election
President:
Marj Murphy 21
Carr Everbach 1

Vice President:
Micheline 1
Paul 2
Ted Fernald 1

secretary:
Edwin 1
Paul 2
Lynne 2
William Turpin 1

Treasurer:
Carr 2
Ted 1
Judy 1

Corresponding secretary:
Judy 1

Other positions (exec committee?):
Matt Zucker
Ted Fernald
Carr Everbach
Carol Nackenoff (volunteered)
Peter Baumann
Lynne Molter 2
William Turpin

Secretary or treasurer if needed in no particular order (all from one voter):
Carr
Richard Eldridge
Bob Weinberg
Lynne Molter
William Turpin
Ted Fernald

I will happily serve as President and again thank Paul for helping out; Carr remains as our unofficial treasurer, web master and general support; Matt Zucker has already stepped in as Recording Secretary and I am very grateful. Lynne Molter is head of the Steering Committee on Salary; Judy Vogt has been elected corresponding secretary and will be helping us make target lists of faculty to expand our membership; Ted Fernald, Richard Eldridge, William Turpin, Micheline, Peter Bauman, Judy Vogt and Paul should all consider themselves members of the executive committee and potentially vice president.   (I figure the administration has all of these vice presidents, why can’t I?) Please plan to come to a meeting in November and please, please bring a new faculty member. mm

 

Blog post 11/6/16

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I was hoping to get our meetings going a little earlier, however, the election is now almost over and most of us are beyond mid-terms so it is a good time to go back over a few things and set our agenda for the rest of the year. We have benefitted from two innovations in the faculty meeting of September 30th the first was a second report from the Ad Hoc Committee on Child Care and the second, a report from the Ad Hoc Committee on Faculty Salaries.

The Child care committee has initiated discussion with the Director of the Swarthmore Friends Nursery School about developing an after school program on the site. They have also inquired about reserving slots in their program for incoming faculty and they have initiated within the Faculty Staff Benefits committee a discussion about subsidies on a sliding scale for childcare.   I noticed that there are still major issues on child care that the Child Care committee is yet to resolve. We have never received an adequate explanation for the missing (and then found) $300,000 donated for childcare and then acquired by the Benefits committee for purposes never discussed within the community, but rather designated by senior staff. To some this is a done deal and we should move on, and yet to others we have far too much to lose by simply ignoring the injustice of this slight of hand administrative maneuver. We should look for another Child Care report in the Spring. Meanwhile, the question was raised in the faculty meeting: “Can we move forward to a sliding scale subsidy for child care for the entire community, including faculty?”

The second report came from Cheryl Grood of the Ad Hoc Committee on Faculty Salaries. Much of what follows comes from the Faculty Minutes of September 30th. After a short history of the committee, Cheryl explained that :

“The original committee noticed that starting in 2004 the number of long serving associate professors was starting to rise, which resulted in the unintended consequence of inflating the average salary of the associate professor rank and the professor rank, impacting the comparison to the reference group, and resulting in raises being moderately lower than they should have been for those two ranks.”

This was by way of explaining the model created by then Associate Provost Richard Witcentowski, which predicted salaries based on everyone being promoted at year nine of service to the college. He estimated that salaries from 2011 were anywhere from $200 to $11,400 lower than they would have been had everyone been promoted at year nine. The most effected were junior full professors and senior associate professors. For more detailed information on Cheryl’s report please take a look at the minutes for the Septemer 30th Faculty Meeting. The most important thing for the AAUP is that much of our discussion a week earlier was superseded by this long overdue report on salaries. Discussions over salary will now certainly include the issue of the 41 senior faculty members and it will include issues of gender and cohorts in salary scale. The issue of including the median as opposed to averages would certainly improve things. We hope they can provide more seniority and a gender breakdowns of salaries in future reports which might give us more transparency.

Cheryl also reviewed the recommendations of the 2014-2015 Joint Faculty Board Committee on Faculty Compensation, which were as follows:

1) Faculty in years 1-8 post tenure will be compared to associate professors elsewhere. Faculty in years 9 through retirement will be compared to full professors elsewhere.

2) Before calculating salary increases for the 2016-2017 academic year, associate and full professors who have been adversely affected by the increase in LSAs will have their salaries adjusted upward to the 2015-2016 level dictated by The Model.

3) Salary increases for the 2016-2017 academic year for all associate and full professors will be based on the 2015-2016 salary levels calculated by The Model.

4) The 102.5% target with respect to the comparison group should be changed from total compensation to salary + retirement benefits.

Recommendations one and two have been implemented, a modified version of recommendation three is being implemented, and recommendation four has been delayed to allow the Finance Committee of the Board of Managers to decide. It is important to note that the idea to recoup money from senior faculty members was not part of the Ad Hoc Committee’s plans. Apparently, as Mark Kuperberg explained the Board suffered some sticker shock in addressing the cost of fixing the salary scale and so this was an attempt to lower the total cost. It appears that the committee will be working this year to address points two and three, hopefully without taking out a lien against senior salaries.

Am I giving AAUP too much credit here to mention that we are finally getting committee reports at faculty meetings that actually affect us? Our discussion at the September party would have been much more informed had we some of this information before we met. Yet, we still have much to do to keep information flowing and to move the conversation forward.

Marjorie Murphy