I'm not quite sure how a system passes a record budget and justifies personnel cuts by pointing at state appropriations reductions. The lion's share of this $3.3 billion budget will go to the College Station flagship campus, with the remaining campuses, including the Health Science Center, picking up the scraps.
I don't know if this decision extends to the Texas A&M Health Science Center or not. Maybe administrators should put some of that bureaucratic red tape in there instead or cut down on those high-cost airplane rides.
This is an interesting observation made by a commenter on the TexasJustice.org message board. The commenter does not say if UTMB or TDJC hired these people back, assuming what he or she says is accurate.
Hell almost all of our staff is going to High Security, what the hell, why get rid of our staff who is great, and send us someone elese. Yeah i already know, they fired them, then rehired them at a lower pay, some at a lower title, and then put them on a different unit, some a lot farther to drive to. We are getting high security staff, goree staff, huntsville staff, and one from el paso. lol.
30%, 40%, 50%, or more: that's the proportion of their salaries medical researchers are often asked to provide through their grants, money the public believes is going directly to research. Instead, shortsighted administrators, whose six-figure salaries are most definitely NOT dependent on their performance, increasingly make faculty salaries, one of the largest, if not THE largest expense item in the budget, dependent on the largess of primarily the federal government. So what is going to happen when the spigot runs dry? Oh, in the short run, an easy lap or two around faculty senates, the same administrators who have made their faculty fund greater and greater proportions of their own salaries will also try to tell everyone that the federal spigots will never run dry, and everyone should just go back to sleep. Meanwhile, university decision-makers can continue to spend that proportion of their budgets formerly devoted to faculty salaries on their own salaries, perks, or pet projects.
Sooner or later, however, the federal spending spree has got to end, and higher education will have to face the long run, a run it is woefully out of shape to complete. Our economy is in trouble, federal deficits loom large, and the clamor to reduce government spending, particularly from conservative quarters, is growing louder and louder. By the way, faculty are not immensely popular in conservative circles, and Texas is a conservative state, after all.
So what's going to happen? When federal organizations like the National Institutes of Health start cutting back, administrators will put on their long faces and start talking about a budget crisis. What they won't say is that they created the crisis themselves over the years. The next thing faculty know, they will be facing a RIF, a reduction in force. Even tenured faculty are not immune to a RIF born of economic necessity. In fact, with administrators seeking to consolidate control as well, tenured faculty could be more at risk than non-tenured faculty, particularly since tenured faculty are more senior and tend to make more money.
My guess, however, is that the vast majority of faculty, tenured or not, will meekly accept the status quo until it is too late. After all, bucking the system involves risk to one's career. Of course, making faculty salaries more and more dependent on federal dollars involves risk too, doesn't it?
I was surprised to learn that the University of Texas Medical Branch is second only to M.D. Anderson, albeit a distant second, in terms of total revenue. This is the university constantly complaining to the Legislature about how poor it is. Of course, the university would come back with the idea that it has expenses to match its relatively large revenue, but let us not forget that during the 2008 reduction in force, UTMB staff was lining up for $3 million in bonuses.
Curious about how your medical school stacks up against other schools in Texas? Then go to this website and look at the interactive data available there. I've already gone there and looked at a small part of the information available, operating expenses per full-time faculty and full-time staff, the results of which appear below the link.The results, particularly those for UTMB, are rather surprising to me. UTMB appears to be an expense leader, ahead of the pack in expenses per staff, and in competition to lead the pack in expenses per full-time faculty members. And this from an institution that seems to try to solve its budget problems through reductions in force. Another RIF or two, and it will be the leader in both categories, I suspect.
Dr. Elena Volpi, new director and principal investigator of the Pepper Center, said in addition to this grant from NIA, which funds the Pepper Center infrastructure, the center’s researchers bring more than $20 million in grants to UTMB, mostly from the National Institutes of Health.
I have to wonder how much of the grants actually go to research after the university gets through taking its 50% or 51% cut and the administrators require researchers to take much of their compensation from these grants. So out of $20 million that the Pepper Center researchers got from NIH, how much went to research on aging? $8 million? $9 million?
University of Texas Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa is making some personnel cuts within System Administration in response to the budget cuts mandated by the state. I am struck by a couple of aspects of these cuts. First, I don't get the sense that the people being cut or, for that matter, the people allowed to stay had much input into the process. Why do I say that? A couple of key phrases in the attached letter, linked below, led me to that conclusion, to wit:
"I, too, have spent considerable time looking at U. T. System Administration, carefully studying all aspects of our organization and budget, as well as taking into consideration your valuable input." (This letter was addressed to UT system component presidents, so the "your" in Cigarroa's sentence had nothing to do with the people being cut.)
"In order to achieve these goals, I am implementing the following System Administration organizational changes effective September 1, 2010."
There's just a little bit too much first-person stuff going on in those two statements for my comfort. There may be no "I" in team, but there sure is one in RIF.
The second thing that struck me in this letter is the liberal use of "sunsetting." What a nice little euphemism that is for throwing people and their families onto the street during a high period of unemployment. I wonder if it makes people feel better to know that they were sunsetted rather than fired or laid off.
Cigarroa's letter to component presidents, several of whom are in the "Million-Dollar Club," is linked below:
I've said it in a previous post, and I'm going to say it again: UT faculty had better be on the lookout for administrators using the state budget crisis to unilaterally target faculty rather than receiving faculty input and following system policies.
Texas A&M Health Science Center Pres. Nancy Dickey points out that Texas A&M HSC has the lowest tuition in the continental United States. I would have to imagine, but have not checked out, that this status would be reflected in faculty salaries.
But Eric Wilkinson, a medical student at the A&M Health Science Center, said he wasn't sure the 3.95 percent increase requested by the medical school was needed.
“We don't mind paying more money,” he said. But he questioned whether the additional cost would produce greater value.
Health Science Center President Nancy Dickey defended the increase as approved, saying her medical school has the lowest tuition of any in the continental United States. (One school in Puerto Rico is less expensive, she said.)
The biggest threat to academic tenure lies like a snake ready to strike passersby at medical academic institutions, and the greatest threat may well be coiled up at University of Texas medical institutions. Why do I say this? I say this mostly because of what has happened over the past few years in Texas. First, let us not forget that the UT Executive Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs, Dr. Kenneth I. Shine, has repeatedly and publicly stated that tenure protects only a position and not a salary. This stance, of course, leaves a faculty member wide open to what is known as "constructive termination." Constructive termination occurs when a faculty member's salary is cut to a level that is intolerable, requiring the faculty member to seek another job. The University of Texas Medical Branch, an institution directly under Dr. Shine, at least thought about doing this on a massive scale. Please see the e-mail linked below in which former UTMB Dean Valerie Parisi discusses cutting tenured faculty salary in order to run them off:
Now, I wouldn't expect administrators to say, "We're cutting your pay to run you off." No, they would get on their game faces and talk about how bad the budget was, how they needed to make cuts, and how everyone needed to sacrifice. In other words, the institution would have to lie to its tenured faculty as a matter of course in order to pull something like that off. Although UTMB never fully implemented this scheme, I, in fact, saw several faculty members' pay cut in an effort to make them dissatisfied enough to leave. This was done mostly through the manipulation of resources. These faculty members, by the way, were tenured.
Here is a syllogism for my readers:
Resources control faculty productivity. Administrators control resources. Administrators control faculty productivity.
So how do you go about cutting a tenured faculty member's pay? One way to do it, and the way I've seen it done several times, is simply to restrict the resources that a faculty member has to be productive. This is particularly effective at an institution like UTMB, where faculty compensation is based in large part on productivity. I have seen lab space taken away from faculty. I've seen faculty reassigned to less lucrative pursuits. I've seen opportunities for professional growth and development denied out of hand. The problem is that for institutions where tenure protects only a position and not salary, all those resources are fair game.
As the old saw goes, "Money is the root of all evil." A tremendous amount of money, whether through patient revenue or government grants or whatever source, moves through a medical institution's coffers every year. With corporate management steadily taking hold in academia, the push for faculty to be more productive will only grow more intense as the years go by. Academia's corporate managers will have very little regard for concepts like tenure and the academic freedom that tenure protects. They will be concerned primarily with the bottom line of the spreadsheet and keeping the faculty complacent and cowed. For instance, when UTMB laid off three of the last five faculty senate presidents during its 2008 reduction in force, what effect do you suppose that had on the remaining faculty? Do you think they got the message? How about the faculty who watched what happened to Dr. Robert Klebe at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio? How about the faculty who watched what happened to Dr. Larry Gentilello at UT Southwestern Medical Center? I would think that a whole bunch of faculty got the message.
Yes, tenure is in real trouble, and nowhere more so than medical institutions, where the temptation to manipulate money is the greatest. Faculty at these institutions must decide if they're going to stand up for what is right, or if they're going to be "complacent and cowed." Most will take a look at their mortgages and tuition rates for their children and opt for the latter. The problem for the bad guys is that it doesn't take too many good people standing together to stop them. That's why these few are often called "heroes." Tenure could use a few heroes where they're needed most right now: medical institutions.
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