15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut #8
"Against Voluntary Servitude"

Monday, February 22, 2010

posted under , , , , , by Unit for Criticism

[The next in our "15 Ways" series on the condition of higher education offers a reflection on the choice between furloughs and voluntary pay reductions.]

Written by Joseph Valente (English)

On January 20, our Interim Chancellor, Robert Easter, sent us all a message: “we are pleased to be able to offer... to our faculty and academic professionals... a voluntary and temporary salary reduction in lieu of a furlough if they so wish.”

That’s right, they were “pleased to offer” us hell or high water as a consumer choice. Those who acted quickly, signing up by February 8, were offered the “choice” to bypass the mess, hassle and indignity of being furloughed by simply submitting to the no-fuss option of voluntary servitude! Who could refuse a deal like that? And aren’t we all grateful for an administration benevolent enough to permit us such license?

Seriously, given the overeducated, hyper-credentialed audience he was addressing, you might think Bob Easter would be especially careful about adding gross insult to our collective intelligence to the unwarranted injury done our pocketbook. But perhaps that collective intelligence itself is overrated. According to Interim Vice-Provost Richard Wheeler's remarks in the Champaign News Gazette (1/21/10), people were approaching him with the entreaty, “We’re willing to give up the pay [as if they had a choice] because that’s necessary, but please don’t make us stop working.”

Now setting aside the nauseatingly craven identification it expresses with a currently abusive institution, this sentiment is just plain wrong on a number of different levels.

And so even though the Illinois readers of this blog will have already made their choice between hell and high water, I will trouble these readers to hear me out on why furloughs—much though I hate them—are a superior option to “voluntary” pay cuts.

1. The first problem with the sentiment described in the News Gazette is that it assumes the necessity of the pay cuts in the present financial crisis. But the amount saved by docking our pay amounts to less than 4 percent of the money the state legislature is illegally withholding from the university budget. Accordingly, the furloughs are unavailing in themselves and the savings they produce could be greatly exceeded by a combination of other measures, including a moratorium on all building projects and a corresponding abrogation of current contracts for developers, a moratorium on social and professional receptions, meals and other entertainments, a slashing of the athletic budget, especially for the many sports that do not pay for themselves, a temporary increase of student fees and tuition, a significant hike in parking fees and a restriction of all administrative supplements to the period of actual administrative service. If the state truly lacks the wherewithal to meet its legal obligations, it might consider lifting sales taxes, income taxes, user fees for highways, state parks, etc. In sum, the furloughs are not necessary, they are elective, a target of state and administrative opportunity made all the juicier by the soft-headed attitude of those employees eager, by Wheeler’s account, to work for nothing.

2. The sentiment assumes that voluntary servitude is a boon to the university (Easter claimed it indicated great devotion). But as Faculty Senate Executive Committee Chair Joyce Tolliver has observed (Champaign News-Gazette, 1/21/10), the damage to our educational mission wrought by all such draconian reductions to the budget are real, inescapable and long-lasting. All a voluntary pay cut accomplishes is to conceal the damage, so far as possible, from the eyes of the legislators who have inflicted the damage by withholding the monies owed the university on an ongoing basis. Such concealment can only make it all the more likely that they will continue to inflict the damage, by the same means, and in ever greater magnitude.

Moreover acceding to the notion of the “voluntary” pay cut also helps to dissimulate the entirely coercive nature of the injury done to the employees themselves. You get “cut” either way. Instead of making visible the malfeasance of the state government and the profound gutlessness of the university administration in confronting it, submission to voluntary servitude makes clear just how little professional self-respect the gratefully self-indentured possess. If one holds oneself and one’s office in so little esteem as to suffer willingly the outright theft of one’s proper remuneration by one’s employer, why in the world should one’s students appraise rightly or take seriously the worth of our joint enterprise? Certain Unit Heads have exhorted the faculty to “maintain the integrity of the classroom” by not cancelling sessions, but should you embrace being treated like an amateur, or worse a chump, as these officers recommend, you will only succeed in showing your classroom that you hold your own professional integrity very cheap indeed.

3. The sentiment assumes the pay cuts and furloughs are temporary, a one-off in the continuing devaluation of higher education in the state of Illinois. In papering over the effects of the legislators’ intellectual vandalism, those submitting to peonage only encourage the administration to institute more furloughs in future, “pleased,” as they will undoubtedly be, “to offer a voluntary and temporary pay cut” as an alternative. Those voluntary martyrs to state mismanagement are, in other words, encouraging Springfield to subject their colleagues, all of us, to further salary reductions, further hardship, next year, at which point the same acquiescence in the “voluntary pay cut” option will help to ease the crafting of a permanent furlough policy (I note that the University of Maryland is facing the possibility of a third year of furloughs). With this in mind, the sentiment recently expressed by Professor Burbules that University employees have the right to decide for themselves on either option (News Gazette 1/21/10), without being harassed, is entirely wrongheaded. While faculty have the legal right to choose either course, obviously, I have the moral right, and I am right, to denounce their choice thusly: in making it easier for the powers that be to continue the practice of pilfering our pay and corroding our work conditions, anyone who elects the voluntary pay cut is acting as the moral equivalent of a scab.

4. The sentiment assumes the virtue of being a “good citizen” is somehow divorced from the nature of the state being served. If you regularly profess the necessity of opposing unjust power and practice, why would you erase the lesson by complying with and endorsing, in full view of your students, this patent injustice. If you teach students to speak truth to power, why would you obviate that lesson by cooperating in the lies of the furlough system? Avoid the performative contradiction of rationalizing by your “voluntary” appearance in the classroom the sort of mendacity you speak of resisting in the classroom.

For all the reasons I have given, the way to take your furlough in the best interest of the university, the students who would emulate you, political principle, your families, and your own professional dignity is to foreground the damage and disruption furloughs can cause in the hope of preventing their future occurrence.

So don’t just take your furlough days. Take them on the days you teach. Mark your syllabi “Class Furloughed,” not just to give fair notice for the cancellation, but to underline the reason. Let your students, their parents, and the taxpayers at large know this: the Chancellor may be “pleased” to sell us a bill of goods—a variety of means for surrendering our salaries and our professional dignity, but we are not “buying it,” and they should not be either.

And if you've already opted for the pay reduction, it's not too late for you to "volunteer" to teach your students the meaning of substantive choice--by letting them know why you are "volunteering" to cancel your classes four times this semester. Read more

15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut
#5: "A Furlough to Arms"

Friday, February 5, 2010

posted under , , , , , by Unit for Criticism

[Cary Nelson's contribution to the "15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut" series on the condition of higher education is excerpted from the lecture he gave for the Unit for Criticism's January 25 colloquium, "Higher Education's Perfect Storm: What Can We Do?"]

Written by Cary Nelson (English/President, AAUP)

The requirement to choose between a 2% salary cut and self-selected furlough days is not simply a matter of convenience. It represents a series of fundamental political choices. We can lie about our likely activities and pledge to do no work for four days.

I would urge faculty members instead to pick furlough days and use one such day to self-report violations, then join the collective activities organized by the Campus Faculty Association, including their February 9 meeting and February 15 common action day/teach-in. Contrary to the Senate Executive Committee's call to "contain the damage," I do not believe we should make seamless cooperation our goal.

The list of prohibitions on furlough days is itself an unacceptable embarrassment to institutions like the University of Wisconsin which has distributed them. No visits to your office or your lab, no professional phone calls to students or colleagues, no research oriented reading or writing, no university work of any kind. Not only do these protocols offend academic freedom, they violate your human rights. Thus I regard self-reporting violations as a form of nonviolent professional disobedience, conscientious objection to the war against the faculty.

So, alternatively, you can admit the furloughs were really a salary cut and just take a 2% reduction. But then the two choices—pretending not to work, or admitting you will work without pay-- put the lie to each other. Apparently our senior administrators were not prepared for the news that some faculty members prefer not to lie. At the moment, we can either accept the administration’s paternalism on good faith, or we can resist. We can also let a thousand flowers bloom, resisting on one day, cooperating on another, hold a mass teach-in, volunteering in the community, and so forth. A public display of faculty/staff solidarity is an important component of an activist strategy. But do not delude yourselves into believing you can win public support for teaching and research if you limit yourself to volunteering in an old folks home or adopting a highway for a faculty cleanup project. You cannot build public admiration for our core activities indirectly. Moreover, unless deliberate noncompliance is part of our collective response, it will not have sufficient impact.

Taking the 2% salary cut is easier, but it includes no element of resistance. Combining a teach-in with nonviolent professional resistance establishes a full protocol for the faculty to assert its rights and its point of view. If at least 100 faculty members agree to identify furlough days and then publicly declare that they “read a book,” “talked with a student,” “worked in their lab,” etc., on one of the furlough days, then we can gain national publicity for a faculty collective voice.

I know some of you will say “We do not see the benefit of being confrontational,” and I also know what that really means. “My dignity is fragile,” “I am afraid of retaliation.” “If I keep my head down maybe the world will stay the same.” A research university is a roiling mix of fear, arrogance, and idealism. But the first of these, fear, is never far from the surface. I understand that. I’m no less subject to it than any of you. I have just learned to control it and move on. That is what you must do if you wish some control over your fate. That said, if the administration is foolish enough to punish you for reading a book, then let them reap what they will have sown. They would be the laughing stock of higher education. I do not believe they will go there.

Be assured, the furloughs are in place not because the university lacks the money to pay faculty/staff salaries but because there is a cash flow problem and the university prefers to spend the available funds in other ways, to protect other priorities.

Not, of course, that we really know what all those other priorities actually are. The faculty needs independent sources of information. We could fund an annual audit through the AAUP for about $4,000. The AAUP has already donated a general audit of the system and can now move on to detailed campus-by-campus reports. Short of that, there is every reason to distrust a university budget. We have never seen one that is adequate, never seen one that lists all resources available to an institution. Over the last year we have analyzed budgets for a dozen large institutions that claimed severe financial difficulty and found all the claims false. On the other hand we have found several small schools to be literally in jeopardy of financial collapse, but that is not the U of I’s situation.

Despite some loss from investments, total UI revenues grew from 3.573 billion in 2005 to 4.046 billion in 2008. Tuition and fees in the same period grew from 507 million to 662 million. Bonds payable are at $1 billion, but our total assets are over $5 billion. Interest payments on our debts come to only 2% of our budget. Our cash flow projections have to be modified by removing depreciation costs from the budget, since depreciation is not a cash expense. Overall, the UI is in excellent financial health.

The one alarming piece of financial data is that while expenditures on instruction increased only 12% from 2005 to 2008, and expenditures on research increased only 2%, three of the four administrative categories increased more than 20% in the same period. In the financial report on the UI system that the national AAUP just released, we conclude that the fact that UI administrative costs have increased at a substantially higher rate than expenditures on teaching and research suggests “the UI system has not be true to the core academic mission” (13).

Now ask yourselves this: if you look at senior administrator’s salaries three to five years from now, will they have been handsomely overcompensated for their 2010 furlough days? Will faculty and staff?

The assurance that the university will honor its core mission is thus the least reassuring thing one hears. For we are not in agreement about what our core mission is. We now have an honorable interim president, but some of the mid-level administrators who transferred funds to cover the losses from Global Campus or facilitated clouted admissions are still in place. The ideology that endorsed the Academy on Capitalism has not been rooted out. This remains an entrepreneurial campus looking toward defunding the humanities and the interpretive social sciences. Unless you are perceived as bringing in money, a perception that is often misleading, you have no reason to trust the administration.

For, short of outright gifts, dollars often come packed in a Trojan horse. The administration is well aware that the grants supporting big budget science or engineering research often do not cover all costs. So tuition income is siphoned off from other units. Global Campus is the model for every major initiative. And this system of robbing Peter to pay Paul operates without informed faculty consent. A ruling ideology and set of priorities have increasingly been imposed on the campus without adequate consultation or buy-in.

Our current system of shared governance is not adequate to address either the ideological differences or the compensation gap between faculty and administrators. That does not, however, mean that I am opposed to cooperating with good administrators. For nearly twenty years, a succession of deans and provosts and chancellors routinely posed the same question: “How are humanities, science, and social science disciplines evolving and how can Illinois be a leader in those changes?” They were eager to invest in the whole range of disciplines so as to make that happen.

But the world has changed. The administration is no longer genuinely interested in what the humanities have to offer the country. The sciences in many ways have it worse. Tenured humanities faculty members at least have intellectual control over their diminished patrimony. Scientists forced to turn to corporations to fund their work are frequently compelled to focus on producing marketable products, rather than on fundamental research. And now the university itself touts research that translates into products. If all this were just a local phenomenon, it could be reversed. But these are national and international trends.

The faculty needs an independent voice willing to speak truth to power. It needs an organization with sufficient membership and sufficient independent financial resources to be a decisive force on campus. The faculty senate, only intermittently reliable, is not a sufficiently independent or courageous voice. Like many senates nationwide, it can be corrupted by members hoping to use the body as a route to a well-paid administrative position. It can be compromised by a tendency to withhold critical information from the faculty as a whole.

The standard form of financially and legally empowered faculty organization is called a union, but there are examples of nonunion but dues paying faculty organizations—including nonunion AAUP chapters with majority membership--that also negotiate salary, benefits, shared governance, and academic freedom issues with the administration.

As it stands now, candidates for senior administrative positions come for an interview, assure us they love children, puppy dogs, and arts and humanities faculty, then do as they please as soon as they are on the job. Humanists lose their infrastructural support, and scientists lose their academic freedom.

Why on earth should two thousand PhDs cede their collective fates to a provost, a chancellor, or a president? Do they know more than we do? Are they more enlightened? Do they better understand what a university is or should be? Do they have research and teaching experience? Did you have that confidence in Joe White? Do you have that confidence in the board of trustees? Do you think the next administrator will be a philosopher king or queen?

The second chapter of my new book No University is an Island (NYU) is devoted to enumerating and analyzing the threats to academic freedom posed by higher education’s transformed administrative and cultural climate. I list sixteen, pointing out that the U of I regularly violates merely 15 of those. The key threats to academic freedom include:

1. INSTRUMENTALIZATION (the notion that higher education is first and foremost job training);
2. CONTINGENCY (the shift to faculty without job security and full academic freedom;
3.AUTHORITARIAN ADMINISTRATION;
4. ABUSES OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE;
5. ADMINISTRATION RESTRICTIONS ON THE USE OF COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY;
6. UNWARRANTED RESEARCH OVERSIGHT (as with institutional review boards);
7. NEOLIBERAL ASSAULTS ON ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES;
8. MANAGERIAL IDEOLOGY
9. CIRCUMVENTION OF SHARED GOVERNANCE;
10. GLOBALIZATION;
11. OPPOSITION TO HUMAN RIGHTS;
12. INADEQUATE GRIEVANCE PROCEDURES;
13. RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE;
14. POLITICAL INTOLERANCE;
15. LEGAL THREATS;
and finally
16. CLAIMS OF FINANCIAL CRISIS.

About the last threat, I say in part: The recession gives administrators the opportunity to claim financial crisis whether or not it is true. Their plans often demonstrate they do not share the same values, priorities, loyalties, goals, and sense of mission as the faculty.

Deciding how to deal with either real or imagined financial constraints entails fundamental moral and ethical issues. How well schools deal with them—whether they are even willing to address them—may depend on how staffing and compensation have evolved over the last two generations.

An institution that pays its president and its football coach half a million dollars a year or more, an institution that has bought into huge disparities between salaries for humanities and business faculty, an institution that already pays contingent faculty subminimum wages, may be ill-prepared to address the ethics of employment in a “crisis.” Nothing is more disingenuous in the context of an amoral salary schedule than an administrative declaration that “we all have to share the pain equally.”

If the worldwide recession continues, many institutions will face a fundamental choice—whether to exacerbate or ameliorate pay schedules and working conditions that are wholly unfair. Should campuses now reap the fruits of gradually enhanced exploitation or take this as an opportunity to address them? In any case, the central issue is always how you spend the money you have. That requires broad campus-wide consultation. Otherwise both shared governance and academic freedom will suffer.

The university has a cash flow problem, but the reason the faculty is being subjected to taxation without representation is that the administration has other priorities for spending the money is does have. The main problem is with Swanlund, not Springfield. There is one and only one solution to these problems—collective action. Reconceive faculty identity to embrace both careerism and community responsibility. Then act. The jury is still out on whether this faculty can rise to the occasion.

Long term, we will need to see the operational fruits of faculty solidarity. That will require:
  1. A sustained conversation about the mission of the university and a search for faculty consensus about what that mission is. Until then, special pleading for disciplinary utility or funding is likely to be unsuccessful.
  2. A broad campaign to create a coalition of students, faculty, parents, administrators, citizens, and legislators to revive the commitment to public higher education. It has begun in California, with the realization it is not a short-term goal.
  3. A readjustment of the power relations between faculty and administration. That will mean broader faculty involvement in campus governance.

There really is no other choice. The only other option is to work at a university whose overall goals and practices many of us do not believe in. Meanwhile, idealism harnessed to progressive self-interest can overcome fear and arrogance. But only if we remake our lives.
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15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut
#3: On Furloughs in an “Arts Cult”

Saturday, January 23, 2010

posted under , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
"Red Dress in F Minor" by Midori Furze

[On January 20, 2010, Interim Chancellor/Provost Robert Easter announced a new Voluntary Pay Reduction program as an alternative to the mandatory furlough program announced in Interim President Stanley Ikenberry's January 5 communication. In response, Kritik's series on the state of higher education has been renamed "15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut."

The third contribution to the series, "On Furloughs in an 'Arts Cult,'" is by Ken Beck, an Academic Professional who works in the Department of Dance as a Specialist in Music and a Lecturer. He accompanies dance technique classes, teaches “Digital Media for Dancers,” and maintains departmental media facilities.]

Written by Ken Beck (Dance)

As I read the January 5 email from Interim President Ikenberry concerning employee furloughs at Illinois, I could feel the muscles in my chest tighten, and my appetite vanish. It was not the fact of the furloughs alone that set off the panic reaction so much as the premonition that, along with furloughs, will come the notices of non-reappointment.

An awareness of the visceral response is a natural for me. I have had a long career as a musician in dance studios. Central to the skill set that makes it possible to provide live, improvised accompaniment for a dance technique class is the learned ability to read movement as though it were a musical score. The art of reading movement involves more than eyesight. It entails absolute commitment to the practice of a physically and emotionally demanding form.

From the perspective of the cultural mainstream, that level of devotion may resemble nothing so much as a cult. I didn’t originate this idea. I heard the Department of Dance referred to as “one of the arts cults” by a dry-witted professor in Theater not too long after I arrived in Illinois, in 1998. The metaphor resonates when considering the nitty-gritty of employee furloughs. No cult employs a time clock.

Since I was already at the computer, after reading President Ikenberry’s email, I googled the local news and looked at the instant responses to the announcement already sprouting on line. Distressingly, many respondents reiterated the notion that academics make too much money for what they do. Many people resent the idea that academics do not work “eight to five, five days a week.” These must be the people that, sadly, have not participated in a creative discipline.

It is a simplification, of course, to say that when one is done with an eight to five stint at a “real job”, one gets to head for home free and clear of job-related stress. But in an arts cult the boundaries between work and leisure are completely erased. Even mundane tasks become sources of inspiration, and inspiration can happen anywhere, at any time. Were it not for this kind of commitment to creativity, the innovations and discoveries that have made this institution renowned would not have happened. It is as hard to furlough the members of a cult as to track their hours. You can bar these dedicated employees from their workplace and reduce their paycheck, but they will still be playing hard.

About a week later, I watched Interim President Ikenberry and Interim Chancellor/Provost Easter on WILL TV. I was surprised to learn that furloughs and layoffs will “make the institution stronger.” This idea seemed to undermine the subsequent plea for stronger state investment in higher education. A legislator hearing this from the experienced voice of a revered administrator might be tempted to assume that a stronger public university could be had by simply cutting its budget.

It will be difficult to secure adequate funding as the state of Illinois tries to address its budget deficit. It has so far proved impossible to meet the requirements of the already enacted budget in a timely fashion. Perhaps this is political reality. It is certainly reasonable, conservative thinking to plan for the worst, while hoping for the best.

Meanwhile, among those of us pondering not simply reduced pay, but also notices of non-reappointment, we will be doing our jobs while looking for new ones. We will be at our desks, in our labs, in the theaters, sitting behind pianos, fiddling while Rome burns to the glow of our Bunsen burners or computer monitors. We will endure the distraction of planning for the worst, and lack conviction as we hope for the best.

We are in transition. We were members of an internationally renowned team. Now we are either lucky to have jobs, or will be lucky to find jobs. Some of us will be completely out of luck, money, and health insurance. We won’t much feel like putting a positive spin on it. We think that the state’s economic troubles will not be good for the University of Illinois.

We think that good people will be lost. Many will not be replaced. Some may not be replaceable. We are not shrinking from potentially including ourselves in that reckoning. We think that the burden placed on those that remain will be heavy, and that overburdened people cannot do their best work. We think that a sense of security is necessary for the nurturing of creativity, and when confidence in that security is lost, discovery and innovation are harder to realize.

We can take slight comfort in the certainty that we have plenty of company nationwide. Many are making do with less. Corporations have been snatched up, ransacked, leveraged, gutted, and left to founder. The winners are those few who will fly their private jets into the sunset. History teaches that there is nothing new here. History is full of rescissions, relocations, and reactions.

My furlough days, when I take them, will be given over to political action. What other activity can provide a more satisfying outlet for all of that restless creative energy?

Postlude

I write just after reading an email from the Interim Provost/Chancellor in which he announces the possibility of “voluntary pay reductions” in lieu of a furlough.

I feel sincere sympathy for the executive administrators who are working on this rapidly developing monetary problem. They must work through these matters linearly, and they must answer to multiple factions. The lawyers, too, are being pushed to the limit. Thank goodness they’re not subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act!

While furloughs raise legal issues, the voluntary pay cuts pose a semantic problem. I thought that “voluntary” meant “of one’s own free will.” The only thing that’s really voluntary about these pay cuts is that one can volunteer to work despite them. Let’s hear it for choice!

Having kept an ear to the ground regarding the state of my employers’ financial well-being since I lost my shirt as the arranger of a gospel show once upon a time, I’ve been wondering whether (or when) I should volunteer to take a cut in pay to keep my job at Illinois. I would have taken a deeper cut than the one now required. I would have slashed it down to just above the mortgage-defaulting, wife-divorcing bone. I would have had my head held high and been proud to serve.

Under the present circumstances, I can’t say that I’ve decided whether I’ll “volunteer” or not. The recent election in Massachusetts demonstrated how unpredictable politics can be. I repeat: not to blame those who must work these things out for us, but down in the trenches where the work gets done, things are just not copacetic.
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