Students, Staff, and Faculty Together

What's Driving Up UVM Tuition?

2010-05-14T11:40:00.004-04:00

Recently the administration told SGA officers that faculty salaries are the driving force behind their latest request for a 4.8% tuition hike - and they've told the faculty senate executive council that if trustees don't approve the request, "100 layoffs" will be the result (sound familiar?).

But the administration's own general fund budget tells a different story: Over the past five years, even as the number of students and the tuition they pay have grown, the share of the budget going to academics, academic support, and physical plant (i.e., faculty, the libraries, and the classrooms/dorms where students learn and live) has declined. While our peer institutions devote between 52 and 57% of their operating budgets to academics, UVM's share for academics has fallen to less than 48%. No wonder seats in classes with fewer than 40 students are hard to find while capacity in large lectures has mushroomed.

Where has the money gone? "Institutional Support" - that is, administration - has grown slightly. (Because of layoffs of much-needed clerical staff, how much growth there has been at the top isn't really captured here). And the share eaten up by "Debt Service" - that is, the Davis Center - has more the doubled.

We shouldn't face a Hobbesian choice between hiking tuition or facing further cuts to staff and faculty. The administration whose budget decisions have brought us to this place need now to make the hard choice of cutting back on their size and expense: No tuition hike; cut from the top.

Teach-In to Defend Public Education at UVM

2010-05-04T09:11:00.005-04:00

Marking the one-year anniversary of the arrest of student activists for sitting in to protest President Fogel's plans to cut faculty and staff while increasing tuition and the student body, some 100 students filled Livak Ballroom last week to consider where we've been and where we are going. Below are two talks from that teach-in plus a couple of charts to give us a picture of the UVM administration's continuing priorities: fewer faculty and staff, bigger classes, bigger salaries for those at that top.

Students Stand Up! is getting re-organized and will be using this blog through the summer to hit the ground running come fall. La lutte continue!

Introduction: Nancy Welch, Professor of English, United Academics Delegates Assembly Chair:

Last March after President Fogel announced that he had no choice but to downsize faculty and staff while increasing tuition and the number of students at UVM, 1,000 students, faculty, and staff walked out in protest. A month later 32 students held a sit-down protest in a hallway of Waterman, to which President Fogel responded by calling in the police. The administration did succeed in hamstringing the best activists on this campus with ridiculous court and campus judicial board charges. But because of last spring’s mass protests, the administration was also thwarted in carrying out the full extent of its downsizing plans. At the end of last school year the administration even announced that they’d miraculously found several million dollars to reinvest in faculty and staff positions that had been slated to be cut.

This year, however, it’s become increasingly clear that all is not well. Fifty-seven of 170 so-called part-time lecturers were given no teaching at all this semester – including Jay Moore, a Kroepsch-Maurice teaching award winner and historian who had been teaching at UVM for more than a decade. Some two dozen vacant professor positions have been frozen or eliminated. The result of fewer faculty and more students has been, of course, larger classes: This year, according to the registrar’s own figures, 2,682 fewer seats for students were in small classes of 12 to 29 students while the number of spots for students in large classes of 150 to 249 jumped by 6,980. And if you’ve been trying to get into a writing class, forget it: This year there were 33 percent fewer sections of English 1, our first-year composition course and 50 percent fewer offerings of English 50, the intermediate composition course. That’s just one example of the kinds of shut-outs students are experiencing.

So what has the administration done with their savings from laying off long-time lecturers and staff and herding more students, especially first- and second-year students into 200-seat lecture halls? They’ve given themselves raises: not the kinds of raises that faculty have received because we unionized to try to staunch the bleeding of resources away from education on the ground. For the average assistant professor in Arts and Sciences, for instance, a 5 percent raise last year on an average salary of $59,000 meant less than $3,000. In contrast UVM’s interim provost received a salary increase of $106,000. All told, ten top administrators received five-figure raises this year ranging from $11,536 for UVM’s vice president for research—bringing his salary to $251,718—to an $82,647 raise for the dean of Natural Resources—even while a long-time Environmental Studies faculty member was reduced from full to three-quarters time. Two administrators received six-figure raises, interim provost Jane Knodell, who now draws a salary of $251,300, and interm engineering dean Bernard Cole, whose raise of more than $100,000 raised his salary from $89,250 to $190,000—what has become typical for UVM’s administrative class which does no teaching, does no research, provides no direct services to students but who do dream up schemes like the transdisciplinary research initiative—that is, a plan to starve undergraduate education even further in order to try to staff and fund a handful of research “spires” that supposedly will attract grant dollars, national attention, and make it worth it for students to pay more than $40,000 a year to sit large lecture-hall classes and have your learning measured by machine-scored testing.

So all is not well at UVM and tonight’s teach-in will take us through some of the reasons why. But we also have some bright spots that tonight should also point us towards: First, it’s because of the activism on this campus last year as draconian budget cuts were raining down on public colleges and universities nationwide that students across the country this year, especially in California, are now protesting en masse. Next, three votes by the faculty and a key resolution from the Student Government Association have thrown up a roadblock in the administration’s plans to shift resources from undergraduate education to fund their TRI spires. We have a long struggle ahead and going around is a sign-up sheet: If you want to be part of organizing to bring arguments from tonight’s panel to the Board of Trustees next month and to hit the ground round next fall, please sign up. And we need to get educated. So let me introduce tonight’s speakers. Each will be speaking for about 15 minutes; after that, we should have a good half hour for whole-room discussion.

Our first speaker will be Kate Ash, vice president of the Student Government Association, who recently delivered to UVM trustees an argument against yet another tuition hike to pay for administrative bloat and mismanagement. Next is Pablo Bose, a professor in Geography, active in the Faculty and here tonight to also help us connect the situation at UVM with the attacks on public education that reach far beyond Vermont. Then we’ll hear from Stephen Hannaford, an SGA senator and organizer in Students Stand Up, which spear-headed last year’s fight against budget cuts. And we’ll conclude with Nagesh Rao, a professor of postcolonial literature from the College of New Jersey, a founding member of the Free the Academy network, and an activist in struggles against public education and public sector cuts in New Jersey.

My Students Stand Up Story: Stephen Hannaford, SGA senator and SSU organizer

In the early winter of 2008, as the spectacle of the Wall Street meltdown was in full swing and (in language that echoed President Obama and Chairman Bernanke who urged us to “tighten our belts,” and “prepare for tougher times that lay ahead”) the powers that be on this campus had begun sending out terse, placating e-mails to the community about the University’s sudden, unexpected budget deficit, a small group of astute students, staff and faculty members formed a coalition called Students, Staff and Faculty Together (SSFT). This coalition was the first to respond, quite loudly, to the communications in November and December from the President and his “Ad Hoc Strategic Budget Advisers Committee,” a committee of campus elites including Vice President Grasso, the former SGA President Taylor, and President Burgmeier of the Faculty Senate, which had begun a rhetorical campaign—or rather an onslaught through e-mail and through visitations with the governance bodies on campus—with the clear objective of resolving the deficit by pushing the cuts through with as little opposition and democratic input as possible.

I was writing for the Vermont Cynic at that time, reporting on SSFT’s first press conference, and after doing the research for this article, looking at the President’s initial estimates for the deficit—$22 million dollars as of December 2—and then examining the recent financial history of the his administration - $60 million for this building, something like $10 million to implement human resources software that didn’t work, an additional $ 6-7 million dollars a year (compared to the beginning of this decade) for upper administrative salaries…

After doing this research, well, I decided I had better join the coalition—because it didn’t take a Vice President of Finance or Research or Development or Enrollment Management or any of the other 20-some-odd vice presidents we have now to figure out that the argument that UVM’s sudden deficit was due solely to “unpredictable” market forces and not to an irresponsible, overzealous strategy of “focus and invest” deployed by the Fogel administration—it didn’t take a Vice President to figure out that that argument did not hold water—and that the hole busted in our already frail budget by the collapse of the housing market was going to be patched by cutting lecturers, cutting staff, cutting academic support, cutting student athletics, terminating searches for much-needed tenure-track faculty, and continuing to raise tuition.

Under intense pressure from the unions and the various contingents on campus he released initial estimates of the amount of people that would be laid off in the Spring, but from the outset we saw that down in the Wing, in his offices, they were immediately shifting the focus away from themselves. While talking about making “tough but necessary decisions,” the president sent out letters that lauded his committee for all their work, attempted to pacify a concerned university community by highlighting the “strategic” nature of the cuts, transforming the word “layoff” into the more benign “non-renewal,” claiming that the rise in student to teacher ratios was actually a good thing because it helped us reach our targeted goals, and of course throwing in the obligatory mention of diversity, congratulating his own administration for the increase in ALANA applications. I don’t think the obvious solution of cutting the salaries of the people responsible for managing the school’s budget—he and his Vice Presidents—was mentioned once.

Now this is all to say that we, as students, were sensing a clear and present need to take action. The students in SSFT formed Students Stand Up! At our first meeting we drew up some action plans and divided into groups to handle flyering, literature, fact sheet production; we put a zine together with poetry and drawings as well as a guide to understanding the deficit and deconstructing the administration’s shock doctrines. I believe there was another group handling the planning for our first march. It seems now that overnight, almost like it was an automatic response to the tension we felt on campus, there were 15 or 30 of us meeting every Tuesday in the Martin Luther King Lounge, three and four of us sitting down every day together in the library discussing tactics, discussing the latest e-mail from President Fogel. You had kids from the Student Labor Action Project who were tight and full of fight coming off their recent livable wage campaign, you had students from the ISO there ready to organize. But what seems amazing to me now (it wasn’t amazing then because it was the moment, it was my first experience with activism and I had no idea what it was supposed to be like) was that many of us were not the ones you would plug as “radicals” or as “campus activists.” We were athletes, we were psychology students, we were artists—we were just an average sample of the student body blessed with the guidance and experience of some amazing, charismatic, seasoned activists. And I think this was because at that time, with the worldwide media spectacle going on around the crash and the tension that was so high on our campus, the feeling of crisis was very salient to all of us.

I remember someone saying to me last spring, “It seems like every institution we know of right now is in crisis,” and we saw the gaping holes in the administration’s explanation of the budget crisis, holes in their assurance that we had nothing to worry about, that President Fogel and the Deans and the campus leaders were going to handle this deficit, and we were going to make it out okay, almost the better for it because we were reaching our strategic goals and we were, to paraphrase the poetics of President Fogel, an island of calm in an ocean of troubled waters. I think this all exacerbated a feeling of dissonance we as students at UVM are all very accustomed to at this point. You know, we are on a campus that is saturated with the rhetoric of diversity, of sustainability, of social justice and gender equity and all these things that so many of us care so deeply about, but that are terms the University has commodified, really just beaten into submission and robbed of their true meaning in its public relations literature. Because regardless of the beautiful, convincing language he uses when he talks about these things, the President is wrong if he thinks we are a sustainable campus and a diverse campus, President Fogel is wrong when he stands behind the really quite offensive assumption that this school embodies the ideal of social justice. We are a campus that is as segregated as ever. We do nothing, nothing at all to subvert the socially unjust practices in public education in this country; in fact we perpetuate them in the way we select students for admission. And this room, this $60 million building we are sitting in right now is proof that our commitment to sustainability is a wash, it’s a green wash that we sell here at UVM, notwithstanding the work some of our faculty are involved in.

So this, I think, captures some of the feelings and the thoughts that drove Students Stand Up! last Spring. We distributed our zines and our fact sheets, and in February we held our first march with Students, Staff, and Faculty Together. It was a funeral for public education. About fifty or 75 of us met here in the Davis Center with a coffin and some placards in the shape of tombstones and we marched to Waterman, chanting along the way, and stopping on the steps of the Royall Tyler theater to listen to the more eloquent among us speak out. We delivered the coffin to the President’s wing to let him know we were all very concerned and then next month when the Trustees were in town the students marched again. We had made a beautiful puppet of President Fogel and written a script and a score for a guerilla theater piece—very much inspired by the Bread & Puppet theater—and we performed it downstairs here in the Atrium to rave reviews, and then we sent out a welcoming committee to the renovated McCauley hall where the president and the provost and the trustees were going to be touring the newly renovated office building— now dormitory into which they were cramming the additional 300 students we admitted this year.

At some point, probably after turning the corner at Spring Break, SSU started meeting twice a week to continue building up towards the end of the semester. We kept distributing the zine and our other literature, and we also began our own sort of teach-ins in our classes and the classes of willing faculty members. We were so well-versed in the budget and the crisis at this point, so two at a time, we would get up in front of a class—sometimes a 20-person seminar in Living and Learning, sometimes a 300-person lecture in the Billings Theatre—and for the first ten minutes of their class period we would present the figures around the deficit, explain the process the administration was taking to resolve it, the anticipated layoffs, and the projected cuts to academics, and then we would make our case for taking action—for walking out on April 9th. We also started having at oatmeal breakfast in front of the President’s wing two days a week, and we would welcome everybody to work as they came in, remind them to put people over profit, and the cops would come and stand guard at the door and it was all very humorous because we knew we were not doing anything against the law or university policy, so these huge, armed police officers only succeeded in intimidating the administrators and office staff on their way into the wing.

One of the grand ironies of the spring too was that, during these breakfasts, Richard Cate, the man whose job it was to fix the whole mess former CFO Michael Gower created with Peoplesoft and all the other unbudgeted expenses, was the only administrator who came out of the office and sat down and talked to us. And it was, he, not President Fogel, whom we contacted over and over again throughout the semester, Richard Cate was the only administrator who agreed to hear the concerns of the students last year because he realized what we were doing was entirely valid and justified, and that we were using the tactics we did, in large part, because our student representatives, Jay Taylor and the SGA, were failing us. I think the irony of that taught us a lot about how power works, and how confounding and frustrating it can be to confront it.

So we got 1,000 students to walk out of class on April 9th and rally, we cut out cardboard figures to represent the staff and faculty we were losing, we made a list of our demands, we spoke out in front of our student center, and on the steps of Waterman, we delivered our demands to President Fogel, requested he meet with us to discuss them, and we were ignored. I should say, the student body as a whole was ignored, as more students turned out for the walkout than vote in most SGA elections.

So, in the face of continued uncertainty, and with our actions ignored by President Fogel and his administration, we began planning an occupation. I want to pause and congratulate all of the students from SSU here for our perseverance and our solidarity last year. Looking back it was nothing short of amazing that we were able to stick together, to operate on near consensus in everything we did, to revisit all year our internal dynamic, and hold ourselves (more or less) to an extremely high standard in the way we treated one another and in the awareness we maintained of the gendered and racialized power dynamics that inevitably pervade groups in our society. I really did not know until visiting UC Irvine this past winter how special the people in SSU were. I want to finish up soon and leave time for discussion, so I will say, we organized an occupation—I think it was a year and a week ago today. A small group of students entered the president’s wing, declared peaceful intentions, sat down quietly in the middle of the hallway and locked themselves together. The three of us on support made sure they were comfortable, fed them cookies, called the ACLU, and the other organizers who were up here at the sit-in diversion we had staged to let them know to bring the party down to Waterman. We presented our demands to President Fogel who was extremely indignant, dismissive, and paternalistic. He basically scolded us, told us our concerns were ridiculous, and then snuck out the back door of his office to attend a gala at the Fleming museum, leaving, again, Richard Cate to sit with us, and explain why he could not make any decisions on our demands without the approval of President Fogel. The cops came, those who were locked down got arrested, and we sat-in outside the wing for the remainder of the evening, singing, eating pizza, generally feeling more alive than we had ever felt anywhere else on campus. We had a Twitter page up at the time, and we tried to get students down to join us with the hopes that we could occupy Waterman itself without using chains and barricades, and it would have worked because 300 people showed up. Unfortunately, Chief Margolis was a close follower of our tweets and he and his officers beat the students down there, and closed off the building. When it was all said and done, I think twenty seven of us were arrested and charged with trespassing. We were released from Waterman, which, had it not been shut down prematurely, would have still been unlocked…

So, where are we now? The upheaval last spring caused the university to change its tone and its actions around the budget cuts dramatically. I think any of the organizers and participants in this room will agree that we never felt tangible victory in any of our actions last spring, but each time we pushed, they relented just a little bit. We did not succeed entirely in any of our demands—baseball and softball were eliminated; though they were covered up, eliminations, non-renewals—layoffs—went through; empty positions were eliminated; tuition went up; and when it was all said and done, Fogel made out with $9,000 more than the year before—presumably a bonus for handling things so well. But we got more money for financial aid, there were reinvestments in academic units, and the layoffs were nowhere near the initial estimates. We continued the work of, and I think we honored the work of, the students who organized the divest from apartheid campaign in the early 80s and those who took over Waterman in 1988 and 1990 to demand that something be done to address the climate on this campus and to start an ethnic studies program among many other demands around diversity that remain unmet. We continued and honored the work of students in the Livable Wage campaign as well as all other organizers who have blessed this campus with their presence.

But where are we now? The Transdisciplinary Research Initiative and the rest of President Fogel’s 2009-2014 Strategic Vision is a continuation of the shock doctrine of 2008’s budget crisis, as well as a new chapter in the Fogel Administration’s transformation of UVM that is bringing it further away from its mission and its responsibilities as an institution with commitments to diversity, social justice, sustainability and affordable public education. We are not and will never be a premier small research university as President Fogel and Vice President Grasso and Provost Knodell assert we will become. Nor should we be. I think the others here can speak to this more knowledgably than I, so my conclusion will be sort of abrupt and flat compared to the stories from last year. As students, we need to remain vigilant. The university has ratcheted up its policies against free speech, revising the solicitation policy this year so that you can essentially be silenced and reprimanded for anything a university official deems “disruptive.” The transparency around the TRI is awful, and we are plodding along with an astounding amount of institutional amnesia—you would think that the President and his administration have forgotten about last year. We need to continue to watch and to read and to listen in on what is happening in the offices and conference rooms on this campus, and we need to continue to hold the SGA accountable, in fact we need to get involved with the SGA and legitimize it by actually turning out and voting in its elections. Faculty and staff need to join students—not wait for them to lead—in organizing against the continued privatization and corporatization of our school. We are in a trough in terms of the energy and vitality among the student organizers here. But that does not mean we have been defeated. Far from it. Apartheid was not the last protest, the diversity takeovers were not the last protest, SSU will never be co-opted the way activism has been in the past by the administration and its PR department. Stay awake. Stay alive. Keep fighting…

Loss of Seats for Students in Small Classes, Rise in Seats in Lecture-Hall Classes (from the Faculty Senate Policy and Planning Committee, using Registrar Office Figures

Changes in the Salaries of UVM's Top ($150k+) Administrators from 2009 to 2010 (excluding medical school positions)

Fogel's priorities v. ours

2009-07-08T08:51:00.003-04:00

The Burlington Free Press's Tim Johnson just posted a new blog entry following up on Fogel's recent administrative appointments. The positions, salaries, and Fogel's explanation of the need, particularly for the new senior advisor on the "commercialization of intellectual property" can be found at

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=PluckPersona&U=61c2a273a99f4ac887299e2015e42d80&plckPersonaPage=BlogViewPost&plckUserId=61c2a273a99f4ac887299e2015e42d80&plckPostId=Blog%3a61c2a273a99f4ac887299e2015e42d80Post%3ac7d17ec5-0e24-46c5-9168-2110128e075a&plckController=PersonaBlog&plckScript=personaScript&plckElementId=personaDest

What I especially want to point to is how Fogel responded to Johnson's question regarding his late-February promise that he would be streamlining the administration. Fogel now says:

"A prevailing theme of our decision-making has been, of necessity, adjusting to changing circumstances. As you know, as our financial picture improved, our projected layoff numbers were significantly reduced, as were our departmental budget reductions to academic units.

"As a matter of fact, we were able to reinvest significant monies in our highest priorities. Our decisions on administrative structure and costs will be ongoing and informed by new data that emerges. Fortunately, we have been able to operate in a less crisis-oriented mode, and are able to make more carefully considered decisions as a result.

"This fall we will be completing a comprehensive administrative benchmarking study vis-a-vis comparable universities, and we will be able to provide a full accounting of administrative positions and costs in relation to what they have been historically at UVM and also within the national context in higher education. I am strongly committed to increasing efficiencies wherever possible, which will be an ongoing process rather than an unveiling of a large plan. I am also committed to hiring and retaining talented individuals who will actively focus on achieving UVM's most important goals."

So Fogel's "highest priorities" were to preserve and even add to his administration while (in the end how many?) first-round staff layoffs and hour reductions still went through, full-time lecturers were not reappointed, tenure-track positions were eliminated (in English we got Victorian literature back but still lost creative writing and Irish literature lines), and (again how many?) part-time faculty were cut.

Here's the response I just posted on Tim Johnson's blog:

"Tim, you might consider asking Fogel's administration to give a full postmortem on the cuts they did make:

* the number of Phase I staff layoffs (and any additional staff layoffs) that went through;
* the number of staff placed on reduced hours and benefits;
* the number of full-time lecturers whose contracts were not renewed;
* the number of part-time lecturers who were not assigned courses for the fall;
* the number of tenure-track lines that were eliminated.

That final accounting against the preservation and even expansion of Fogel's administration should give a pretty clear view of what this president's "highest priorities" are."

My Turn: Fogel Should Respect Protesters

2009-06-25T17:28:00.001-04:00

June 3, 2009

My Turn: Fogel should respect protesters

By Tina Escaja

Last year, the University of Vermont celebrated the 20th anniversary of the first Waterman takeover by students who'd become convinced that only through this act of civil disobedience would the administration finally sit down to discuss seriously their proposals to diversify the university community and curriculum.

Here's how UVM's The View, in an article this year, described the outcome of occupation of President Lattie Coor's office in the spring of 1988: "After negotiations among faculty, students, and administrators, President Lattie Coor and the protesters emerged from the wing on April 22 with a formal agreement to advance the hiring and recruitment of multicultural faculty and students and enhance the curriculum to build racial and ethnic awareness."

Fast-forward to spring 2009 when a small group of students held a sit-in at President Dan Fogel's office and a large group sat down in the hallway outside the president's wing, convinced that only through this act of civil disobedience would the administration finally agree to discuss seriously students' concerns that UVM's budget was being balanced at the expense of their educations.

This sit-in was part of a series of events that took place over the months following the announcement of cuts and layoffs that many students and faculty feared threatened quality education at UVM. A few weeks before, many hundreds of students who participated in a walk-out were praised by delighted and appreciative professors and staff. But since students still could not get an audience with President Fogel, they decided, in a most peaceful, even celebratory, manner, to wait in the public premises of the Waterman Building until he would see them.

However, unlike President Coor in 1988, President Fogel did not sit down cross-legged on the floor for long hours of discussion that might culminate in a new Waterman Agreement. Instead, he stepped out of his office, telling the students he'd return in a moment, and then called in the police. Instead of a new Waterman Agreement, what President Fogel brought us this spring were the arrests of and criminal charges against 32 students for carrying out a nonviolent protest of his policies.

I am among many UVM faculty and staff who denounce the mishandling of the sit-in by our administration. I was there, and I could see the solidarity among our students that seriously contrasted with the harsh response by the administration. I saw how the administration had the windows of the president wing covered by blankets and paper to block any communication between the students inside and outside the president's wing. This visual rejection of students' attempt at serious dialogue with President Fogel was appalling, as was the use of force exercised exclusively by one side -- the administration -- to break off negotiations.

Students were then banned from entering this building where they were to take classes, receive honors and take exams that would allow them to graduate. This barring of students from entering the building even to fulfill their obligations as students was another example of administrative overreaction and mishandling of the situation. The explanation that students must "pay for their actions" when the administration itself has not been questioned about their own actions is not satisfactory to faculty such as myself.

What would be helpful at this point would be for the trustees and President Fogel to now actively support the dismissal of charges against all of the students. The sit-in was nonviolent, nondestructive and nonobstructive. The students involved should be celebrated, not punished, for honoring UVM's social justice tradition and for their commitment to our university's future.

Tina Escaja of South Burlington is a professor in romance languages at the University of Vermont.

Testimony and Inspiration for the Struggles Ahead

2009-06-23T09:25:00.003-04:00

Thanks to the hard work of Students, Staff, and Faculty Together - launching Students Stand Up and United Academics' "Don't Downsize Education at UVM" campaign to unite the campus in struggling against President Fogel's downsizing plans - the Spring '09 semester at UVM ended with the administration forced to put money back into education and staffing budgets, rehire some laid-off part-time faculty, refund some eliminated professor positions, and at least delay its plans to proceed with "Phase 2" staff and lecturer layoffs.

But the semester also ended with 32 students facing "trespassing" charges for a half-day sit-in in the administration building during its usual operating and open-to-the-public hours. While the state prosecutor has dropped the charges in exchange for students performing community service (on top of the significant service they've already done for the UVM community, that is!), the administration has recently called at least some of these students to a judicial hearing with the Center for Student Ethics and Standards. (Remember that the 2008-09 school year began with the revelation that President Fogel and his administration had "squandered millions,"as the Free Press editorialized, in unapproved overpayments to a PeopleSoft consulting group. Shouldn't Fogel be the one called on to answer for ethical challenges and lax standards, especially as his administration, not the national economic downturn, largely created UVM's budget woes?)

In addition, scores of staff and faculty, many of whom had served UVM for a decade or more, have lost their jobs while the executive branch of the administration has not scaled back its size and salary spending even by a single vice president. (In fact, with chief of staff Gary Derr now including "Vice President for Executive Operations" as his title, it looks like they're still adding to their ranks!) And with a grim economic forecast for the many months ahead and calls in Washington not for more stimulus funds for public education and programs but instead for cutting the deficit, including by cutting funds for public education and programs, we can expect the administration this fall to renew and intensify their arguments for downsizing - not themselves, of course, but the faculty and staff on whom students' educations depend.

So below are two dispatches from the end of the Spring '09 semester that may help as we consider how to carry our arguments, struggle, and commitments into the coming school year.

The first is a letter from a long-time staff member that was read to UVM trustees at their May meeting by a member of Students Stand Up; the second is the statement of English professor and United Academics member Helen Scott at the May joint press conference of United Academics and Students Stand Up.

Dear UVM Trustees,

I hope you will read this letter in spite of my hidden identity. I would rather communicate with you openly, but events at UVM and the actions taken by the administration have left me and many others on the staff afraid. Every evidence seems to prove that those who go along are rewarded while anyone who expresses dissent must fear potential punishment. The institution I have been proud to serve for almost two decades has become a place I no longer recognize.

During my time at UVM I have witnessed firsthand the aftermath of the firings of George Davis and Judith Ramaley, the sudden departure of Provost Dalmas Taylor, the 1992 Waterman takeover, the 1995 hunger strike of Shontae Praileau, and shouting matches between Provost Robert Low and community members at public forums over accusations of racist actions by the administration. Through all of these difficulties, I have never felt as disheartened or witnessed such low morale on campus.

Actions taken by President Fogel: his public declaration that he would rather resign than take a pay cut, his insistence that executive bonuses are deserved while dedicated, long-serving, and hard working employees are being laid off, and everyone is being asked to do more with less, have left faculty and staff at UVM feeling demoralized and undervalued. The clear message to so many of us outside the circle of power is that hard work and excellent service to UVM has become expendable. Something that set UVM apart from every other state university, its tight-knit community and small village feel is being sacrificed for expediency. President Fogel seems to think this is a necessary step towards some kind of progress, but what if he is as wrong as so many of us on the front lines, providing services to students believe?

President Fogel has articulated a vision of UVM as an elite institution. Those of us who have dedicated our careers to UVM and to the student body it attracts appreciate a pursuit of excellence, but not a pursuit of elitism. The two are not the same. National scandals in the banking industry have proven that excessive compensation is much more reliable at attracting self-interest and questionable ethics than talent and excellence.

I am told that President Fogel has been a very good fundraiser and of course that ability is important to the success of UVM, but I question whether it will ever be possible for UVM to sustain a president's salary that is competitive with that of the president of the University of Connecticut, e.g.. Vermont is not Connecticut. We will never have that kind of revenue stream to draw on. If President Fogel manages to finish destroying the sense of community and institutional integrity that have made UVM a diamond in the rough for so many like myself, all of us in Vermont will have lost something of rare value. I am one of many who have stayed in Vermont and at UVM in spite of knowing that I could earn more money elsewhere, because I have valued the total experience of being in a place that put integrity ahead of expediency and community ahead of self-interest. Perhaps UVM would be best served by a President who holds similar values.

I want to join everyone who has written in support of the students who have protested President Fogel's budget actions. If I was not afraid, I would have joined their protests. Their actions are the only thing that have given people like me hope in recent months that you, the trustees might look more closely and ask harder questions of Fogel and others. What has been happening at UVM, the way decisions have been made and carried out feels terribly wrong. I am one of many who have lost confidence in President Fogel's leadership and feel ashamed to be represented by his choices and decisions.

Sincerely,

A sad and concerned staff member

United Academics-Students Stand Up Press Conference

May 12, 2009

Statement of Helen Scott, Associate Professor of English

In the decade that I have taught in the English department we have lost several tenure track positions, and have increasingly relied on lecturers, who, as several of my colleagues have asked me to make clear, cost less, and have less job security. As the make up of the department has changed, fewer faculty have taken on an increased burden of committee work and advising, which means that we have less time to spend on individual students. We have also struggled to provide the courses that are required both by the college and for our majors. At the same time our full time and part time lecturers have, despite carrying heavy teaching loads for little pay, nonetheless excelled as teachers and colleagues.

Last semester we were told that the university was facing a significant financial crisis and that there was no alternative but to cut positions. United Academics has consistently argued that there are alternatives to layoffs, and that any budget decisions should be driven by academic concerns. But the cuts that were announced earlier this semester were not based on a strategic plan to protect academic quality, but on abstract quotas and ratios. While I do not know all who have lost their jobs, I do know they include lecturers who are committed to UVM and have won tremendous respect and loyalty from their students and colleagues. Some faculty members have been compiling a list of the courses that will be lost: So far, with only a fraction of the reports in, the list has 67 courses. It is apparent from a brief glance that the hard won diversity of the curriculum is a casualty of these cuts, which include Afro-Caribbean Civilization, Art Addressing the Holocaust, and Global Violence against Women and Girls. In the English dept. we are losing courses at the core of the curriculum as well as one-of-a-kind Writing Workshops. We were already hard pressed to meet the needs of our students, and now we have to make do with fewer teachers.

We heard with great relief and hope, therefore, that the budget gap was nowhere near as large as was initially thought, that money was to be restored, and that the Senate’s Financial and Physical Planning Committee was gathering information from the faculty about individual academic programs, which would then be used to guide future decisions. It was in turn a crushing disappointment to learn that those positions already eliminated are not to be restored. This is inexplicable, and raises questions again about priorities: Some faculty are hoping for an independent audit of executive compensation, looking in to the question, for example, of compensation packages for former administrators returning to faculty ranks.

In the English dept. we can restart one search that was cancelled last year, but this is a drop in the ocean when it comes to what we have lost. And while we have been told that the second round of cuts will not go through as planned, we have no guarantee that future budget decisions will be made strategically, with input from faculty, and guided by concern for academic quality.

I want to end with some words about the students who are being sanctioned for participating in the recent sit in of Waterman. Over the course of the year, these students have researched, educated, organized, and campaigned against the budget cuts. Why? Because they care about their education, they care about the University, they do not want to lose beloved professors and classes, and they are concerned about underpaid and vulnerable staff who may not be in a position to campaign on their own behalf. After marches and speak outs and a walk out of around a thousand, these students still felt that their concerns had not been heard. So they decided to take the next step and carry out a sit-in. I and other faculty members visited them there: they were not threatening people or property, they were simply asking for a hearing from the president. And when they learned that the President had left the building, some of them decided to take this one step further by refusing to leave in the face of arrest. In doing this they were looking to the tradition of the great heroes of social justice, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Gandhi, who maintained that non-violent civil disobedience was sometimes necessary in the course of struggle for a cause.

I have heard it said that the administration cannot and should not drop sanctions against these students because they must be held accountable. For myself and many of my colleagues in a department that feels itself to be under siege, this is the university turned upside down. I think of the negative stereotypes sometimes used against today’s students: that they party too much, binge drink, experiment with drugs, that they don’t value education and are not willing to work hard. And then I look at these dedicated students who are demonstrating the opposite: that they are willing to work hard and long to save their education and defend their professors. UVM often prides itself on being the Social Justice University, and draws attention to the student protests of the past: against apartheid in South Africa, for diversity in the university. These students are part of that tradition, and we should applaud, not punish them.

Follow SSU's Actions

2009-04-20T12:52:00.002-04:00

Follow the live updates from SSU Sit In by texting "on studentsStandUp" to 40404"

UVM Cynic Slideshow of Last Thursday's Walk-Out

2009-04-16T08:46:00.001-04:00

The UVM Administrative Circus

2009-04-16T08:16:00.001-04:00

From cartoonist/engineering professor Nancy Hayden

UVM Protest video #2

2009-04-12T09:39:00.001-04:00

Seven Days' video of the start of Thursday's walk-out.

Video 45

2009-04-12T09:38:00.001-04:00

Seven Days interviews students on why they walked out.

Why the walk-out mattered

2009-04-11T07:57:00.001-04:00

Posted by Paul to the Vermont Labor Activist list:

All,

With some 1000 students walking out of class to protest UVM President Fogel's layoffs, bigger classes, program cuts, and higher tuition, you might expect some reconsideration--especially given the recent restoration of state funding plus federal stimulus money that closes the current deficit. But no.

When Fogel stated several months ago that he would leave UVM rather than take a pay cut to his approx $400,000 salary, one could sense that he was excited by the possibilities of downsizing and reorganizing UVM now that there was the pretext of a budget deficit. That there is no change in plans now shows that the administration's call for "shared sacrifice" during difficult times was just a tactic for selling restructuring. Fogel remains committed to the disastrous path of outlandish executive pay and unbudgeted bonuses, breathtaking project cost overruns at public expense, and the notion that long-term faculty and staff are totally expendable.

With 1 in 6 U.S. workers un- or underemployed, and all the sacrifices of the current recession being shouldered by workers and students, the growing protests to challenge this at UVM are a great development. More below.

--Paul

plus....

Check out the Free Press article and video coverage:

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20090410/NEWS02/90410001/1007

And this excellent summation of the situation by Free Press writer and blogger Tim Johnson

Cat country or Cajun country?--Tim Johnson

We'll have more to say about higher ed reform, unavoidably, but we're going to defer that for now -- this topic is kind of like a term paper, which is what's known in the wonk world as "a conversation worth having" (ACWHA). That is, something to be put off as long as possible.

Today, as folks at UVM get ready for another protest, let's take up the questions on everyone's minds:

If UVM stands to receive a big chunk of one-time federal stimulus money ($5.4 million is the figure we keep hearing) plus a base appropriation from the state that's on a par with what UVM has been receiving lately, then why carry through with all those layoffs and program cuts that were announced in February?

Weren't those cuts predicated on the expectation that the state would reduce its appropriation? And weren't the budget cuts announced before the federal bailout money was on anybody's radar?

So what if the stimulus funding is "one-time money"? It would still buy another year for the baseball/softball programs, and the lecturers who are being let go, and all the rest -- another year to take stock and plan some more for lean times to come.

Letting all those cuts stand might seem almost like not taking the stimulus money at all. That's what the governor of South Carolina is doing, and the governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, has been talking like that too. Hmmm, Louisiana, LSU. Isn't that where Dan Fogel came from? Is he getting his fiscal advice or inspiration from (drum roll, please) Bobby Jindal?

They can't help themselves down in the bayous up at UVM: That's what's they're asking. We'll try to get some answers -- check out the news side of this Web site later today.

Comment from ConcernedforUVM:

Excellent questions! My understanding is that the House budget bill would send UVM two infusions, $5.4 million each, of federal stimulus money. Combined with the usual level of state funding, that should be more than sufficient to close UVM's projected budget gap, take back the layoffs, restore to programs the staffing they need for quality academics and student support, and send the administration back to the drawing board to consider what in the long-term is needed for a more sustainable UVM--including a smaller, less expensive administration. That President Fogel is currently not considering doing any of this suggests that, like Bobby Jindal (and our own governor), he's ideologically driven--by his belief that it is more "efficient" and a good application of "economies of scale" (two of his favorite phrases) to have fewer faculty serving more students.

WALK OUT!

2009-04-10T07:52:00.006-04:00

Free Press photos:

Free Press story:
April 10, 2009

Hundreds walk out at UVM

Students leave classes to protest budget cuts

By Tim Johnson, Free Press Staff Writer

Thursday’s student-organized walkout drew the biggest protest crowd by far since the University of Vermont’s budget woes began, but the rally followed a familiar course with a familiar outcome.

There were speeches, a march, a raucous demonstration outside the administrative offices, but the announced budget cuts and layoffs — the Phase 1 reductions totaling $10.8 million that sparked much of the campus anger that fed the protest — will stand.

Those cutbacks are here to stay, Chief Financial Officer Richard Cate said in an interview that preceded the noisy gathering outside the executive suite. The question now for the administration is whether to proceed with Phase 2, he said, and that likely won’t be decided until May, when the state budget is completed and UVM has a better sense of its fall tuition revenue.

Brightening prospects for state and federal funding, which could bring UVM about $9.5 million more in public support next year than UVM budgeteers forecast a few months ago, will not lead to restoration of the staff jobs, varsity sports or other programs that were cut.

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/gallery?Avis=BT&Dato=20090409&Kategori=NEWS&Lopenr=904090802&Ref=PH"> Gallery: UVM student protest

The reason, Cate said, is the administration is trying to balance its fiscal year 2010 budget in the face of a structural shortfall that’s at least $12.8 million, even if UVM receives normal state funding and tuition revenue. Structural, Cate said, means a permanent shortfall that will be there every year unless it’s reduced in some permanent way, as the $10.8 million in cuts are designed to do.

Cate had no opportunity to make that argument when he emerged from the locked administrative suite to address the crowd in the Waterman Building. This was a loud but civil confrontation, and he was presented with a list of 13 demands by members of Students Stand Up, the ad-hoc group that organized the demonstration.

Among the demands were that the administration “revoke all dismissals,” forswear more layoffs, reinstate baseball and softball, cap tuition and enrollment and return the last two years’ worth of administrative bonuses. Cate said administrators were studying some of these demands, but when students demanded an on-the-spot “yes” or “no” to the full list, he replied “not yet,” drawing jeers.

The crowd was in the hundreds, filling most of Waterman’s first-floor hallway. The numbers apparently swelled with students who left class to participate in the rally, which began in front of the library at 1:30 p.m.

Among them were Chris McManus, a sophomore who walked out of his class in Canadian literature; Sarah Barnard, a sophomore who left North American archaeology; and Jane Smith, a junior who walked out of American literature.

Their instructors apparently didn’t hold them back. Some teachers reportedly dismissed classes early. McManus said his teacher taped the lecture so students could hear it later on a podcast.

“I’m not a protester,” McManus said, “but I want to support the students and faculty.”

Smith said her instructor advised students to participate in the demonstration, and she wanted to because “they’re cutting a lot from English and anthropology, my major and minor, and I think it’s important to have small classes.”

Ann Sheperdson, one of six lecturers who have been told they won’t be rehired next fall in women’s and gender studies, was among the speakers at the rally, urging the students to “speak truth to power.”

Sheperdson said non-reappointed lecturers number 107, based on reports gathered by faculty. The administration has said it won’t have a number until summer.

Members of Students Stand Up said they would debrief each other later Thursday before deciding their next steps.

“More actions” are coming, promised student Catherine Nopper.

More amazing photos:

(Grim) Faculty Humor

2009-04-07T13:12:00.002-04:00

From cartoonist and engineering professor Nancy Hayden:

Free Press Coverage of Budget-Cut Breakfast Protest

2009-04-07T07:59:00.001-04:00

April 7, 2009

UVM budget protests continue

By Tim Johnson
Free Press Staff Writer

Budget-cutting protests have resumed at the University of Vermont, with a Monday morning demonstration outside the president's office and plans for a walkout Thursday.

Initial budget reductions for the next fiscal year, announced in February and totaling about $10.8 million, continue to draw objections from faculty, students and staff. United Academics, the faculty union, cites a survey of faculty that shows the impact of cuts falling heavily on the English department, environmental studies and the Helix program for undergraduate science research, among other areas.

Other reductions drawing notice have been in athletics, where intercollegiate baseball and softball have been eliminated for next year; and the UVM farm, where the dairy herd and staff will be cut.

Staff layoffs include 16 announced in February "plus 10 others that were part of separate actions," said university spokesman Enrique Corredera. In addition, he said, about 12 full-time lecturers would not be rehired, along with "a significantly higher number of part-time lecturers." The final outcome, he said, would not be known until summer.

English could lose three tenure-track faculty positions, as departing professors specializing in Victorian literature, fiction writing, and modern British and Irish literature are not expected to be replaced. The Helix program, which supports about 30 undergraduate lab research projects a year, will lose four staff members, said coordinator Gayle Bress; the program will continue but not under the College of Arts & Sciences, Corredera said. Loss of a lecturer in the environmental program leaves 4.6 full-time equivalent faculty serving more than 400 majors, the union said.

Facing flagging revenue in a deepening recession, the administration has vowed to carry out budget cuts without compromising academic quality, even as the overall student-faculty ratio is brought up to a longstanding goal of 16 to 1. Protesters have said academic quality will suffer under cuts already announced.

"We're concerned that our central administration may not be aware of how deeply their planned cuts will erode student experience and how desperate the situation is in some departments," said David Shiman, United Academics president, in a news release. The union said understaffing in the environmental and civil engineering programs puts accreditation at risk.

"Final decisions about the reallocation of resources to academic units are not yet final and will not be concluded until the budget recommendation in May to the board of trustees," Corredera said. The board will review and approve the fiscal 2010 budget, which begins July 1, at its May meeting.

Monday morning's event in the Waterman Building offered a stand-up breakfast with a "let them eat gruel" theme -- in keeping with what protesters called a starvation diet being imposed on academic programs.

The "gruel," ladled out from a pot on the floor, was oatmeal cooked by junior Ali Ascherio. It wasn't as tasteless as the fictional version in Dickens' "Oliver Twist" -- Ascherio said he made it with maple syrup, butter and applies -- but it helped them make their point.

About 40 students, faculty and staffers attended. Sponsors included United Academics; United Electrical Workers Local 267, another UVM bargaining unit, with a contract due to expire July 1; United Staff, which is attempting to unionize unrepresented UVM workers; and Students Stand Up, a group that has mobilized to protest the cuts.

The student group said a walkout protest would be staged at 1:30 p.m. Thursday, beginning with a rally in front of the Bailey-Howe Library and followed by a march to the Waterman Building, which houses administrative offices.

UVM administrators have said a second round of cuts might be announced later this spring, depending partly on prospects for state funding. Budget cutting plans earlier this year were based on the assumption that state funding would be reduced in fiscal hard times. The $10.8 million in reductions already announced were part of what administrators said would be total reduction of about $15 million for fiscal 2010.

The faculty union has said the expected infusion of federal stimulus money should ease UVM's financial burden significantly.

A budget appropriation approved by the Vermont House last week, and now awaiting review in the Senate, restores funding for UVM and Vermont State Colleges in the current fiscal year and next year to previous levels.

In UVM's case, that's an addition of several million dollars that could ease the financial stress next year -- but it's also a one-time boost that will not be available after the federal stimulus program expires.

United Academics Press Release for Tomorrow's Protest

2009-04-05T09:06:00.002-04:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
United Academics Calls April 6 Protest, Will Urge UVM President Fogel to Use Restored Funding to Restore "Starved" Academic Programs

Burlington, VT--An English major without courses in Charles Dickens or the Brontes. A Political Science major without International Politics. A civil and environmental engineering program so understaffed, its accreditation is at risk.

These are only samplings of the sobering realities facing the University of Vermont in the coming year, faculty report, if trustees next month give final approval to President Daniel Mark Fogel's current plans to reduce staffing and increase students.

To call attention to the starvation diet being imposed on UVM's academic programs, United Academics, the union representing most UVM faculty, is joining with students and staff this Monday, 8:30 am, in the Waterman building for a "Let Them Eat Gruel?" budget-cut protest. Co-sponsors include United Electrical Workers Local 267, United Staff, and Students Stand Up.

They will also call on Fogel to use the restored state support and federal stimulus funds included in the budget bill that passed the House side of the state legislature Thursday night to restore jobs, positions, and programs.

Said David Shiman, professor of Education and faculty union president, "We're concerned that our central administration may not be aware of how deeply their planned cuts will erode student experience and how desperate the situation is in some departments."

Monday's protest will feature findings from United Academics' recent survey of faculty about the impact of position cuts and layoffs. In English, for instance, the department's only professor positions in fiction writing, Victorian literature, and modern British and Irish literature are to be eliminated. With the layoffs of up to six lecturers who had taught as many as five writing courses each semester, the department's introductory writing offerings will be reduced by half.

But while members of Students Stand Up will serve bowls of oatmeal at the Monday morning protest, participants say they won't beg but insist that the university's resources be reallocated to safeguard academic quality, student experience, and the faculty and staff on whom both depend.

UVM's resources for safeguarding academics seem likely to receive a welcome boost from the Vermont state legislature. So that Vermont qualifies for federal stimulus money, the Vermont House of Representatives voted last night on an appropriations bill that restores $5.4 million in state support to UVM for this year. The bill also sends the university an additional $5.4 million in stimulus money next year to supplement the state's usual appropriation.

With no cuts in state support next year and $5.4 million in additional stimulus funding, UVM's $14.7 million budget gap for the coming year would shrink to $4.3 million.

The $5.4 million the House voted to return to the university for the current year could also be applied to next year's budget, wiping out the deficit entirely. Combined with an administration willing to place themselves on a strict spending diet, rally organizers point out, the stimulus funding could, as Congress intended, enable UVM to restore jobs and keep tuition down.

University administrators have faced sharp criticism in recent months for their spending priorities, including the $41+ million PeopleSoft financial and human resources system, which will claim another half million from next year's budget, and the recent revelation that 21 administrators had drawn nearly $900,000 in additional salary and bonuses.

"We believe that our Congressional delegation, in voting yes on the federal stimulus package, and our legislators, now considering a restoration of higher-ed funding, are doing so because of their commitment to keeping the faculty and staff needed to maintain academic quality at UVM," Shiman said. "We want to make sure our administration understands that whatever resources we have must go to shoring up our programs and the faculty and staff on whom students depend."

House Budget Bill Would Eliminate UVM Budget Gap

2009-04-02T22:18:00.003-04:00

First Fogel said $22 million.

Next he said $28 million.

Then, after two "treasury operations" transfers, the budget gap was $14.7 million, and Fogel told the deans they must cut $15 million from next year's budgets.

But now the House, so that Vermont qualifies for federal stimulus money, has passed a budget that will maintain the full level of funding for UVM next year: $5 million of the projected deficit evaporates.

More, it appears the House budget also includes, to meet the stimulus eligibility guidelines, a return of $5.4 million of this year's rescission. If applied to the budget deficit, that would shrink the gap to $4.3 million. The House bill also adds $5.4 million in stimulus money to next year's UVM appropriation. The deficit entirely disappears.

We're a long, long way from $28 million.

But whether the restored money goes to restoring jobs and halting tuition and fee increases, as Congress intended, and whether the administration places itself on a strict spending--and reduction--diet so that UVM can staff programs and keep the cost to students down: That's up to us.

Hope to see a large crowd Monday morning 8:30 am in Waterman where the "Let Them Eat Gruel?" budget-cut protest now has a new purpose--not only to protest the starvation of academic programs (an English department losing its only professor positions in Victorian lit, creative writing/fiction, and British and Irish modern lit; a Poli Sci department threatened with the loss of any faculty to cover International Politics) but to demand that the restored state money be used to restore jobs and programs.

TWO UPCOMING EVENTS!

2009-03-31T16:41:00.003-04:00

This week begins with staff deeply worried about Phase 2 layoffs and with news from Montpelier that for Vermont to be eligible for federal stimulus money, it must restore to the state colleges and UVM this year's funding cut and keep next year at least at this year's level of funding. Suddenly UVM's projected budget deficit is nowhere near $22 to $28 million. Next year's budget gap would be more in the range of $9 million, easily handled by reducing the size and expense of administration (do we need 26 vice president positions? 29 deans and associate deans?) and also by slowing the pace of dealing with the Fogel administration's overspending on such costly items as PeopleSoft. Yet no one in Waterman has stepped out to say, "We're halting the layoffs. We're looking using the money from Montpelier to restore jobs, positions, and courses."

So two upcoming events--one sponsored by United Academics and Students Stand Up and one planned by students--are well-timed (click on each to view/print the full-size poster):

Remarks at the Burlington Save Our State Rally

2009-03-31T16:39:00.002-04:00

It’s only Monday and already this week has seen rallies for gay marriage and against the state budget cuts. In both cases we have the opportunity to reverse inequality in this state. Over the past 30 years, the tax rate for the wealthiest Vermonters has plummeted by two thirds. As Howard Zinn recently put it, we need to put class back into how we talk about taxes. Douglas says the rich pay too much; we should say they don’t pay nearly enough. Douglas says state workers should give back on wages, health benefits, and full-time hours. We should say no concessions, workers have been sacrificing for 30 years with stagnant and declining wages and an eroding social safety net. Douglas is trying to use the crisis to further undermine wages, unions, and social services. We need to use this crisis to reverse gaping inequality in this state starting with preserving jobs, paychecks, and programs and by taxing the rich.

I’m also heartened to witness a brewing fight against state budget cuts because it helps us at UVM in our struggle against budget cuts and our argument that if cuts must be made, they must come from the top and not by refusing to negotiate decent contracts for UE workers and part-time faculty, not by pressuring full-time faculty to open up their contract, and not from shifting full-time staff with full-time work into part-time hours and pay. At UVM we also have a chief executive who’s overseen the upward transfer of resources into the hands and pockets of executives. If the 40 people at UVM who currently make more than $150,000 a year each took just a 5% pay cut, that would restore jobs to the 27 College of Arts and Sciences lecturers who are slated for layoff. If the 21 executives, including Fogel, gave back the nearly $1 million in extra salary and bonuses they’ve secretly paid themselves, that would bring some 100 service and maintenance workers up to the state’s livable wage standard. Likewise if Vermont repealed the capital gains tax loophole so that Vermont’s wealthiest 1% can no longer squirrel away 40% of their investment returns, that would bring some $40 million in new revenues each year.

The math is on our side. Public sentiment is also on our side: At UVM more positions for vice presidents than English professors, money for executive bonuses and not for livable wages: I don’t know a student or a parent to whom that makes any sense. Cutting social programs in the midst of a recession, telling LGBT couples that civil rights are a distraction: that makes no sense to most people beyond Jim Douglas’s small-minded circle. And at the federal level spending $1 trillion a year on war and occupation and another trillion on bank bailouts while saying, “Don’t worry, this time it really will trickle down to the rest of you”—that really makes no sense.

What does make sense? At UVM, stop the layoffs and give back the bonuses; at the state level, stop the cuts and adopt the Save Our State coalition's People's Plan—if the stimulus money isn’t enough, let’s argue for more. And maybe that’s what will finally compel Washington to redirect war-funding and bank-bailouts into the education, healthcare, unemployment insurance, housing, and jobs people actually need.

2009-03-23T15:21:00.003-04:00

At the Ira Allen Chapel forum earlier this month, President Fogel defended his UVM compensation package, arguing that he is actually underpaid relative to other university presidents. Not according to the New England Board of Higher Education, Winter 2009:

Total compensation for Presidents of New England Public Land Grant Universities 07-08:

U Conn: Michael J. Hogan $610,000 (28,500 students or $21/student)
UVM: Daniel M. Fogel $417,410 (12,800 students or $33/student)
UNH: Mark W. Huddleston $381,870 (12,315 students or $31/student)
UMass: Thomas Cole Jr. $367,500 (26,359 students or $14/student)
URI: Robert L. Carothers $242,319 (15,000 students or $16/student)
UMaine: Robert A. Kennedy $230,405 (11,912 students or $19.34/student)

Letter of Demands From SSU to the Board and Administration

2009-03-22T17:42:00.001-04:00

Over the past few months, Students Stand Up, in solidarity staff and faculty, has stood in firm opposition to the budgetary actions of the UVM Administration. The Administration's approach to reconciling the budget gap has crippled our community with layoffs, will overburden staff and faculty, will make attendance less affordable and will erode the overall quality of our educational experience. Students Stand Up, representing over one thousand members of the student body, has demonstrated these grievances but has been met with little more than condescension and confounding campus-wide emails that skirt the gravity of these proposed cuts. In defending the principles of this university, Students Stand Up advocates for a just and democratic response to the situation. To this end, we demand the Administration of the University of Vermont comply with the following:

1. Revoke all dismissals and non-reappointments thus far issued.

2. Terminate all plans for more layoffs and non-reappointments of staff and faculty.

3. Return positions that have been reduced to part-time back to full-time status.

4. Issue a statement of neutrality respecting the right of staff and faculty to organize.

5. Disclose all budget reconciliation options that were reviewed and considered prior to the decision to initiate layoffs.

6. Disclose all information related to administrative compensation and bonuses.

This includes reasons for compensation beyond base pay salary.

7. Return all administrative bonuses from FY `08 and FY `09 to the UVM general fund.

8. A reduction in administrative compensation has the potential to preserve faculty and staff whose jobs are being eliminated to meet the deficit. Therefore, we call for the administration to return their salaries to the 2002 level.

9. Pursue all legal options to utilize the university's endowment to close the FY `10 operating budget gap.

10. Cap rate of tuition and room and board fee increase at corresponding year rate of inflation.

11. Negotiate with students, staff and faculty a more democratic decision making process by which students, staff and faculty have a decisive role in decisions regarding budget reconciliation.

12. Cap student body population at Fall 2009 levels.

13. Reinstate the varsity softball and baseball teams

In recognition of the fact that we students, along with staff and faculty ARE the University of Vermont, we take on responsibility to protect what makes it special and to maintain and improve opportunities for learning and growth for future students. This responsibility, in the face of the great threat to UVM posed by the administration's recent propositions and actions, justifies the escalation of our tactics to ensure that our voices are heard and that the administration changes its course in compliance with these demands. We do so with no other motivation than to preserve the university we love.

We will commence escalating action until these conditions are fulfilled. Furthermore, we anticipate and will be receptive to direct communication from President Fogel or other Administration regarding the above demands. Should the Administration refuse to meet these demands we will call for President Fogel's resignation.

Signed,

Students Stand Up

The Cuts Line by Line, or What Cutting from the Bottom Looks Like

2009-03-22T13:33:00.012-04:00

The Cuts, Line by Line, or What Cutting from the Bottom Looks Like

During Spring Break, Vice President Cate circulated to some Faculty Senate and United Academics members line-item detail of the cuts proposed by deans and other unit heads. Thanks to a colleague in CEMS for sending these spreadsheets my way and for noting that the proposed savings in the College of Arts and Sciences for eliminating salary and benefits for 27 full- and part-time lecturers (according to the dean's latest tally) is less than the amount that would be saved if the 40 administrators who teach no students but draw base salaries above $150,000 a year would take a 5% pay cut.

Click on each sheet to view it in full-size:

More on the Executive Bonuses, or What UVM and AIG Share in Common

Also about the letter President Fogel distributed during Spring Break, promising that the practice of executive bonus and additional salary spending would end except where the administration is contractually obligated (apparently, taking their cue from AIG!) to pay bonuses to execs already earning about $200,000 a year, BronwynVt writes:

President Fogel said in his recent letter that "/*performance bonuses and other non-base elements of administrative pay will no longer be used at UVM except to honor existing contracts." */It seems reasonable to expect that UVM's leadership would have acted in the best interests of UVM's financial integrity when entering into these contracts by assuring that any compensation agreements pertaining to performance bonuses would not be honored in the event the institution faces financial exigencies like those we face today. The facts as we know them are that UVM is facing a deficit that is requiring us to shed staff and faculty positions and lay off staff with decades of loyal service, even in areas that provide essential services to students, at the same time we are increasing enrollment by another 2.3% and increasing our already high tuition costs to students. Since these are not steps that stand to improve our competitive position among our peer institutions, wouldn't this fit the definition of a circumstance that would necessitate that we could not under any terms be paying out any type of bonus to anyone? If UVM's leadership failed to protect the institution with such basic contractual language, the UVM community and the state of Vermont deserve an explanation from everyone involved and those officers should be held to account for such an oversight.

On Higher Ed Administrative Greed, Incompetence, and Budget Crunches

And thanks to Stephanie and Tricia for spotting the below article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Twelve of their thirteen examples of the greed, incompetence, and neglect do indeed appear to apply to UVM. The one that I don't think applies is the charge against faculty for not stepping up to do more teaching: UVM is unique among research universities in its focus on undergraduate education and most faculty--the lecturers on what one concerned United Academics colleague calls the "exploitation track," teaching eight courses a year; the tenure-track faculty teaching the equivalent of five courses a year while also trying to meet intensifying research and publication requirements for tenure--are already burning the candle at both ends, especially in the past six years as the student body increased by 30% but long-term positions increased at less than half that rate. Regardless, instead of allowing our very expensive administration to continue to claim that they are the victim of bad economic circumstances, we should point out with the Chronicle's help that "Smart moves clearly helped some colleges and universities avoid the worst of the downturn." Especially given that UVM started the decade with a surplus, beyond the endowment, of more than $100 million and especially given that nearly $1 million in bonuses and extra paid were paid out at the executive level to attract and retain "talent," UVM's administration ought to be held accountable for its "green, incompetence, and neglect":

13 Reasons Colleges Are in This Mess
How greed, incompetence, and neglect led to bad decisions

The economy may not have hit rock bottom, but the finger-pointing over what went wrong is well under way.

In some ways, higher education has been a victim of the recession — but not a defenseless victim. Smart moves clearly helped some colleges and universities avoid the worst of the downturn. But mistakes have left many others in the lurch.

The downward spiral has brought layoffs, budget cuts, and anxiety to many campuses. With the cuts have come protests and recriminations.

Scores of college presidents have written open letters that describe dire finances and make the case for an era of belt-tightening. But missing in many of those messages are explanations of how colleges landed in their predicaments, and who is to blame.

The Chronicle came up with 13 common mistakes that have put many colleges in the fix they're in. There's plenty of responsibility to go around, in the industry and beyond. And the choices that people made are likely to haunt higher education for years.

1. Took on Risky Investments
David F. Swensen is a rock star among endowment managers, and many colleges have tried to duplicate his success.

With a portfolio heavy on hedge funds and private equity, Yale University's chief investment officer averaged annual returns of more than 16 percent for 20 years. Yale's endowment reached $23-billion last year.

Times have changed. Yale officials say a quarter of the value of its investments have evaporated. The university is considering layoffs and delaying construction projects.

The pain will be deeper for most imitators of the Yale model, who have far less cushion.

Mr. Swensen has said the diversity of his model will pay off in the long run. But he acknowledges that most colleges lack the resources to have properly followed his lead.

2. Sloughed Off as Trustees
By most accounts, the glory days of rubber-stamp governing boards have passed. But the shocking tale of Bernard J. Madoff and J. Ezra Merkin, two trustees of Yeshiva University who allegedly defrauded the institution — and many other investors — suggest that some boards are still nodding off on the job.

Trustees are fiduciaries, responsible for ensuring that colleges have sound finances. They must push back when administrators take on risky debt or allow an institution to become too tuition-dependent. That clearly has not happened at many colleges. Even worse, some board members (Mr. Madoff was treasurer of Yeshiva's board) continue to have conflicts of interest.

3. Relied on Cheap Credit
Colleges have assumed tens of billions of dollars in new debt over the past decade in pursuit of better facilities and expectations of growth. Many of them saved millions in interest payments with the bond-market equivalent of adjustable-rate mortgages. But when the credit markets seized up last fall, those low-interest bonds and loans, on which they had banked their futures, suddenly became a lot more expensive to carry. Institutions with healthy reserves have managed their way through — though certainly at a price.

Even under the best of circumstances, there are costs to refinancing variable-rate debt and unraveling complicated "swap" agreements. Some institutions, like the Colorado School of Mines and Simmons College, with fewer resources to fall back on, have seen their credit ratings downgraded. The price of cheap credit may soon be measured in program cuts and job losses.

4. Failed to Play Well With Others
Millions of workers have lost their jobs in recent months. But tenured professors are hard to fire. And some powerful faculty unions have resisted when colleges asked their members to teach more classes, despite what seemed like reasonable requests.

The faculty union at Kean University, for example, balked last year when administrators tried to require professors to teach on Fridays and some Saturdays. The public university, located in New Jersey, was facing a $4.5-million cut in the state's contribution and was trying to get more use out of classroom buildings.

Faculty members considered the proposal an assault on their autonomy and a retaliation for a previous squabble with administrators. Since then Kean has postponed several construction projects and raised in-state tuition by about 8 percent.

5. Overbuilt
For more than a decade, colleges have had a tremendous appetite for building. According to Sightlines, a company that analyzes space utilization on more than 200 campuses, 14 percent of those colleges' buildings have been built in the past 10 years. Among research institutions, the proportion is even higher.

Many motivations have led to this building boom, but often a key driver is the quest to impress prospects, whether faculty members or students (and their parents). Energy-intensive research buildings. Swanky residence halls. Climbing walls. Olympic-size swimming pools. They are like the expensive cars that real-estate agents drive — they project an image of success.

What kind of future have these colleges built for themselves? A burdened one. The bulk of the cost of any building comes after it is built — in the energy needed to run it and the maintenance needed to keep it functioning. Those happen to be costs that well-heeled donors are unlikely to support, whether their names are on the buildings or not.

Deferred maintenance is already a problem in higher education, running into the hundreds of millions of dollars at many institutions. In the building boom, many colleges have merely added to infrastructure they already cannot support.

6. Bowed to Boosters
Many voices stoke lofty gridiron ambitions. Trustees and politicians often clamor for a good football team, particularly at flagship public universities. Even governors have been known to meddle in coaching decisions.

But big-foot boosters like Philip H. Knight, at the University of Oregon, and T. Boone Pickens, at Oklahoma State University, often call the shots. Viewing themselves as majority stockholders in a company, some high fliers browbeat administrators into making accommodations for king football.

Scores of fancy facilities were built on donors' pledges. But with the donors' bank accounts taking a dive, it's the universities that will pay.

7. Stumbled at the Statehouse
Even in good times, competition for state money can be tough, as some lawmakers charge that colleges waste tax money on pretty buildings and underworked faculty members.

It can be much worse during economic downturns, when higher education must compete for scarce dollars against elementary schools and health care for low-income families, among other needs.

More colleges are finally waking up to a well-known reality: Politics is the art of compromise. The University of Arizona hopes to appease state lawmakers by consolidating more than a dozen colleges and eliminating dozens of majors that produce few graduates. The university has also assembled a team of economists and policy experts to present budget alternatives to lawmakers.

Not so in neighboring Nevada, where the university system's chancellor, James E. Rogers, has waged a bitter public battle with Gov. James Gibbons over his proposed 36-percent cut to the system's budget. While legislators may not go along with the governor's entire plan, Mr. Rogers's fiery rhetoric may leave hard feelings after he steps down this year.

8. Led With Unchecked Ambition
Building booms and hiring sprees can be fine during flush times. But a recession requires a president who can say no, not one who pads his résumé at the college's expense.

Some observers say an abundance of ambition helped bring down John D. Petersen, who last month announced his resignation as president of the University of Tennessee. The system is facing a budget deficit of up to $100-million, which it says could result in 700 layoffs. Apart from Mr. Petersen's commitment to the university, some critics say he was too focused on research and expensive growth.

"We are really struggling to meet core competencies," says John Nolt, a professor of philosophy on the flagship campus, in Knoxville, and chairman of the Faculty Senate.

9. Failed to Find a Niche
Small private colleges that have failed to differentiate themselves will face increasing obstacles as the student population shrinks.

Tuition-driven private colleges that have not established a firm identity will lose prospective students to those that have staked out a clear market position, as well as to lower-cost public universities, community colleges, and for-profit institutions, which are nimble at marketing.

Pamela Fox, president of Mary Baldwin College, says the key to staking out turf is doing it within the college's mission. For Mary Baldwin, that means adding a personal touch to both a traditional women's campus and adult education centers. Colleges must clearly show that they add value beyond their liberal-arts core, she says: "That's the gravy that goes with your meat and potatoes."

10. Ignored Customers' Needs
Dormitories and the campus quad are images of America's higher-education past that now apply to only a minority of students. Today's college students are older, often have jobs, and are less likely to be white. Many are not interested in a traditional residential experience.

What's more, as the nation's population growth has shifted to the South, the numbers of potential students who can pay full freight are now more often located in hot spots like suburban Dallas and Atlanta.

Colleges that have paid close attention to those shifts are generally in decent shape. Leading that pack are for-profit institutions, most of which have healthy bottom lines despite the recession.

The colleges that succeed in this evolving new world will be the ones that aren't afraid to try new ideas, like setting up out-of-state branch campuses, spending more on strategic advertising, and building partnerships with community colleges.

11. Built Duplicative Centers
Universities love nanotechnology laboratories. Biotech ones, too. And while some of those labs may reap benefits for the institutions and for society as a whole, it's a safe bet that the country has many more nanotech and biotech facilities than it can support.

So, too, with a host of other research ventures, many of which quickly prove redundant or unproductive. With fewer federal grants available, these centers are often a drain on a university's finances, drawing resources that could be used for student financial aid or faculty raises.

12. Overcommitted Their Budgets
Much of higher education lived high on the hog for the five years before the credit implosion of 2008. Endowment returns averaged 17.2 percent across the industry in 2007, and state budgets were flush.

While few budget planners could have foreseen the scope of this financial crisis, those who set money aside in recent years are much better off today.

Experts say the most serious mistake colleges made was to commit almost every dollar of their projected income to capital and operating expenses. Institutions that made overly optimistic building plans and other commitments are much likelier to be laying off employees or slashing budgets now.

13. Stymied Accountability Efforts
When the Bush administration's Commission on the Future of Higher Education aimed to bring more accountability to colleges and universities, the only member of the panel who refused to sign the document was David Ward, who represented the nation's biggest higher-education group.

It was a clear act of defensiveness.

College lobbyists eventually succeeded in killing the commission's proposal to develop a national system to track the progress of each student in the country. They also resisted efforts to make the accreditation process more open and to establish a consumer-friendly database that would allow parents, students, and policy makers to compare institutions. Instead, the higher-education associations decided to build their own online tools — except they couldn't agree on a model. So the public colleges created one system, and the private institutions another.

Left unchecked, college costs have continued to rise, along with student debt. Some for-profit lenders pushed loans that few students understood while some financial-aid officers stood silently by. New York's attorney general later accused dozens of colleges and alumni associations of taking kickbacks, and financial-aid officers of accepting consulting fees and stock options from lenders.

http://chronicle.com
Section: Money & Management
Volume 55, Issue 27, Page A1

Priming the Pump

2009-03-13T18:11:00.005-04:00

As students and many faculty return to campus from Spring Break, here are some recent news developments and analyses from the around the country to "prime the pump" as students, staff, and faculty at UVM consider our next steps in the struggle to stop the downsizing of education at UVM by administrators who refuse to be accountable for their mismanagement and who insist on hanging onto salaries that are two, three, and even four times those of full professors--and many more times the salaries of the staff and lecturers they seek to lay off:

First, suggested by BronwynVt, from the Huffington Post's Phillip Slater, "Money Doesn't Attract Talent, It Merely Attracts Greed":

When the banking and auto industries claimed they needed their exorbitant executive salaries to attract 'talent', we all laughed to think the 'best and brightest' were needed destroy the global economy. What actually did the job was greed, which is, after all, what money attracts.

Whereas the average ratio of CEO to worker salaries is about 20 to 1 in the rest of the industrial world -- and was about that in America only a few decades ago -- it has ballooned to 400 to 1 in recent times. Does this mean American corporate and banking executives are not only 20 times smarter than those abroad, but also 20 times smarter than the American executives who ran our economy before 1980?

Not very likely. But they're certainly 20 times greedier.

James Surowiecki points out that these overpaid executives were notable for making mergers, two-thirds of which ended up destroying shareholder value. Eighty percent of the new products they introduced lasted less than a year. As he points out, "the business landscape of the last decade is littered with CEOs who went from being acclaimed as geniuses to being dismissed as fools".

If American executives were willing for a century or more to work for reasonable salaries, what other than an obsessive greed makes it necessary to overpay them today?

Bach never got rich, Mozart died in a pauper's grave. Money didn't attract Cézanne, van Gogh, Rembrandt, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, etc., etc., the list is endless. You don't have to starve to be great at what you do, but money doesn't seem especially relevant. Nor is this lack of connection restricted to the arts. Einstein worked in the Swiss patent office to survive while he came up with his major contributions to science, and most of the authors of major inventions were poor before they made them. Small firms come up with 24 times more inventions than large ones with fat R and D budgets.

The truth is, money has nothing to do with talent in any field. The biologist Lewis Thomas once said that the need to feel useful, to make a contribution, is fundamental to human beings. People crave challenges, like to exercise their abilities. They also like to eat. But our culture -- or at least the least evolved elements of it -- have distorted this need by using money as the only criterion of worth, which has elevated some of the least valuable members of society to the most valued. Huge sums of money attract only the most neurotic members of society -- those who feel empty, who have nothing to give, who are sick with greed. The decline of America in the world is due largely to this failing. We can only hope Obama will inspire a reversal of this pathological trend.

Next, an example of how teachers, students, and parents facing downsizing elsewhere are indeed inspired by our current invigorating political climate to say no to cutting education in a country that's still funding Wall Street and war, a video of a protest and sit-in by teachers in Los Angeles:

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Rallies-Planned-in-Respose-to-Possible-LAUSD-Layoffs.html

And for the fuller story by a Los Angeles teacher: http://socialistworker.org/2009/03/12/la-teachers-sit-in

Finally, check out UVM professor Tina Escaja's essay, in Spanish and in English translation, on bringing the spirit of Pablo Neruda into the struggle for UVM's future: http://www.redpoppy.net/journal/Pablo_Neruda_Presente.html

This Week in the Fight Against Downsizing at UVM--And the Truth about Class Sizes, Updated

2009-03-05T17:18:00.010-05:00

This week saw two "My Turn" columns calling on the administration to dramatically reduce itself as a better solution to addressing much of next year's $10.8 million shortfall than lay offs of people who serve students and programs. Seven Day's Shay Totten wondered if Fogel will go the way of the previous presidents who couldn't grasp the mood, and the values, of the campus. We also learned that UVM has two more executives earning more than $150,000 a year--bringing the total to 40, for a small state university with 9,000 undergraduates.

But the week also brought to light more of the hidden layoffs--the full-time lecturers who did not receive contract renewals by the March 1 deadline, the part-time lecturers who thought they had Continuing Ed courses until the dean of Arts and Sciences reportedly called on chairs to pull those courses, the staff who have received notices that they're slated for round-two layoffs later this Spring. The Channel 5 report on yesterday's speak-out ended with Vice President for Finance Richard Cate claiming that these layoffs are in motion and can't be stopped--and also that next year's bigger student body won't notice the difference of fewer faculty and staff. Here's the Channel 5 report, followed by an updated table (with the most recent class size data sent by the Registrar to all chairs and directors) showing the very noticeable shift that will take place next year from a small to large and super-size-me classes. (Click on the table to see it full size.)

My Turn: Administrative costs hurt UVM

By Nancy Welch

The Free Press editorializes that University of Vermont employees and students are unrealistic in pressing the Fogel administration to pursue alternatives to faculty and staff layoffs. An examination of publicly available salary data suggests a different conclusion: President Daniel Fogel has shown excessive devotion to increasing the size and salaries of upper administration whose expense a state university cannot realistically bear. Consider:

In 2002, four UVM administrators (not including the College of Medicine) drew salaries above $150,000 a year for a total of $641,543.

Today, the number of top-tier earners is 40, including the president, provost, and various vice presidents, vice provosts, deans and directors. The total spent on their salaries, not including benefits, is $7,312,381.

The published salaries for top executives is only part of the story. Raises and promotion increases for individual administrators this year far outpaced the salary increase pools of 3.8 to 5 percent for faculty, staff and service workers. Consider:

The dean of UVM's modest-sized College of Engineering, Math, and Statistics received a 9 percent raise, bringing his salary from $220,964 to $240,182. Salary.com lists the U.S. median salary for an engineering dean in 2009 as $192,149.

When two midlevel professors were promoted to associate dean, their salaries were boosted from $65,698 and $69,026 to $110,000 and $120,848 respectively. Salary.com lists the median salary for an associate dean of undergraduate education as $84,194.

As we look ahead to lean years at UVM -- and consider how we will meet the educational needs and expectations of students who will take care in deciding where to spend their tuition dollars -- it is time for UVM to reassess the unrealistic size and expense of its administration. For instance, through salary reductions and position cuts at the top, the administration could return to its 2002 salary pool for top executives, realizing an immediate savings of more than $6.5 million annually.

Or -- taking President Fogel at his word that we should use the financial crunch as an opportunity to imagine a better UVM -- consider this proposal: that no administrator draw a salary more than 30 percent above what the Sourcebook lists as a full professor's average salary. Such a proposal would bring down the president's base salary from $322,563 to $130,000 -- and would have the added bonus of pulling down all other administrative salaries that have soared with the president's in the past six years.

True, our current president and many in his administration might choose to pack their bags. True, UVM would not be offering salaries that are competitive on the national higher-ed administration market. But maybe that's what UVM, valued by students for the attention faculty and staff give to undergraduate education, needs: not career- and corporate-oriented administrators but faculty and staff who, after years of commitment to UVM, serve in a downsized administration for modest pay increases, then return to the classrooms, labs and academic support offices where a university's people are most needed.

My Turn: UVM should cut pay before jobs

By Joanna Grossman

I was completely baffled this morning when I read your editorial titled "UVM facing down difficult choices" (Feb. 24). You say that "Those who protest the cuts without offering realistic alternatives cling to the unrealistic notion that the university can somehow escape the harsh economic realities that afflict nearly everyone outside of academia." As a matter of interest, the word "alternatives," like "choices," implies many options -- look it up. Now, if the protesters weren't offering alternatives, that might have been counterproductive.

However, if you had attended, or had even read about, the protests on Feb. 20, then you know that those protesters are promoting the same measures being used largely "outside of academia." Companies and organizations, such as the state of Vermont and Hewlett-Packard, are creating executive pay cuts that allow a small number of comfortable people at the top to make a modest sacrifice to save the livelihoods of many others.

President Fogel has made something of a show of insisting that his executives be treated with private-sector-style panache. A good example is the nearly $1 million in bonuses he paid them over the past four years, despite UVM's nonprofit status.

According to UVM, it spends $6,931,241 on salaries over $150,000. Let's say the average UVM job being cut pays $30,000. Now let's say that benefits cost 40 percent of that, which is $12,000. That means that, under said conditions, a one-year executive pay cut of:

5 percent could save eight-plus jobs.

10 percent could save 16-plus jobs.

15 percent could save 24-plus jobs.

This is not even considering the fact that many jobs cut on Feb. 20 weren't even entitled to benefits, so they come cheaper. Nor does it consider the numerous recent executive vacancies, or even other points in the pay scale where cuts could begin.

So, when it suits him, President Fogel does what the private sector does. But when it's inconvenient, he'd rather not. In fact, President Fogel says he'd leave if UVM cuts executive pay. Exactly what kind of leadership is a hypocritical and self-serving ultimatum?

You can say that you think it's more important for 38 executives to clear $150,000 than for 24 people to keep their jobs. It won't endear you to this community, but you can say it. But you should know that it's factually inaccurate to say that those who protest aren't offering a realistic alternative. They are offering the most realistic alternative.

Published on Seven Days (http://www.7dvt.com)
Fogel's Folly
Fair Game
By Shay Totten [03.04.09]

Divestiture from South Africa. Diversity. Livable wages. Union organizing. Hazing. These are some of the issues raised by staff, faculty and students that have tested University of Vermont presidents — and eventually brought down three of them.

Today’s question is: Can UVM Prez Dan Fogel [1] avoid the mistakes that sank his predecessors, as calls increase for top university execs to take pay cuts to avoid layoffs?

Fogel is UVM’s sixth president since the late 1980s, when the popular Lattie Coor stepped down amidst tumult over diversity and divestiture after 16 years at the helm.

After Coor came George Davis, who lasted just one year — his demise was accelerated by a month-long takeover of his Waterman office by students pressing for more racial diversity and multicultural teachings. At one point, Davis climbed a ladder to his office window in an effort to negotiate with the student occupiers. The humiliating image brought down his presidency.

Vermont Governor Tom Salmon filled the gap until 1997, when Judith Ramaley, UVM’s first female president, was hired. She resigned in early 2001 after a hockey hazing scandal rocked the school and made national headlines. After Ramaley, former airline exec and Burlingtonian Ed Colodny stepped in as an interim prez. He was eventually succeeded by Fogel.

Fogel quickly embarked on a “build it and they will come” strategy to make UVM a premier, small-scale research and environmental school. And build they have.

But that growth hasn’t done enough to boost UVM’s bottom line.

Last month Fogel eliminated 16 vacant staff positions and laid off 16 others. He will also leave unfilled 18 tenure-track faculty slots and four new faculty positions. At least 12 full-time lecturers will not be offered new contracts, along with a larger number of part-time lecturers who teach one or more courses each year. The baseball and softball teams are history. Fogel is also freezing salaries for non-union employees earning more than $75,000, along with other measures, to trim $10.8 million from the university’s $284 million general fund budget. More cuts are likely in April.

Some students and faculty are urging Fogel and his top administrators to take pay cuts, and for the school to dip into its endowment as a way to avoid eliminating people and sports programs.

Fogel has so far balked at those suggestions. But more recently, UVM Communications Director Enrique Corredera told “Fair Game” that the prez is considering whether it’s possible to streamline some top administrative functions.

Union members point out that since 2002 the number of administrators at UVM making more than $150,000 a year has jumped from four to 38, and their total collective compensation tops $7 million annually.

If that weren’t enough, UVM paid out nearly $900,000 in bonuses to many of these top administrators — including Fogel — since 2006, including $264,196 in the current fiscal year.

Yikes. First Wall Street, now College Street.

At a campus forum last week, Fogel addressed the crowd gathered at Ira Allen Chapel: “I understand very acutely, however, how in the wake of today’s news report on executive pay that anger is running very high, and I want to begin by addressing that, because I do not think it will be good for our students, our faculty, our staff or the State of Vermont for us to begin to tear ourselves apart as a community.”

Fogel said there would be no bonuses this year, noting past pay bumps were performance based.

“He could have won a section of the room and instead he just reinforced a sense of a divide on campus,” said Nancy Welch, an English prof and active member of the faculty union [2]. “His defense seemed out of touch with the anger over these bonuses.”

Faculty, students and staff aren’t the only ones fired up about the extra compensation.

“The new data on bonuses and salary adjustments, if true, further confirms indefensible systems of privilege, power, inequity and injustice, borne on the backs of some of our most vulnerable staff and faculty,” said Betty Rambur, dean of the College of Nursing and Health Sciences, who announced her resignation two weeks ago. She claimed to suffer from “increasing moral distress” over the cuts she was being asked to make.

Another top official has resigned, too. Provost John Hughes is on his way out, but not before putting a key dean on administrative leave.

Students were told last week that Larry Forcier, dean of the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, was stepping down. But, in an email to students obtained by Seven Days, Forcier claimed he was stripped of his title and received no written explanation — only told that he “scared some people” and was “creating a hostile work environment for them.”

As one grad student told Seven Days, “I can say, amongst a large majority here at the university, that from personal experience that this … just doesn’t seem right.”

This student also said the dearth of information about Forcier’s ouster in the wake of budget cuts across the campus was giving students “reason to suspect that something larger is at play.”

They may be on to something.

Speak-Out Against Layoffs Tomorrow!

2009-03-03T17:52:00.001-05:00

Join UVM Faculty for a
SPEAK OUT AGAINST LAYOFFS AND CUTS
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4
12:30-1:30 pm
BAILEY-HOWE LIBRARY STEPS
Sponsored by UVM United Academics

The campus has heard President Fogel claim

* the layoffs and hour reductions could not be avoided
* nonrenewals of lecturers are routine and, with the elimination of vacant professor positions, bring the colleges into line with
"agreed-upon" student/faculty ratio targets
* the bonuses he and his executives received were for extra responsibilities

Now the campus needs to hear from faculty. United Academics, the union representing most faculty at the University of Vermont, invite staff and students to join faculty for a speak-out on the steps of Bailey-Howe, Wednesday, March 4, 12:30-1:30 pm.

* How many lecturers--full and part-time--have been laid off? How many vacant positions are being eliminated? How many of our programs have lost vital staff?
*What will these lost jobs mean for our personal lives? For our departments and programs? For academic quality, student experience, research and scholarship, service to the community and state?
* What are the extra responsibilities we and colleagues have already shouldered--without any additional compensation--as the student body and programs grew faster than long-term positions? How will those extra responsibilities be borne by even fewer people next year?
* What does the increased student/faculty ratio mean for class sizes and class offerings?

Welcome, too, are students and staff who want to share their stories of the impact of layoffs, FTE reductions, rising tuition and fees, and student body expansion.

Help us put together and publicize a fuller story of the academic and human consequences of President Fogel's budget-balancing approach--as we continue to urge him not to downsize education at UVM!

Video of February 16 "Emergency Protest Against Staff and Faculty Layoffs"

2009-03-02T15:02:00.002-05:00

Thanks to Tricia who found this in a remote corner of the Burlington Free Press website. If you missed the mid-February protest of the layoffs, this video gives a good sense of what it was like to be there--and how strong the arguments are for giving back the bonuses and taking back the layoffs:

Business Week: Colleges Need to Spend--Not Hoard--Their Endowments

2009-03-02T11:54:00.005-05:00

Thanks to bronwynvt for alerting me to the below article from Business Week that adds to our "Tap the endowment" argument.

Some background: Under President Fogel, UVM has aspired to follow the example of the country's elite private colleges that fund big portions of their operations through investment revenues from massive, multi-billion-dollar endowments. In the below Business Week article, however, the elite university model is called into question. Instead of hoarding a university's resources in endowments, the article's author argues, a university should put gift money to work right away for benefit of students and to meet a university's current needs. What does this mean for UVM?

* We would be better off following the example of other public universities, such as Cal State Long Beach mentioned below, than trying to model ourselves after elite private universities whose addiction to the financial markets has led to greater financial crunch and instability than public institutions are experiencing. (Consider: Middlebury and Dartmouth are laying off faculty and staff; SUNY, UNH, and UMass/Amherst have announced no layoffs.)

* Far from being financially prudent for UVM to be protecting what's left of its endowment (some $200 million) now, it is imprudent not to use as much of this money as possible to stave off further tuition and fee hikes and safeguard student experience so UVM has students who can enroll here, graduate, and very possibly go on to be grateful alums who give back to the university.

The Past Week's Headlines: Fogel Under Fire for Exec Bonuses, 100s Critical of Fogel's Leadership

2009-03-01T08:49:00.002-05:00

This week finally saw the local press run with the story that UVM's President Fogel had rewarded himself and 20 other administrators with bonuses and extra pay totaling nearly $900,000 over the past four years. In the Free Press (story below), Fogel defended the bonuses as compensating administrators for taking on "extra responsibilities." And where was the compensation for lecturers who had scores of additional students added to their classes and advising added to their workloads and for staff who received no overtime for logging in extra hours trying to figure out where into the PeopleSoft system their department operating budgets had gone?

When Fogel faced angry students, staff, faculty, and UVM's softball and baseball teams at Thursday's "The Future of UVM" forum, his handling of the issues wasn't any better: Instead, he stressed over and again, that all of his decisions are to keep UVM "nationally competitive." He doesn't seem to understand that national competition--over student experience, access for Vermonters, and social and economic justice--is not a UVM community value.

WPTZ's "UVM Students Speak Out, Hundreds Critical of Fogel's Leadership":

Free Press story on the bonuses:

February 26, 2009
Faculty decry administrators' bonuses
Fogel expected to face tough questioning today

By Sam Hemingway, Free Press Staff Writer

Leaders of the faculty union at the University of Vermont charged Wednesday that UVM administrators have paid themselves nearly $900,000 in bonuses and extra compensation since 2006, including $264,196 in the current fiscal year.

“The juxtaposition of administrators getting additional pay and bonuses when people are losing their jobs just sticks in my craw,” said David Shiman, an education professor and head of the United Academics union.

UVM officials announced last week $10.8 million in budget cuts and a layoff of 16 staff workers in response to declining revenue projections. The cuts also included a number of full-time and part-time lecturers who will not have their teaching contracts renewed.

Union officials said they obtained the administrative bonus and extra pay figures from an anonymous whistleblower who Shiman described as “quite reliable.” The numbers, if true, show that 21 administrators received extra pay and bonuses over the past four years.

The top recipient of the additional money, according to the figures released by the union, was UVM President Daniel Fogel, who received $161,809 in extra pay and bonuses over the past four years, including $38,536 in fiscal 2009.

Provost John Hughes collected an extra $133,850 in the four-year period, and Marcus Diamond, vice president of development and alumni relations, received $85,000, the figures show. Hughes and Diamond recently disclosed they are stepping down from their posts.

Enrique Corredera, UVM spokesman, said Wednesday night the extra pay and bonus numbers released by the union appeared to be generally accurate.

“One thing to keep in mind is that the bonuses that are in effect this year were decided on early last year, months before the financial meltdown and the recession we are now facing,” Corredera said. He said the extra pay was given to administrators in instances where extra responsibilities were added to their workload.

Shiman and Nancy Welch, an English professor and a union spokeswoman, said the union plans to confront Fogel about the extra pay and bonus issue today at a forum titled “The Future of UVM” set to begin at 4 p.m. in Ira Allen Chapel.

“The sensible thing to do would be to have the administrators give back the bonuses and take back the layoffs,” Welch said.

According to a statement released by the union, the number of administrators at UVM making more than $150,000 a year has jumped from four in 2002 to 38 today. The union said the money paid to employ UVM administrators has increased tenfold since 2002, to nearly $7 million annually.

“All kinds of spending has to be looked at,” Welch said. “UVM can’t afford to lay off the bulk of the people doing the teaching.”

Corredera said UVM has frozen the pay of all administrators making more than $75,000 in the coming year but is not inclined to reduce salaries. “We have worked very hard the past few years to improve compensation for all UVM employees,” Corredera said.

Fogel might also face questions at today’s forum about claims by the outgoing dean of UVM’s well-regarded Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources that he was forced out of his post by Hughes.

Lawrence Forcier, in an e-mail to Rubenstein School students widely circulated on the UVM campus Wednesday, said he was put on administrative leave, effective immediately, based on what he said were false accusations that he had created a hostile work environment at the school’s Aiken Center.

“I have served many years in academic leadership roles at UVM and have tried to reinforce the need for higher education to set an exceptionally high bar for integrity, justice and fairness,” part of Forcier’s e-mail said. “I intend to challenge any effort to cause me to ‘step down.’”

Corredera said he would not comment on the circumstances that led to Forcier’s removal as a dean. “It is a personnel matter I am not at liberty to discuss,” Corredera said.

He said UVM is hoping to name a new, permanent dean for the Rubenstein School soon, possibly within a month.

Forcier and Hughes did not respond to requests for interviews Wednesday.

Two guest entries on the struggle against greed and for the public interest

2009-02-24T10:55:00.004-05:00

The first guest entry is from bronwynvt (also visit bronwynvt.blogspot.com) on how much some employees have had to pay out of their own pockets while the administration was helping itself to bonuses and other perqs. The second is from a former UVM staff member, also active in labor left politics, about the role unions need to play in ending the bonanza for the rich rather than consenting to still further cuts to wages, hours, and benefits.

From bronwynvt:

Another small but significant example of the inequities we are now forced to live with at UVM concerns the policy of not reimbursing professional employees (e.g., counselors at the Counseling Center) for the regulatory fees they have to pay in order to maintain their licenses (which are a required credential for jobs). Employees at UVM have willingly worked for departments with operating budgets so small that some have had to pay out of their own pockets for expensive continuing education courses that are a requirement of these licenses as well. All of this costs hundreds of dollars per year to people who are paid salaries far below a nationally competitive rate. In the past it was clearer that these policies were a financial necessity at an institution with scarce resources. Now these policies are set and maintained by a group of people paying themselves excessive salaries, bonuses, generous allowances, and according to one rumor I've heard, expensive golf club memberships as well. Vermont's state university does not need leaders whose primary motivation is money rather than the public good. We need leaders who will help us keep the institution as a whole, which means its facilities and its people vital and well prepared to meet the demands and challenges of serving our students. What our leaders have proven is that they will make sure they generously staff their own ranks and reward themselves with excessive compensation at the direct expense of adequate staffing for our most essential services.

And from Paul F.:

While the goal of averting layoffs is of course good, the Vermont State Employees Association offer of wage freezes and furloughs is a disastrous strategy. Instead of challenging Douglas's underlying agenda of downsizing, privatizing, protecting the wealthy, and frankly eliminating some of last good working class jobs by going after public sector unions--and then helping to mobilize a mass opposition that could make a difference, this concessionary approach exposes everyone to more cuts and takeaways later on as the depression deepens. Consider:

1. Vermont's tax rate for the wealthy has plummeted by about two-thirds since 1970. What about that? (See attachment)

2. Montpelier and Washington have refused to socialize healthcare for the many decades now. Let's reform that before more give backs.

3. I was told yesterday that some advocates in Montpelier are expecting an additional $100 million budget shortfall by July. What then? There will be even more pressure for concessions --instead of taxing the wealthy, healthcare reform, and cutting the war budget. There is no choice but to fundamentally challenge the skewed priorities that have prevailed for the past 4 decades. The sooner we do this the better.

4. As one of the few organized forces capable of mounting a challenge to the attempts to further lower living standards and to protect the accumulated riches of the wealthy, unions need to be leading this struggle and can have an influence far greater than their size.

Click to see chart and text full-size:

A Modest Proposal

2009-02-23T16:37:00.006-05:00

• In 2002, four UVM administrators (not including the College of Medicine) drew salaries above $150,000 a year for a total of $641,523.

• By 2008 this number of top salary earners had jumped to 25 for a total of $4,727,685.

• One year later the number of top-tier earners is 38, including the president, provost, and various vice presidents, vice provosts, deans, and directors. The total spent on their salaries, not including benefits, is $6,931,241.

The published salaries for top executives is only part of the story. Raises and promotion increases for individual administrators this year far outpaced the salary increase pools of 3.8 to 5% for faculty, staff, and service workers. Consider:

• In addition to a bonus of $21,000, the dean of UVM's modest-sized College of Engineering, Math, and Statistics received a 9% raise, bringing his salary from $220,964 to $240,182. Salary.com lists the U.S. median salary for an engineering dean in 2009 as $192,149.

• When two mid-level professors were promoted to associate dean, they received promotion increases of $44,302 and $51,822, bringing their salaries to between $110,000 and $121,000. Salary.com lists the median salary for an associate dean of undergraduate education as $84,194.

Through UVM's "boom years" of 2002 to 2008--when, according to UVM Sourcebooks, tuition revenues increased by nearly 50%--the increase in the size and cost of administration came at the expense of academic programs. The pool for unionized faculty salaries as a share of tuition revenues fell by 12%. According to Sourcebooks, the majority of new faculty brought in to teach the 30%-bigger student body were given contingent rather than long-term, tenure-track positions.

As we look ahead to lean years--and consider how we will meet the educational needs and expectations of students who will take care in deciding where to spend their tuition dollars--it is time for UVM to reassess the unrealistic size and expense of its administration. For instance, through salary reductions and position cuts at the top, the administration could return to its 2002 salary pool for top executives, realizing an immediate savings of more than $6 million annually.

Or--taking President Fogel at his word that we should use the financial crunch as an opportunity to imagine a better UVM--consider this proposal: that no administrator draw a salary more than 30% above what the Sourcebook lists as a full professor's average salary. Such a proposal would bring down the president's base salary from $322,563 to $130,000--and would have the added bonus of pulling down all other administrative salaries that have soared with the president's in the past six years.

Executive Pay and Bonuses, Part II

2009-02-21T14:21:00.003-05:00

Click on table to view full size.

Also at yesterday's rally Vice President Cate was asked to explain the above table of bonuses--beyond base salaries--paid to 21 administrators between 2006 and 2009. His initial response: that bonuses are common "in the world of business." Yes, it's true: It is common in corporate America to reward incompetent and greedy executives with bonuses on top of their already fat paychecks. But UVM isn't corporation; it's a public university.

Executive Pay and Bonuses, Part 1

2009-02-21T14:17:00.004-05:00

At yesterday's emergency rally to stop staff and faculty layoffs, UVM's interim vice president for finance and administration said that the administration does not know where United Academics (the faculty union) got its numbers about top-tier salary spending growing under Fogel from just over half a million dollars annually to nearly $7 million- just for the salaries of 38 top executives. But where the information comes from is UVM's own publicly available base salary data, reprinted below.

Salaries (not including medical school) at and above $150,000 2009:

Ballard,William Preston Associate Vice President $166,050
Johnson,Barbara L. Associate Vice President $153,750
Nestor,David A. Associate Vice President $152,986
Schultz,Michael W Associate Vice President $155,408
Winfield,George F. Associate Vice President $219,145
Carr,Frances Eileen VP Research & Grad Studies $235,092
Cate,Richard Interim VP for Fin&Admin $180,000
Corran,Robert Assoc VP & Director Athletics $179,375
Diamond,Marcus M. VP for Dev & Alumni Rel $261,375
McCabe,Christopher James Ast VP Athl Mrktg&BusnDvlp $151,337
Hughes,John M. Senior Vice Pres/Provost $232,336
Bazluke,Francine Vice Pres & Gen'l Counsel $189,432
Gustafson,Thomas James Vice Pres Stdnt&Cmpus Life $179,957
Lucier,Christopher H. Vice Pres for Enrollment Mgmnt $187,775
Meyer,Karen N. Vice Pres State&Fed Rlnts $152,978
DeWitt,Rocki-Lee Dean $223,900
Forcier,Lawrence K. Interim Dean $187,775
Goldberg,Joel Michael Associate Dean $151,842
Grasso,Domenico Dean $240,182
Johnson,Rachel K. Administrative Leave - Dean $180,330
Lantagne,Douglas Ovila Dean $162,049
Miller,Eleanor M. Dean $192,280
Miller,Fayneese S. Dean $193,356
Rambur,Betty A. Dean $177,094
Rizvi,Saiyid Abu Dean $158,000
Saule,Mara Rita Dean $175,351
Shirland,Larry Elwyn Associate Dean $155,736
Vayda,Michael E. Associate Dean $158,277
Vogelmann,Thomas C. Interim Dean $180,000
Heading-Grant,Wanda Renarda Associate Provost $150,329
Tarule,Jill Mattuck Associate Provost $168,527
Ashikaga,Takamaru Director $179,407
Chiarelli,Salvatore Director $150,000
Kelleher,Kathleen Ann Advancement Professional Sr $154,200
Lonergan,Michael Thomas Athletic Head Coach Sr $154,950
Sneddon,Kevin A. Athletic Head Coach Sr $157,400
Marshall,Jeffrey Scott Assoc Dean $160,697
Fogel, Daniel Mark President $322,563

Total Top Tier Salary Pool, 2008-09: $6,931,241

***

Salaries at/above $150,000, 2001-02:
Colodny, Edwin Irving, Interim President 170000
Bramley, Andrew John, Interim Provost, 165000
Degroot, Ian Willem, Interim VP for Dev & Alum, 150123
Shirland, Larry Elwyn, Interim Dean, 156420

Total Top Tier Salary Pool 2002: $641,543

The Truth About UVM's Class Sizes--Confirmed

2009-02-15T17:42:00.003-05:00

President Fogel now acknowledges that the table he presented to trustees last weekend, showing that small classes would only be minimally impacted by a downsized faculty, was flawed--the "0- to 11-seat" courses containing sections for independent studies, honors thesis, and internships plus Continuing Ed seats reserved in much larger classes. So, as common sense would tell us, it really is true: A downsized faculty and an upsized student body will result in more lecture hall classes at UVM - more than a third of classes, in fact.

Click on the table and charts to see them in full size:

The truth about how downsizing faculty will upsize UVM's classes

2009-02-09T09:09:00.005-05:00

Click on the table below to enlarge. Also note that the UVM administration appears to have counted as "small classes" credit hours that students take as independent study/readings and research, internship, honors, and clinical/field experience--obscuring the impact of the cancellation of 87 12- to 19-seat small classes. But even working with the administration's distorted data, the evidence is clear: If faculty layoffs proceed, small- and medium-size classes at UVM are declining while large and "supersize-me" classes are on the rise.

Thanks to the movement against downsizing education at UVM ....

2009-02-06T13:56:00.004-05:00

....President Fogel is on the defensive and the press coverage no longer assumes that layoffs are inevitable, necessary, or can be done without harm to education on the ground. Read on for a sampling of coverage from yesterday's press conference and the sharp rebuke of Fogel and his spending priorities/downsizing plans delivered this morning to trustees by Faculty Senate President Robyn Warhol-Downs.

On Vermont Public Radio:

UVM faculty ask Board to slow down on budget cuts
Friday February 6, 2009

(Host) University of Vermont students and faculty say the Board of Trustees should consider alternatives to layoffs and budget cuts. The Board is meeting this week to get an update on the school's response to an estimated $28 million shortfall.
Education Professor David Shiman is the president of United Academics, the union that represents faculty. Shiman says administrators should instead be looking at the endowment.
(Shiman) "So why not look at this in the way other universities have, and say are there ways that we can tap into this, to give us some breathing room to make decisions. I think another way is to look down the hallway, and look at the salaries and say are there some issues that the administration can look at, as far as compensation for upper level administrators.''
(Host) Shiman says that administrators should not act so quickly on cuts. Deans have submitted plans for layoffs and budget reductions. Nursing Professor Judith Cohen says the threat of layoffs have been stressful for faculty. And she says necessary programs like hers shouldn't face cuts:
(Cohen) ``It makes absolutely no strategic sense given the University's emphasis on health and increasing enrollments that resources are not forthcoming to support programs at UVM where there is a high interest and even greater societal need."
(Host) UVM president Dan Fogel says the school may be able to avoid layoffs by eliminating vacant positions. And Fogel says no decisions will be made until the size of potential state appropriations are known.

In the Burlington Free Press:
UVM faculty, students decry cutbacks

By Tim Johnson
Free Press Staff Writer

One day before the University of Vermont's trustees convened to review UVM's fiscal woes, faculty and students gathered Thursday to decry anticipated budget and program cuts, and to urge restraint.

They contended that larger classes and stretched resources would detract from staff morale, from the quality of education and from the appeal that UVM holds for prospective students as a small research university -- arguments that the administration sought to counter with a response late Thursday afternoon. And the protesters urged alternative ways to meet the budget shortfall: by spreading some of the structural reductions over three or four years, by reducing expenditures for top-level administrators and by drawing on a small percentage of the endowment.

How seriously trustees will take these and other ideas is an open question. The board is expected to receive an update today from the UVM administration on the process of formulating a budget for the next fiscal year, to begin July 1. UVM administrators have said they have to make up for a $28 million shortfall in that spending plan and have obtained budget-cutting recommendations from each of the university's deans.

The administration has said details on the new budget would be released this month. Reductions in teaching staff (fewer lecturers, open positions left vacant), layoffs and bigger classes are anticipated.

David Shiman, president of United Academics, the faculty union, said a recent survey revealed anger, frustration and sadness as common faculty reactions to uncertainties surrounding the budget and university structure. He took issue with what he said was the administration's penchant for basing policy decisions on student-faculty ratios that the faculty never agreed to and that don't reflect the educational values to which UVM aspires.

Any spending cuts should be "patient, thoughtful, strategic," Shiman said.

"Don't start with the faculty and staff," he said. "That's the last place you go, not the first." He said he expected the trustees to put cogent questions to administrators charged with drawing up the budget.

Shiman's remarks kicked off an hourlong news conference in the Waterman Building.

Stephanie Kaza, a director of UVM's environmental studies program, said popularity of the program is surging (majors and minors increased by more than 22 percent, to more than 600 students) but that with just 6.2 fulltime-equivalent positions, faculty are hard-pressed to meet all the needs. Instead of increasing faculty resources, she said, she is only hearing about cuts.

Three students said they feared that the educational attributes that drew them to UVM are in jeopardy.

"A big school with a small-school feel -- that's what really attracted me to UVM," said first-year student Peter Helm, adding that student-professor relationships were "the best part of this school." Yet the expected budget cuts, he said, "would radically change my experience at UVM."

Judy Cohen, professor of nursing, said cutbacks to the nursing faculty and nursing undergraduates would fly in the face of the state's growing health needs and of an economy that counts health professions as one of the few growing sectors.

Responding for the administration, UVM spokesman Enrique Corredera said in an e-mail: "The quality of UVM's educational experience has been on the rise. The changes we are pursuing will only enhance our quality and allow us to use our resources more wisely.

"Some classes are too small and don't meet new minimum requirements," Corredera said. "We expect that small classes with fewer than 11 students will be affected the most. ... The vast majority of UVM classes will have the right number of students. We will continue to rank very high among peers in the number of small classes we offer."

He added that "the budget challenges we face affect all levels of our operation. Budget reductions are indeed affecting senior members of the administration."

The protesters passed out data showing percentage growths in salary spending for deans and executives that exceeded those for faculty in 2002-08, along with a letter to trustees that United Academics sent last week.

The letter said in part: "Some prominent faculty who have long been strong supporters of UVM are now questioning whether they can, in good conscience, stand in front of prospective students and tell them that this university still offers a high-quality education."

Professor Robyn Warhol-Down's Address to Trustees:

I. The three minutes that the President of the Faculty Senate is allotted on the agenda do not begin to be enough time to convey the anxiety, dismay, anguish, and outrage that many faculty are expressing right now. I have timed this report at four and a half minutes. I trust you will grant me that extra ninety seconds, and listen to what the faculty have to say.

II. First, the faculty are dismayed by the priorities and the approach to budget cutting that the central administration and the deans have taken. The faculty wants to keep all our valued colleagues on the staff and faculty at UVM, and not to see them fired, laid off, or “non-reappointed.” Behind every so-called “routine non-reappointment” is a part-time faculty colleague’s professional life and livelihood, a teacher’s relationship to a community of students. Everything and anything else that does not directly produce revenue needs to be eliminated before one faculty or staff colleague loses a job. For one example, catering bills. Like that [indicating the buffet table]—when faculty gather for department meetings or college meetings, there is no Sodexho coffee, no Pellegrino, no scones. We bring our own coffee. The university does not pay for that. For another
example, tonight there will be a lovely dinner for 100 people, celebrating retiring trustees, which is appropriate and as it should be. But were any of us who are attending asked to write a check for our dinners? If the faculty has a retirement party for a colleague we pay for our own meals. The university does not pay for that. Or executive bonuses—faculty do give our support staffs bonuses around the holidays, but the money represents gifts from our own pockets. The university does not pay for that. Or our increasingly lavish and admittedly beautiful Commencement celebrations—this university cannot afford to pay for that. These amounts might sound to you like nickels and dimes, but if you knew what a part-time faculty member earns, that would sound like nickels and dimes to you, too.

III. Second, the faculty are resisting the prospect of large-scale institutional restructuring, not because they are afraid of change, but because they are fearful about the rapidity of the process for initiating it. The faculty need to hear direct assurance
(as I heard from Chairman Boyce in his report this morning) that no degree program can be canceled, moved into or out of a college, or recombined with another program without first going through the review, debate, and approval process mandated by the Faculty Senate. By now you, the Trustees and you, the central administration cannot say this soon enough or often enough to allay all the anxiety out there.

IV. And finally, the faculty are still reeling from the invitation of Ben Stein to speak at Commencement and receive an honorary degree, although of course everyone is relieved that he will not be coming. The press and the public have misunderstood the grounds for the faculty’s rejection of Ben Stein. This is not political correctness, nor is it about silencing people who hold controversial (or conservative) views. When Ben Stein spoke at UVM last year, it didn’t cause a ripple. The problem this time was that this person who profits enormously by his professed rejection of science was to be honored with a UVM degree. The faculty confers degrees, and for such a person to receive one from this faculty was an impossibility. Learning that he was to be paid $7,000--more than most part-time faculty members earn for teaching a whole semester’s course--added insult to
injury.

V. In 26 years at UVM I have seen the faculty this riled up only two times, once just before the end of George Davis’s presidency and once just before the end of Tom Salmon’s. I speak for the Executive Council of the Senate when I say we strongly support Dan Fogel’s presidency and we would not want to see it end for many years to come. But this kind of upset among the faculty leads to real institutional instability, and it cannot be ignored.

Press conference this morning, rally and march tomorrow!

2009-02-05T07:47:00.000-05:00

REMINDER: Today!
Don't Downsize Education at UVM Press Conference
11:30-12:30, Memorial Lounge, Waterman
Join United Academics, the union representing most faculty at UVM, to send the message that the administration's plans to add 600 additional students by 2012 and boost class sizes while eliminating professor positions and laying off faculty and staff pose a grave threat to UVM's specialness and value. There are alternatives--including slowing the pace by which the accumulated deficit under Fogel is addressed and downsizing his administration, which grew sevenfold in six years--to downsizing students' education.

AND TOMORROW:
Stop the Budget Cuts, Stop the Layoffs,
Stop the Tuition Hikes, End Large Class Sizes!

Rally and Demonstration at the Board of Trustee Meeting
Friday, February 6th, at 12noon in the Atrium of the Davis
March to McCauley Hall, Trinity Campus, leaves from Davis by 12:45

Amidst a national economic downturn, UVM administrators have decided to take the opportunity to drastically overhaul and undermine the University
and our educations. With their plans to increase the incoming freshman size by another 300 student into already overcrowded dorms, increase our tuition by 6% and ruthlessly layoff over a hundred of our lectures, professors, faculty and staff, they're balancing the budget on our collective backs.

We must tell the Board of Trustees that we will not allow them destroy our education, that there are alternatives to this slash and burn shock doctrine and "tightening of our belts." Tap the endowment and if cuts must be made make them from the top, from the administration, not from those who make this University worth going to.

Join Students Stand Up for Friday's rally in the Davis Center. Have class until 12:35? Join the march to McCauley Hall to "welcome" trustees as they tour the planned renovation for (ware)housing additional students.

UVM Financial Facts and Spending Priorities Under President Daniel Mark Fogel

2009-02-03T17:48:00.002-05:00

Compiled for United Academics' "Don't Downsize Education at UVM" press conference
Thursday, February 5, 11:30-12:30
Memorial Lounge, Waterman, UVM

University of Vermont
Financial Facts and Spending Priorities
Under President Daniel Mark Fogel

Change in undergraduate enrollment 2002-08: +30%
Change in tuition revenues 2002-08: +50%
Change in operating fund 2002-08: +40%
Headcount of tenure/tenure-track faculty in 2002: 579
Headcount of tenure/tenure-track faculty in 2008: 603
Change in tenure/tenure-track faculty headcount 2002-08: +4%
Number of vice president positions in 2002: 3
Number of vice president positions 2008: 22
Change in vice president positions 2002-08: +633%
Increase in salary pool for unionized faculty (new positions and raises) 2002-08: 30%
Increase in salary pool for vice presidents, provost, president (new positions and raises) 2002-08: 152%
Number of deans (not including College of Medicine) in 2002: 20
Number of deans (not including College of Medicine) in 2009: 27
Salary pool for deans (not including College of Medicine) in 2002: $2,032,467 million
Salary pool for deans (not including College of Medicine) in 2009: $4,028,841 million
Change in number of deans: +35%
Change in salary pool for deans: +98%
Number of administrators (not including College of Medicine) earning $150,000 or higher, 2002: 4
Number of administrators (not including College of Medicine) earning $150,000 or higher, 2008: 25
Number of administrators (not including College of Medicine) earning $150,000 or higher, 2009: 38
Change in administrators earning $150,000 or higher 2002-09: +850%
Change in administrators earning $150,000 or higher 2008-09: +58%
Total of administrative salaries (not including College of Medicine) $150,000 and above 2002: $641,543
Total of administrative salaries (not including College of Medicine) $150,000 and above 2008: $4,727,685
Total of administrative salaries (not including College of Medicine) $150,000 and above 2009: $6,931,241

From the University of Vermont Office of Institutional Studies Sourcebooks 2002-2008 and Annual List of Base Pay, 2002 to 2009.

This Week in the Fight Against Downsizing at UVM and Beyond

2009-02-01T17:50:00.002-05:00

Here's a quick run-down of the events that Cecile, Ben, and I promoted on WRUV this afternoon:

* Monday (Tomorrow!): 5 pm Save Our State vigil against state budget cuts and layoffs, 108 Cherry Street (near Church). 6:30 pm Students Stand Up organizing meeting, MLK Lounge, Billings.

* Tuesday: 7 pm Community forum with Sit-down Strikers from Chicago's Republic Windows and Doors, North Lounge, Billings. (They sat down so we can stand up!)

* Wednesday, 7 pm Public forum on War, Recession, and Obama: Socialist Strategies for Radical Change, 302 Lafayette

* Thursday, 11:30-12:30, Don't Downsize Education at UVM press conference, Memorial Lounge, Waterman.

And stay tuned for any events and actions related to Friday's Board of Trustees meeting. Help us project the message: "Money for jobs and education - not for Fogel's administration"!

UVM Funeral March to Protest Budget Cuts and Layoffs

2009-01-31T20:01:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Carol for the camera, Llu for the videography, Didier for the editing, and everyone for coming out!

Next up:

Students Stand Up meet Monday, 6:30 pm, MLK Lounge, Billings
United Academics' "Don't Downsize Education at UVM" Press Conference, Thursday, 11:30-12:30, Memorial Lounge, Waterman
Stay tuned for events and actions related to Friday's Board of Trustees meeting

What are the alternatives?

2009-01-22T17:09:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow's "The Death of UVM Education?" funeral procession highlights what will be dealt a mortal blow -- experienced faculty, small classes, livable dorms, affordability for Vermonters, job security, respect for long-time faculty and staff etc. -- if President Fogel's plans go through to downsize faculty and staff while boosting the number of students and tuition. But we're also emphasizing that the administration has alternatives to balancing its budget that don't put the health of our university at risk. Those alternatives include ....

TAP THE ENDOWMENT: As argued in the Chronicle of Higher Education, colleges and universities lucky enough to have a decent endowment should tap that endowment to make it through the national recession rather than resort to downsizing faculty, staff, and education. Business Week lists UVM’s endowment, after the stock market plunge, at more than $202 million. Tapping just 5%—$10 million per year—over the next 3 years could get UVM through the national downturn without squeezing more from students.

SLOW THE PACE: The dramatic size of the budget deficit is due not so much to a dip in stock market revenues, state support reduction, and administrative overspending but much more to the administration’s aim to change rapidly UVM’s long-standing practice of financial “planning”: underbudgeting for actual academic and student support program needs, then making up the difference each year with “one-time” funds. Now the administration wants to force programs to reduce, adjust, and live on an amount that’s never been adequate. If UVM needs to alter its budget practices, it should not happen quickly, under the guise of crisis, and by starving academic programs.

IF CUTS MUST BE MADE, CUT FROM THE TOP: For a campus of 12,000 students, UVM has grown top heavy with 22 vice presidents, more than 24 deans, plus senior directors, liaisons, officers, and vice provosts. Between 2001 and 2007 spending on top executive salaries nearly tripled, from $2.6 million to $6.1 million. A return to the 2001 executive salary pool would net $9 million in salary savings over two years—and save the jobs of faculty and staff on whom UVM’s future and reputation depend.

Funeral March Friday to Observe - and Protest - the Death of Education at UVM

2009-01-20T10:50:00.004-05:00

***Please Distribute Widely***

FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 12 NOON
DAVIS CENTER ATRIUM ENTRANCE
"THE DEATH OF EDUCATION AT UVM?"
FUNERAL MARCH TO WATERMAN TO
PROTEST LAYOFFS & BUDGET CUTS

This Friday UVM deans are to submit to President Fogel their plans for meeting "budget reduction targets"--including plans to lay off staff and faculty, cancel such fundamental courses for as English 1, and double and triple class sizes, all while hiking up the number of UVM students and the tuition they pay.

JOIN STUDENTS, STAFF, & FACULTY TOGETHER in a march against downsizing UVM jobs and education. While the deans will deliver to President Fogel plans that portend the death of education as we know and value it at UVM, our march will deliver a coffin bearing the death of education should these plans be accepted--and call on the administration to pursue alternatives to cuts, layoffs, and tuition hikes!

Got class until 12:35 pm? Join the march as we reach the steps of Waterman!

For more info, visit uvmssft.blogspot.com and come to Students, Staff, and Faculty Together upcoming planning meetings: Wednesday, 1/21, 5-6:30 pm, Lafayette 210, and Monday, 1/26, 5-6:30 pm, MLK Lounge, Billings.

Students, Staff, and Faculty Together is a coalition of campus groups and individuals who oppose the administration's current plans to balance UVM's budget through downsizing education and jobs. We promote alternatives to layoffs and tuition hikes including scaling back executive salary spending, eliminating executive bonuses, slowing the pace of UVM's budget practice changes, and--as recommended by the Chronicle of Higher Education to safeguard long-term educational quality and stave off more tuition hikes--tapping the endowment.

**Dorm-Storm to Get Out the Word on Campus: Protest Cuts, UVM Has Alternatives**

Meet TODAY (1/20) 5 pm, Fireplace Lounge, Living/Learning. After a quick discussion and distributing petitions, pamphlets, and flyers, small groups will spread out among the dorms to knock on doors and talk with students about Students, Staff, and Faculty Together, the petition, Friday's march, and getting involved.

And THURSDAY (1/22), 12 noon, billiard table lounge area, first floor Davis. Following a short discussion, groups will spread out to talk with students, staff, and faculty in the Davis Center during the lunch hour about the petition, Friday's march, and getting involved. ALL STUDENTS, STAFF, and FACULTY WHO WANT TO HELP ARE WELCOME!

Forum Says No to Cuts and Layoffs, UVM Has Alternatives!

2009-01-16T10:37:00.009-05:00

Last night's forum, sponsored by Students, Staff, and Faculty Together, drew a standing-room only crowd to hear panelists Kat Nopper, UVM senior and SSFT coalition member; David Shiman, UVM professor and United Academics president; Tony Magistrale, UVM professor and United Academics member; and Tricia Chatary, UVM staff and SSFT member plus join the discussion about alternatives--with hearty applause for cutting from the top instead of laying off faculty and staff and tapping the endowment instead of adding students and hiking up tuition.

In addition to the petition we launched last night, the crowd and panelists had many suggestions for next steps and actions. To act on these ideas and more, we need everyone to our next planning meeting: Wednesday, January 21, 5-6:30 pm, Lafayette 210.

Can we do it? Yes, we can! Stop the cuts at UVM!

Charting the Spike in UVM's Executive Salary Spending

2009-01-14T08:53:00.004-05:00

President Fogel insists that there has been no dramatic growth in top administrative salary spending during his reign, but the UVM's publicly available year-by-year listing of base salaries tells another story: Between 2003 and 2007 his administration added $3 million in salary spending for top administrators while salaries for the 700 faculty represented United Academics made only modest gains.

Click on the chart to see it in full size

Yellow Curve: Represented faculty (source: UVM Sourcebook 2008, taking the figures from 2003 to 2007 and charting the total change)

Blue Curve: From data posted on United Academics’ website on UVM Base Salaries. The group represented by the blue curve is comprised of central administrators (president, provost, vice presidents, and highly paid associate vice presidents), academic unit administrators (deans and highly paid associate deans, including the medical school), and directors who could be identified by that title in the UVM Directory (three from the Medical School, three from other units) and who received base salaries greater than $150,000 in 2007. Salary histories are then traced back as far as they appear in the data base. However, some new positions were created, and so the overall trend of the blue curve represents the combined effect of salary growth (for the top 19 positions, this growth was 38% compared to the 23% increase for represented faculty) and the increase in the number of positions (from 19 in 2003 to 30 in 2007, a 58% increase) for a combined increase of 91%.

The sharp increase beginning between 2005 and 2006 may be attributed to the arrival of Dean Grasso of CEMS, hired at a base salary 35% higher ($206,000 a year ) than his predecessor. This appears to have triggered salary increases for other executives. These salary increases also occurred during a time when internal financial controls, by the administration’s own admission, were lacking.

Important Dates for the Coming Week!

2009-01-09T12:42:00.004-05:00

Help Students, Staff, and Faculty Together poster for the week's coming events, including the Thursday forum and Tuesday's SGA resolution for a budget-cut, layoff moratorium. Meet 3 pm Sunday in the lobby of Lafayette (near vending machines). Bring tape and staplers; we'll have the posters!

And spread the word for

*Monday: Students, Staff, and Faculty Together planning meeting, 5-6:30 pm, MLK Lounge, Billings, followed by the Student Labor Action Project emergency meeting for students to prepare and mobilize for the week, 8 pm, Billings North Lounge.

*Tuesday: Student Government Association meeting, which will both host a Q&A session for students with President Fogel on the budget deficit and planned cuts and take up a resolution for a moratorium on cuts and layoffs. Be there with your questions and arguments for President Fogel and to support the moratorium!

*Thursday: Students, Staff, and Faculty Together sponsor "Budget Cuts and Layoffs at UVM? Causes, Consequences, Alternatives," 6:30 pm, Sugar Maple Ballroom, Davis. Let's fill the ballroom with the campus community so we can get informed about - and organize against - the administration's plans to expand the student body while cutting faculty and staff.

Forum on Budget Cuts and Layoffs: Causes, Consequences, Alternatives

2009-01-06T18:54:00.003-05:00

Save the Date
Thursday, January 15
6:30-8 pm
Sugar Maple Ballroom, Davis Center, UVM
Budget Cuts and Layoffs at UVM?

* Causes
* Consequences
* Alternatives

A Campus Discussion sponsored by
Students, Staff, and Faculty Together

UVM's administration says that increasing the student body and tuition while laying off faculty and staff will be necessary to make up a projected $28 million budget shortfall. But what are the causes of UVM's budget deficit? What are the potential consequences of the administration's budget-balancing plans? What are the alternatives? Join Students, Staff, and Faculty Together - a coalition of campus groups seeking alternatives to layoffs and tuition hikes as a means to address UVM's budget shortfall - for this urgent campus conversation.

Join SSFT's announcement list: Send an email to listserv@list.uvm.edu and in the message write Subscribe SSFTANNOUNCE your_email_address

Students, Staff, and Faculty Together meets Mondays, 5-6:30 pm, in the MLK Lounge, Billings (adjacent to the CC Theater).

UVM Apartheid Divestment, Part II

2008-12-24T08:27:00.002-05:00

Part II (see below entry for Part I!) of the escalating semester-long mass student campaign at UVM in Fall 1985 to push for divestment from Apartheid South Africa. After students succeeding in winning in divestment, they turned to the problem of racism on campus and a curriculum that, 20 years after the civil rights and women's movements, still offered little by way of U.S. ethnic and women's studies. In subsequent years, the question was taken up by numerous committees and task forces, their recommendations ignored--until 1988 and 1990 when the issue, and activism, surged back into the open again.

UVM Apartheid Divestment, Part I

2008-12-24T08:20:00.001-05:00

Thanks to the archives of the late Will Miller, we have news clips of UVM campus activism throughout Fall 1985 as students, with some faculty and staff, used every available means, growing their numbers and escalating their actions over the semester, to push the trustees to divest from Apartheid South Africa. This clip is Part 1.

timing is a tactic

2008-12-23T11:54:00.004-05:00

"However, time is of the essence, as state government is learning. The longer the university puts this off, the harder and more costly it becomes. To suggest that the cuts can be found by a campuswide focus group is unrealistic. To suggest, as has been by one university union leader, that the answer is to fire President Dan Fogel and the board of trustees shows how ludicrous the debate is going to get. No one has purposely created this situation..."

We read this quote in the BFP editorial (12/23/08), and it serves as a great example of one of the top arguments running against SSFT. So let's debunk, and I welcome help with the details...

First, 'time is of the essence' is exactly the message the administration counts on (as well as Wall Street) and it is this insistence that is bringing the greatest clamour from the greatest number of folks that do the work and serve the students up on campus. This financial mess was a long-time coming, and we can't assume there were that many folks not doing their job in their comfortable chairs--so we must recognize that the administration could have, should have done their job and started looking for creative solutions through the wisdom and knowledge of those on the ground actually providing the UVM learning experience. Professor Streeter: "A faculty member who has taught thousands of students over the years knows a lot about what students need or want. A well-published scholar might have useful ideas about how best to focus the university's research priorities."

That they didn't prepare, that they aren't hearing the collective voices of the faculty, staff, and students (but rather isolating department chairs and deans upon whom thousands of folks, including the students and their quality of education, are depending to speak up, alone... and do what? say no?). This timing excuse backs folks into a corner--it is a tactic, and it has been used before. How do we say never again? We stand up now. And there is much at stake--these budget shortfall "solutions" really look like they will create further "problems"--for example, how are classrooms supposed to function with an increase of 300 students and a significant termination of lecturer positions (upon whom many departments depend as the number of tenured has not kept pace with student growth and lecturers have multiplied, no doubt part of a cost-saving strategy by the administration) as well as a huge loss of staff who already are each working jobs that normally would require two or more people? One professor commented at the Arts and Sciences Dean's meeting (to share where money would be cut) that making irrational decisions because we are squeezed for time will have long-lasting and serious ramifications.

If we don't take the time (which somehow the administration is trying to steal from us by putting all this off until the holidays, when folks and students leave) these cuts will mark a significant step in the direction of a corporate university. This is the fear above all else that motivates me--corporate solutions means that people are no longer in the vision, and that my university is no longer about my education, but about cost-saving and huge administrative salaries--while my generation pays more and more to get through college... and fewer and fewer of us are able to do this.

I included more in the editorial quote! "No one has purposely created this situation." Well, that is not a whole truth, is it? Well, it depends on what 'purposely' means and whether this editorial considers that part of the administration's job is to be responsible to the community. When the BFP has run articles on the sloppy mismanagement of funds I find it ironic this tone should appear in the most recent article. When 40% (and who knows now about these percentages and estimations coming from the President?) of this shortfall is due to internal factors, clearly some folks were irresponsible... And now who pays for it? Certainly not those who are responsible--I am sorry but symbolic gestures mean nothing when folks are being told to be "frugal" over the holidays (from the Dean of A&S to a staff person wondering what to do going into the holidays, not knowing if it is her job that will be cut and not knowing when).

It is funny that the op-ed uses the word "ludicrous"--that was the same word used by professors and staff over and again at the Dean's meeting: It is ludicrous that over $10 million was minmanaged by the administration and they are telling faculty and staff to cut where all has already been cut to the bone--there is no more fat left! And that means that not only folks, through no fault of their own, are going to the unemployment office in a time of recession, it means that we students loose our mentors even though its killing us and our families financially to be here.

Timing is a tactic! This timing is "purposeful"! And op-eds aren't going to be heard well enough, and nothing will be heard unless we stand up. If not now, when?

2008-12-23T10:33:00.004-05:00

Click on the image above, from the Chronicle of Higher Education, to see it in detail. You'll see that last year President Fogel's compensation included a $15,000 performance bonus (for failing to catch the $10 million in PeopleSoft overpayments?) as well as the $12,936 car allowance and $21,600 housing allowance (because he can't possibly live on campus and because he can't possibly afford his car and mortgage payments on a base salary of $314,696).

Tell the Free Press UVM should downsize from the top

2008-12-23T08:28:00.003-05:00

Today's Free Press has one editorial on UVM cuts and one op-ed by a UVM faculty member and United Academics officer:

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20081223/OPINION/812230301/1006

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20081223/OPINION/812230302/1006

The editorial takes an unwarranted jab at Carmyn for calling for Fogel and the trustees to go. It's not "ludicrous" to call for the ouster of a CEO whose administration, as the Free Press put it in a September editorial, "squandered millions." What's ludicrous is for that CEO to be permitted oversee the layoffs of dozens of workers.

But the Free Press editorial also gives a good angle for us to all sit down and write letters as Paul did yesterday: With a list of the steps the administration is taking besides the planned layoffs (top-tier administrative salary freezes, cap on building projects and borrowing, allowing some vacant administrative posts to go unfilled), the editorial states "These steps are the *minimum* the university should be doing if the financials are forcing layoffs."

Yes, the minimum: The maximum of what UVM should be doing isn't just freezing top-tier salaries that have grown sevenfold under Fogel but cutting them. How many staff,

lecturer, and maintenance worker jobs could be saved if the president, vice presidents and vice provosts, deans, associate deans, and sundry directors and senior liaisons all accepted a salary for the next three years of $100,000 a year (and no extra housing and car allowance for Fogel)? What's unreasonable about that? What is it about $100,000/year that these folks find impossible to live on?

The editorial also makes a second important point: that the proposed 6% tuition hike for UVM next year runs well ahead of what people will be able to afford. Another reason to keep arguing for downsizing from the top.

Letters to the editor can be sent the letters@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com. Include a phone number where they can reach you for verification.

Where did the money go?

2008-12-22T08:56:00.003-05:00

From $100+ Million in the Black to $22+ Million in the Red

Where Did the Money Go?

Students, Staff, and Faculty Call for Moratorium on UVM Budget Cuts and Layoffs

Press Release

Moratorium on UVM Cuts and Layoffs Press Conference

2008-12-21T13:36:00.007-05:00