By Don Dupay for June 2014
“Let them eat… tuition?”
This past year, as a full time student at PSU completing my undergraduate degree, I began hearing some whispers and hushed conversations about the inequalities within the Portland State University community. During the fall and winter terms, those whispers revealed numerous inequities regarding the way professors are treated and compensated at PSU.
The salaries paid to professors, the people that actually teach students, and top administrators, who don’t teach students, reveal a huge and growing disparity.
Each term, the buzz became more intense, the complaints by professors more vocal, sometimes shared with students in the classrooms. Something was wrong with the pay equity system, and the boiling pot of discontent was on the verge of spilling over.
Talk of a faculty strike was everywhere. Posters of an impending strike were taped to walls in the restrooms and on the entrance doors to various buildings, and in other unauthorized locations. Something was about to happen. The posturing was over and the message from professors was clear. Pay us a decent and livable wage, with better contract security, or we will strike. In essence, that meant they would quit working and go home, throw the university in turmoil, embarrass the administrative leaders, and make national news. The administration’s response? Essentially: “Sorry, we can’t afford a substantial raise for adjuncts. The status quo must be maintained.”
But the fact is, professors create the product the university manufactures: education, and educated professionals.
This scenario sounds a little like the precursors to the French Revolution of 1789, between the haves and the have-nots. And we all know how that ended up. The king who wouldn’t listen to the people, and the queen who was so far removed from the reality of French peasant life—both were beheaded. Well, we try not to behead people anymore, but in the case of PSU, a symbolic beheading may be in order. Let’s check the facts.
First, the terms. I don’t like the words “rich” and “poor,” because these terms are relative. How rich is rich? How poor is poor? The expressions “haves” and “have-not’s” resonate better with me, because we all know our group.
The president’s annual compensation of $540,000 per year is broken down here into a 40 hour work week we can all relate to, to get a more nuanced view of exactly how much money he makes: $540,000 divided into 12 months is $45,000 per month, which breaks down to $11,250 per week or $281.25 per hour. An adjunct professor making $34,000 annually breaks down to $2,850 per month, $712 per week or $17.50 per hour, at 40 hours a week. Most of these adjunct professors are highly educated PhD’s who invested both thousands of dollars and thousands of hours into their education, in order to teach and impart knowledge to the rest of of us.
Now, we at PSU are all smart enough to see there is a problem here, when adjunct professors can’t pay their bills, and continually struggle under the mantle of adjunct-ness and all of its present strictures. Besides salary considerations, of equal annoyance is the continuing employment anxiety of short term contracts—of a single nine-month term or even the ten-week contracts that the newer adjuncts must accept.
This treatment of professors by PSU continues to perpetuate the administration’s notion that adjuncts are worrisome part-time employees replaceable at any time. This process of forcing adjuncts to re-apply for their positions term-to-term is demeaning and insulting to valuable and educated instructors who represent the backbone of Portland State University.
President Wim Wiewel’s salary and contract length are also public information. Let’s have a look.
On June 21, 2013, the Oregon State Board of Higher Education extended President Wiewel’s contract until June 30, 2016. This represents no short term contract anxieties for the president. He can relax knowing he has a job for the next two years, while he looks down at the adjuncts struggling to cobble together yet another short term contract for very little money.
Of equal interest is the breakdown on how the president is compensated: his $260,000 base salary, paid by the state, is more than seven times the $34,000 salary paid to a PhD adjunct. Now here’s where it gets interesting. The remaining balance of the president’s compensation, $280,000, comes from the PSU Foundation, a non-profit whose mission is “to enhance the development of PSU through [their] relationships, resources, and guidance. Gifts to the foundation advance PSU by providing scholarships, supporting faculty research and instruction, enhancing facilities and nurturing new programs.”
That balance, referred to as a “salary supplement,” is $141,000 direct pay and $138,000 in deferred salary. The president’s housing is provided, as well as $750 per month for vehicle compensation.
This begs the question; does the president have to pay income tax on the “supplement,” or is it a non-taxable revenue source for him? Note that nothing in the mission statement indicates the PSU Foundation can be a back-door tax free paymaster. Is this what’s happening? The inequities here are piling up quickly.
President Wim Wiewel can live like a king, while the peasants operate as his wage slaves. This system is so upside down, no thinking person could justify it continuing at Oregon’s largest university.
A Portland Oregon Trimet bus driver, with no education beyond high school, can make $24.75 hourly. A journeyman plumber, also with no education beyond high school, can earn an average of $24.92 per hour according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Compare that to the $17.50 that a PhD, adjunct professor at PSU earns.
Perhaps there is something in the rarefied atmosphere the top PSU administrator is breathing that brings about his confusion over the turmoil swirling about the university (and ultimately, him). The unrest came as “a surprise,” he claimed.
Surprise surprise! Why is it a surprise that the rabbles are not happy with Mr. Wiewel making more money in a month than they make in a year? Because it’s a representation of obvious inequity they’re no longer willing to tolerate in the climate of economic hardship that currently exists in much of Oregon.
To me, Wim Wiewel’s “surprise” at the discontent on campus sounds a little like Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake.” In both cases, true reality is lost on them. And frankly, a man making $540,000 a year (which, by the way, is more than the president of the United States earns in a year) had damned well better know what is going on in his fiefdom.
President Wiewel seriously overestimated his leverage in assuming the PSU administration could win a strike. And when confronted with the reality of losing the strike, he responded to faculty members at a senate meeting, “I have heard you and I am listening.” Just like a politician.
As a tactician in this period of labor unrest, President Wiewel has demonstrated his lack of savvy, and I would hesitate to seek counsel from a man with his misunderstanding of labor relations and basic gamesmanship. He simply didn’t have enough marbles to win the game.
PSU is a microcosm of American society, and the labor unrest at universities across the country mirrors the Occupy movement—it rails against America’s battle with the elites, who are more than happy to continue this manner of economic inequity. In my opinion, President Wim Wiewel is a head-in-the-clouds elitist, who has lost touch with the common realities of the working class and what it takes to survive in this world.
I would not present a problem for dissection without also suggesting a solution. My recommendation is this: since a large part of the president’s job is to solicit funds, tie his compensation, over and above his base state paid salary, to a percentage of the funding he brings in. That would encourage him to be a fundraiser. Return the “salary supplement” provided by the PSU Foundation to “research and instruction,” which actually is in the mission statement of the PSU Foundation.
It is past time to review the royal, near God-like treatment of all of Oregon’s university presidents, who earn more money than the president of the United States does. These university presidents simply make too much money and the disparity is too great to be further tolerated by the public, and particularly by the thousands of professors who live in near-poverty conditions.
President Wim Wiewel teaches no students but has provided a discouraging lesson to academia. It is this: there is no money in teaching. The real money is in power and administration.
By Don DuPay
ABSOLUTELY NO PORTION OF THIS OPINION PIECE MAY BE REPRODUCED OR DISSEMINATED WITHOUT EXPRESS PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR, DONALD LEE DUPAY, UNDER PENALTY OF COPYRIGHT LAWS!!