Faculty Senate President's Message
To:
From:
Re:
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Faculty Senators
Bruce Sorte
Faculty Senate Summary
February 23rd - March 1st, 2003
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Hopefully, you noticed a good deal of emphasis on scholarship and student athletes
in the press releases on hiring Mike Riley as the new OSU football coach. It was
clear in my conversations with Tim White and Bob DeCarolis during the search process,
that your comments and emphasis on scholarship, advising and diversity were reinforcing
criteria to which Tim and Bob were already strongly committed. The faculty senate
president is a member of the Athletics Advisory Board and I attended the Board Meeting
on Saturday. Again, Bob DeCarolis spent a significant portion of the time working with
the Board on student scholarship issues. At times the discussions were intense, yet,
they were productively intense and the meeting was well worth the time spent.
The subgroup of the Undergraduate Admissions Criteria Issue Group revised the proposed
changes to the admissions criteria, in response to your February 6th deliberations and
individual comments from faculty to remove a GPA level that would guarantee admission
and require all students to submit an "insight resume" (previously the behavioral
assessment tool. ****** would then evaluate the applicants resume, classes, completed,
GPA, SAT, etc. and decide whether or not they would be *** admitted, **** admitted or
not admitted. The EC expressed concerns as to whether, in fact, we had the capacity to
carefully evaluate each packet for thousands of applicants or if there would be some GPA
cutoff that might be used anyway, effectively raising the GPA without doing so explicitly.
Members of the EC were also concerned about how Oregon parents and students would react
to no guaranteed GPA level for admissions when the other OUS universities have a guaranteed
level. We are now back to the drawing boards. The Undergraduate Admissions Criteria Issue
Group has done a good job of reviewing and applying the data to propose what could be a
very individualized and useful procedure. The question is whether we can afford to apply
the procedure to all the applicants and whether Oregonians, and you, will accept a process
with few fixed criteria. Please try to attend the Admission Policy Symposium session on
March 10 and11. We hope to deliberate the proposed changes again in April.
I spent last week in Eastern Oregon working with business owners, county commissioners,
OSU Agricultural Experiment Station and Extension faculty, non-profit folks, and concerned
citizens to develop six county level economic models. These models will be used to assess
the economic impacts of forest restoration, bull trout critical habitat designations, and
economic development efforts. As I mentioned at the last Faculty Senate meeting, the 26
nonmetropolitan counties have not experienced any increase in real average earnings per job
for 31 years, while metropolitan counties have seen slow increases totaling 27.2% over that
same period. Nonmetro businesses and governments are then ahead of the metro governments,
including universities, and many metro businesses in dealing with declining resources. Measure
5 and the 1990's may not have been as good as you thought they should be, yet, OSU's budgets
continued to grow and most unclassified salaries exceeded inflation.
Applying last week's experience to recent projections of another $244 million revenue decline,
the most important step I believe we need to take is to move from a "duck and cover" approach
to viewing the current situation as our future. There may be temporary relief, however, I think
all of Oregon will be happy to have nonmetro Oregon's real average earnings "no change" curve
from the last 31 years for the next 31 years. In the last major recession of the early 1980's,
I was working in a manufacturing firm and we did not start improving or working our way back
to profitability until we agreed that the business environment had fundamentally shifted. We
needed to stop whining and hoping, and get on with restructuring.
If OSU continues to follow past procedures, we will spend the next 30 months reducing our
costs more than we already have by not refilling positions as they come open and/or laying
off faculty and staff who are critical to this institution. We will stridently try to hold
the line on PEBB and PERS and continue to see stories like those in The Oregonian on Sunday,
March 2nd. Regular across-the-board cuts will continue to be routine. OSU 2007 may be
partially implemented in a pessimistic and under-resourced environment. A new president may
arrive to make difficult and unpopular decisions. Adversarial relationships may be common
between the new OSU administration and faculty, staff and students. Our quality may be
seriously jeopardized at the same time we raise tuitions and become less competitive in
relation to the private institutions and other states' public institutions.
On the other hand, we could follow some of those more fiscally sound nonmetro counties and
businesses pragmatic approaches by agreeing that we are all in this together. We may need to,
for limited periods of time, reduce FTE. That may be much better than freezing or even
reducing salary levels. We might want to become serious participants in the PERS discussions.
Adjusting actuarial tables and capping returns at 8% were changes that should have been made
years ago and are not perceived by many Oregonians as getting down to business on reforming
PERS. I have followed your instructions and stayed out of the discussions, yet, I am afraid
that the decisions may be made too quickly in an adversarial environment and structured more
for public relations impact than to assure OSU can recruit and retain the quality of employees
who can succeed for the next 31 years. We could carefully prioritize our health care needs,
protect the core of those needs and be willing to pick-up more of the routine costs. That will
happen anyway, it is just a matter of whether we are drug into it or participate in leading
the way.
When I work with counties, there are differences in their approaches and levels of success.
Some of them are willing to cut loose from the past, be less protective, and trust each other.
They take the time to be involved so they will know the details of how well their initiatives
are working and they do not need to rely on the media or hearsay for their information. They
know if their ideas need to be refined and if their trust is justified. If they are not being
told the whole story or someone is being lazy, they have serious uncomfortable discussions with
their colleagues or neighbors. Yet, they come out of those discussions more resilient. We have
many more frank discussions ahead if OSU is to avoid managing for decline and continue being a
significant contributor.
