What is Effective Faculty Representation?

I’ve had a number of faculty ask me what can/does the MSU union do?  I just wanted to spend a little bit of time highlighting one answer to that question from events that have occurred on campus over the past six months related to the mid-year raise just approved by the board and announced by President Smart in his Clif’s Notes.

As a faculty member, I have served on the President’s Executive Budget Committee for the past year.  You may, or may not, recall that last year employees also got a mid-year raise, which was supported by faculty representation on the Executive Budget Committee.  For the current year, a regular pay increase was originally proposed approximately a year ago.  That is, a 2 percent across the board pay increase was originally scheduled to be given in the summer of 2012.  The proposal made by the President was to reallocate money to allow for the pay increase even with an expected budget cut from the state of 7 to 8 percent of state funds.  However, early in 2012 Governor Nixon announced a 12.5 cut to higher education funding, and this scheduled pay increase was cancelled.  I believe it fair to say that everyone on the Executive Budget Committee understood that such steep budget cuts would not allow for employee raises during the summer of 2012.

However, under political pressure Governor Nixon lowered his recommended cut to higher education down to 7.78 percent.  Then, the state legislature passed a budget with no cuts to higher education.  In Missouri, the Governor has the power to withhold money from the budget if he/she does not think the legislative budget will be balanced.  Hence, the issue of withholdings by Governor Nixon remained an active issue at the end of the last academic year.  The President’s proposal at this time was to not give employees a raise and, in fact, employee raises were a very low priority at that time. 

I asked in the meeting why, if we were at worst contemplating an 8 percent cut in state funding to MSU and when that had previously been the case we had agreed to a 2 percent across the board pay increase, we were not now simply going back to that same pay increase?  That remains an open question.  At the time, the best that I could encourage the President to agree to was that we would readdress the issue of raises in the fall of 2012 when we knew the level of Governor’s Nixon’s actual withholding from our budget.  Let me note that the above details are for the most part present in the minutes of the Executive Budget Committee and in a number of past issues of Clif’s Notes.

When the Committee again met in September, a salary increase proposal was presented by the President and the CFO that constituted either a 2 percent or a 1.5 percent across the board increase.  Why, might you ask, would any faculty member on the Committee vote for the lower raise?  The President/CFO presented the medical plan as being in dire straits with low reserves and a number of large claims in the past 9 months.  Hence, the 0.5 percent reduction in the proposed salary increase would go into the health care plan on an annual basis.  The 2 percent raise was presented as being done in the “hope” that health care costs would go down.

No specific numbers were given regarding the medical plan just the assertion that the raise could not be given because of problems.  I was skeptical both because we had previously discussed the Health Care Plan in May 2012 (see those Executive Budget Committee minutes) and noted that the plan had performed well recently, the spikes in costs were likely random and the health care plan was currently out for bid, with the implication being that significant savings could be realized.

I also asked about the level of University reserves, which had been increasing substantially over the past 5 years while we were in the midst of an on-going financial crisis.  Here are those reserves over the past 5 years:

Missouri State University General Operating Fund Carry Forward Fiscal Year End
	$ Millions
2012	$ 61.4
2011	$ 59.8
2010	$ 53.2
2009	$ 47.7
2008	$ 46.1

Notice that MSU’s reserves have increased by a total of $15.3 Million over the past 4 years of our financial crisis or a 33 percent increase.  I, and other faculty on the Executive Budget Committee, have complained about budgeting in such a way that reserves go up during a financial crisis.  The committee had agreed in 2011, after an investigation by the CFO, that $40 to $45 Million in reserves was sufficient.

Hence, we had $15 Million in extra reserves that we could use to improve the salary increase and I proposed a third option for a salary increase, a 2 percent raise with any extra $ needed for the health care plan taken out of reserves, of which we had more than sufficient.  We had a vote, with my third option included and the majority of the faculty and staff on the committee voted for the 1.5 percent salary increase.  A minority, including several prominent administrators, voted for the other two options, both of which were variations on the 2 percent salary increase.

Here is the point of this blog post: Effective faculty representation requires both a willingness to challenge authority and an understanding of what are often complex issues, especially with respect to the budget as in this case.  President Smart noted just before having the vote that I had been rather aggressive in supporting a 2 percent raise.  To be an effective representative of faculty interests often requires a willingness to challenge authority, sometimes aggressively.

Why did other faculty on the Committee vote as they did?  I have talked to several but certainly not to everyone.  Nor, let me hurry to add, do I intend in this post to “blame” people for how they voted.  But there is a tendency by many people to defer to authority especially in the case where your vote is public, as it always is in these meetings.  That deference often comes down to, as one member told me later, believing what authority tells you – in this case the false premise that the University couldn’t afford a 2 percent raise.  At the time, the chance that this premise was true was essentially zero.  As is evidenced by the fact that the annual savings to the health care plan announced in the most recent Clif’s Notes were 5 times the approximately $500,000 needed for a .5 percent extra raise.  Those numbers, in fact, suggest that a 3 to 4 percent increase would have been a more reasonable raise given MSU’s actual budget situation.

As I noted in my previous blog post, President Smart neither understands nor particularly values the academic mission of MSU.  At best, he views academics as one of 2 dozen “priorities” and as he made clear at his open forum academics lies at the lower end of this priority scale.  Without effective faculty representation, this priority will never change.  Effective faculty representation is the best argument for a union that represents the faculty with the ability to negotiate salary increases and academic priorities.