UVM President Fogel

Before Daniel Mark Fogel became President of the University of Vermont in 2002, the school had been losing students, faculty, and reputation.

Not any more. Now there are more students, paying higher tuition, filling a university treasury that in turn is paying the more generous salaries of a larger faculty which is teaching students who have better test scores at an institution that is regaining its status as a high-quality school and a sought-after destination for smart, energetic (and affluent) high school seniors.

So why are the professors complaining?

Well, to begin with, complaining what college professors do. Maybe it’s because professors are scholars. They analyze systems and situations, often a prelude to criticizing them. It’s part of their job.

In this case, there also seems to be an inclination if not an insistence on opposing whoever is in charge, especially if they make a lot of money. A visceral populism, not really germane to the basic dispute, keeps popping up in the professorial rhetoric.

But complaints are not invalid just because the complainers are wont to complain, or because they clutter up their complaints with politics. Perhaps all those rosy statistics about UVM’s growth hide as much as they reveal.

To begin with, those higher faculty salaries owe less to anyone’s generosity than to the faculty’s decision to unionize a few years ago, and Vermont’s professors still don’t earn as much as their colleagues at public universities in most other states. The American Association of  University Professors divides faculty salaries by quintile, and English Professor Nancy Welch said, “we’re in group four in the AAUP salary scale. We used to be in five.”

But the faculty is not complaining about salaries. The dispute at UVM, which flared up at the end of the first semester last week and could continue for the rest of the academic year, defies the old, “it’s not about the money” rule: When anyone claims, “it’s not about the money,” it’s about the money.

This isn’t about the money. At least not about faculty salaries. The university and the union will renegotiate salaries before the current contract expires in 2011.

What the professors are complaining about is how the university’s money is allocated. They think too much of it has gone to fancy buildings and a bigger, high-salary, administrative staff, and not enough to teaching and research.

(The union is United Academics, affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers and the AAUP. Full disclosure: I have been part-time adjunct faculty in the Political Science Department since 2004 and am a member of the union.)

Now that UVM, just like almost every other institution private and public, has to cut its budget-by roughly $28 million, Fogel says-the faculty union argues that the university should cut out more of those $200,000-a-year administrative positions and not fire as many junior instructors and researchers.

At first glance, there might seem to be an inconsistency here because United Academics also argues that UVM has been relying too much on junior instructors, many of whom are effectively full-time part-timers, teachers who are not on a tenure track and are hired for a year at a time.

In the last five years, enrollment has gone up by 28 percent, but the number of tenure-track positions has risen by only 14 percent.  In the view of English Professor Welch, one of the union leaders, the problem is not that these year-at-a-time hires aren’t good teachers. It’s that “professors should not just be teaching delivery devices.”

Instead, she said, “professors should be determining together what a degree from UVM is, what courses we should be offering.” Because the year-to-year hires don’t serve on committees or advise students, she said, they are not a part of this process, and the heavy reliance on them degrades the quality of  a UVM education.

“In the English Department. 91 percent of the seats for first and second-year courses are taught by (part-time) lecturers. This is bad for any kind of curricular continuity.”

At a time of almost-universal belt-tightening, many might consider this position a luxury, if not a conceit, that UVM and the taxpayers who help support it can ill afford. But it happens to be the almost-universal point of view of serious academics, probably including one-time English professor Daniel Fogel, who pledged to the university community last week his “abiding commitment to maintaining academic quality” as UVM struggled to cut its budget.

By almost all accounts, UVM’s academic quality has improved under Fogel, and it’s close to absurd to suppose that he would want to diminish that accomplishment. But what he wants to do now is cut the academic staff, to reduce the size of the faculty so that class sizes are larger.

Not, on the face of it, all that large. Fogel is aiming for a university-wide ratio of 16 students per faculty member, up from today’s 15.2-to-one. But as any student of statistics knows,  an overall 16-1 ratio could mean many classes that are much larger. Already, Welch said, many English literature classes have 35 students, which does seem to high for quality education in that field.

The same complexity holds over the question of budget cuts. In a letter to union president David Shiman, Fogel said the plan was for “academic units” to reduce their budgets by 4.7 percent while “other units” (the administration) would suffer a larger 6.5 percent reduction.

But that 4.7 percent is a minimum for  the academic units, many of which would have to cut more to reach their 16-to-1 ratio. Shiman, a professor of education, said the total reduction of this “ration penalty” for his school would be 9.25 percent, while the school of Arts and Sciences would see a cut of more than seven percent.

Fogel has pledged “an open and collaborative process” in working out the cuts, and on Friday he met with faculty representatives, including Shiman.

“His response was that we have time within the next few weeks to renegotiate and talk.,” Shiman said. “I’m hoping we can build a case. We’re not questioning the 4.75 (percent cut).  I think one of the positive outcomes of this whole thing is there is greater openness, more candor I have seen in years.”

Perhaps, he said, because the faculty and the union have refused to accept the administration’s effort to impose the cuts unilaterally.

To some extent, what is going on at UVM is a power struggle, and a fairly common one. Faculties and administrations battle over who controls what at universities all over the country. A few years ago, Harvard’s faculty effectively fired the university’s high-profile president. Against that backdrop, it is no surprise that a strong president who has built a larger and more powerful administrative structure would evoke a strong response from the faculty. That helps explains why the professors decided to unionize.

Not that faculty and administration are the only factions at UVM. There are the students and their tuition-paying parents. There are the non-professional maintenance and technical workers. And, of course, there are the government and the citizens-taxpayers of the state of Vermont. After all, UVM is a public university, is it not?

Well, only sort of. Details tomorrow—Jon Margolis[

It’s the end of another week-the second of this news site-so we will pause for some more housekeeping, as well as announcements and some odds and ends.

First, let me apologize to those readers who saw nothing but a title and a blank space when they clicked on the site Wednesday and Thursday mornings.

Using a new (for me) way of pasting the posts into the site, I skipped one step in the process. Thanks to the courtesy and knowledge of the folks at Northeast Kingdom Information Associates in downtown metropolitan Glover, that shouldn’t happen again.

But if it-or anything like it-does, don’t hesitate to let me know. A few readers did, and I’m grateful to them.

Thanks also to the reader who asked an actual news question: what happens with the almost $450,000 the state just got as its share of a settlement with toymakers Mattel and Fisher-Price, who were putting too much lead in the casings of some toys.

The money is in the General Fund. Sometimes, said Assistant Attorney General Elliot Burg, who handled Vermont’s share of the case, settlement money goes back to consumers.

“When people scammed by a fraudulent paver or lost money to a telemarketer, the settlements will say everybody gets a refund,” Burg said. “But here it’s impossible to tell who the buyers of the products were.”

So the money’s in the state’s kitty, easing, if minimally, Vermont’s budget crunch.

But Burg said the Attorney General’s office sues “to enforce the law,” not to bring in revenue.

“My office has been very clear that the attorneys here are not to be paying any attention to that,” he said, the “that” being the state’s fiscal problems.

Keep such questions coming. In fact, why not treat this site as your own personal reporter? Have a question about what’s going on in Vermont only Ask it. Answers not guaranteed, but likely.

As all my new Facebook “friends” have probably figured out, I have dropped my qualms and decided to accept the friend status of all who propose it. A little strange, having friends you never heard of because they are friends of other friends you never heard of. But it seems to be the new world. Eventually I will get around to putting my own face and more on Facebook. You “friends” may regret it.

So far as I can see, I made no mistakes this week. At least nobody pointed any out. A couple of people did object to a few things I said, which is fine, and two readers got into a squabble among themselves over something I didn’t even say at all.

That’s fine, too.

Next week there will be at least one major report, on a matter intricate and important enough to require lots of words. The conventional wisdom in the on-line journalism world is that readers got glassy-eyed, or sleepy, or maybe just bored if any one article goes much over a thousand words.

So this report will probably be stretched over two days, maybe even three. Unless  some major development requiring immediate exploration surprises us all over the weekend, the report will start on Monday.

And what will it be about?

Oh, let’s maintain the suspense. But it’s a major Vermont institution with a head and claws.

To hear some folks tell it, Vermont’s greatest threat is that it is on the verge of a urination crisis.

This excretive emergency appears to loom as a result of the $19.7 million in state budget cuts getting their final approval at the Capitol in Montpelier this week.

It isn’t that Vermonters expressed no concern for the poor, the ill, and the mentally retarded who will become worse off because of the cuts.

But nothing seems to have gotten any more attention-or condemnation-than the proposal to close four of the rest areas along Interstate Highways 89, 91, and 93.

Both the Burlington Free Press and WCAX-TV (Channel 3) had stories quoting unhappy travelers who were…well, we’re going to keep it clean on this site, so let’s just say, ‘teed off’ at the impending shut-down of the rest areas, especially because of the loss of places to go to the bathroom.

“If you don’t want us peeing in the woods, you better have some place open for us,” said one traveler. Another worried about children being exposed to the spectacle of folks relieving themselves at the side of the road.

What? Has it become against the law for motorists to get off the Interstate until they have come to their intended exit?

No. It’s both  legal and easy to get off and then get back on the highway. Everyone stop worrying about the horrors of pants-wetting or pubic displays of what ought not be publicly displayed.

The Douglas Administration’s “Impact Narrative” explaining and defending its proposed budget cuts might be disingenuous in some places. But it appears both terse (for a government document) and accurate when it defends this cut by saying it will have ” minimal impact on the travelling public because of proximity to exits with full services available.”

If anything, the document  understates the case. Perhaps this is a good time for Vermonters to consider the wisdom of closing all 17 of the Interstate rest areas, which cost $5.1 million a year to operate, according to Ed Von Turkovich, the Director of Government Business Services for the Department of Buildings and General Services.

And that’s just the operating cost. Every few years the facilities also need capital improvements. By closing them down, the state could save millions, using the money instead to limit the pain about to be inflicted on the sick and the poor.

No doubt the rest stops are convenient. But are they as necessary as they were when the Interstate system came here in the 1970s? In those days Vermont  was smaller, poorer, and less developed. Back then there might well have been long stretches of highway on which a traveler’s stomach could get too empty and his/her bladder too full.

But that was before there were fast-food restaurants, gas stations, convenience stores, and diners every few exits.

Whatever else the rest areas may be, they are  tax-subsidized competitors of private firms, most of them small businesses (if often franchises of large chains) run by local residents trying to make a living.

Yes, at their establishments the customer has to pay for the coffee. But somebody pays for the coffee at the state rest stops. And rare is the convenience store clerk who will object to travelers who use the rest room and don’t buy anything. This sounds like a function adequately performed by the private sector.

Still, it has to be admitted that the state-run rest areas have one advantage over the off-highway establishments. They’re nicer. If not examples of great architecture, most of them are not awful to look at, which can not be said of the off-highway fast food restaurants and convenience stores, each of which is uglier than all the others (and if you think that’s logically impossible just go to a few). Quiet, unhurried. serene , the rest areas are pleasanter to visit than the commercial establishments with their hustle and bustle, not to mention their awful food.

But we’re talking about a ten-minute visit.

To be sure, the rest areas also provide maps and directions for the confused traveler,  brochures touting the local restaurants and hotels, and, of late, wireless internet connection.

But Von Turkovich said the state already has deals with private off-highway places which have agreed to provide the maps and tourist brochures and to keep their rest room facilities at least as spiffy as the ones the state runs. There’s no reason more such arrangements can’t be made.

As to the Internet connection, have a little faith in American capitalism. Shut down  those rest areas and enterprising Vermonters are likely to open up just-off-the-highway coffee shops as wi-fi’d as downtown Seattle.

And who knows? Maybe they won’t even be ugly.