Editor’s note: This commentary is by Felicia Kornbluh, a professor of History and of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Vermont.
Members of the University of Vermont staff council last week pushed back against salary cuts announced by the central administration because of their impacts on the poorest staff and staff of color. For several weeks, an ad hoc group I am part of, UVM United Against Cuts, has been protesting a proposal to cut the salaries of non-tenure-track faculty to the bone while barely changing the highest administrative salaries. At the same time, the Vermont Legislature is considering giving UVM a significant amount of support from federal Covid-19 relief funds – the tax dollars of Vermonters, including UVM employees.
I have a double message for those who have the power to help our university and to hold it accountable: The university deserves robust public support: do support the outstanding teaching, research, and community service that occur every day at UVM. Second, the university must act consistent with its public mission: demand that UVM administrators act with justice, fairness, and transparency in all of their decisions about how to sustain our vital work through the current crisis.
Of course, Covid-19 presents challenges unlike any in my lifetime. It is possible that budget cuts are indeed necessary at the University of Vermont. If so, then public officials must demand that UVM make them in a genuinely progressive way. One of the biggest challenges for those who care deeply about UVM has been that we don’t know the real financial situation. We haven’t seen the administrators’ projections, and we don’t know the exact financial targets they are trying to reach or the rationale behind those targets. Legislators should demand that administrators open their books and share concrete, specific information with all of the university’s stakeholders – especially those who are asked to take income cuts. Public officials should also demand that the university deliberate and negotiate openly with those stakeholders. The leadership of my union, for example, United Academics (AFT/AAUP), is willing to discuss these issues with the president and provost at any time. The administrators have shown absolutely no interest in having such a discussion. They have gone so far as to create a crisis-planning committee, UVM Strong, with no participation from the faculty union.
When the latest cuts were announced, we were still reeling from the announcement by several deans, under intense pressure from the president and provost to slash their budgets, that they would cut the salaries of non-tenure-track professors who teach in their colleges. The deans of Arts and Sciences and the Rubenstein School of Environmental and Natural Sciences informed a total of 72 non-tenure-track faculty – professors who helped UVM weather the crisis this spring – that their workloads will be cut, from 100% of their usual number of courses to 75%, with a concomitant cut in income of 25%.
Many UVM staff, faculty, students, and alums are incensed by these proposals, which make a mockery of the idea of “progressive” cuts. But the deans who cut non-tenure-track faculty have dug in their heels and refused to change their plan. And the UVM president and provost have created a three-tier system of salary reductions for staff who lack a union. These could deprive people who make between $45,000 and $60,000 per year of 2.5% of their income and snip 3.5% from those making between $60,000 and $80,000 a year. Those earning over $80,000 per year stand to lose 5% per year in their base pay.
That is the UVM central administration’s idea of progressivity: a cut of 25% to non-tenure-track professors making an average of about $60,000 per year, when the average salary of the university’s 72 top executives is $251,293. And a pseudo-progressive scale of cuts for non-unionized staff that tops out at $80,000 per year, as though there were no difference in the degree of economic security Vermont families experience at $80,000 in income and $180,000 or $280,000!
Thus far, the UVM administration has suggested that its proposals are unavoidable, that there is no other way to move forward. One instructive contrast is with the University of Wisconsin at Madison, whose chancellor has instituted a 15% pay cut for the top administrators for six months and a progressive system of furloughs in which those making over $150,000 per year take the largest number of furlough days and those making less than $50,000 take the fewest. Another is with Longwood University, whose president took a 25% reduction in full salary for the coming year and each of whose vice presidents took a 20% reduction. All other reductions for 2020-2021 are to be progressive, with those earning the least facing the lowest percentage cuts and those earning most facing the highest percentage – unlike the UVM approach.
Closest to home is the UVM Medical Center, which responded to the Covid-19 crisis by cutting salaries of senior leaders, including physicians, by 10%, eliminating retirement benefit contributions for top administrators, and instituted a freeze on capital spending
UVM is a great university. Because of my colleagues on the staff and faculty, and because of my great students, I am always proud to say it is my home. But it can, and must, do better. Leaders in Vermont government must demand that it do better.
