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UNLV brainstorms ways to keep staff intact
Mona Shield Payne / Special to the Sun
Students, alumni and staff march through the UNLV campus chanting in support of the Engineering Department during a budget rally Friday, March 5.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010 | 2:01 a.m.
Please don't go
In the past six months, at least five UNLV faculty members have received offers from other institutions. To find ways to keep faculty on campus, a series of meetings has been organized. Suggestions have included new seed grants and increased acknowledgment of faculty accomplishments.Sun Archives
- UNLV president driven despite harsh cutbacks (7-1-2010)
- Nevada regents approve cuts to higher education (6-4-2010)
- UNLV surpasses goal, raises $537 million in campaign (2-11-2010)
As UNLV copes with current budget cuts and the possibility of new cuts when the state Legislature meets again next year, the administration and the faculty worry:
How can they keep women and minorities from being poached by other institutions?
It won’t be easy.
Across the country, a similar question troubles universities, public and private. But to UNLV, hit with some of the harshest cuts in higher education, the question is especially urgent.
Students in Nevada’s public schools — the pipeline for much of UNLV’s 28,000 undergraduate and graduate students — are more diverse every year, coming from dozens of ethnic groups and speaking scores of languages.
And UNLV, without the big endowment of Harvard or the national reputation of the University of California, Berkeley, must find new ways to keep its faculty members, regardless of gender or ethnic group, from circulating their resumes.
In the past six months, according to the administration, at least five faculty members have received offers from other institutions. Of these, one was of Asian heritage and the other black.
The issue is stirring emotions at faculty meetings.
At one session, sitting in a circle of chairs in a student-union conference room, were a dozen faculty members who are black, Hispanic, Native American, white and those whose multi-ethnicity was not immediately apparent.
Some suggested that seemingly small things, like “seed” grants, might help win far larger federal grants. The resulting research projects might keep faculty from leaving. Others felt that acknowledgment of faculty accomplishments and other non-monetary rewards would help.
Still others felt reaching out to the community and demonstrating the university’s prowess would strengthen bonds ever further. Daniel Ortega, 41, gave an example.
He is an associate professor of landscape architecture and has been on the UNLV faculty for 10 years. A few years ago, Ortega said, his department donated a design plan, complete with assessment of water mains and other complex studies, to an assisted-living center for its community garden. A private contractor would have charged $40,000, Ortega said.
“We need to market community support,” Ortega said at the meeting, “so we’re not always connecting just in a survivor psyche and will-the-target-be-on-my-back-next.”
The meeting was the second of three, open to all faculty. Provost Michael W. Bowers, the academic officer overseeing faculty and curriculum, organized it.
“We need to keep people here before they start looking,” Bowers told the faculty. “If you start looking, you’ve got one foot out the door.”
About 100 faculty positions spread across 60 departments are now vacant, he said. And it is unclear whether more positions may go unfilled or current faculty will be laid off if new cuts come when the Legislature, which oversees UNLV’s budget, reconvenes in February.
UNLV’s budget this year is about $480 million, although the numbers aren’t final.
But state funding has fallen from the peak in 2009 by more than a quarter to $172.4 million. (The rest of the funding comes from external grants, contracts and other sources.)
For students, the vacant faculty positions can disrupt their class schedules. For example, theater history, a required class for graduation as a theatre major, may not be taught both semesters for lack of an instructor.
Robert Brewer, 64, a theater professor who has been at UNLV for 22 years, said after the meeting that budget cuts mean that “not everything will be taught at a time when students want it.”
For the faculty without tenure, which means a permanent position after a probationary period, the cuts mean vertigo.
Rayme Cornell, 41 and black, said during the meeting, “I’m happy to have a job but there comes a point ...” and her voice trailed off, as colleagues nodded their heads.
Martin Schiller, 46, white and an associate professor in the school of life sciences, told her, “That’s the danger. You’re on the path to leaving.”
Cornell, who is a full-time artist in residence in the theater department and a graduate of UNLV, continued, “I believe that hard work alone is rewarding and will be rewarded.”
But Cornell said she was troubled when a retired woman professor, who is black and visiting from another university, recently told her, “that’s not always so, not in higher education.”
Markie Blumer, 35, assistant professor in the department of marriage and family therapy, has a father of Norwegian heritage and a mother of Mexican and Apache heritage. Blumer also describes herself as bisexual.
“With my blond hair,” she told the others, “I’m not a visible minority.”
Later, she said she felt compelled to come to the faculty meeting as a woman, as someone with a varied ethnic background, and as “a sexual minority.”
But there is something beyond the faculty anxiety, Carolee Dodge Francis executive director of the American Indian Research and Education Center, said after the meeting. A diverse faculty benefits the larger university community, said Dodge Francis, a public-health professor.
“I was a rez girl, I was never supposed to go to college,” said Francis, an Oneida Indian who grew up on the Menomini reservation in Wisconsin.
“We never had enough resources, we were always pooling our resources to go forward” on the reservation, she said. “If you didn’t get by, you were never going to succeed.
“Now we’re trying very hard to be a competitive university. We have to get by and we have to succeed.”
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One thing that would help would be to get rid of the professors that don't bother showing up for classes. We have put two of our kids through UNLV and some teachers don't show up for 25% of their classes while the over all average is no less then 10% no show rates. Considering what some of these professors are being paid that amounts to a very large sum of money being wasted on no shows.
Education not Incarceration!
Ask the Governor candidates why they won't speak out in favor of SB 398, a program to divert 300-400 selected nonviolent drug offenders into treatment instead of prison. The SAGE Commission estimates it'll save hundreds of millions of dollars over the long run.
UNLV's 8 year graduation rate is 46 percent. http://npri.org/publications/predatory-e...
Amazing that UNLV did not care one bit about this until it became another way to argue with the Legislature for more money. A diverse faculty is critical in a state with a majority Hispanic and black K12 population, yet UNLV has ignored the problem for 20 years.
The Faculty Senate has discussed this many times, and every administration including this one, has ignored them. Now that it might mean money, its worth talking about.
Patrick,
UNLV's average graduate is 27 years old. They started school when they were 21, have a full time job and a family. We should be proud that they are in school, and recognize that they are trying to make a life for themselves and their kids.
We should not care if it takes them 10 years to graduate. We should be thrilled that they are graduating.
And, of course, you always play loose with your statistics. The eight year rate counts all the kids who transfer out as not graduating. UNLV is and always will be the "first two years" to a lot of kids who want their diplomas to say BYU, U of U, or U of A.
Why is it a concern weather women or minorties leave?
UNLV needs to stop wasteful spending. They spent millions on a recent peoplesoft upgrade, which could have waited, and have bids for other technical crap that is NOT a priority but more of a convenience. Get the budgets together and pay your staff first. Fancier ways of doing the same thing can wait.
Vegaslee - you sure the teachers weren't showing up? Sounds like a good excuse you give your parents for not going to class.
WITH THE LACK OF JOBS AND BUDGETS, EVERYONE IS A MONORITY! Why are we breaking this into blacks, whites, asians, etc..I thought that went out the window many years ago?
Sexual minority? I suppose that when you have a culture that rewards minority status, then you create great incentive for people to somehow classify themselves as minorities.
So the writer says students in Nevada's public schools "are more diverse every year". Where is the evidence to support this claim? This is a key point in the story and completely unsubstantiated.
Also, "blond" is not a hair color, "blonde" is.
retiredyoungster: Diversity initiatives are alive and well, they did not go out the window years ago.
You make a good point though that the lack of jobs and budgets are hurting everyone to a great extent. To isolate the attention on minorities is arguably divisive and counter productive at this time. UNLV has massive issues to address as a whole. Everyone in the UNLV community is feeling the pain. I believe the UNLV community should rally as one to battle through this crisis as best as possible.
Really,
Transferring out or dropping out doesn't matter, it simply signals that students don't find enough value in the UNLV education and that is still a ding against them. BTW, the federal government doesn't collect graduation rates beyond 8 years. In fact, it is widely recognized that if you haven't graduated after 6 years you are unlikely to ever graduate. And the reason the average graduate is 27 (if that is true) may be inclusive of graduate degrees or is because UNLV has a lot of non traditional students -- it does not mean the average graduate took 9 years to get out.
And no, I haven't played loose with the statistics, anyone will use the stat the same way I did. Graduation rates are calculated by looking at the full-time, first time freshman and seeing how many graduate after 4, 6 and 8 years. There is nothing deceptive about the statistic.
I'm surprised no mention of reimplementing the NSHE merit system (or some form of it) was discussed as a way to help retain talented faculty (of any background). When the state repealed cost of living allowance increases (COLAs) and also passed pay cuts through furloughs to NSHE faculty and staff, those were equitable cuts that essentially affected everyone - regardless of job performance.
When the state legislature and NSHE cut merit pay (i.e., bonuses for faculty and staff who perform meritoriously), those cuts only take money away from those who would have received it. If you have a group of 100 faculty members where 50 would receive some merit pay and 50 wouldn't, then removing merit pay only hurts the 50 who had done something worthy of receiving a bonus of some kind. Although I know our economic condition warrants tightening the belts and reducing as many costs as possible, I think the long-term removal of incentive-based pay for the better faculty members in the state may lead to an exodus of the best and brightest of NSHE's faculty.
How long will a bright and talented faculty member deal with increased class sizes and other work responsibilities, uncertainty about program cuts, furlough pay cuts, health insurance premium hikes, cost-of-living pay cuts, and the removal of incentive programs? (Remember that other state economies are recovering faster than Nevada's economy...other universities will have funds available to continue attracting Nevada's most talented educators and researchers.) If we want talented faculty to stay in our state, we have to find a way to recognize those who are doing outstanding work in Nevada.
We don't need no education.
We are a one trick pony town.
Now let's put our heads together and get these tourist back so we can create the jobs we are best known for, parking cars, opening doors, serving drinks, and dancing naked.
Last I checked you don't need a college degree for that.