Interesting article in the Financial Times (Thursday, October 22, 2009) by Sarah O’Connor, “Colleges confused over which jobs have been saved by the extra cash.” Marcia Smith, associate vice-chancellor for research administration at UCLA, who leads a UCLA administrative team handling its stimulus awards
received guidance from the UC Office of the President saying she should include everyone paid by stimulus dollars, including tenured faculty members. She was surprised, given that this appeared to clash with the government’s definition of a “retained” job as “an existing position that would not have been continued were it not for [stimulus] funding”. But it did avoid a very sticky problem: how can you know for sure whether a job would have disappeared were it not for stimulus money?
If you were a tenured professor who happened to receive stimulus dollars as part of work on some research project, then your job, on this guidance, was counted as “created or saved.” Many universities, says the article, are “including tenured academics in their ‘jobs created and saved’ numbers even though their jobs were already guaranteed for life.”
While “many universities,” according to the article, including UCLA, simply decided to count everyone who is paid through a stimulus grant, in accordance with the formula, others “have excluded tenured academics from their data, after taking legal advice, amid what they say was a lack of clarity from the government on how to deal with the issue.”
Fiftycal says:
Well, with the current understanding of “if the government funds it, they can set the parameters”, are you ready to accept the “pay czar” recommendations or mandates for YOUR salary?
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October 22, 2009, 9:12 pmStrick says:
I’m shocked that no one’s commented on how Sarah O’Connor is saving faculty from the Terminator...
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October 22, 2009, 9:21 pmbyomtov says:
We learn from this that the UC Office of the President is staffed by morons.
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October 22, 2009, 9:39 pmKenneth Anderson says:
Strick: Heh.
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October 22, 2009, 9:40 pmBill Poser says:
I grant that there are ambiguities here, but tenured faculty positions are not uncuttable. One of the conditions under which tenured faculty can lose their jobs is economic necessity. It doesn’t happen often, but universities do sometimes close down entire departments or reduce the number of faculty in them, in the process terminating tenured faculty.
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October 22, 2009, 9:47 pmMark N. says:
There are not many people, from the left to the right of the political spectrum, who would dispute that statement.
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October 22, 2009, 11:05 pmwm13 says:
I’m shocked to discover that the administraton of the University of California would lie to advance the Democratic political agenda.
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October 22, 2009, 11:17 pmOren says:
You learn from this that the UCOP is staffed by morons. The rest of us knew that approximately 500 milliseconds after hearing of its existence.
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October 22, 2009, 11:53 pmtvk says:
I think we can all agree that Eugene Volokh is unlikely to be high on the list of people who would be out of a job but for stimulus money; and so the UCLA formula sucks. But this focus on a tenured versus untenured distinction is a red herring, as Bill Poser notes. Universities are perfectly free to fire tenured professors when there is no money. If UCLA really were running out of money, then yes, the stimulus would have saved EV’s job. It is just highly unlikely that UCLA is that poor yet.
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October 23, 2009, 12:19 amCharles N. Steele says:
I think Poser’s argument is a little misleading (not intentionally on his part, I don’t mean). It is extremely difficult to shed a tenured faculty member unless s/he gives pretty serious cause. One *can* eliminate a position, but that’s different from getting rid of a person; it’s a “permanent” cut to a department’s numbers, and in most circumstances a U. is loathe to do it as it is a cut to one’s own throat. Eliminating an entire dept. is the drastic case, and it would have to be an extremely problematic dept. before this would occur.
If we look at the way universities and colleges have actually responded to the economic downturn, it’s almost entirely hiring freezes and some dismissals of non-tenured adjuncts and visitors, and in some cases pay cuts (e.g. U. Iowa).
Bottom line: it’s hokum that the stimulus saved tenured professors, in CA or elsewhere.
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October 23, 2009, 12:54 amPerseus says:
The California public university system has seen cuts in non-tenured faculty, pay (furloughs), and student enrollment. It’s also my impression that tenured faculty have seen some increase in their teaching loads and administrative duties.
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October 23, 2009, 1:10 amSMatthewStolte says:
Just out of curiosity, is there any non-ideologically biased way to measure the number of jobs saved by the stimulus package? What would it look like?
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October 23, 2009, 1:13 amGlen says:
Did anyone honestly expect that the Obama Administration’s claims of “jobs saved/retained” by the stimulus boondoggle would have any connection with reality?
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October 23, 2009, 1:14 amAnonymous says:
Absolutely.
It has a perfect inverse relation to reality.
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October 23, 2009, 3:36 amAh, estas estatísticas… « De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum says:
[...] Leave a Comment Nada contra o uso das estatísticas. Mas usá-las com malandragem não pode. O povo da UCLA deveria saber disto. [...]
pmorem says:
Interesting accounting methods.
I’d like to propose the pmorem Economic SuperStimulus Plan.
Under my plan, we will “create or save” over 100 million jobs for under a quarter billion dollars.
We will send a check to each and everyone’s employers, in the amount of $1, to be contributed to their paycheck.
Costs are ~ $135M for payments, and ~$100M for administration.
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October 23, 2009, 5:51 ammicdeniro says:
This isn’t true at the University of California.
Tenured faculty have tenure at the University, not at a campus such as UCLA or in a department at a campus.
A couple of years ago, Berkeley closed the Department of Plant Pathology. All tenured faculty were offered positions elsewhere, either at Cal or some other campus.
So unless the entire University of California were closed, tenured faculty have uncuttable jobs, subject to termination for good cause. Budget difficulties do not fall within the limits of good cause.
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October 23, 2009, 8:33 amDudeman says:
We now know why there has been such a shift for tenured professors to support the Obama administration — he saved their jobs!
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October 23, 2009, 9:17 amMalvolio says:
What would it look like? It would be round-ish, with a hole in the middle. There’s one on your computer keyboard, between the 9 and the hyphen.
OK, that’s an ideological position, but the belief that the “stimulus” creates (in the net) any jobs at all is an ideological position itself, born of Keynesianism, and not one that makes a lot of sense.
Consider demand in general. Suppose you literally rob Peter to pay Paul; you take 10 shekels from Peter at gladius-point and give the money to Paul. Paul is now richer and can go buy more, but obviously Peter has less and can buy less.
If the government taxes or borrows or inflates $787 billion to put 13,000 people to work (and those are the number that seem to be floating around), the American public is out that same $787 billion, which it would have used to put at least that many, and more likely 1000 times as many, people to work.
Keynes and Keynesians make a big deal about the difference between consumption spending and savings/investment but personally I think that’s a crock too.
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October 23, 2009, 11:13 amEMB says:
If they’re only counting tenured faculty whose salary is paid completely by stimulus money, then they’re actually probably undercounting the number of saved jobs (since really non-tenured faculty would have been cut first, and they’re generally paid less).
If they’re counting tenured faculty that are getting a little summer salary or something from some stimulus grant, then yes, they’re probably vastly overcounting.
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October 23, 2009, 12:15 pmTheBadness says:
Just out of curiosity, is there any non-ideologically biased way to measure the number of jobs saved by the stimulus package? What would it look like?
It would look like a white horse.
Except with either wings, or a single horn projecting from the forehead (or both, and be the greatest delight to five-year-olds ‘cross the land).
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October 23, 2009, 12:33 pmKazinski says:
Because even if you could track all the money spent and the hiring and (non-)firing decisions that were made as a result, you wouldn’t be counting the jobs lost to the economy by the massive diversion of funds from the private sector to the public sector. You can make a pretty good case that the stimulus is costing an enormous number of jobs from the private sector.
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October 23, 2009, 12:44 pmJobs “Created or Saved” | Snowflakes in Hell says:
[...] is one great way to pad the numbers on the stimulus – add in jobs that were never in jeopardy: If you were a tenured professor who happened to receive stimulus dollars as part of work on some [...]
In All Fairness... says:
...that stimulus money for research grants probably did save the paychecks of some graduate assistants.
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October 23, 2009, 2:51 pmMartha says:
At my university this year, five programs were cut for financial reasons, and 48 faculty were laid off, including several tenured full professors. The university did receive stimulus money, but that money was deemed insufficient to save these jobs because it was “nonrecurring” money and collective bargaining agreements call for a year of notice before positions are terminated. In other words, the stimulus funds were used to pay out the notice. (I presume that reserve funds would have been used if the stimulus money had not been available.) Other universities in my state also laid off faculty. Tenure is no guarantee of lifetime employment.
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October 23, 2009, 8:01 pmjosil says:
The United Brotherhood of UC Morons covers Faculty as well as administrative staff. Also, we are trying to extend coverage to blue collar UC employees but there is a lot of resistance.
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October 28, 2009, 8:51 pm