If you were a professor, you must have to truly love the university to work there. Valpo should be embarrassed and ashamed with their compensation to faculty.
It's more complicated than that. The reality is that many people are trapped in their positions at VU (or any other university for that matter). And the administration knows and exploits this.
This is again something hard to see from the outside. Lack of career mobility is a feature of this profession. I personally accepted this fact when I started my career (though at the time I did not envision certain things that happen now.) The more senior you are the less likely is to be hired by another University. First of all, nearly ALL open positions are for junior rank, tenure-track at best (meaning you lose tenure if you accept such positions and start all over). If you are full professor, even with an impressive list of credentials, even if the place you apply for likes you, it is very hard for them to convince their own administration to hire at a senior level (different budget because of higher salary) and it is very rare for a university to grant tenure at employment because of inherent risk for them. Basically, the safest and cheapest way for a school is to hire junior tenure-track with a 6 years probationary period.
So, if you are a full professor in the late 50's or early 60' you are basically in the worst possible place when it comes to career mobility. It does not help either if you do not tick the boxes of the DEI policies. Yes, I said it! Might be blasphemy for some but reality keeps punching me in the nose. Now, of course, if you are really big star, then yes, you are mobile. But the bell curve guarantees that being good or very good is simply not enough.
So going back to VU, just my gut feeling is that whoever can leave WILL leave. Management is just fine as long as there are enough prisoners to row the ship. And there will be...What that does to student experience, God knows..
Re: IPED
Like USC, what jumped out to me was that the ratio of Valpo Management to that of peers is almost double. But also, I noted that the relationship of Management to Business and Finance at Valpo was 9:1 compared to peers where the relationship was a rounded 1.3:1 (virtually an even balance). Those figures seem out of sorts to me.
@vulb62 I would not get too wrapped up in the ratio comparisons between Management vs. Business and Financial Operations in figure 27. If you add them together, the number of staff at VU for both of those is 140 and the median of our peer group is 122. The reason is that some universities would put the staff managing student accounts and billing under Management, and others would have that under Business and Financial Operations - there could be also differences in where staff are counted in other areas like accounts payable, payroll admin, and other areas. The difference in ratios is far less if these are combined.
Echoing what @usc4valpo mentioned above, what is a bigger issue for me is that according to Figure 4, VU has 3,074 FTE enrollments, and the median comparison has 4,658 enrollments. If you take 140 total Management & Business and Financial Operations staff for 3,074 FTEs, that seems like quite a few in comparison to 122 staff for the median FTE of 4,658. The median peer has fewer total management and financial staff for 51% more students!
Contrast that with VUs 242 Instructional staff, versus the median of 373 - again from Figure 27. The Instructional staff to FTE student ratios are similar, yet that is not the same for management and financial staff.
Wow, I am blown away. These numbers are pathetic and if I assume there is no bias in this survey. Faculty is 22% below the medium, and there are a significantly more management positions compared to the medium. Also, and correct me if I am wrong, cost of living in Valparaiso isn’t low. If you were a professor, you must have to truly love the university to work there. Valpo should be embarrassed and ashamed with their compensation to faculty.
@vuindiana - another recent corporation example of disjoint loyalty and collaboration between leadership and employees is John Deere.
Yes, Valpo's cost of living is just around the US average.
Yes, this is the official data collected by the NCES/U.S. Dept of Ed, and US universities are required to submit such data if they want their students to be eligible for Title IV financial aide programs. Universities try to massage the data as much as possible to make themselves look better rather than worse (as they do with the data submitted to USNW and other rankings organizations too); for instance many universities including Valpo sometimes try to give upper administrators a faux honorary faculty status in order to count them as faculty in the metrics even if they never teach any courses. Nonetheless, I don't think there's a ton of wiggle room for 'bias' in any direction in these particular metrics. For the most part, the #s of employees and the $ salaries are what they are....
It's because of these really wonky admin/faculty ratios that I think faculty get so frustrated that the Board/Pres's first impulse is always to cut academic programs and instructor salaries, with almost a shocking unwillingness to consider anybody else. I find it frustrating that we are already so comparatively THIN in the (underpaid) instructor ranks, and so OVERRUN with (generously paid) administrators compared to peer institutions, yet in every financial conversation the Board/Admins jump immediately to hacking away at the instructional programs and faculty ranks...
Sometimes (though I admit this is probably sounds a little toooo conpiracy-theorist?), I sometimes wonder if the Presidents Office/ CFO/VP/et al. like to stir up the Board of Directors to hate the faculty just to keep us at the front of the Board's thinking, so that the Board never even considers cutting their own plush upper admin jobs and offices full of vice managerial deans and associate directors .... Looking at the Board's curt response to the Faculty Senate, it just occurs to me that a Admin/Faculty antipathy is not such a useless thing, if you are actually in the Upper Admin cohort and have the Board's ear to turn all scrutiny away from oneself towards those pesky faculty.... (Edit: In this most recent kerfuffle, I know it is the faculty that raised the vote of No-Confidence as a (maybe naive) effort to ask the Board to look at some of the problems they see, but I'm just saying this is just the most recent back-and-forth in a much longer history of the Pres/Admins maintaining a narrative to the Board of Directors that the faculty and programs are 'the enemy' to be quashed and that instructional programs are always the obvious 'budget wastage' to be cut.) It's in regards to all this, that the IPEDS employment/salary data offers a kind of reality check about where the real wonkyness exists compared to peer institutions.)
@USC, yes that's interesting about John Deere. I googled it and found some interesting juicy articles about the company's drama.
@vuindiana Good stuff. But I very naively come back to the three pillars of higher education: students, teachers of students and business people who take in the money and pay the bills (yeah, I know there is much more granularity, but sheesh).
So it makes little sense to me that one of the legs of that 3-legged stool is underrepresented in the ongoing process of the education business ( and it is a business). It may not have to be, nor should it be ⅓, ⅓, ⅓ but certainly faculty have to have a firm and proportional place at the table. Just sayin.
@vuindiana Good stuff. But I very naively come back to the three pillars of higher education: students, teachers of students and business people who take in the money and pay the bills (yeah, I know there is much more granularity, but sheesh).
So it makes little sense to me that one of the legs of that 3-legged stool is underrepresented in the ongoing process of the education business ( and it is a business). It may not have to be, nor should it be ⅓, ⅓, ⅓ but certainly faculty have to have a firm and proportional place at the table. Just sayin.
Your 'three pillars' makes me remember an early Valpo memory. I remember when I went thru new faculty orientation, the president (not current folk, this was a while back) did introductions and then a little icebreaker 'quiz' to launch the morning, asking everybody, 'What constitutes the university? What, really, is Valparaiso University?"
Some practical engineering type proposed, "The campus and students who live here?" "Nope!"
Then somebody joining Arts and Sciences raised their hand, "The students and faculty, and the life of the mind we build together?" "Nope!"
Some social scientist-type went for procedure: "Uh, whatever the Faculty Handbook sets into place?" "No.... but do make sure to read the Faculty Handbook!"
The faculty began to grasp around for other ways to frame it.. "Faculty, students, and STAFF?" "Nope!" "Faculty Senate and Student Senate?" "Nope!" "Alumni?" "Nope." "The Gen Ed curriculum?" " Nope!" "Town and gown?" "NOPE."
Finally after a while, the president enlightened everybody with a flourish: "It's the Board of Directors. What legally constitutes 'the university' is the Board of Directors."
At the time, I though it was just a kinda quirky trivia icebreaker (I was a 29 yr old newly minted PHD straight from my R1 dissertating, so I was wondering in an entirely naive sort of way what the heck a 'Board of Directors' might be and in what random footnote of the Handbook this obscure entity was referenced.) But in retrospect I see this lesson in university identity was just a simple, bald laying out of how things really are. The rest of these elements and constituencies we tend to think of most often (the physical campus, the students, the faculty, the extracurricular clubs and activities, the alumni, etc. ) are secondary incidentals. On some level, I guess the Board really could do away with all of it, since the entity of the university IS the Board and they don't need any of these other things to exist.
Alas, yea and verily, you’re right. College closures are dictated by B of Ds. They issue the order to shut the gates.
For those in the know, is it normal for universities/colleges to involve their faculty in key university decisions that are being spoken about in this forum?
While these Admin/Faculty tensions are not inevitable, I think they are particularly caustic at VU primarily because we are SO heavy laden on the administrator side with faculty notably underpaid. The public IPEDS data shows that (compared to VU's own chosen peer institutions, we are pretty skewed compared to the averages of Bellarmine U, Lipscomb, Misericordia, Quinnipiac, U Detroit Mercy, etc). With admin/faculty relations always a little sensitive and difficult, it becomes nearly impossible to maintain respectful relations when faculty know that the admins are making high six-figure salaries while they are (compared to peers) overworked and underpaid:
https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/dfr/2023/ReportHTML.aspx?unitId=152600
Folks, we've covered this territory before, but it bears repeating: VU has been underpaying its faculty for decades, especially when one adds the comparatively heavy teaching loads imposed.
Is it any wonder that, in addition to being seriously underpaid, they are angry and concerned over the future of the University?
Knocking faculty for exercising their right of academic freedom, without looking at their underlying criticisms and the larding up of the payroll on administrative hires and administrative salaries, is wrongheaded. Don't blame the messengers for trying to have a voice in university priorities and decision making, especially when faculty at many private universities (and I presume VU is among them) have scant access to budget and financial info beyond what can be gleaned from publicly available non-profit tax filings.
If one assumes that the Board and Senior Administrators are doing their jobs at a high level and raising tons of money (the most important job of senior university leadership), then perhaps the faculty can be accused of being overwrought and self-centered. But these folks have seen multiple rounds of personnel cuts, program closures, and majors and minors eliminated. I can't imagine any faculty member not feeling demoralized and less than trusting under the circumstances.
For those critical of the faculty, you can rest well knowing that these days, even strongly supported, full faculty votes of no confidence seldom move mountains. These votes are equally likely to cause the board to double-down on defending the status quo, which VU's board has just done. The result is to confirm the lack of trust and sharp divisions among major stakeholder groups. I guess that's helpful in assessing the climate of the university.
I applaud the VU faculty for their dedication and hard work - they are underpaid by market standards. I understand their anger and concern.
Yet I also understand the fiscal constraints facing VU and President Padilla, and the expression of no confidence offers little in the way of solutions to the problems facing VU. For example, it does not support the sale of the O'Keeffe painting. It does not recommend growing programs and facilities in Nursing and Health Sciences. It does not prioritize updating freshman dorms to attract students. All of those are things President Padilla is trying to do, and those have the support of the Board. The expression of no confidence also does not demand that VU reduce its number of administrators - this is something on which the President and the Faculty could agree, yet lays the root of the problem entirely on the current president.
Let's try a thought experiment: In a hypothetical, would the faculty vote to support selling the O'Keeffe to secure a raise? If the O'Keeffe could be sold for $15M, if that were in the endowment at 4.5%, it would result in $675,000 per year. If there are 242 instructional faculty, that would be a raise of $2800 for every one of those faculty members, secured in perpetuity. Instead, if re-doing the dorm gets 50 more students per year to enroll (or 200 across four years) and each of those pays a net tuition of 25,000, this results in $5M of annual revenue, which of course could support faculty raises or other programs. Even 25 more students per year would be a help.
Perhaps, the biggest takeaway is that President Padilla has not established a great enough sense of urgency for change in the first part of his presidency, at least outside of the Board of Directors who have supported him thus far. That may have had its own downside(s) such as some students or faculty being worried about the future of the university much earlier.
I can report some good news and an example of cooperation in the art situation. Until now, the Brauer Museum could not reopen without a curator to care for the artworks and other infrastructure, and the administration was unable to find a qualified individual to serve part-time, especially after the conditions surrounding Director Canning's firing. However, in a kind-hearted spirit of compromise, former director Gregg Hertzlieb, whose terrible treatment by the administration upon dismissal has been detailed here in the past, has agreed to return and oversee the collection on a part-time basis for the university, though as a "curator," not as "director." Gregg is beloved by members of the faculty and his release was a bitter pill to swallow. He will be welcomed back even in this lesser position.
The university has placed curious limits on Hertzlieb's activity. Although he was an excellent spokesperson and ideal representative for the museum, he now will be limited to behind the scenes storage, care, and documentation of works; he will not be permitted any public-facing role. Obviously, this prohibition is to quiet any objections he might have, since Gregg still vehemently opposes the art sale and is a strong ally of Richard Brauer. It will be interesting to see if any of this changes and Gregg remains silent should the paintings be sold and Brauer insist his name be removed from the museum. But Gregg should be commended for his good character as he places his love of art, his willingness to care for the collection, and his desire to have the galleries open above all else.
The current exhibit in the museum is one of its finest, America the Beautiful—Impressionism at the Brauer Museum of Art, which was the last curated by Director Canning. The open time of the museum will be confined to four hours each weekday, and unfortunately there are no more formal programming or docent tours available.
I was not surprised by the Board's statement of support for Pres. Padilla. I do not believe they had another option. If they expressed agreement with the faculty, Padilla would need to resign immediately. Notably, the Board's statement was generic and did not dispute or even address any of the issues raised by the faculty. Since the faculty vote was "overwhelming," as described in news reports, with 84% of those who did not abstain (131-26) voting "no confidence," and given the ongoing contentious relationship between Padilla and the faculty, highlighted by media coverage, one might think an eventual Padilla exit is not out of the question unless conditions change dramatically in the future. In fact, the Chicago Tribune article below pointedly makes a comparison to the "no-confidence" faculty vote at Purdue Northwest in December 2022 for their Chancellor with almost identical numbers (135-20). He left about a year later.
Sean McKinniss, a scholar who has extensively studied votes of no confidence in higher education, has highlighted that while not all such votes lead directly to the president’s removal, they frequently destabilize leadership and often result in a president’s departure within a year. He suggests that when presidents survive a no-confidence vote, they typically need to engage in significant relationship repair with faculty and often pledge to address their concerns. However, persistent issues like budget constraints and declining enrollment can make meaningful change challenging, regardless of leadership adjustments.
Professors at different levels are paid a whopping 22% below the norm with comparable universities. Based on compensation, which is the top criteria compared to fluffy other factors, I would be pissed off at the university as a professor, with the griping regarding the art sale and reduced majors as either secondary or moot. If faculty salaries were around 10% below norm with considering the current economic situation at Valpo, I can see this acceptable and faculty needs to bite the bullet. But 22%. That’s a bigger issue.
I like the idea of using the art sale for a dorm renovation and salary boost combination if that is feasible.
The division between the Board and Faculty couldn’t come at a worse moment and I’m sure is impacting both the student and alumni experience. We need more and happy students. The perceived student experience is keeping some students away. One feedback is that our dorms are not up to par, especially for a three year requirement. We need capital to change the student experience to the positive, including curriculum for the future. Padilla and the school haven’t been fundraising, but in this uncertain alumni experience, who is willing to donate into a school that may not be there in 10 years.
We need more applications. Especially from students who will excel with a Valpo education.
I’m pulling for the current administration to right this ship. I hope they can include the faculty the process of getting more and quality students.
