As most everyone on campus knows, the Oregon football team finished the season ranked second in the nation and winners of the Pacific-10 Conference title. Less well known is how the University of Oregon ranks in terms of education; the University does not appear near the top of many United States college and university rankings. The disparity between these rankings is not a coincidence, but reflects the level of commitment the University gives to these two programs.
It is well established that gridiron success did not happen overnight, but is the result of millions of dollars of investment in facilities and dedication to fielding the best team possible. I am certainly not one to question this investment and dedication (New Year’s Day found me in a Tempe, Ariz., end zone cheering on my beloved Ducks), but I do believe that it is time the University made the same commitment to academics that it has made to athletics.
One of the ways the University can show its dedication to academics is by making an investment in academic infrastructure similar to the one made for athletics. On a college campus, those who do the work of educating students, faculty and graduate students make up the academic infrastructure. Just as the University had to spend money build a quality football team, it must spend money to build a quality academic program.
The Emerald reported in an Oct. 5 story that tenure-track instructors at the University earn 85.7 percent of what their colleagues at comparator schools earn. The University has made a paper commitment to raising faculty salaries, but so far little has been done to honor this agreement. The situation has gotten bad enough that University has had to resort to trumpeting the fact that faculty salaries have not fallen farther behind their comparators in the last
few years.
As worrisome as faculty salaries are, the situation for Graduate Teaching Fellows is much worse. Comparing GTF salaries at the University to salaries at the same comparator universities, Oregon’s GTFs ranked sixth out of eight. The University of North Dakota Study on Graduate Assistant Stipends on graduate employee salaries at 41 universities nationwide revealed that Oregon’s GTFs take home only 66 percent as much as their colleagues. The University’s own 1999 Process for Change Report concluded that an “increase of total (GTF) package by an average of 33 percent would make us competitive but not fat.”
With GTF salaries, the University does not have the luxury of arguing that at least we’re not falling further behind — we are. The North Dakota study reveled that salaries for graduate employees increased by an average of 14.12 percent over the last four years, but Oregon’s salaries have increased only 3.2 percent.
Salaries for instructors at the University of Oregon consistently rank toward the bottom of the Pac-10 and in the middle nationally — just as our football team used to. The University built and bought its way out of this situation athletically; it can and should do the same academically.
David Cecil is a graduate teaching fellow
in the history department.