Who Benefits from UNCG's Cash Hoard

We've all heard that things are tight, and it's true, but only because the money is being choked off. You know who isn't feeling the crunch? The private equity fund managers who are being compensated through performance fees to care for both the endowment and UNCG's $80 million hoard.

This saved money should, by no means, be spent down to 0 and obviously the endowment is tricky, but imagine if we had used that savings account to deal with the $12 million give back. Or to provide copy paper to the campus or to pay for employee parking or, well, any number of things that would have been better than keeping it on wall street for the profit of others at our expense.

I'd say the new chancellor's first task would be setting our financial house in order - and clearly. I love his commitment to fun, but it's hard to have fun in the wake of the Brady disaster and even more difficult when the wages you live on leave you struggling to make ends meet while still paying increased parking fees just for coming to work. Add to that the distinct feeling (and overwhelming evidence) that we're being lied to about the money and it moves from fun to funereal.

Maybe in this context it's a little easier to understand the bad taste we get when we hear that the chancellor only flies business class, rides to country clubs in a shelby cobra, needs a new butler, and has gotten a fat pay increase over his disastrous predecessor. As the 'needs' at the top get bigger, the money gets diverted from below.

The NY Times has recently addressed a portion of this hoarding - using the example of Yale, but instructive for us as well. It raises questions.

Gilliam will either address them or allow himself to be bought, the choice is still his.

The Fight for a Living Wage

Across the country today, workers are joining the struggle for a living wage.

Why we seem so thoroughly convinced that universities shouldn’t get money from the state and yet seem perfectly content to let those same dollars subsidize the externalized costs of big companies is something tragic.

In any case, the reason I bring this up is because UNCG participates in this shameful low wage cabal. What I mean is that we aren’t all poor struggling to get by, UNCG just has some employees that it pays a pittance to and some who get fat raises at the same time.

For example, Tim Crews who has worked for UNCG for 19 years is employed full time for $10 an hour. If minimum wage had kept up with cost of living increases it would now be $18 an hour. So, we pay him only slightly more than half of what the absolute bare minimum pay should be.

After 25 years of loyal performance, Alice Courts only makes $23,762 a year. And she’s on the list of essential employees who must come to work at UNCG even when hazardous weather causes others to stay at home and the university to close.

Imogene Cathey, however, pulls in a handsome $85 an hour.

Jan Zink rakes in $137 per hour.

And they get to stay home.

UNCG has more than 200 full time employees earning less than $15/hour. Adjunct pay is shameful too.

Nancy Maree has been willingly teaching our students in the nursing program for 12 years and in return? She get $1,000. That’s all a class is worth? That’s all her expertise and insight are worth?

And, of course, the enormous raises given to those who already make more than they deserve continue to roll in. The execs get bigger salaries while the rest of us have to deal with nothing or fight among ourselves for scraps.

We are the workers.

We are the people.

We can do better.

How Much is Too Much? A Quick Note About Raises at UNCG

I have been going back through UNCG salary data since 2008/2009 and looking at the raises that each individual has received who is still employed by UNCG.

Wait, let me correct that. Generally speaking, I have been looking at the raise (singular) that most people have received during that time. Rhetoric of financial crisis aside, I have already found something disturbing…and I’ve only made it from Z – R.

James Ryan received a $4,000 raise.

Okay, I know that’s not terribly shocking on the face of it. I mean, it’s certainly not the largest raise (I could refer to Mike Tarrant’s $25,000 but why bother since he is leaving - I'll certainly refer to Kim Record's raises, but that's an article in and of itself to be address later).

What is shocking about it is that James Ryan was already being paid $350,000 per year. Yes, he makes more than the chancellor. He is, in fact, the highest paid employee at UNCG. Now, I will grant that he has done less damage to UNCG than the chancellor and for that he should be rewarded, but the question it raised in my mind is this:

We have folks who have been working with us for 10, 20, 30, 35 years who are making $20,000 a year. The raises the folks in that range have been given generally amount to no more than $300. Spread that over 12 months and you are saying, before taxes, here’s another $25 for your dedication, don't spend it all in one place!

Many who received these meager sums are the ‘essential employees’ who haveto come to work even when the university is closed. These raises certainly don’t keep up with the cost of living and we should be embarrassed as a university, as a government entity, and as human beings to hand another $4,000 to a man making $350k in the face of the poverty wages being paid to other members of our UNCG community.

I hope that should I ever be in the position to earn $350,000 a year and someone were to offer me a $4,000 increase, I would have the decency to not only decline their offer but to shame them for having made it in the first place.

Opportunistic Greensboro Gives Community Service Award to Brady

I had to reread this story several times before I was able to overcome my firm belief that I must be misunderstanding it. However, and hold on to your barf bags, here is what was released in the Campus Weekly this morning:

“Chancellor Linda P. Brady and NC A&T Chancellor Harold Martin received the Thomas Z. Osborne Distinguished Citizen Award from the Greensboro Partnership at their annual dinner. The award is presented to a citizen who has demonstrated extraordinary service and achievement within the community; it is the highest honor given by the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce and is presented jointly with Duke Energy. Brady and Martin were recognized for not only the significant work done at their respective universities, but also for the unprecedented level of teamwork and collaboration that they have exhibited in working to make projects such as the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering, Opportunity Greensboro, and the Union Square Campus a reality.”

Apparently, Opportunity Greensboro members hold the mistaken belief that Brady has “demonstrated extraordinary service and achievement within the community.”

I am having a very hard time imagining where that idea came from.

First though, let me clarify, while the award could be, in theory, given to any citizen, it just so happens that this time the citizens who ‘deserved’ it were both members of the Opportunity Greensboro cabal.

I have no beef with Harold Martin, I don't know him or his work, but the mere idea that the words community service and Linda Brady could be put together in a sentence without a negative separating them makes my skin crawl.

Apparently, you can severely damage several communities and yet still receive an award for outstanding work if, and here’s the catch, you benefit in some way the people who are giving out the award. So that raises the question: which benefits are being given to whom in such a way that Brady’s work would seem meritorious?

Let’s take a look at this “significant work done at their respective universities.” During Brady’s administration:

• The Glenwood fiasco
• The Wreck Center and its fee hike
• The UNCG3 / Paul Mason
• The unnecessary $12 million give back
• Raises for the highly paid
• Shrinking student numbers
• Academic Program Review Circus
• Alienation of HES donors and alumni
• Forced reorganization (twice!)
• Multiple new upper administration positions
• Massive loss of employment
• Underperforming nano program
• Ever shrinking Union Campus Initiative
• Demonstrated racism in UNCG police
• Wood frame housing subject to fire at Spartan Village
• 85% of faculty experience morale as a significant problem on campus
• Culture of bullying rampant in administration
• Rise & Fall of Learning Communities
• Faculty flight
• Staff disappearance
• Enormous increases in health care premiums & co-pays
• Increased teaching loads
• Lost course sections
• Wrestling program dissolved
• UNCG Magazine abandoned
• #36 on list of Fastest Growing Sugar Baby Schools
• Fallen off list of best places to work
• Jan Zink's fundraising impotence
• Tragic branding campaign #dsba
• Greatly increased police presence at BOT meetings

I could go on. And on. And on.

Now put that up against the benefits of the nano school and union square campus:

• Union square already twice reduced in size
• Currently at 85,000 square feet that will cost $90 million to build (a popular number as the rec center cost $91 million)
• Meanwhile, 500,000 square feet of unused space at Gateway East and Gateway North
• Nanoschool has currently produced four PhD graduates in 4.5 years at an outlay of $700,000
• Unfortunately, the outlay for those who dropped out was about $2 million
• In other words, this is a program that produced 4.5 students at $971,000 per degree)
• The nanoscience program was supposed to enroll 110 students (and the nanoengineering a further 110)…in nanoscience they seem approximately 100 short - makes you wonder about the University's prediction of 320 for the Dr. of Nursing to be offered at the Union Campus
• The JSSN cost $65 million to build and equip (odd that the rec center should be so much more expensive…)

I’m still waiting for the benefits from either of those projects to become clear to me.

What is clear to me is that Randall Kaplan, who is a member of Opportunity Greensboro is also part of the founding group for Capital Facilities Foundation, the group that purchased the rec center land in Glenwood and made it available to the university.

Here is what Brady has really done that has earned her this award:

Turned the university into a mechanism for real estate development.

It is clear that a lot of university money is being pumped into real estate in and around Greensboro and that some people benefit directly from the sale of that real estate, some benefit from the property value increases, some benefit by skimming, some benefit through kick backs for construction contracts…and some benefit from lying through their teeth while rubbing elbows with the Greensboro elite.

What are we positioning for here? Who is benefiting from all of these projects? I guess it could be a coincidence that despite the lived experience of thousands of people which indicate that Brady has been nothing short of an unmitigated disaster, when that is placed by the side of hundreds of millions of dollars of student and taxpayer money being funneled into private hands that Opportunity Greensboro sees Brady as a hero, but I think not.

The poor bastards writing for Campus Weekly should be given hazard pay for having been made to handle this toxic material.

Latest Employee Paycut

I think we're just about scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of ways to suck money up to the top layer of fat at UNCG. A new policy has just been announced by the Chancellor's office regarding adverse winter weather. Really, you will find yourself in one of three tracks should the roads be covered with ice and visibility reduced to only slightly past the end of your own nose.

Track 1: You are an essential employee. You must come to work. No matter what. Plagues of locusts, sharknadoes, or the storm of the century. You are probably paid the least and therefore your safety is cheaper. Upper admin uses the Jedi mind trick of saying your are essential but not valuable.

Track 2: You are not an essential employee. At least not in the sense of needing to risk life and limb on the highway coming to work...if you are willing to buy your safety. For the low, low price of a vacation day or leave without pay, you can stay off of the ice covered roads just long enough to realize that the money you have lost means that even if you could go out and get milk, you wouldn't be able to afford it.

Track 3: You make a ridiculous amount of money for something that nobody really can define. You aren't essential, that much is clear. You are encouraged to keep yourself safe and warm by your fireplace, wrapped in your imported noro afghan and occasionally wondering aloud "how the other half lives." Should you find the tedium of being trapped inside drinking brandy begin to overcome you, you could always reorganize departments, fire employees, create new draconian 'money-saving' policies or simply kick someone smaller and weaker.

My suggestion?

 When there's black ice on the roads and snows are piling up, let the chancellor warm up her fancy car and risk her $324,000 salary to come in and cook and clean and patrol. And let the men and women who are among the most shamefully underpaid employees have those days as paid vacation. I think that seems more just, don't you?

Essential Employees at UNCG

The message sent out by the Chancellor’s office regarding winter weather was actually more interesting than I thought it would be. The reason for this is that it gives a list of ‘essential’ personnel. Those whose presence is absolutely required for the university’s live-in community to continue functioning. That got me thinking. If those people are essential, and I believe that they are, they should clearly be at the top of the pecking order on campus, right? They are singularly valuable and certainly we must be treating them as such, no?

If, for example, physical plant employees are considered essential, why is it that Margaret Coleman who has dedicated 12 years of her working life to that essential service making $23,837, Geraldine Coppedge after 14 years earns $24,049 and 17 years of hard work is only enough to earn Sarah Cottrell $25,718. This hardly seems the way to reward the people who are essential – the ones who are required to risk their safety even when conditions are considered too dangerous for the rest of the university employees to even attempt to come to work.

Who isn’t on the essential employee list?

The Chancellor’s Chief of Staff Bonita Brown, for example, is clearly not essential to the operation of the university. And yet, she earns $151,800 to stay at home if it gets icy outside.

I think we have seriously inverted the scale of worth here. Sure, it may be the trend across the country, but again, I’m not terribly interested in UNCG being a trend follower at a broken system when we could be a leader in something truly amazing. I also understand that not all value is reflected in money, however, in a place of employment there are two ways of conveying value: money and cultural capital (ie prestige) and we continue to assign these values incorrectly.

Assuming that the essential employees, those in physical plant, residence life, and safety are at the university closed or not, where else might we look for employees who are essential to the university when it is open?

It would clearly be incredibly difficult to run the university without any faculty. Although that would eliminate a troublesome sector for upper administration, they have not yet figured out how to get the money directly from the students without having to offer these ‘pesky’ classes.

In theory, students are here not only to learn but also here to earn their degrees, right? This would be impossible without the staff in the registrar’s office.

The gross inflation in the tuition caused by the Chancellor’s real estate development deals would be even more onerous (and in fact create an impossible burden) for a majority of our students if not for financial aid, making those workers essential to the functioning of the university when it is open.

Just as we have to maintain the upkeep of the physical plant at the university, the students’ human bodies require health services. It would be unacceptable to have 18,000 students enrolled and then leave them without access to health care – and this means both for their bodies and their minds (as the two cannot truly be separated in any case).

In other words, the circle of employees who are essential to the university continues to expand.

So, after we have students who can register, take classes, graduate, and be healthy through the experience, what else?

It would turn our university into a transparent joke if we were, for example, to eliminate the library. There isn’t even any need to waste my breath arguing for the value of the libraries, right? Surely, that’s a given. I mean, I would imagine the funding for the university libraries far exceeds that granted to something as extra-curricular as, let’s say, athletics, yes? I can only imagine a student who graduates going to a job interview and saying that they couldn’t access the latest research in their field but they sure could go the basketball games and not being laughed out of the job market.

We live in the 21^st century and while the role and applications of technology are continually changing and subject to philosophical debate, fluency in current technologies is a requirement for interacting with the world today. So my guess is we would be hard pressed to run a university without experts in information technologies.

So, the list gets longer and yet, it still doesn’t include anything indicating that it is essential to pay Kim Record $177,000 a year to direct intercollegiate athletics. In fact, quite the opposite.

We have made a fundamental error. It’s not the number on the salary so much as it is the message conveyed:

Is Kim Record worth 7.5 housekeeping employees? I sincerely doubt it. When it snows and the university closes, nobody in their right mind believes that without Record there will be a crisis. She is dispensable. She is what we pay for after we have paid for everything else and we have money to burn. Until every employee at this university makes a living wage and is rewarded for their dedicated service, the Chancellor should be ashamed of counting herself worthy of 15 employees who are required to drive over ice to make sure that our students survive even under adverse weather conditions.

And, of course, Paul Mason has proved himself to not only be not essential but actively dangerous and yet he remains, along with the burden of his salary.

Maybe those in upper administration should take a note from the president of Uruguay, José Mujica Cordano who donates approximately 90% of his monthly salary to charities and small entrepreneurs. Imagine if the Chancellor were to willingly accept a mere $112,000 (a 50% pay cut) and donate $10,000 to 11 members of the essential staff. That would increase their salary by a third and bring them above the poverty line for a family of four. 

Wouldn’t that truly be ‘doing something bigger all together’?