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 21st 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’?
