PRESS COVERAGE

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" colspan=2 height=90 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000" background="043a45a3.jpg"> <div> <FONT SIZE="5" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" ><B>Massachusetts Society of Professors</B></FONT><B>    </B><B> |     </B><A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Massachusetts Society of Professors"><U><B>home</B></U></A></div> <div>                                                   </div> <div> </div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" width=210 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000" background="044d2b03.jpg"> <div> <IMG SRC="09464640.gif" border=0 width="100" height="100" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> <bR> <bR> <bR> </td> <td valign="top" height=390 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <I>PRESS COVERAGE</I></div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="#romney_s_ax_at_umass__" TITLE="PRESS COVERAGE"><U><B>ROMNEY'S AX AT UMASS</B></U></A></div> <div> Boston Globe Editorial (2-28-05)</div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="#umass_status_will_grow_when_it_boosts" TITLE="PRESS COVERAGE"><U><B>UMASS STATUS WILL GROW WHEN IT BOOSTS FACULTY</B></U></A></div> <div> Springfield Republican Editorial (2-27-05)</div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="#facing_a_chasm_in_higher_ed" TITLE="PRESS COVERAGE"><U><B>FACING A CHASM IN HIGHER ED</B></U></A></div> <div> Boston Globe Article By:  Derrick Z. Jackson (3-4-05)</div> <bR> <div> <A HREF="#full_time_faculty_cuts_reverberate_at" TITLE="PRESS COVERAGE"><U><B>FULL-TIME FACULTY CUTS REVERBERATE AT UMASS</B></U></A></div> <div> Boston Globe Front Page (2-22-05)</div> <bR> <bR> <div> <B> <A NAME="romney_s_ax_at_umass__"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A></B><FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#0033CC" FACE="Arial" ><B>ROMNEY'S AX AT UMASS</B></FONT></div> <div> Boston Globe Editorial ~ February 28, 2005  <FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" > </FONT></div> <bR> <div> AT STRONG colleges and universities a potent chemistry of passion, knowledge, and good teaching transforms classrooms, creating academic and eventually economic prosperity. For this, a vibrant faculty is fundamental. But in Massachusetts, the ranks of faculty members on public campuses are being eroded. Their pay has been stagnant. And their numbers have declined. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst has lost nearly 200 full-time faculty over 10 years.</div> <bR> <div> To save money, the university has added more part-time teachers. They help carry the teaching load, but they cannot create stability. And because part-time teachers are typically not on a tenure track, they face pressure to find jobs with more-secure futures.</div> <bR> <div> Last week Governor Romney made a grim picture grimmer by vetoing more than $30 million that would have raised the salaries of the state's higher education faculty and staff. Although the raises had been negotiated in collective bargaining, the governor argues that faculty should live with the same belt-tightening as other state programs.</div> <bR> <div> Troubling budget cuts on public campuses are a problem across the country.</div> <bR> <div> ''Nationally, state appropriations for higher education in fiscal 2004 declined by 2.1 percent, the first such decline in 11 years. This cut followed a year in which state appropriations for higher education rose by only 1.2 percent," says a report from the American Association of University Professors.</div> <bR> <div> In this bleak environment, students scramble to find the courses they need. Professors scramble to find working copy machines or use aging computers that repeatedly crash under the strain of running new software. The effect on salaries has been harsh.</div> <bR> <div> ''The average salary of full professors at public doctoral universities is now only 77.4 percent of the average salary of full professors at private doctoral institutions. This percentage is the lowest since the AAUP started archiving its salary data in the late 1970s," according to the AAUP report.</div> <bR> <div> This paves the way for private colleges to poach faculty from public schools, a trend reported last fall by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Romney has proposed giving more money to faculty who get competing offers. But such a star system could create a perverse incentive for faculty to pursue other jobs, and it could set up a two-tier salary structure that dampens morale. The better solution is to keep salary levels current.</div> <bR> <div> State revenues are creeping upward, creating opportunities to increase faculty pay and hiring. This can't happen too soon. In counting the state's assets, it's easy to focus on roads and revenue. But -- especially in Massachusetts's knowledge-based economy -- great wealth also lies in the state's faculty members.</div> <bR> <bR> <div> <B> <A NAME="umass_status_will_grow_when_it_boosts"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A></B><FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#0033CC" FACE="Arial" ><B>UMASS STATUS WILL GROW WHEN IT BOOSTS FACULTY</B></FONT></div> <div> Springfield Republican Editorial ~ February 27, 2005</div> <bR> <div> Imagine a university where students are unable to graduate in four years because a faculty shortage shuts them out of courses and limits their ability to find academic mentors. It's fair to say that an institution with these kinds of problems wouldn't rate among the top universities in the nation. </div> <bR> <div> That's the situation facing the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where a serious faculty shortage has put a crimp in its quest to position itself in the same pantheon as the universities of Michigan, Florida and Wisconsin. </div> <div> The university's ambitions have been dealt some serious blows over the past few years due to the state's budget crisis, but now that the economy is looking a bit brighter, it's time to invest in its future. </div> <bR> <div> We hope the Legislature reads the new report commissioned by the Massachusetts Society of Professors outlining the need for additional full-time faculty at the UMass' flagship campus in Amherst. It makes a good case for adding more faculty. And with UMass fees on the rise, students deserve to get their money's worth in the form of faculty time and attention. </div> <bR> <div> According to the report summary, in 1990, there were 1,133 faculty at UMass-Amherst who either had attained tenure or were scheduled to attain it, compared to 865 in 2004. While UMass has begun to address the problem by hiring 69 new tenure-track faculty this year, more hires are needed. </div> <bR> <div> Max Page, treasurer of the union, said the Amherst campus hasn't made a dent in the problem. "The core of a research university has always been tenure-track faculty. It's an issue that everyone recognizes, but we have not seen a real plan of action in reversing this trend," he said. </div> <bR> <div> State Sen. Stan Rosenberg, D-Amherst, co-chairman of the Senate Task Force on Higher Education, understands the importance of supporting new faculty. "When you don't have enough professors in place, you are compromising the quality of education and the quality of the contribution the university and public colleges make to the commonwealth's economy," Rosenberg said. </div> <bR> <div> In the meantime, it's important to keep up campus morale. Gov. W. Mitt Romney didn't send an appreciative message last week when, for the second time in five months, he vetoed $29.9 million in retroactive pay raises for employees of state university and colleges. It's time to send a better message.</div> <bR> <bR> <div>  <A NAME="facing_a_chasm_in_higher_ed"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A><FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#0033CC" FACE="Arial" ><B>FACING A CHASM IN HIGHER ED</B></FONT></div> <div> Boston Globe Article By:  Derrick Z. Jackson ~ March 4, 2005</div> <bR> <div> MASSACHUSETTS Governor Mitt Romney vetoed nearly $33 million in raises for faculty at the state's public universities and community colleges. The governor who tells us education is a civil right in K through 12 is the same one who accords public higher education professors all the dignity of a discount rack at his former signature company, Staples.</div> <bR> <div> UMass-Amherst has already gone through two decades of slow but dramatic erosion, with a drop in permanent faculty from 1,215 in the mid 1980s to 865 today. The ratio of students to permanent faculty has jumped from 19-1 to 24-1. Similarly, UMass-Boston has lost 15 percent of its full-time faculty in the last decade. At UMass-Boston, part-time teachers outnumber full-timers, and at UMass-Amherst, part-timers, according to the teachers union, teach 40 percent of classes.</div> <bR> <div> Then you have Brown University, one of the Ivy League schools. It just announced a budget increase of 8.2 percent, a 5.5 percent salary rise for faculty, and a 9 percent rise in the number of faculty. While UMass-Amherst has become legendary in higher ed circles for budget cuts to its libraries, Brown is increasing library funding by 5.3 percent. At Brown there are 628 regular faculty for its 7,595 undergraduate and graduate students -- a student-professor ratio of 12-1. That is half of the ratio of UMass-Amherst.</div> <bR> <div> A similar chasm is visible in student aid. In the past five years, Massachusetts has slashed financial aid by 22 percent. To partially compensate for a 4.9 percent rise in tuition, Brown is proposing a 9 percent rise in student aid. As Brown increases aid, the number of students who receive Massachusetts grants for college has fallen from about 32,000 to under 27,000.</div> <bR> <div> The basic notion that an Ivy League college has more resources than UMass is no news. What should be deeply disturbing about this latest juxtaposition is that it demonstrates how the richest nation in the world is plunging even more deeply into an impermeable two-tiered society of higher ed. Eighty percent of the nation's 14 million undergraduate college students go to public colleges. We already have a system where desperate parents flood the most desirable private and public colleges with applications.</div> <bR> <div> We are starving the public colleges at a time when only 3 percent of the enrollment in the nation's most selective colleges comes from the bottom 25 percent in family income. We are sending the clear message that public colleges are grimy places for rejects.</div> <bR> <div> A quarter-century ago, according to the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, the average professor at a public university earned 91 percent the salary of a professor at a private college. Today the average public college faculty member makes only 77 percent the money of a private university faculty member. No relief is coming from the Bush administration, which is cutting higher ed to fund the war and to give tax cuts to the wealthy.</div> <bR> <div> Business Week has reported how the funding priorities of federal and state governments have forced public colleges into a chancellors-in-the-barrel mentality of flagship schools desperately lunging for privatization schemes to stay attractive while the nonflagship schools are left to compete for even less resources. While public schools get government cuts, private schools tap into endowments and gifts from the wealthy. Out of the $24 billion donated to the nation's 3,000 colleges in 2003, just 20 institutions controlled $6.2 billion of the money. The leader was, not surprisingly, Harvard, which has a $22 billion endowment.</div> <bR> <div> Harvard, Business Week pointed out, received the equivalent of $28,300 per student in donations compared to $36 per student at Palm Beach Community College in Florida. The Rand Corporation's Council for Aid to Education said that in general, ''voluntary support is not likely to offset declines in other funding sources." David Breneman, an education scholar at the University of Virginia, told The Chronicle of Higher Education, ''The most serious public policy issue involves the 90 percent or more of students and institutions that are not part of the meritocracy. Only when higher education is available to the bulk of potential students can we say that our system is strong."</div> <bR> <div> Rand and Breneman say this even as the system weakens into permanent stratification with declines in public funding sources. Brown gives faculty a raise and increases their numbers. Romney, with his Harvard law and business degrees, treats public college faculty in Massachusetts like another box of printer paper at Staples. We are rapidly heading to a day where the worth of a public college education is the price of that box.</div> <div> <I>Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.</I></div> <bR> <bR> <div> <B> <A NAME="full_time_faculty_cuts_reverberate_at"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A></B><FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#0033CC" FACE="Arial" ><B>FULL-TIME FACULTY CUTS REVERBERATE AT UMASS</B></FONT></div> <div> Boston Globe Front Page Article By:  Jenna Russell ~ February 22, 2005</div> <bR> <div> When Jill Ogline enrolled in graduate school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the fall of 2001, the history department offered a small but solid core of modern American scholars. She looked forward to close, lasting relationships with the professors who would teach her classes and guide her research. One day, she imagined, they would write her recommendations.</div> <bR> <div>  Three and a half years later, Ogline's education is lonelier than she expected. Three of the four professors in her research area have left the university, and the fourth became department chairman, limiting his teaching role. A temporary professor filled in for a year, but later left UMass to seek a permanent job.</div> <bR> <div> Forced to move ahead without a steady mentor, Ogline has completed a dozen graduate courses. Fully half have been independent studies, undertaken on her own, with limited oversight often provided by professors outside her department.</div> <bR> <div> "There just aren't enough faculty to teach the courses students need," she said.</div> <bR> <div> The decline in permanent, full-time professors at UMass-Amherst, accompanied by increased numbers of temporary and part-time teachers, echoes a national trend on college campuses. Nationwide, the number of full-time, temporary faculty grew by one-third from 1998 to 2001, and almost half of all college faculty are now part-time or "contingent" teachers, according to the American Association of University Professors.</div> <bR> <div> A cost-saving measure temporary professors earn lower pay, work year to year, and often shuttle between campuses the hiring shift has been widely criticized for diminishing research and stu dent-teacher interaction while creating an academic underclass with no office hours, benefits, or job security.</div> <bR> <div> "It's changing the nature of higher education, because the faculty member isn't there [after class] to talk to you," said Jamie Horwitz, a spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers, a union representing 130,000 professors, college staff members, and graduate student employees. "A lot of what people learn in college is in informal conversations with peers and teachers. So students are getting less, but no one's giving them a break on tuition."</div> <bR> <div> In Massachusetts, while enrollment has held steady at the state's flagship campus, it has lost almost 200 permanent, full-time professors in the last decade. This 19-percent decline in tenured and tenure-track faculty has damaged educational quality and threatens the university's reputation, according to faculty union leaders. Last week, they launched a campaign to educate the public about the changes, and challenged university trustees to join them.</div> <bR> <div> "We have to begin to recognize what's happening, and what it does to our ability to serve students," UMass-Amherst sociology professor Dan Clawson told trustees at their quarterly meeting last week.</div> <bR> <div> The president of the professors' union on campus, Clawson delivered copies of a new, 50-page report on the shrinking faculty to the Board of Trustees last Wednesday, and challenged board members to commit to rebuilding the faculty. "With you or without you, the faculty is going to keep pushing," he said. Professors made the same pitch at a State House press conference later that day.</div> <bR> <div> University leaders have spoken hopefully in recent months of a financial turnaround: After a three-year, $150 million reduction in state funding across the five-campus system, the budget is smaller but stable, and there are signs of gathering support for higher education in the Legislature.</div> <bR> <div> Among some UMass trustees and administrators, there is concern that the faculty's campaign will do more harm than good, by planting seeds of doubt about the university's quality, and alienating legislators who view the complaints as out-of-touch with fiscal reality. But UMass system President Jack Wilson and Amherst campus Chancellor John V. Lombardi both acknowledged last week that more permanent replacements are needed.</div> <bR> <div> "The last few years . . . we had to take actions we didn't want to take," Wilson said at the trustees' meeting. "The good news is, we're on our way back." Adding faculty is "one of the things we need to do," he said.</div> <bR> <div> Lombardi said hiring is hindered by the urgent need to repair aging buildings on campus a budget burden not shared by campuses in some other states, where upkeep is often covered by separate state appropriations. The chancellor's budget plan for next year includes $1.5 million to add 20 new full-time faculty positions and more than $30 million to repair and renovate buildings and pay down capital debts.</div> <bR> <div> "The truth is that to succeed in national competition, we have to have a larger faculty," Lombardi said. "At the time when we were more nationally competitive than we are now, we had 200 to 300 more professors."</div> <bR> <div> UMass-Amherst had 1,215 tenured and tenure-track professors and about 23,000 students in the mid-1980s, according to the union and the administration. The permanent faculty declined to 1,063 by 1995. This year, after budget cuts and two rounds of early retirement bonuses designed to shrink the state payroll, the school has 865 permanent faculty and 20,500 students. The pool of temporary teachers grew from 131 to 220 full-time equivalents in the last decade. When graduate students who teach classes are included, 30 percent of UMass teachers are temporary employees, and they provide 40 percent of all campus instruction, said union leaders.</div> <bR> <div> Shifts have been similar, if less drastic, at other UMass branches. The tenured and tenure-track faculty on the Dartmouth campus declined by just 10 positions, to 302 professors, in the last decade, a spokesman said.</div> <bR> <div> To cope with a 30-percent enrollment increase in the same period, the school doubled the number of full- and part-time teachers hired outside the tenure system, to the equivalent of about 130 full-time positions. At UMass-Boston, the tenure-system faculty shrank 15 percent in 10 years, to 368 professors, while the part-time teaching staff grew to 390 positions.</div> <bR> <div> As similar changes have been made across the country, raising concerns about quality, some states have studied campus hiring patterns, said Horwitz, and a few are trying to buck the trend. Three years ago, leaders of California's state university system drafted a plan to boost tenure-system hires from half to three-quarters of the faculty.</div> <bR> <div> Elsewhere, temporary teachers have formed unions to demand better conditions. Part-timers who teach several courses at the City University of New York now receive extra pay to hold office hours for students.</div> <bR> <div> UMass-Amherst students said the faculty decline has meant fewer course offerings and larger classes, less access to experienced advisers, and in some cases, delays in graduation.</div> <bR> <div> Studies have shown that students who develop relationships with professors are more likely to stay in school. Because the university's reputation rests on research and writing by its core faculty, the shifts also risk the school's national standing, said some professors.</div> <bR> <div> Pavel Payano, a junior from Lawrence, said he has learned to show up for large classes 15 minutes early "because if I didn't, I definitely wouldn't see the teacher."</div> <bR> <div> Elvis Mendez, a freshman from Framingham, said all four of his classes this semester have more than 200 students; he was unable to take a fifth course because every one he tried to sign up for was full. "I only know two professors by name," he said.</div> <bR> <div> For Ogline and other graduate students, the fundamental nature of their studies has been altered. Instead of debating ideas around a seminar table with classmates and over coffee with scholarly mentors, "you really grapple with the ideas yourself," she said. "It's not the same." If the decline continues, UMass will lose its luster for top graduate students, she said.</div> <bR> <div> As the students spoke last week in a State House hearing room, the handful of legislators listening included Senator Robert O'Leary, a Barnstable Democrat, former professor, and co-chairman of the Legislature's new Higher Education Committee. The committee, which will help determine future funding for public campuses, is considered evidence of lawmakers' heightened interest in higher education.</div> <bR> <div> "There's a tipping point at which an institution starts to lose the critical mass of full-time faculty that makes it a university experience," O'Leary told the assembled students and professors. "I think we moved the public [system] over that tipping point, and I think that's why we're here today."</div> </td> </tr></table></body>