UHPA contract comment: "Train Wreck"

This comment on one consequence of the proposed new faculty contract was offered up by a longtime faculty member at UH Manoa:

One very important effect of the recent salary offer has not publicly been considered by either the faculty or the administration. It is this.

UH expanded tremendously in the late 60ies and early 70ies. The community college system was created and implemented; the medical school was created, as were a number of graduate programs. Buildings were built and a lot of faculty were hired. These faculty, both in the community colleges and at Manoa, Hilo and West Oahu, are now on the brink of retirement.
Retirement benefits are based on the 3 highest years….the last 3 for the vast majority of us.

This means that in order to receive the full benefit of the proposed settlement, faculty cannot retire until 2011. For them –and there are a lot of them— this is an 8 year contract, and one that you have to stay in the system to get any real value from. Anyone retiring in the next 4 years will be retiring at a salary that has actually eroded from the present level, compared to mainland comparables. This statement is based on the AAUP compensation report (2002-2003) indicating that pay of continuing faculty, nationally, rose by an average of 4.65% per year over the two years just prior to that report (the latest one available). Since these were recession-like years, this should provide a very conservative baseline for projected increases, as the economy nationally is expected to grow. The proposed settlement comes nowhere near providing that level of increase, for at least 4 years.

So what is going to happen? My guess is that a lot of them (us?) are going to hang on, decrepit and increasingly disaffiliated from a system that is so unbelievably unresponsive to their legitimate needs. From the perspective of a faculty member who can’t afford to retire, this is obviously a disaster. From the perspective of the University system, it is equally disasterous. They won’t be able to get rid of a lot of old fogeys and replace them with new, young faculty whose starting salaries, at least, are somewhat lower. Even worse than the salary situation is that the University will be stuck with a substantial number of really old faculty who don’t want to be here; who feel that their working days should be over, and who resent the system for denying them a timely and minimally comfortable retirement. Who would care to bet how up-to-date these folks will be with reference to classes, or how many grant proposals they will write?

While the grant proposal problem is most acute at Manoa –and compounded by the denial in this settlement for the compression that makes Manoa senior faculty the most underpaid of all, relatively to comparables— the problem of an aging and unwillingly retained faculty hits everybody. Anyone who thinks that a 12-15 contact hours per week schedule is not stressful, or that it can be undertaken as easily by a 70+ year old as by someone younger, hasn’t been there. This proposed contract is a train wreck, a very, very slow one that will take 8 years or so to do its full damage.