Remarks to the OUS Board of Higher Education

Mina Carson

4 May 2007

When I returned from the grocery store last night, thinking about what I would say to you today, I glanced at the back of my receipt where they put all those cool, custom-chosen coupons, and I read, "Don't sell yourself short. If you are underpaidÉact today." The panel went on to say "Outside sales experience necessary," and I moved on.

I'm not sure what product combination led the computer to conclude that I am underpaid. I pride myself on eating and drinking well, if not hugely. It might have been the yogurt: 20 for $3. Now, that's a deal.

Last month I spoke to you about salary compression. This month I want to return to my historical theme, courtesy of Peter Gilkey, my distinguished U of O colleague down the road and former IFS president. He not only preserves the U of O Senate records - which date back to the mid-1880s -- , he transcribes them, bit by bit, and converts them to PDF files, so that the glorious and sorry moments of official faculty history are recorded for posterity. And this is a rich legacy. For a historian, these records are thrilling. It is so very cool to see the reflections of the faculty on student military training during World War I, and how best to devote university resources to the cause, and then later how to memorialize the fallen. The most striking wartime recommendation was to plant the golf course with potatoes. The faculty grappled with other national issues, passing a resolution endorsing the erection of the National Archives in Washington in 1922, and in 1925 entertaining a motion to register the faculty's attitude toward U.S. participation in a World Court - which motion was quashed by the Senate President, who deemed it beyond the scope of the faculty as an official body. (I have sat in on such debates at OSU in recent years.)

The faculty senate records inevitably reflect the cultural concerns of the period, and it is wonderful to watch those concerns come and go like freeway traffic. Back in the teens, courses in "practical ethics" and in hygiene were both established for freshmen women; there is no mention of similar courses for men in the Senate minutes.

Professor Gilkey has sent IFS members vignettes of the records as he has worked on them. Many of these have to do with the faculty's endless grappling with the place of athletics in the university. They abolished training tables - then allowed the football team a two-week trip to Hawaii. They vindictively voted to fail any student caught at an unauthorized post-game celebration during class hours. They established standards for the coaching staff, including a college degree and sound moral character. Et cetera.

My favorite vignette from the faculty senate is intriguingly ambiguous; in 1910 "the faculty respectfully petition[ed] the Portland, Eugene, and Eastern Street railway company to take off the flat-wheeled car that runs on east 13th street." Was it too noisy? Too dirty? As a result of this entry I've learned that flat-wheeled cars were in fact a standard type of railway car and not a thumping aberration.

And you can guess the other issue that pops up like blight in that golf course potato field: salaries. What is so shocking, and a little discouraging, is that the terms of the faculty's struggle for a competitive wage were set before the turn of the century. The faculty has been in a position of supplication and bargaining for over a hundred years. Here is a note from June 4, 1887: "To the honorable board of regents. Gentlemen. During the year 1877-78, the University was in a very unsatisfactory condition financially and the faculty voluntarily recommended to the Ex. Com. and to other members of the Board residing in Eugene City that their salaries be reduced twenty per cent to relieve the financial stress [with] which the Institution was at that time struggling. The recommendation of the Faculty was adopted at the next annual meeting of that Hon. Body. The members of the faculty at the same time received assurance that the salaries would be restored when the finances would warrant [sic] the same. The present faculty feeling that the salaries are too low and that the finances are in a favorable situation very strongly petition your Hon. Body as a matter of justice and to restore the salaries to the standard fixed by and adopted by the Regents at the time of the organization of the Universities, these salaries to begin July 1 1887." In September they renewed this request. [28 September 1887. The faculty "beg leave respectfully to invite your attention to their petition for increase of salary and they would ask that you grant it at the meeting."]

After the establishment of initiative and referendum in 1902, Oregon faculties found themselves facing a new and often hostile force: the voting public. In 1911 a referendum was held questioning the state appropriation for the University of Oregon. The faculty passed two measures relating to that referendum: one was a request to "the Board of Regents, through the President of the University, that any retrenchment deemed necessary shall not be made at the expense of the present instructional force of the University." The other was broader and more prescient: it suggested that a committee be established to generate favorable publicity for the public universities as a response to "the plight in which institutions of higher education in Oregon now stand" thanks to "a system of direct legislation so easily set in motion as the Oregon system." World War I saw another dip in the purchasing power of Oregon faculty salaries - a dip remedied several years later in many other universities and in the state's public school systems, but not at all promptly for University of Oregon professors. I've made a note to myself to further research the 1913 proposition to consolidate the University and the Oregon Agricultural College. My guess is that this notion was not popular among U. of O. faculty. There's a wonderful note in 1919 that faculty are asked to contribute 1/1000 of their salary for the entertainment of state legislators. Of course I have to admit that today, our salaries are high enough, and ethics codes stiff enough, that personal gifts to legislators at that level would be prohibited by law. Progress!