Wednesday, February 04, 2009

UNM faculty lack "standing" in complaint.

UNM Regents President Jamie Koch, in response to
a proposed vote of (no)confidence petition being circulated by
UNM faculty members, pointed to an article in the
Princeton Review,
which ranked UNM number one in
"inaccessible professors".

Apparently, UNM faculty are expected to lower the ranking
before they earn the privilege of voting no confidence

in an administration that spends so much money on
administrative salaries, that there is little left to hire the
professors who could be meeting with students. link

Faculty will not be allowed to complain about under staffing
until they have remedied the effects of being understaffed.

Kind of a Catch 22. wikilink

Ya gotta love it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Of course UNM instructors are not easily accessible. Why?
1) way too many undergraduate students have teaching assistants as teachers and never see the real faculty.
2) Only about 1/3 of the faculty are full-time UNM instructors. The rest are part time / adjunct.
3) There's constant sabbaticals, or out-of-state conferences, or administrative meetings for full time faculty.
Of course they are inaccessable...the system at UNM is built that way!

Anonymous said...

As an assistant professor @ UNM, I find all of Koch's claims about the faculty beyond stupid. He is an outright liar.

1) I can't tell you how often I've twiddled my thumbs during office hours with no students coming to see me, or even setting up appointments outside those regular office hours. The study Koch cites is fundamentally flawed - at least in my experience.

2) Koch claimed that the average faculty salary @ UNM is $94,000. He later openly stated that he had purposefully misrepresented that figure. I make $46K and change. If you don't include the salaries of Med School and Athletics "faculty" then the average is much lower - in the $55K to $65K range for main campus faculty - which is over 11% lower than any even tho lowest of our peer institutions. President Schmidly, whose hiring was overseen by Koch, makes about $500K a year (one of the highest presidential salaries among our peer institutions), and the newly hired football coach will make $700K (and were not even a BCS School or in a BCS Conference!). All the while, Faculty have seen pay freezes and academic departments have seen their budgets gutted as a direct result of Schmidly's and David Harris's criminal mismanagement of UNM's budget.