Over the past three months, we have been subjected to an unrelenting campaign to inform us of the sorry state of the University's finances. The most evident measures for cost-cutting we have seen are the voluntary workload reduction and early retirement schemes initiated last year and reintroduced at the end of February.
The early retirement scheme, particularly as it applies to faculty, raises a number of issues that lead me to wonder whether it provides a suitable approach to cost saving. These include:
1) The scheme pays 15 months' salary to all faculty who qualify. Since salaries continue to increase each year, the payout is greatest for people closest to retirement, where the potential savings are smallest. Am I missing something here?
2) The financial incentive for faculty really only kicks in if you're over 60. The faculty I know who took up the offer were between 61 and 63. If you allow for the payout of 1.25 times the annual salary, the potential savings to the University are small. We then need to add up the additional costs of financing the payouts, the costs of any sessional faculty hired to teach courses the retired faculty would have taught, and the administrative costs for chairs, deans and Human Resources personnel in selecting the applicants who qualified. Finally, if you factor in the likelihood that a number of the 37 faculty who took up the retirement offer in the first round would have retired before 65 (and I know several to whom this applies), then it is quite possible that the scheme results in a net loss to the University.
3) One result of the scheme is that it produces two classes of retirees. If you were 64 last year, you don't qualify for either package and you retire this year with your pension and nothing else. If you were 63 last year, you qualified and received a package on the order of $150,000. Nice if you can get it, but if you don't, it can leave you feeling a bit unhappy at the end of your career.
4) A final issue concerns a lack of consultation and transparency with the implementation of the scheme. My understanding is that neither the U of G Faculty Association nor the unions representing support staff were consulted about the introduction of the retirement package. The actual criteria and process by which faculty were chosen were never spelled out in detail, and they appear to have varied from one college to another. It thus makes it difficult to assess whether faculty who applied for the package and were turned down were indeed treated fairly.
I think most faculty and staff appreciate that these are not the best of times financially and are willing to listen to appeals to work together to help solve the crisis. But collaboration involves sharing information and some of the decision-making and generating an atmosphere of trust about the decisions being made.
Prof. Robin Davidson-Arnott, Department of Geography
Bryce Kohlmeier, Robin Begin and I would like to thank all those who generously contributed to our “Crop a Cop” fundraiser for the tsunami disaster. We raised more than $3,200.
Special thanks to president Alastair Summerlee, vice-president (finance and administration) Nancy Sullivan, associate vice-president (student affairs) Brenda Whiteside and the staff of Trendz Hair Design for their participation. Thanks also to At Guelph for its coverage.
Jim Armstrong, Campus Community Police
