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Glenn Cook
The luxury of being a tenured university professor
In the case for tenure reform, former UNLV professor Martha Watson is Exhibit A.
Watson was among the 48 tenured UNLV professors who accepted buyouts in exchange for their resignations this summer. All received a lump sum equal to 1.5 times their base salaries. The voluntary separations cost taxpayers a total of $7.4 million with the promise of payroll savings years down the road.
Watson's take was a whopping $229,960.50 -- the university's third-biggest severance payout -- even though she hadn't collected a dime of her $153,307 base salary in two years and hadn't taught a class in at least three years.
That's right, you paid almost a quarter-million dollars to make an unproductive academic on extended unpaid leave go away for good.
Watson had served as dean of UNLV's Greenspun College of Urban Affairs until she agreed to return to a communication studies faculty position effective July 1, 2008.
Such demotions rarely occur without some sort of outside pressure, so Nevada's university system makes sure anyone who steps down gets a soft landing. Administrators typically get a one-semester or one-year break from the classroom to change gears and, ahem, restart their research. So Watson got a fully paid, one-year reprieve from the burdens of teaching through June 30, 2009 -- at what amounted to a dean's salary.
But rather than return to the classroom for the 2009-10 school year, Watson decided to leave the university.
In the private sector, that would entail resigning. But being a tenured university professor provides alternatives. On July 1, 2009, Watson began an unpaid leave of absence that was still in effect when the university announced its buyout offers this spring, UNLV spokeswoman Afsha Bawany said.
Nevada System of Higher Education policy dictates that unpaid leaves of absence be granted to faculty for up to 12 months if it benefits the system -- such as "research work, advanced study, related consultation, teacher exchange and governmental service" -- or if the reason is "deemed appropriate by the president."
Perhaps Watson's unpaid leave benefitted UNLV solely because it temporarily dropped her salary from the books.
The reasons for Watson's leave of absence "are part of the employee's confidential personnel file and are therefore not public records," Bawany wrote in an e-mail, citing the opinion of the higher education system's chief counsel.
I asked Watson herself to explain why she needed two years of unpaid leave and whether she ever intended to return to UNLV in a productive, full-time capacity. "You have spoken with University counsel who has provided an answer to your question," Watson responded in an e-mail.
Something tells me Watson's leave didn't involve research or advanced study.
It's safe to assume that UNLV realized no "benefit" from Watson's unpaid leave -- especially now that she has essentially received back pay for her time off.
Such gravy in the aftermath of the Great Recession is beyond the comprehension of any taxpaying schlep. UNLV has had to lay off an awful lot of wonderful instructors and cut the pay of others, to say nothing of the fiscal plight of support staff. But handing an enormous check to someone like Watson might be the greatest morale killer of all.
Tenure is supposed to protect highly engaged, productive faculty from retribution, not let slackers earn a windfall for taking a long vacation.
It's time to blow up the tenure system and make professors at-will employees like the rest of us.
Oceguera follow-up
Democratic Assembly Speaker John Oceguera has an explanation for why he was paid so well by the North Las Vegas Fire Department during the 2011 legislative session: the payroll division screwed up.
Oceguera, a North Las Vegas assistant fire chief and announced candidate for Congress, collected roughly $70,000 in compensation from the city while also drawing his legislative pay during the session. After I reported the double dipping on June 26, Oceguera and his boss, North Las Vegas Fire Chief Al Gillespie, asserted that Oceguera's pay was totally above board. They released a copy of an undated, unsigned agreement between the men that stipulated Oceguera would work nine hours per week (largely by phone and computer) for the department while serving in Carson City, collect 18 hours of vacation and holiday pay per week and take nine hours of unpaid leave per week.
That agreement was not released to me when I requested North Las Vegas records regarding Oceguera's pay during the legislative session. Apparently, the North Las Vegas Finance Department didn't receive the agreement, either.
In July, the Nevada Policy Research Institute obtained Oceguera's detailed payroll records, and lo and behold, Oceguera actually was paid for 18 hours of work per week by the Fire Department while receiving nine hours of paid leave and nine hours of unpaid leave each week. Oceguera initially couldn't explain the discrepancy.
On Thursday, Steve Redlinger, a spokesman for Oceguera's campaign, said the city of North Las Vegas had found that the paycheck problem was caused by "reasons beyond the speaker's control." Redlinger provided a copy of a letter from North Las Vegas Payroll Supervisor Tina Geiger, dated July 26, saying 72 hours had been deducted from Oceguera's accrued paid time off and applied to pay periods in February and March to resolve the matter. Redlinger said that action made Oceguera's paychecks consistent with his agreement with Gillespie: nine hours of work, 18 hours of paid leave and nine hours of unpaid leave per week during the session.
North Las Vegas Acting City Attorney Jeffrey Barr did not return a Thursday phone message seeking comment.
All this proves why public employees shouldn't be allowed to serve in the Legislature in the first place, in defiance of the state constitution's separation of powers doctrine. It's too easy for someone to amass power that can easily be abused at the expense of taxpayers.
As Oceguera campaigns for Congress over the next over the nine to 14 months, he'll try to downplay his double dipping as an honest paperwork mistake and a partisan distortion. He'll try to have the public believe that he never looked at his North Las Vegas paychecks and never noticed that his vacation bank wasn't being appropriately depleted.
Do you go four months without looking at your paychecks? Are you oblivious to how much vacation time you have left in a given year? Me neither.
One thing is pretty clear about Oceguera's latest double-dipping controversy: Oceguera wouldn't have caught and corrected this "mistake" on his own -- it took some annoying questions from the Fourth Estate to make him do it.
Glenn Cook (gcook@reviewjournal.com) is a Review-Journal editorial writer.
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Like CEOs don't run a company into the ground and get their golden parchachute? Oh right, the corporate board (composed of other CEOs and corporate big wigs) is in charge of the bonus?
Sounds like a good deal though, who could take that kind of time off? Certainly not people on editorial boards of Newspapers?
Will Oceguera continue to "work" for the NLV FD even after elected to Congress?
Hey Harry Hater. That's okay. We hate you too!
Hey Glenn, where'd ya get your PhD? I hear it's real EASY to get one, just like getting tenure.
Sweet deal for them on both counts, bad deal for the slob of a taxpayer, like me!
My children attended the Engineering school here after attending an actual school of engineering at BYU...they found the much talked up UNLV engineering classes are lacking and dated...the faculty is not up to snuff either....sad after the Hughes money that was poured into that sorry institution....scrap it all...
The thing with Oceguera is that we already know that the firefighter's union/employees are not interested in hard work with a fair wage. You know that when Oceguera goes to Carson City he lobbies for additional inappropriate protections to firefighters' salaries and benefits.
Chandler_L-
And yet, despite having a lucrative tenure system, both schools are in the second tier- perhaps because the system is protecting a lot of sub-par professors?
Martha Watson's base salary while on leave was zero. One and one half times zero is still, zero!
Smarter officials would have used the words "last year's pay, but not to exceed the last year's base salary" to avoid such rip offs. During this buyout, they should also have specified that anyone who had been on leave for more than one year would be terminated as being unnecessary to the University, and started tenure revocation procedures.
All you Sheeple out there should understand where this Nancy Pelosi Socialist Dina Taxus is, and its all about power and money After her November loss, Dina Titus increased her staff’s salaries by 80% in the 4th quarter, handing out over $155,000 in bonuses on her way out. In January 2011, Titus returned to UNLV with a 6.5% pay increase to an annual salary of $107,575. In the spring 2011 semester, she is teaching only one class (an upper-level elective course for only 39 students), re-starting her research, and hosting a 30-minute weekly radio show on UNLV’s radio station while planning to run for office again in 2012. Titus continued to attend Democratic Party events, Planned Parenthood and union rallies, and other events which we know that her campaign had already begun, and then took a buyout of over $160,000 which you paid along with all the others..Haven't you Sheeple learned anything yet? She increased her net worth from a range in 2008 $330,048 to $1,255,000. 2009 her net worth range was $3,428,091 to $10,978,000. How much have you increased your net worth in one year?
Botox Berkley went from in 2004 a range of $2,752,539 to$8,751,510 to in 2009 a range of $6,593,038 to $20,654,033. Almost trippling her net worth in 5 years. Have you done that? HoHouse Harry has stayed pretty consistent over the years, his net worth in 2009 is a range of $3,062,056 to $6,707,000 which is still pretty good. This can be verified at the website listed below. Bend over some more Sheeple! http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/CIDsummary.php?CID=N00030191&year=2008