Changes in Faculty Composition Within the State University of New York System: 1985-2001

[Excerpt] The last two decades of the twentieth century saw a significant growth in the share of faculty members in American colleges and universities that are part-time or are full-time without tenure-track status. Growing student enrollments faced by academic institutions during tight financial times and growing differentials between the salaries of part-time and non-tenure track faculty on the one hand, and tenured and tenure-track faculty on the other hand, are among the explanations given for these trends. However, surprisingly, there has been no recent econometric evidence to test whether these hypotheses are true. Our study uses institutional level data provided to us by the Office of Institutional Research and Analysis of the State University of New York (SUNY) System to begin to address these issues. In the next section, we present background data on how the ratios of full-time lecturers to full-time professorial faculty and of part-time faculty to full-time faculty changed at SUNY during the fall 1985 to fall 2001 period. Counts of faculty numbers tell one little about who is actually teaching undergraduate students and so we also show how the share of undergraduate credit hours taught by part-time and non-tenure track faculty members increased during the part of the period for which we had access to credit hour data. Section III presents a simple conceptual framework that illustrates why an institution’s usage of part-time and non-tenure track faculty members should depend upon both the revenue per student received by the institution and the relative costs to the institution of the different types of faculty. While we have no data on the costs of part-time faculty members, we do have institutional level information for SUNY institutions for an eleven year period on the average salaries of tenured and tenure track faculty on the one hand, and of non-tenure track faculty on the other hand, as well as information on the revenue per student received by each institution each year. This enables us in section IV to estimate the roles that average salaries of both types of faculty members and revenues received by institutions play in explaining the observed changes in faculty composition

Collective Bargaining and Staff Salaries in American Colleges and Universities

[Excerpt] In 2001, a twenty-day sit-in at Harvard University brought the living-wage debate to the forefront of American consciousness. After a six-month study, the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies, a 19 member committee of faculty, staff, administrators and students that had been appointed by Harvard’s president as a result of the discussions to end the sit-in, recommended giving raises to the university’s lowest paid employees and relying more on collective bargaining in the future to assure that the wages paid by subcontractors did not undercut local union wage scales. A three-day sit-in at the University of Connecticut that related to the living wage issue also yielded a substantive victory for campus workers. The protesters there generated an almost two-dollar increase in wages, as well as substantial improvement in benefits for many of the university’s workers. Collectively these struggles represent a new battleground in American higher education. The growth of living wage movements on almost one hundred campuses reflects the large variation in the wages paid to college and university staff across the country. There are many potential explanations for these salary differences, including differences in local cost of living and differences in the resources that the academic institutions have available to pay faculty and staff salaries. One other possible explanation is the influence of staff unions. Previous studies of the impact of unions on salaries in academia have focused on faculty unions and have concluded that faculty unions have increased the salaries of their members relative to the salaries of faculty at academic institutions in which faculty are not covered by collective bargaining agreements by at best a small percentage amount. There have been no studies, however, of the impact of collective bargaining on staff salaries in higher education. Our paper addresses this issue. After providing some background data on the number of blue-collar and white-collar employees covered by collective bargaining agreements at American higher education institutions, we use data from a 1997-1998 study on the costs of staffing in higher education conducted by the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers (APPA) and other sources to estimate models that explain the variation in academic institutions’ salaries for a number of narrowly defined blue collar and white collar occupational groups that are employed by the academic institutions’ facilities divisions. Of primary interest to us, is the extent to which the salaries of academic staff covered by collective bargaining agreements exceed the salaries of otherwise comparable academic staff that are not covered by such agreements

Collective Bargaining and Staff Salaries in American Colleges and Universities

Our study is the first study that addresses the impact of collective bargaining coverage on salaries in academia for employees other than faculty. We use data from a 1997-98 study on the costs of staffing in higher education conducted by the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers and other sources to estimate the impact of staff unions on staff salaries in American higher education. Our best estimate is that for the occupations in our sample, collective bargaining coverage raises staff salaries by at most 10 to 20 percent relative to the salaries of comparable higher education employees not covered by union contracts.

Do Historically Black Colleges and Universities Enhance the College Attendance of African American Youths?

Recently, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have become the center of intense policy debates. Do HBCUs enhance the college attendance of African American youths? Previous research has been inconclusive. Among other improvements, our study adjusts for the relative availability of HBCU enrollment opportunities in each state. We find that African Americans are more likely to choose HBCUs over other colleges if more HBCU openings are available. However, more HBCU openings don\u27t increase overall African American enrollment. As we have shown elsewhere, attendance at an HBCU does enhance African American students\u27 college graduation rates

10. The Academic Departments

Includes: Collective Bargaining, Labor Law, and Labor History: The Department of Economic and Social Statistics; Labor Economics and Income Security Department: A Parent Department: Human Resources and Administration; The Organizational Behavior Department; Evolution of the Human Resources and Administration Department

Do Trustees and Administrators Matter? Diversifying the Faculty Across Gender Lines

Our paper focuses on the role that the gender composition of the leaders of American colleges and universities – trustees, presidents/chancellors, and provosts/academic vice presidents – plays in influencing the rate at which academic institutions diversify their faculty across gender lines. Our analyses make use of institutional level panel data that we have collected for a large sample of American academic institutions. We find, other factors held constant including our estimate of the “expected” share of new hires that should be female, that institutions with female presidents/chancellors and female provosts/academic vice presidents, as well as those with a greater share of female trustees, increase their shares of female faculty at a more rapid rate. The magnitudes of the effects of these leaders are larger at smaller institutions, where central administrators may play a larger role in faculty hiring decisions. A critical share of female trustees must be reached before the gender composition of the board matters

Evidence of discrete energy states and cluster-glass behavior in Sr2−x_{2-x}Lax_xCoNbO6_6

We report the detailed analysis of specific heat [C$_{\rm P}$(T)] and ac-susceptibility for magnetically frustrated Sr$_{2-x}$La$_x$CoNbO$_6$ ($x=$ 0--1) double perovskites to understand low temperature complex magnetic interactions and their evolution with $x$. Interestingly, the observed Schottky anomaly in the $x\leqslant$ 0.4 samples shifts gradually towards higher temperature with magnetic field as well as $x$, and the analysis reveal the persistence of the discrete energy states in these samples resulting from the spin-orbit coupling and octahedral distortion. Moreover, the extracted values of Land\'e g--factor indicate the existence of high-spin state Co$^{3+}$ ions close to non-magnetic low-spin state. The specific heat data show the $\lambda$-type anomaly for the $x\geqslant$ 0.6 samples due to evolution of the long range antiferromagnetic ordering. Our analysis of low temperature C$_{\rm P}$(T) data for the $x\geqslant$ 0.6 samples demonstrate the 3D isotropic Heisenberg antiferromagnetic (AFM) interactions and the temperature induced second order AFM--paramagnetic phase transition. More interestingly, we demonstrate the presence of the free Co$^{2+}$ like Kramers doublet ground state in the $x =$1 sample. Further, the ac susceptibility and time evolution of the magnetization data reveal the low temperature cluster-glass like behavior in the $x=$ 0--0.4 samples, where spin-spin correlation strength decreases with $x$.Comment: accepted for publication in PR

Collective Bargaining in American Higher Education

[Excerpt] No discussion of governance in higher education would be complete without a consideration of the role of collective bargaining. Historically, most researchers interested in the subject have directed their attention to the unionization of faculty members. Given several recent decisions by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that leave open the possibility that unionization of faculty in private colleges and universities may increase in the future, we discuss collective bargaining for faculty in the first section (Leatherman 2000, A16). Recently, however, attention has been also directed at the unionization of two other groups in the higher education workforce. Activists on a number of campuses have pressed for academic institutions to pay their low-wage employees a living wage, and this has brought attention to the role of staff collective bargaining in academia. In the second section, we present the first empirical estimates of the impact of staff bargaining on staff salaries in higher education. Finally, the number of public universities in which teaching assistants, and in some cases research assistants, have won the right to bargain collectively began to expand rapidly at the turn of the twenty-first century. A NLRB ruling in 2001 that permitted collective bargaining for teaching assistants at New York University (NYU), led the university in the following year to become the first private one to sign a contract with a union representing teaching assistants. Building on this ruling, graduate assistant organizing campaigns are underway at a number of prestigious private universities. In the third section we address why graduate assistants are increasingly interested in organizing and then present evidence on the effects of graduate student unions on a number of economic variables

The Paradoxical Forces for the Classical Electromagnetic Lag Associated with the Aharonov-Bohm Phase Shift

The classical electromagnetic lag assocated with the Aharonov-Bohm phase shift is obtained by using a Darwin-Lagrangian analysis similar to that given by Coleman and Van Vleck to identify the puzzling forces of the Shockley-James paradox. The classical forces cause changes in particle velocities and so produce a relative lag leading to the same phase shift as predicted by Aharonov and Bohm and observed in experiments. An experiment is proposed to test for this lag aspect implied by the classical analysis but not present in the currently-accepted quantum topological description of the phase shift.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure