This post is the third post in a series of stories that, taken together, might help explain why I decided to take early retirement from UCI. My point in posting these stories is to say "This happened. It shouldn't have. Can you learn something from it, so you can prevent such things from happening where you are (or at least not be complicit)?"
The Cheating University
When I arrived at UCI, I was told to attend an orientation meeting for instructors who hadn't taught here before.
At the meeting, I was surprised when the person in charge of teaching told us, "As you know, UCI has a reputation of being `the cheating university'."
No, I didn't know that! I wish I'd been told before I accepted the job offer.
Over time, I learned more and more about how misleading UCI could be to faculty it's trying to hire.
When I was hired, I was experienced enough to make sure that everything that was important to me was put in writing in my offer letter. Nevertheless, I've had to fight to try to get UCI to keep its promises. In some cases the battle lasted many years and didn't have a satisfactory ending.
My highest priorities were quality of life issues, such as having an office with a nice view, so I bargained harder for the nice view than for salary (and I later had to fight to get the promised office).
At that time, almost all regular faculty were hired with an "off-scale" salary, i.e., a salary higher than the salary listed for their "rank" and "step" on the published salary scale. I secured a promise in writing from the Dean (approved by the Chancellor) that the amount by which my salary was "off-scale" would never go down.
The university broke that promise just a few years after I was hired, but I didn't realize it until later. For a "merit review", I was asked to sign a form that stated my new salary; I looked up the salary scale and learned that I was shortchanged by thousands of dollars a year, and it had been going on for several years.
This took me into a years-long stressful Kafkaesque nightmare through UCI bureaucracy that ended up setting some powerful administrators against me. Had I known that would happen, I never would have accepted UCI's job offer. I would have gone elsewhere.
I argued my case, mostly in emails that were sent up the line as in the telephone game, to I-didn't-know-whom, who never seemed to completely understand what was admittedly a complicated situation due to mysterious and confusing changes in the salary scale that included my campus instituting a "shadow scale" above the official one.
For each merit review, I was pressured to sign off on a salary that violated the promise, and I refused.
I pay for insurance, offered by the university, for legal advice, but it turns out they won't advise you on any issue involving the university.
When I was diagnosed with cancer, I had more important things to worry about than trying to find a lawyer to fight my university.
Years later someone told me that the longtime manager of the Dean's Office, who was the bottleneck, was "rigid"; once she got it in her head that I was wrong, she would never change her mind. No progress was made until I went around her.
None of the administrators cared enough to sit down with me to go over the numbers and discuss a reasonable solution.
I was eventually offered a salary bump to partially make up for the shortfall in back pay. The "Mad Hatter" Dean advised me to take the offer since (according to him) there was a real chance the Vice Provost would simply withdraw that offer if I didn't accept it. While I was unhappy with the offer, which wouldn't come close to making up for the years of lost salary, I felt I had no choice. A few years later that (now former) Vice Provost told me he was all for giving me what I wanted to make the problem go away, and it was the Dean who was very much against both it and me.
Honoring written offers is an important principle. A university's reputation gets around. If faculty feel they're treated unfairly, that can make it hard to hire good new faculty.