"I was President of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for 11 years."
Source?
Sounds like his entire complaint is about the BOV. I don't see anything in the letter that would give you a different impression about the professor's complaint.
It's easy to say that's not what it's about, but practically that what it's about. The university has been increasing faculty expenditures at 4-5% for years in the face of 0.7% increases in enrollment. The state has no more money. Faculty salary expenditures are the biggest line-item in the budget. If academic freedom is to be preserved by opposing the board's cuts, the practical consequence is continued rises in tuition.
And why does an 80% increase in expenditures necessarily lead to a tripling of tuition? Shouldn't tuition go up 80% as well? Unless some other source of funding has disappeared?
100 + 5% = 105 + 5% = 112.5 + 5% = 115.7625 + 5% ... = 179.5856326 - which is approximately an 80% increase over 12 years.
As for the tripling of tuition, let's assume that tuition accounted for 30% of the budget at the start of things above. Even if no other funding sources are decreased (which is not the case with public universities, but let's ignore that for now), increasing the cost of tuition by 79.58%, which is the same amount that the overall budget increased, gets us:
30 + 79.58% = 53.874
So if we still have 70% of the original budget covered, and we add it to our newly increased tuition cost, we get:
53.874 + 70 = 123.874
You can see that there's a bit of a deficit here.
All of that having been said, what is going on at UVa is pretty clearly messed up. Regardless of the changes that need to happen in the budget, which I think everyone can agree on, the BOG way overstepped here.
At the end of the day, the growth in expenses has not been funded by grants, etc. The biggest component of increased revenue has been tuition. A tripling of tuition is what has paid for the 4-5% annual increase in faculty salary expenditures. Opposing faculty cuts is a slap in the face to the students that now pay 1/3 of the university's operating expenses.
In any case, I don't see anyone on either side in this standoff making that tough proposal. Instead, we have the (now-fired) incrementalist looking for across-the-board savings, and the apparently-incompetent Goldman Sachs schemers looking to cut the faculty who don't even account for the past decade's salary increases (humanities, etc.). If someone is actually in favor of making the tough call to fire the 6-figure STEM faculty, they should come out and say so, and lay out their proposal.
One of my beefs with the "decreased state funding" argument is that it presupposes that state funding should keep up with dramatic expansions in University expenditures.
Now, to be fair, state funding has dropped from $166m in 2001 to $140m today. Had it kept pace with enrollment and inflation, it should be about $233m today. State funding keeping pace would have allowed tuition to merely double instead of triple as it has.
On the other hand, all of the cuts have been since 2007. I.e. the greatest recession since the 1930's. During this time, faculty salary expenditures have continued to grow. In an economic environment where nearly everyone's salaries have stagnated or been cut. What should have happened instead is layoffs and salary cuts, as happened in nearly every other field.
My wife (Anita Jones) and I are in Computer Science and we both hold the title University Professor — the highest rank at UVa. Of the 3300 faculty at UVa, roughly 13 hold that title.