To the editor:

This is in response to the June 10 article containing Kansas University’s response to the requirement for overtime pay to people on lower salaries when they work more than a 40-hour week. Michael Rounds, associate vice provost for human resources, supposedly speaks for KU, and, if so, I am ashamed for our university.

Mr. Rounds and KU apparently like the idea that if you are the chief of some work crew (paid, like most university employees, at the just-above-living-wage level) and a provost or vice provost or associate vice provost decides that you should come in tonight to work on a computer problem or icy sidewalks, you do so without compensation. This even though your spouse is working at his or her night job and you are watching the kids. Or maybe you are scheduled to work at your night job because your KU salary alone will not allow you to save money to buy a house or pay your spouse’s tuition.

I noticed in checking my 2010 KU phone book that the office of “associate vice provost of human relations” did not exist six years ago. Maybe overtime pay could be freed up by a judicious reduction in the number of vice, associate and assistant provosts, deans, and chief attendant commissars on the campus.