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Administration, faculty debate faculty salaries

by Alden Ferro
News Editor

After months of discussion, the University announced at a heated faculty meeting on Tuesday that it would increase faculty salaries by five percent next year, a decrease from the past three years’ increase of 6.5 percent each year. The University pays each faculty member an average of three percent—roughly $3,000 per year—below the mean salary of a set of 12 colleges and two universities, according to University Vice President for Academic Affairs Judith Brown.

“The University is committed to offering compensation levels that will allow us to attract and retain high quality faculty and to offering faculty the highest levels of compensation we can while meeting all of the University’s financial obligations responsibly,” Brown said.

Most faculty members disagreed.

“The Administration is not on our side, and maybe they are even ingenuous. We don’t have a lot of confidence in them doing the right thing,” said Molecular Biology and Biochemistry (MB&B) Professor Don Oliver.

Before Tuesday’s faculty meeting, a petition with 93 faculty signatures was sent to the Administration disagreeing with the proposal. It was sent to Brown, University President Doug Bennet and Vice President for Finance and Administration Marcia Bromberg. The petition also urged the Administration to make faculty compensation one of its highest priorities in the present and future.

In the petition, the faculty objected to the University’s decision to change the group of colleges and universities to which Wesleyan’s faculty salaries were compared.

Initially, the University’s salaries were significantly below the mean of the five universities and seven colleges in its original comparison group. The University maintained that the two universities and 12 colleges in its new comparison group are more appropriate.

“The elite group of colleges and universities that Wesleyan has always compared itself to academically and mission-wise has been clearly articulated over the years … and we see no reason to uncouple this comparison when it comes to salary,” the faculty said in their March 1 memo.

Brown said that other schools’ decisions to release their faculty compensation data to the University is voluntary.

“We are operating with better data than before,” she said. “We can make adjustments and increases based on better data. Our reference group is still better than it was.”

Oliver proposed recommendations for the Administration at the faculty meeting, including a 20 percent salary increase over the next three years. The difference between raising salaries by five and seven percent is less than $1 million per year, or less than one percent of the University’s annual operating budget, according to Oliver.

“Another decade of low compensation could have devastating effects [for the University],” Oliver said. “It’s not to fix the current situation but also the future of Wes.”

According to Brown, such an increase in salaries would impact the University’s budget by approximately $800,000.

“It would really be impossible to reduce other budgeted items by this amount at this late date because the budget is about to be sent to the Board of Trustees shortly,” Brown said.

The faculty maintained that changing the comparison group to include mostly colleges reduces the average salary figure. This made the University appear to compensate its faculty more equitably than it actually does, according to the faculty.

Identifying one problem with this new group at Tuesday’s meeting, the faculty said not enough research universities were included in it. Wesleyan considers itself a small research university because it provides research programs.

“Changing the comparison group is a smokescreen,” said MB&B Professor Bill Firshein, Wesleyan’s longest serving faculty member. “They were embarrassed [by the University’s low ranking in the original group]. And they still could not get us up to parity.”

A new petition by concerned faculty written after the April 2 faculty meeting said Wesleyan has been significantly below the mean of the original comparison group regarding faculty compensation for at least the past decade, amounting to millions of dollars in savings for the University.

The petition encouraged the Administration to include average salary increases for the coming academic year of seven to eight percent “while acknowledging that we still have not managed to close the salary gap that exists between our cohort group and us.”

Additionally, the petition asked for the creation of an Endowment for Faculty Excellence that could be used to keep faculty salaries competitive in perpetuity. Such an endowment would separate the issue of compensation from competing with other University priorities.

“We all agree that fair and competitive faculty compensation represents an important institution goal for retention of a distinguished faculty and upholding of its morale,” the petition said.

As of yesterday afternoon, the new petition already had 93 signatures, many of them coming from faculty members who did not sign the original petition, according to Oliver.

The issue of faculty compensation has persisted for years, according to Firshein.

“Four years ago we were behind,” he said. “There was a cry and they formed a committee, of which I was the chair. Both sides compromised and we got a 6.5 percent increase each year for three years.”

In their most recent petition, the faculty has maintained that the University has not put as high a priority on keeping faculty compensation competitive with other institutions as it has on other elements of the budget.

“We believe the time has come for the Administration to show the Faculty that it places a premium on our compensation that is on par with other ongoing institutional priorities such as additional buildings or their renovation, athletic facilities, etc. that quite frankly dwarf our modest request in most cases,” the petition stated.

Firshein said continually discussing their salaries distracts professors from their jobs.

` “An administration’s function is to provide [adequate compensation] so that we can devote ourselves to teaching and research,” Firshein said. “We have always had to distract ourselves; they’ve neglected [to compensate faculty appropriately] so we’ve been forced to devote attention to it.”

At the faculty meeting, Firshein said to Brown, “We seem to be seven to eight percent behind other institutions. I don’t think the faculty salary increase [of five percent] is acceptable, and I don’t know how you arrived at this data.”

Brown has maintained that through the Fund for Excellence of the Wesleyan Campaign, the University has been able to “increase substantially the salaries of faculty and professional librarians.”

In a March 27 letter to the faculty and librarians, Brown said that the state of the nation’s economy also affects the ability of the University to increase faculty salaries.

“The performance of the economy affects our endowment, tuition increases, and the amount needed for financial aid, which is necessary to reduce the loan burden on our students. All of these factors affect the revenues available for the compensation of faculty and professional librarians – the single largest item in the University’s budget.”

“Professors in general go into the field not for the money,” Oliver, one of the authors of the faculty petition, said. “Faculty don’t really like to get into these matters, which is why this is an overdue process.” According to Oliver, the University’s extensive fundraising permitted a substantially greater increase in salaries than the University proposed.

Brown said increasing faculty salaries further would lessen other expenditures. “To accommodate this additional expense in our budget … we would have to consider … reduc[ing] the [proposed] 3% increase in staff salaries, slow down the reduction in student loan levels, freeze library expenditures, freeze discretionary departmental accounts, reduce the increase in the faculty travel account or replace faculty and staff computers less frequently than we do now,” Brown said.

While some faculty members have said that persistently lower than par compensation will cause faculty to seek jobs elsewhere, Brown argued that the University hasn’t lost any faculty due to salary-related issues.

Economics Professor Gil Skillman said this is because it is costly for faculty to relocate, and therefore the University can continue to underpay them.

“The reasoning is straightforward: since it is costly for tenured faculty members to relocate, their incumbent employers can, without seriously risking their departure, pay them less than would be justified by their productivity levels in alternative employments,” Skillman wrote in a report to the faculty and administration.

“People have families and lives here,” Firshein said. “They don’t want to leave, so they have to stay under the control of the administration.”

The continuing schism between the faculty and the Administration has adversely affected faculty morale, according to Firshein and Oliver.

“The faculty cannot trust the administration,” Firshein said. “Morale is low because of this uncertainty in what’s going to happen. There’s a feeling that there’s little trust. I don’t trust what they’re saying.”

“Morale isn’t high, but it’s issue specific,” Oliver said. “On issues where the faculty and administration feel as they’re doing something together, you’d see people perk up.” These issues include the University’s master plan to build a new student center and film studies building, according to Oliver.

Brown remained positive about future faculty raises despite asserting the impossibility of salaries rising beyond five percent this year: “It will be possible to plan for higher increases in the next few years.”

“We believe that the gap between where we are and where we want to be with regard to faculty salaries can be closed within a few years and we will do everything we can to do so,” Brown said.

“The tragedy is that the faculty has to be distracted. We shouldn’t even have to think about [faculty salaries]. I want to see a salary that makes me proud of our tradition,” Firshein said.

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