University faculty salaries have risen over the past year, but they still lag behind peer institutions, according to a report by the University Senate Budget Committee.
According to the report, tenured and tenure track faculty compensation at the University — including salary and benefits — was 85.7 percent of compensation at comparable institutions in 2000-2001, up from 85 percent in 1998-99. There are 147 tenured faculty and 458 faculty in tenure track positions, according to the Office of Resource Management.
“We have made steady progress — a cumulative gain on our comparators of 5 percent in two years,” the report said.
The report, released in May, outlined the progress of a plan released by the committee in March 2000. That plan called for average faculty compensation to be brought to 95 percent parity of the University’s peer institutions by 2007.
The eight peer universities were chosen by the Oregon University System, and mirror the University in academic scope, program types and state funding. The list includes: The University of Michigan, University of California — Santa Barbara, University of Virginia, University of Iowa, University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill, Indiana University at Bloomington, University of Colorado — Boulder and the University of Washington.
Authors of the report are satisfied about recent gains in faculty compensation, but admit there is still a long way to go in University faculty salaries.
“We are doing pretty well,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Michael Kellman said. “But (salary numbers) are way low for the kind of University we are trying to have.”
David Frank, a member of the Senate Budget committee, said that faculty compensation is a “critical issue” to the future of the University. “We don’t want second-class faculty and we don’t want second-class facilities, because we have first-class students.”
Student leaders would like to see more emphasis on salary issues from the University administration. Noting that the administration is “moving in the right direction” in tackling faculty finances, they are not “pursuing the issue with a lot of vigor,” ASUO President Nilda Brooklyn said.
“87 cents to the dollar sadly states the priority of what the University finds important in funding,” Brooklyn, the student body president, said.
Tim Young, the student representative on the state board of higher education, lays more blame at the state level, including the Oregon legislature and taxpayers.
“We haven’t made this a priority. Perhaps it is time we do,” he said.
The report broke faculty compensation into two main parts: salaries for adjunct professors and salary issues for full professors. Presently, salaries for assistant professors are at 93.7 percent compared to peer institutions, close to meeting the goal of 95 percent parity. Higher salaries for lower levels of faculty makes it easier for the University to recruit new faculty, said Richard Linton, vice president for research and graduate studies.
“We are becoming very competitive at the assistant professor level,” Linton said, noting that, of the roughly 100 faculty members hired over the past two years, many have been hired as assistant professors.
Linton said that the University attempts to balance each department between young, less experienced professors and older, more established professors. While hiring younger professors is an investment on the future, older professors give instant name recognition to individual departments, and the University as a whole.
However, the report raised red flags about salary levels for full professors.
“Average salaries at the University are less competitive than our comparators as people rise through the academic ranks,” the report said. “It appears that the compression problem has not improved and may be getting worse.”
Salary compression, the long-term stagnation of salaries and benefits, is not going away any time soon, Kellman said. He said that salary compression mostly affects the retention of upper-level faculty at the University. “When people’s salaries fall behind that of their peers, they tend to leave.”
He hopes that these issues eventually will be solved over the five-year plan of the white paper.
“This is not something that we are going to solve in one year,” Kellman said. “We are going to focus on it over time. That is the only way to take care of it.”