The characters may change occasionally, but the story remains essentially the same.
With salaries about 18 percent lower than comparable universities, faculty have seen promises made and then broken. In the last seven years things have actually gotten worse, and the University Senate Budget Committee, representative of collective faculty opinion, voiced its concern yet again at a recent University Senate meeting.
Oregon salaries are compared with eight other American Association of Universities institutions, including University of Washington, University of California-Santa Barbara, and University of Colorado at Boulder. In January, committee chairman David Frank called for an SBC-University administration collaboration to achieve 95 percent parity to comparison within the next five to seven years.
“We see ourselves at the U of O among those eight schools, and that’s where we want to be,” said Frank. “We want our students to have those same kinds of faculty.” The SBC maintains that increased salaries are essential in the competitive world of academe.
“When we’re trying to recruit the best professors and retain the best professors we have to be able to offer the kind of salaries they’re offering at comparable schools.”
The recruiting part is probably true, but retention may not be as big a problem.
Ray King, Associate Dean of the Lundquist College of Business, said the college has lost a couple of faculty members because of salary, but none in recent years.
“You can’t hire people unless you’re paying at the competition,” he said, “but sometimes you can keep people when you pay less.”
Senior Instructor Dave Dusseau teaches in the business school. He said the college made it clear upon his initial hiring that his salary would be low, but said they would eventually raise it to a comparable level. He said they’ve worked hard to do that when they could.
“I have had offers that were about almost a third more money,” he said. “But we have a really nice life here and frankly I’m not much motivated by money.”
Dusseau said there are some faculty members who have serious concerns about compensation and equity issues in compensation, and the business school in particular is very receptive to vocalization of those problems.
In fact, Dusseau says he doesn’t even blame the University for low salaries and compensation.
“My frustration isn’t so much with the institution, it’s with the state of Oregon,” he said. “The state has essentially taken itself out of the business of higher education. The institution (wants) to recognize my contribution and pay me more, but there just (aren’t) funds from anywhere.”
Dusseau isn’t the only one calling on the state for more funding. The SBC called on the state to contribute money to compensate University faculty at 95 percent of peer compensation. Also, Frank said the state has yet to understand the contribution higher education makes to the economy.
“For every dollar the state gives the University, the University is able to generate two or three dollars through research and other services the University provides,” he said. Frank also noted that the state provides only 13 percent of the University’s budget.
Frank said he wants to raise faculty compensation from the current 91 percent of the institutional average to match that of the University’s peer institutions. Compensation differs from salary because it includes retirement, insurance and benefits.
The disparity between the University and others in the same class is not a recent development: One effort that the SBC has made to reach the school is more than half a decade old.
The White Paper document was introduced to the University Senate back in March 2000. The SBC wrote it “as a foundation from which to discuss the goal of achieving and maintaining compensation parity with our comparator universities in the next 5-7 years.”
One goal the White Paper set forth was to increase faculty salaries by 2.5 percent every year. At the time, University faculty compensation was at 82.1 percent of the comparator mean, with the average professor making $71,500 in one academic year.
On Thursday, that will have been exactly seven years ago, and shockingly little has been accomplished. In fact, things have gotten slightly worse.
Because of a 1999-2001 tuition freeze and a 2003-05 salary freeze, the 2.5 percent increase goal was shot. In the mean time, competitive universities progressed unaffected.
“We’re playing catch-up,” Frank said. “We’re far behind in the fourth quarter in all those sports metaphors.”
As of the 2005-06 academic year, the University’s salary average stood at 81.5 percent, according to the American Association of University Professors. The average professor made $68,900 last year.
“It isn’t acceptable that our salaries are so low and I think the administration shares that belief and it’s in their self-interest to raise those salaries,” said Frank. “But when there’s a salary freeze and a tuition freeze, it doesn’t give the system much flexibility in raising those salaries.”
For now, faculty will just have to deal with that until the situation improves. And some of them are fine with that.
“In my particular career I have been able to do a variety of things at different jobs and they have all been satisfying,” he said. “I feel like I’m in an environment where my effort is recognized. Not always rewarded in terms of compensation, but recognized.”
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