The University’s Committee on Faculty Welfare has drafted a proposal to administration that calls for a $10,000 raise on each full-time faculty member’s annual salary over the next two years, a move that Faculty Welfare Committee Chair and Associate Professor of Performing and Fine Arts Mindi Logan says would bring the professors’ salaries closer to the average at comparable universities.
This is the first time the faculty have asked administration for a salary raise, according to Logan.
The committee has met multiple times over the course of the past year to draft the proposal. It will be reviewed at the end of November by the Budget Working Group, made up of University President Fr. Mark Poorman, Provost Thomas Greene, Vice President for Financial Affairs Alan Timmins and Budget Director Rowena Bramlette.
According to Greene, the Budget Working Group will review the proposal in late November and will likely have a verdict about the proposal at the budget meeting in late January. The committee would hear back from the Budget Working Group early spring semester.
An anonymous survey conducted in Fall 2014 of UP faculty revealed concerns about current working situations, with low salaries being the number one issue that arose from results of the survey.
“We assessed the survey and found that the faculty felt strongly that we’ve been working really hard and we’ve had increased student body (in classes),” Logan said. “The faculty felt like they were being overworked and underpaid. It was from the results of this survey that we moved forward on the behalf of the faculty.”
UP’s salaries are lower than national averages, most notably so for top-ranking professors, whose average salary in 2014 was $87,300, compared to the national average for professors at four year private colleges, which was $119,105.
A challenge, Greene said, is that while the relative salaries of UP professors may be lower than average, he claims that the University’s “benefit plan” actually exceeds the mean of some other institutions’.
“One challenge is that they’re talking about salaries, but we’re talking about compensation,” Greene said. “We have very generous benefit plans compared to other universities. Mr. Timmins did a study that found that our benefit plan is $5,000 more than the mean of some other institutions’.”
Aside from salaries, the committee has also brought to the administration’s attention issues with the exit evaluations that are sent to students at the end of each semester. While the evaluations are supposed to be a space for students to give feedback to professors about things they liked and disliked about a class, Logan said faculty have been seeing inappropriate comments about female professors’ appearances in the evaluations.
The committee and administration are working to change the evaluation system, according to Greene.
“We shouldn’t talk about how your professor would look in a pencil skirt,” Logan said. “Especially in these days of political ugliness, we are trying to make sure that the comments are appropriate. We read them, we utilize them, we use them to plan what we’re going to do next, and then you get a comment or two about if you’re sexy or if you’re not sexy and it’s just so inappropriate. So we are trying to find a way to make those evaluations better.”
Logan said the administration has been “wonderful” about working with the committee to create a platform to resolve the issues.
“We want to support the faculty and staff but also make sure the institution is well-cared for,” said Greene. “We want to make sure the institution is financially strong and that the faculty and staff have fair compensation.”
