The gaps between the average salaries of professors at public and at private institutions, and between tenured and nontenured faculty members, continue to widen -- even as the percentage of professors who are tenured or on the tenure track decreases, says a report released last month by the National Education Association.
The report, based on 1998-99 data collected by the U.S. Department of Education from 18,000 professors at 960 institutions, supports the assertion of many faculty leaders that the use of part-time labor undercuts the tenure system.
The report says tenured professors of all ranks at public research institutions earned $17,000 less, on average, than their tenured counterparts at private research institutions. Those figures corroborate a 2000-1 study by the American Association of University Professors that -- using a different classification system -- found differences between the salaries of professors at public doctoral institutions and those at private doctoral institutions of $23,000 for full professors and $10,000 for associate professors (The Chronicle, April 20).
The gap between tenured and nontenure-track faculty members at all research and doctoral institutions is even more striking. According to the report, tenured professors at private research institutions earned $87,000 on average -- $31,000 more than nontenure-track faculty members. Tenured professors at public research universities earned an average of $69,000 -- $26,000 more than their nontenure-track colleagues at the same universities.
The compensation discrepancies take on greater importance when one looks at the percentage of all professors with tenure. The percentage of full-time faculty members with tenure held steady at about 55 percent from the last Education Department survey, in 1992-93. But John Lee, president of JBL Associates, a group in Bethesda, Md., that analyzed the data for the N.E.A., says the drop to 32 percent from 35 percent of all faculty members (full- and part-time) who hold tenure “is mostly due to the increased number of part-timers, and the great number of professors working at institutions that don’t offer tenure.”
The percentage of part-time faculty members rose to 45 percent from 40 percent between 1992-93 and 1998-99, and the percentage of all faculty members at institutions without tenure grew to 14 percent, almost double the 8 percent reported in 1992-93. Community colleges were least likely to offer tenure, according to the report, and public research universities the most likely.
The report is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.nea.org/he/heupdate/vol7no3.pdf (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader, available free).
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