Category: Salary-and-benefits
February 5, 2010, 08:58 AM ET
Starting Dates and Pay Gaps
Many institutions are starting to offer contracts to their new
faculty members. It's an exciting time all around. For the hiring
departments, it's fun to think about the energy and talents the new
colleagues will bring. For the incoming faculty members, it's
joyous to celebrate leaving the job market behind successfully.
For the new hires, there is often a shock, though, that comes in
August: either no paycheck or a reduced paycheck. At many
institutions, new faculty members report in mid-August, but the
paychecks don't fully kick in until the September pay date, often
as much as six weeks after that report date. Recent Ph.D.
graduates, used to being poor, often find this to be aggravating,
but for those who are more seasoned and who are changing
institutions, this can be particularly problematic. I have known of
many faculty members who changed institutions and found that their
last...
November 5, 2009, 11:00 AM ET
The Millionaires' Club
According to a recent Chronicle article, 23 private university presidents took home more than $1-million last year, up from nine the previous year. Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, NY, came in at no. 1, with a total annual compensation package of nearly $1.6-million.
Among the other top earners were:
• Steadman Upham, U. of Tulsa: $1,485,275
• Cornelius M. Kerwin, American U.: $1,419,339
• David J. Sargent, Suffolk U.: $1,496,593
• Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia U.: $1,380,035
Meanwhile, over at 11D, Laura McKenna is quick to point out the huge pay disparity between those university chiefs and the instructors who do a lot of unheralded teaching at their institutions:
The president of American University gets paid $1.4 million. Nearly 1/4 of American's teaching staff is comprised of adjuncts. They pay them $2,000 per semester.
Share your...
Read MoreSeptember 29, 2009, 12:00 PM ET
An Interesting Proposal
Are you sick of your tax dollars going to institutions that value big-time athletics over their educational missions? So is Benjamin E. Rosenberg, a New York lawyer who argues in a recent op-ed in The Christian Science Monitor that the U.S. government should withhold federal funds from universities that pay athletics coaches more than professors. The purpose of a university education, he writes, is to ...
gain professional skills and to cultivate a love for learning–tools that will ultimately help carry us through life. In a world that has become increasingly dependent on technology, information, and clear communication, American universities cannot afford to falter on this.
And yet, schools are paying outrageous compensation to the coaches of their football and basketball teams, corrupting their mission.
Rosenberg notes that many universities with big-time football and basketball...
Read MoreSeptember 21, 2009, 09:00 AM ET
Professors and Picket Signs
On the day before classes were set to begin for the current
semester at Oakland University, near Detroit, months of negotiating
had yet to yield a new contract for faculty members. So the campus
chapter of the American Association of University Professors did
what it has typically done when negotiations go down to the wire:
The members voted on whether to strike.
The result, overwhelmingly in favor, gave the union's bargaining
team needed leverage during negotiations. But the seven-day strike
that followed was anything but typical for a faculty union, for
which work stoppages of any length are uncommon.
The strike, which forced Oakland to cancel classes, ended in a
tentative agreement. Even so, local union officials and
higher-education labor experts say boycotting the classroom is a
last resort. Students' education, after all, hangs in the
balance.
"Nobody wants to go on strike, because...
August 24, 2009, 04:00 PM ET
Strategizing on Salary and Rank
The comments in response to my last entry about the beginning of our search season raise good questions that deserve some thought and a thorough response.
One commenter suggests that the best way to make everyone happy is to offer a very high salary and then adjust everyone else's salary to match.
Philosophically, this is an excellent point, and I always try hard to offer the best salary I can to selected candidates because I know that doing so will help us attract and retain the best people we can. I also take careful account of the salaries of faculty members who are already here to ensure fairness to them and to avoid inducing serious distortions in our salary structure.
Practically speaking, however, there are real limits to how much adjusting one can do, particularly at a small institution like mine. For example, I can imagine a scenario in which I would need to find enough money...
Read MoreAugust 18, 2009, 08:00 AM ET
Ball State U. Will Pay Its President an Extra $220K
The president of Ball State University, Jo Ann Gora, will forgo
an extended leave of absence that was promised to her in favor of
an additional $220,000 in pay,
The Star Press reports.
As the newspaper tells it:
When she was hired in 2004, Gora's employment contract provided her a six-month leave of absence if she was still serving as president five years later, which is August of this year.
In the fall of 2007, however, the university's board of trustees amended the contract to give Gora the option of receiving additional compensation in lieu of taking six months of paid leave of absence.
Under the amended contract, Gora, whose 2008 salary was $356,400, is entitled to "additional compensation equal to 50 percent of your then current annual base salary," plus "an amount equal to 25 percent of such additional compensation."
The university was unable to confirm to The Star Press on...Read More
August 18, 2009, 07:00 AM ET
Ex-Chancellor of N.C. State U. Gets a Pay Cut
The University of North Carolina system's governing board voted Friday to slash the salary of James L. Oblinger, the former chancellor of North Carolina State University who stepped down in June over his involvement in the hiring of Mary P. Easley, wife Michael F. Easley, the former North Carolina governor, the Raleigh News & Observer reports:
Oblinger [...] had been earning his full administrative salary: $420,000 annually, or $35,000 a month. Under an agreement forged with UNC system President Erskine Bowles when he resigned, he was to be paid at that rate for six months before returning to the faculty at a lower wage.
The UNC system's Board of Governors voted Friday to scale his pay back immediately. He will now earn $173,000 annually, a salary comparable to other members of the NCSU faculty. Oblinger will be a professor of food science. [...]
The board's decision will cost...Read More
August 7, 2009, 04:13 PM ET
Hiring and Firing Bytes
Neal Smatresk, executive vice president and provost at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, has been picked to lead the university, the Las Vegas Sun reports.
The Wheeling Jesuit University Board of Trustees has dismissed the Rev. Julio Giulietti, president of the institution since 2007, the Wheeling News-Register reports.
The University System of Maryland plans to slash 175 jobs -- 151 of which are currently vacant -- and freeze hiring as part of an effort to carve $37.8-million from its 2010 budget, the Baltimore Sun reports. Only 24 employees, none of them tenured or tenure-track professors, are expected to receive pink slips, but "the cuts include a fair number of adjunct and part-time faculty, and I think that's where the students will see a real impact," Chancellor William E. Kirwan told the newspaper. "There won't be as many sections of courses, courses will be harder to get,...
Read MoreAugust 5, 2009, 01:00 PM ET
Expectations Mean a Lot
Via The Juggle comes word of new research showing that many women hamper themselves at work by underestimating their job performance and their standing with supervisors and colleagues. In contrast, men tend to slightly overestimate how their supervisors would rate them, according to the study, which will be presented at the Academy of Management's annual meeting this month.
The Juggle's Sue Shellenbarger, in The Wall Street Journal, notes that "over all, averaging all the ratings, the gap between prediction and reality was three times greater for women than for men." Not surprisingly, the gap was most pronounced for women 50 and over, whose estimates averaged 11 percent below the actual rating.
The good news, says Scott N. Taylor, an organizational-studies professor at the University of New Mexico, who conducted the study of 251 managers, is that "women rated themselves just as highly ...
Read MoreAugust 5, 2009, 11:00 AM ET
A Lose-Lose Situation
Furloughs at the University of California may be a "foregone conclusion," but faculty members would be wise to carefully consider how the steps are taken, warns Ari Kelman, an associate professor of history on the Davis campus, in a post at The Edge of the American West. Given the choice between taking furloughs on "calendared days of instruction" or on "calendared intersession days when no formal instruction is scheduled," he says he would pick the former, lest a dangerous precedent be set:
My sense was and is that if the state Legislature chooses to impose what amounts to a highly regressive tax (in the form of huge cuts in funding that necessitate furloughs) on a tiny subset of California’s population (most state employees), because it cannot or will not tax all of the state’s citizens, then we (those people being furloughed) need to make sure that the rest of the state understands...Read More
On Hiring is The Chronicle's blog about the ins and outs of college hiring, with articles and advice from around the Web.