The Matter of Faculty Salaries

Isn’t the real issue here the salary freeze over the long term? The failure of salaries to keep up with cost of living increases in most areas?

Yes, cost of living is one of those factors, but even that varies in the same town depending on what kind of living you want to do, too. I learned that quickly here when people started complaining about tuition at private elementary schools, which is not something I would ever need. That’s an expense that can radically alter the cost of living of people on the same street.

Cost of living in a particular area is probably one of the most overlooked pieces of the equation. When I moved from a position in the Boston Metro area to here in Central Iowa, I took a 6K pay cut. But with the difference in cost of living between the two regions, it was like getting a raise–my “real wages” increased (actual purchasing power of the salary). So that’s one way in which salary averages alone don’t tell the whole story.

C’mon, people, we may know that “faculty salaries vary greatly for a host of reasons we could barely list in an hour of brainstorming,” but we also know, without taking time to blink, that the greatest variation is between 1) tenured or t-track FT faculty on the one hand, who receive decent wages and who enjoy either reasonable or excellent job security, and 2) adjunct or contingent faculty who receive very low wages (often less than 1/3 of FT, on pro rata basis), and enjoy no job security. Insofar as the 1st group has been shrinking as a percentage of all faculty, for more than three decades, while the 2nd group has been growing, we need to make it clear to anyone thinking of entering the professoriate that that institution is now established as an inequitable two-tier system and that it needs to be challenged and changed unless the entire professoriate is willing to see itself sink to the bottom. Cheers, Dr. Alan Trevithick, Adjunct at Fordham University and Westchester Community College.

The salary range that exists for professors is ridiculously out of proportion. Starting salaries are way too low overall, and top earners are overpaid. I can’t think of any other job out there that requires 10+ years of eduction and training in order to make a salary in the 40-50k range. That anyone would accept this wage as satisfactory says a lot about how little academics value themselves. Also, why should a professor deserve to get ridiculously high pay increases as part of the tenure track, when they also get rewarded with complete job security as part of tenure?

Salaries need to fall within a narrower range overall, averaging at a respectable rate of pay that reflects the high credetnials needed for the job. This would also help to diminish a lot of the elitism and in-fighting that exists in higher ed as everyone would be getting more comparable rates of pay.

At some institutions, the only way to get a significant raise after tenure is to get a job offer from another institution; see the post and comments here: “Don’t Let Them Get on That Plane.”

Beth, I kind of wanted to make this point in the post, but I was worried about it being too off or making the conversation go into too narrow of a direction. And I’ve been called a Polyanna more than once in my life! But I think this is true. I do know people who left high-paying corporate jobs or jobs in the private sector because they were really starting to hate their lives. Hey, that’s what Oprah was about yesterday, how a Hollywood film director went from a home with seventeen bathrooms to a double-wide trailer with two and ended up happier than he’d ever been.

Of course, we do need to think about truly problematic working conditions within universities as a whole and in their particular contexts. But while I hate that the majority of classes are universities are taught by adjuncts, I would not want 100% of classes taught by tenured faculty because of all the adjuncts who teach one class a semester amazingly well because they love it. I am very lucky to have many adjuncts like this in our program. They refuse to take more than one class, but they also don’t want to be pushed out by full-timers.

Career and financial literacy may be what prompted me to write this post in a great nutshell. Wish I’d thought of it!

And our uni has just created a new course in financial literacy. Obviously, it’s not just for academics, but I’m advising my advisees to consider it strongly.

If I’m not mistaken, Nels’ husband has a non-academic job FT, and he also adjuncts PT.

Isn’t it weird that we live in a hyper-capitalist society and yet we seem to believe that financial literacy starts at adulthood? There are no national standards or curriculum requirements for K-12.

And we do such a poor job of letting young people know that $40/week saved from childhood to retirement at an average interest rate would allow people to retire with some dignity…

Good article!

http://www.aaup.org/NR/rdonlyres/17BABE36-BA30-467D-BE2F-34C37325549A/0/zreport.pdf

Certain jobs — writing, the other arts, academic — have traditionally paid less than jobs in other sectors because these unconventional jobs are more rewarding and pleasurable, as well as afford more autonomy, than the average job.

However, with long term creeping corporatization of the university (over the past few decades: pressure to publish, customer–student–evaluations, combo administrative/teaching positions; invasive technology, monitoring of classroom content and “learning outcomes”), those fortunate enough to obtain full-time academic positions (vs cheap, temporary adjunct positions) find them less rewarding and pleasurable, more stressful, competitive, outcomes-oriented.

Perhaps due to this stress, as well as technology that enables bad behavior, tenured faculty have grown more belligerent and bullying toward each other, less collegial, to the point of driving some colleagues and administrators out of their jobs and even to suicide. This in turn can make academic jobs less attractive than those offered by industry where, if one is lucky enough to have a job at a good salary, people mostly behave themselves because conducting oneself with a modicum of civility and working together are demanded. Excellence can be recognized and rewarded–a major distinction from academic work, where the only way you get recognized is by playing the university’s bluff and threatening to take a job elsewhere, an expenditure of goodwill all round and a royal waste of everyone’s time.

In short, the life of contemplation, the examined life? I fear we’re living on its fumes.

Great example. The (fairly prestigious) university I work for is in the middle of a large metro area renowned for the corruption and generally miserable quality of its public schools (with multiple systems even having accreditation problems), which my now-high-school-age child has never attended. Elementary: $10k/year; high school: $15k/year. The university gives a 50% scholarship, which would make it slightly higher than high school.

“Because of that, I wonder if we get too caught up in stories of averages and use them the wrong ways.”

Absolutely. By construction, information is lost whenever you aggregate data into a summary statistic (e.g., a mean). The value of any summary statistic is to provide one measure of central tendency. Thank you, Nels, for reminding us of this.

The Chronicle’s short item and some of the comments conflate two distinct things: categorically refusing to counsel homosexual people, and declining to affirm homosexual behavior. Julea Ward did not refuse to counsel homosexuals; instead, she expressed reservations about being required to *approve* same-sex sexual intimacy. Indeed, her reservations were not about homosexual conduct per se, but rather about all sexual behavior that runs counter to traditional Christian sexual ethics, including adultery and pre-marital sexual intimacy. The question is whether a public university should expel a student for declining, as a matter of religious conscience, to *affirm* certain behaviors. Surely a nation dedicated to religious liberty can accommodate conscientious objectors like Julea Ward.

My home state’s legislature has been a joke since the election of John Engler. Both houses are littered with closed minded, derivative and reactionary politicians who can’t chase the latest right-wing fad fast enough. I never thought I’d ever be saying this but I ache for the days of a Republican like Bill Milliken.

This is not anything as noble as conscientious objection.

Are professors allowed to not teach people who do not agree with their religious or political views? No. Professors must take all students regardless of their beliefs.

This is about professional ethics. Perhaps Ms. Ward would be happier in another field where she has the luxury of ignoring things like professional and ethical behavior. I view this exactly the same way I view a pharmacist or medical professional who refuses to treat a patient for some reason other than lacking professional qualifications. In the 1980′s medical doctors, nurses, and physicians assistants walked out and refused to treat AIDS patients, such behavior was unconscionable then and it is unconscionable now. Bigotry is no excuse for refusing to counsel or treat a patient.

She absolutely deserved to be run out of the program. Medical professionals are held to a higher standard for a reason. You get no sympathy from me, nor does she.

~J