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What Am I Worth?

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By Dennis Baron

One of the most precarious tasks I had as a department head was to set the annual faculty salaries. I say precarious because the first summer I sent out salary letters, a handful of department members confronted me in no uncertain terms with what they thought of their raises.

That was when my secretary told me that my predecessor had always left town the day before salary letters hit the mailboxes.

The theory wars, the culture wars, the spousal-hiring wars all pale before the desire of some professors to be paid, if not well, then at least better than colleagues they deem less worthy. While I determined their salaries in consultation with an elected committee of tenured and nontenured faculty members, the buck stopped with me: I made the final decisions and my name was on the letter. I never went into hiding, but dealing with salary complaints became a regular feature of my life as a chairman.

Faculty members at my institution know where they are on the salary scale because our salaries are a matter of public record. Each year the masochistic, or the simply curious, make the trek to the library to consult "The Salary Book," a single, well-thumbed copy of the university budget kept in a plain gray binding behind the circulation desk, like a risqué novel that you have to ask for in a whisper. There they can see who is grossly overpaid (hint: it's no one in the humanities), who has been hired in ahead of them, and who has been bypassed once again. To some, that salary book is indeed pornographic.

At least it was for Colin Smith (I've changed the names of all faculty members mentioned here), an angry associate professor who burst into my office waving his salary letter, shut the door, and announced in what was definitely not an inside voice, "This is obscene." His raise was unacceptable, he insisted, explaining, "My salary is the university saying to me, 'This is what you're worth to us.'" He then let me know his real academic net worth, comparing himself publication by publication with everyone from senior full professors to brand new hires.

Smith concluded from the evidence arrayed that he was the most productive professor in the department. Why I didn't recognize that had to do either with my incompetence or my malfeasance, he wasn't sure which. He had been lied to by the previous head, who had advised him that his research would be rewarded with big raises, which he was still waiting for. He was thinking of suing. Was he going to have to bring in an outside offer just to get a real raise? He spoke so loudly that my secretary, who knew that things weren't going well behind my closed door, almost called the campus police.

Apparently Smith, who had memorized his colleagues' pay as he had memorized their vitas, did not know how department salaries were set. When he was done venting, and I had assured my secretary that the danger was past, I told him.

At some institutions, faculty members automatically advance through a series of salary steps that factor in the length of time they've spent in a particular rank and may also allow for merit increases. However, at my university we are instructed to consider merit alone when making salary recommendations -- and they are truly recommendations, for our salaries are all reviewed upstairs.

Raises are handled differently for the different categories of department employees. The university sets a specific raise each year for teaching assistants and non-tenure-track faculty members. Some staff raises are determined by collective bargaining, while others are set by department heads on the basis of annual evaluations.

But Smith was concerned only with the faculty-raise process, and he wasn't happy when I explained that his case had been carefully reviewed by a committee of his peers. The difference between his self-assessment and the committee's had to do partly with budget constraints and partly with the committee's merit judgments.

I assured Smith that everyone got the same treatment over the course of salary meetings that typically took two full days. And at the end of the meetings, we went back over all the raises to make sure they had been apportioned fairly.

I reminded him that in the old days salaries were set solely by the chairman. The story goes that in one particularly lean year a former head gave all of the raise money to one of his cronies; everybody else got nothing. The department changed its bylaws after that to ensure broader input into the process. I welcomed that input and the insulation it provided: If your elected colleagues tell you that your work is worth a $300 raise in a year when the department average is $3,000, you can't attribute that to the chairman's malevolence.

As department head, it was my obligation to respond to all salary complaints, not just the polite ones. Susan Brown complained politely, but persistently. She wouldn't take no for an answer, and ultimately she wouldn't take the yes I came up with for an answer either. Brown had finally started publishing after more than a decade of lean years, and she felt it was time that she took her rightful place on the salary scale.

Like Smith, Brown had little idea where salary money came from or how it was apportioned. I explained that each year departments are allocated a percentage of their current faculty salary outlay, typically 2.5 to 3 percent, as a raise pool for the next year. That pool does not include promotion bonuses or teaching awards -- those are financed separately.

In our salary meetings, held after spring final exams, I would put before the advisory committee a raise figure for each faculty member, and we would then go over each case, looking at the individual's research, teaching, and service activities for the year. At the end, we'd adjust my proposed salary figure up or down to reflect the committee consensus.

It's a given at my institution that faculty members are supposed to publish their research. Each discipline knows the good presses, the competitive grants, the editorships, the invitations, and the awards that signal quality. It's evident when someone's scholarship is making waves, and the committee and I generally agreed on whose research called for recognition.

We could also tell when someone was inflating their vita or had stalled out, and while we focused on the years when a faculty member's book or major article hit print, we tried to cushion the years between big publications, recognizing faculty members with a track record. And we were not supposed to award cost-of-living increases, but by presuming that everyone on the faculty had at least a base amount of merit, we ensured that everyone got something. In Brown's case, we welcomed her reawakened productivity and gave her an above-average raise.

Identifying and rewarding outstanding teaching is a tougher proposition. A teaching award demonstrates excellence, but Brown didn't seem to be in line for that sort of recognition. When I became head I asked the faculty to submit detailed accounts of their pedagogical activities to help the committee determine teaching merit. But when it came to teaching we lacked the kinds of benchmarks we had for evaluating research accomplishment. We never figured out how to weigh course proposals or revisions, syllabi, or participation in teaching seminars, so instead we fell back on the old standards -- student evaluations and anecdotal evidence of strong mentoring.

Service excellence is easier to recognize: We all know who takes on the big jobs, who does them well, who shuns service. For us, strong service in a given year might bring you a small bonus; most of your raise would be based on your research productivity. Strong service over a period of time -- say a term as associate head or a history of committee work that changed the life of the department in positive ways -- frequently rated a reward of its own.

Susan Brown listened patiently to my narrative, but she knew that the standard rewards were not enough to make up for the fallow years that had left her a low-paid full professor. She decided to ask for a formal salary review. For that review, I appointed an ad hoc committee to look at Brown's salary history, her recent accomplishments, and her work-in-progress. The committee recommended a modest mid-year adjustment to recognize and encourage Brown's new productivity, and the next spring I won some additional merit money for her from the dean. Brown was still unhappy about her salary, but her further complaints to the dean and provost went nowhere.

In contrast to the Brown and Smith cases, the advisory committee and I felt that James Porter was lower on the department's salary scale than he should have been. Productive throughout his career, Porter was promoted in the days when promotion bonuses were minuscule, and his major publications had come in years when there was little money for raises. His was only one of several salaries severely impacted by a phenomenon known as compression.

Compression is a narrowing of the salary gap between newer faculty members and those who have been teaching on a campus for some time. Departments constantly struggle to raise the salaries of current assistant professors to keep them ahead of entry-level hires. It's harder still to adjust the salaries of associate and full professors as a group to preserve salary differentials between the ranks and avoid inversion -- the case where someone in a lower rank makes more than a senior colleague.

Those kinds of large-scale salary adjustments can bankrupt the raise pool, so they are typically paid for through special initiatives. Porter benefited from a year when we were able to decompress the full professor salaries, and this year he's right where he belongs on the scale. But with the university budget in a tailspin, salaries could easily go out of whack once more.

Finally there was Joe Lampton, another angry full professor who pounded his fist on my desk and demanded to know how I could justify his $500 pittance when others were getting thousands. He was convinced that only squeaky wheels got raises, and he was prepared to make some noise.

"If you want more, then publish, or retire," I told him. I had learned one thing from Colin Smith's shouting episode: If you're pounding on my desk, I'm allowed to be blunt. "But I love the classroom," Lampton insisted, tacitly acknowledging that publishing wasn't in the cards. I had passed his class and seen the students with their heads on the desk, but I wasn't going to be that blunt.

It took Lampton another year to realize that his outburst hadn't raised his pay. He finally settled for a retirement buyout that gave him a nice increase his final year, though he still held out for a hire-back agreement. He's now teaching less and enjoying it more. Plus his classroom energy level has actually gone up -- at least his students seem more awake these days.

There are people who seem content with their salaries, who crave no special deals and believe the system is pretty reliable. The rest of us just grumble and make do. Colin Smith made a scene, but he left my office no richer than before. I knew he wasn't going to stop working, and he continued to publish and be rewarded incrementally. In the mean time, he never hesitated to tell me what was wrong with me or the department (I actually found that useful, especially when he modulated his voice).

The last time he accosted me, after his promotion to full professor, he was smiling. "I'm finally getting paid what I'm worth," he exclaimed. "Good job." I basked momentarily in the compliment. But Smith isn't the type to stay happy forever, and I won't be surprised when he shows up on the new head's doorstep with his next gripe.