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The Price of Loyalty

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By Jason Stone

A lot of qualities make for a good faculty member: curiosity (about one's area of study), persistence (if you've ever submitted a manuscript to a journal, you are familiar with that one), and patience (because good teaching, mentorship, and scholarship take time).

Loyalty also seems like it would be an important quality to have in academe. A sense of loyalty can manifest itself as hard work and strong collaborations with colleagues. It would seem like a good thing for faculty members to put down roots and invest in the city or town where they work.

Why, then, is that trait seldom rewarded in academe?

I am on the tenure track in the social sciences at a research university in the South. As I've been quite productive the past few years, I have had a number of departments at other institutions try to recruit me. Given that I have been pretty happy in my current position, I have politely turned them away.

Now contrast that to the following: A colleague in my department, hired the same year as I, was contacted by a department at another institution and asked to interview for a job there. While he, too, has been generally happy with our department, he decided to test the waters.

In the end, the competing university made him an offer, which he brought to the attention of our department head, who then made a counteroffer involving a very large raise if he would stay. No new responsibilities, no new job-related tasks -- just stay and we'll give you a big fat raise!

Now, being a junior faculty member, I will confess that I am still learning the politics of salary negotiations, counteroffers, and the like. But here is how I see it: My productivity and loyalty to my department are not being rewarded; my salary will stay the same. My colleague, on the other hand, will be making several thousand dollars more than I do simply because he played the game.

In a sense, I'm being punished for loyalty to my department, and he is being rewarded for his lack of same. Ever hear the saying "Nice guys finish last"?

I have since learned that the offer-counteroffer game is much more common than I had imagined, and not playing it is called paying the "loyalty tax." Such negotiations are sometimes kept secret, so you may not even know that while you were quietly working and being loyal to your department, your colleague next door was out hatching an offer that got him or her a substantial raise while you were running in place.

Does that practice make any sense at all?

You may think I'm being naïve -- and perhaps it is time for me to follow suit, to go on the market and get an offer that I can leverage into a raise in my home department. Or maybe I would take the offer and end up liking the new job even better than the one I have.

In the end, I know that my staying or leaving would work out fine for me and my family. But is it a good thing for academe to have faculty members coming and going -- or pretending to -- so often?

A certain amount of moving around is expected and keeps departments from being stagnant, but this system seems to encourage you to go on the market every few years whether you want to move or not. What a colossal waste of time. And departments who want to keep good people risk losing them every time those faculty members feel forced to play the offer-counteroffer game in order to get a raise.

Another factor is at work here, too. Many state universities (including my own) have been in tough financial shape in recent years, and have given faculty members very small raises (two years ago, we got a 1-percent raise). The offer-counteroffer game is increasingly viewed as a necessary means by which talented faculty members get their "market value" salaries while staying at their current university. In fact, the president of our university recently doubled the size of the "counteroffer pool" in order to keep good people here.

While I appreciate the idea of universities being able to counteroffer and retain top faculty members, that strikes me as a band-aid fix to the real problem of low faculty salaries and weak raises. Why not better finance faculty salaries and use the merit system that is already in place here and at many universities to reward productive faculty members? That's how the system was intended to work -- a system that now appears to be all but broken.

Well, at least for me, the message is now clear: Settle for 1-percent raises or do a counteroffer deal. Everyone else is doing it; why shouldn't I? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and it seems counterproductive to our educational system to be punishing loyalty rather than rewarding it, but then I guess you either get in the game or stand on the sidelines.