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from
Faculty Issues and Concerns listserve
The Loyal Faculty Campaign
Mon, 23 May 2005
Faculty at some universities practice collective bargaining; at UW we rely on "collective
begging." Sometimes it does yield results. AAUP's campaign to highlight the plight of the loyal
faculty appears to have achieved some important results. Next year's budget allocates $2 million
dollars to start addressing the problem of salary compression/inversion. President Emmert
deserves credit for this breakthrough, which he says is the first of a series of such
allocations. His decision, however, comes in response to a concerted campaign that began last
summer. Here is the story.
Salary compression has been an escalating problem since the 1980s when
the UW administration abandoned regularly funded merit raises. Salaries
of long-term faculty members stagnated as priority went to new hires and
emergency retention cases. Previous administrations have acknowledged
the problem but did nothing, privileging selective program growth and
technological investment in each year's budget.
Last summer AAUP decided to make compression/inversion the target issue
for our annual AAUP State of the Faculty Report and to follow up with a
campaign that would set out an agenda for incoming President Emmert.
The first step involved renaming the problem. Compression is too abstract. Our report was
labeled "Shortchanging the Loyal Faculty" and stressed the point that meritorious and highly
meritorious faculty members who have made the mistake of serving the UW for 20, 30, or more
years suffer severely stagnating salaries. The university pays market rate when it hires but
after that often the only way to get an above-inflation raise is to become a department chair or
administrator or threaten to leave. Those faculty who stay longest fall furthest behind. We
called that the "loyal faculty penalty."
AAUP printed 3,000 copies of the State of the Faculty Report and
distributed them widely among faculty and also to the administration and
Board of Regents. The $3,000 cost came out of the chapter treasury and
from donations from AAUP members.
The chapter leadership followed up in meetings with Faculty Senate leaders and then with the
President and Provost. In these meetings we presented additional data to document the loyal
faculty penalty. We showed case studies of particular departments, listing the salaries of each
full professor along with their years of service at UW and indications of scholarly
productivity. These data clearly showed the widening salary gap between those senior faculty
recently hired or retained and those who have served decades without pursuing outside offers.
Merit was not a good predictor of salary in the profiled units. The best indicator was time
served. The longer you serve the further your salary falls behind peer market.
President Emmert declared these data "stunning" and "eye-opening" and
pledged when we met with him to do something to address the problem. He
has kept that pledge and hopefully this is, as he further pledged, just
the beginning of a commitment to restore balance and fairness to the
salary system at the University of Washington. We welcome this first step toward acknowledgment
and resolution of the problem, even as we continue to think that band-aids are not sufficient.
AAUP holds that a real solution to the loyal faculty penalty must address problems in the
structure of UW's policies and practices of faculty compensation.
This is also a lesson in university governance that we as faculty should attend to closely.
Collective begging has yielded results; imagine what collective bargaining might achieve.
Whatever path UW faculty pursue, the point is that we need to set agendas and pursue them
vigorously. AAUP is committed to doing just that.
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University
of Washington chapter