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Individual faculty members’
salaries and raises are determined within the schools or departments. Except for compensation for
administrative duties, faculty salaries are not set by the central
administration (i.e. the President’s or Provost’s offices). Unit budgets
are set and the apportionment to individual salaries is largely under the
control of the administrative head of the unit. In the schools, this is the senior dean.
In larger schools, individual raise pools are assigned by the dean to
subunits, typically the departments, and the department chairperson
allocates the raises to the individual faculty salaries. In most cases, the
dean or unit leader is responsible for reviewing and approving these
individual allocations.
The factors that result
in the specific value of a given faculty member’s salary vary significantly
across the University. Determining
factors include:
· Salary when hired (and hence the effects of
compounding);
· Rank (Assistant Professor, Associate Professor,
full Professor, etc.);
· Effective “Market Rates” for faculty with similar
specialties that are externally established for the region and for the
Nation. These include regional
cost-of-living differences;
· Scholarly productivity and research performance
(“Merit”);
· Teaching and service performance;
· Overall unit budgets;
· Individual-specific history (retention
negotiations, intellectual property generation, administrative
responsibility, equity adjustments, exceptionally poor or strong teaching
or research performance, etc.).
Approval of
the school’s budget, including the overall salary pool, is
usually the only role the central administration has in setting faculty
salaries.
In many cases, the
guaranteed portion of a faculty member’s salary is less than the maximum
gross salary that can be earned over a twelve-month period. It is often
possible for the individual to increase her or his take-home pay by
supplementing the guaranteed portion of the salary. The sources can include
salary derived from external research funds. For some faculty this added income is
received as summer salary. For research
faculty, it is often expected that a substantial portion of the gross
salary is to be funded by external grants. In many of these cases, there is
a base or guaranteed salary portion that determines the maximum possible
annual take-home pay. For some faculty
members, there can be substantial clinical income which is not necessarily
limited by any University salary decision.
Two useful references for
faculty salaries are the presentation by Provost
Kuncl to the Faculty Senate in May, 2008, and a recent article in the
Chronicle of Higher Education.
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