TRANSCRIPT: Faculty Forum about Compensation

On Monday, December 5, 2005, from 12:00-1:00 p.m., a Faculty Forum About Compensation was held in Gallagher Theatre, emcee'd by SPBAC Chair Antonio Estrada. Each panelist was invited to present a brief statement about his/her perspective on compensation issues. An Open Microphone period followed their statements. What follows below is a transcription of this forum.

Panel members included:
Michael A. Cusanovich, Regents Professor, Biochem/Mol Biophysics, SCI
David N. Gibbs, Associate Professor of History/Political Science, SBS
Peter E. Medine, Professor of English, COH
Edward F. Reid, Associate Professor of Music, CFA
Gary D. Rhoades, Professor of Higher Education, COE
Carol A. Beltran, Chair, Appointed Personnel Advisory Council
Juan R. Garcia, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs
George H. Davis, Provost
Peter W. Likins, President

Panel Discussion

Wanda:  Welcome.  I am so glad to see so many of you here.  I wish there were more, but we will begin.  Tony Estrada is not here yet, so I am going to proceed as moderator of this session.  We have, as you can see, nine folks up on the panel and the list was given in the mailing that you received.  So you know who will be here, or who will be speaking of course, I have in some ways arbitrarily and in other ways alphabetically arranged the speakers.  I will announce them right before they begin to speak.  The Provost George Davis will be first and we will proceed then in alphabetical order.  So, Provost Davis.  I have my timer set at three minutes.

George Davis:  Just cut me off at three minutes, as necessary.  I would like to begin by describing some….the basic conceptual framework in terms of what the Arizona University leadership is trying to achieve with respect to salaries and compensation, and then provide some fundamental facts and information that I hope is useful in this panel discussion and conversation.  Language the relates to our budget request, and I would quote, Strong and sustained investment in University of Arizona’s faculty, professional, staff is good business for the state.  The University’s goal for faculty and staff salary competitiveness is to be at the 50 percentile with respect to its ABOR established peers. In 1999, U of A faculty was at the 26 percentile.  In 2004, the University’s place had slipped calamitously to the 18^th percentile.  While the University of Arizona moved back to the 27^th percentile in January 2005 with the state legislators’ recent appropriations and the reallocation of resources for key personnel funds, the institution remains dramatically short of where it needs to be to in anyway sustain a competitive edge.  To frame it numbers, back in 2001, fiscal year 2001, that is academic year 2000-2001, the total personnel services budget for the University of Arizona including the Med School, $284M plus ERE would bring it to $336M.  That $336 in 2000-2001 compares to $390M in 2005.  It compared that way to 2005.  So $283M to $311M just in the raw personnel services dollars from 2001 to 2005.  Importantly, the personnel services total of our general fund appropriation from the state changed in that period from 87% to 93%.  That is now the personnel dollars that I described actually for fiscal year 2005 constitutes 93% of the general fund appropriation, which is an indication of the degree to which the cuts have cut into other non-personnel areas in addition to the cuts we know went into personnel areas.  Let me also say that the actual salary dollars, the salary packages that were available for distribution in this five or six year period of time is as follows: In 2001, a 2% adjustment at a time in which the CPI, the consumer price index, was 3.4% and the Higher Education Price Index, HEPI, was 4.9%.  So there is a 2% merit adjustment opportunity in 2000 and 2001.  In 2001 and 2002, 1.8% adjustment.  $1450 were added to the base salaries of all employees.  There is no adjustment in 2002-2003.  This is a time when the CPI came in at 2.2% and HEPI at 2.9%.  There was a 1.5% adjustment in 2003-2004, a merit adjustment.  In 2004-05, 2.02% cost of living amounting to $1,000 per full time faculty…..per full time FTE.  Also January 2005, I hope I have this right, yes….effective January 2005, $4.3M for the key personnel funds.  It was a state decision package.  The $4.3M included ERE.  In January 2004, we created an internal key personnel package for distribution amounting to $2.6M for merit and $250,000 for equity.  So this sequence of adjustments  compared to total personnel budget needs.  I would like to say that there is nothing that faculty, staff, professionals and administrators agree on more than the fact that we need more state appropriations.  Yet this shared interest is undercut by the realities that nearly everyone feels behind regarding where he or she should be based on performance.  I heard a beep…..(laughter).

Tony Estrada:  Sorry for walking in a little bit late.  I’m Antonio Estrada and I’m the Chair of SPBAC and I am here to moderate the panel and, of course, your questions.  We have just heard Provost Davis discuss the picture and currently, now, we would like to have Peter Likins. 

Peter Likins:  I think I am supposed to be last. 

Tony Estrada:  Carol Beltran.

Carol Beltran:  My name is Carol Beltran.  I am the Chair of the Appointed Professionals Advisory Council.  The Appointed Professionals on campus are academic professionals, researchers and professionals on staff at the University of Arizona.  The Council represents this employee group on various committees across the campus and acts as an advisory group to the administration.  That’s basically why I am here is to represent them. Thanks. 

Tony Estrada:  Dr. Cusanovich.

Mike Cusanovich:  Good Afternoon.  I am representing the faculty of Science.  I don’t know how you can precisely do that.  It is not a monolithic organization and there a lot of departments with different viewpoints.  So I will try to summarize what I think are some general issues on compensation that we see in Science.  They don’t necessarily apply to everybody in Science – or all the departments.  Obviously, market, compression, retention are all issues, but I think I can say that in many of the Science Departments, those have been dealt with.  But with a consequence – two consequences - specifically, that I think cause severe stress and difficulties.  One of those is that we’ve cannibalized lines so that in order to accomplish competing in the marketplace or dealing with compression, so we have less faculty and importantly less support personnel and this creates substantial stress on the departments and their ability to operate.   Parallel to that, I think one of the major issues in a compensation sense within Science, is the infrastructure generically that supports the departmental enterprise, the teaching function and to a smaller extent,  the research function.  We are short on support personnel, partly due to that cannibalization, on equipment that’s departmental rather than individual, and on operations for functioning as a department to the extend that you never want to have a lab – a research lab – adjacent to a teaching lab because you can bet that during the teaching period, much of your equipment will have dissipated right out of the door to the teaching lab.  These kinds of stresses make it difficult to operate efficiently and effectively.  I think if those were dealt with one way or the other, much of the compensation concerns within Science would be satisfied with some departments an exception.  But infrastructure to support the enterprise is really critical and I think it has been a major factor in some of the retention issues recently and the loss of specific individuals, probably more so than salary per se. 

Tony Estrada:  Thank you, Dr. Cusanovich.  According to my list, I have Dr. Juan Garcia. 

Juan Garcia:  Thank you, Tony.  My responsibility, one of my responsibilities in the Provost’s Office is to monitor recruitment and retention and equity issues.  The one that I focused on in terms of our own ability to control those practices that increase internal inequity and we have attacked that on a number of fronts.  First of all, when we first hire faculty, we often create inequitable situations by that hiring especially among people of equal ranks in the same department.  So we now carefully review those contracts and those letters of offers to make sure that we are not already creating inequity to begin with.  If there are problems there, then we send it back to have that issue addressed.  We also deal with retention.  Sometimes my office looks like an emergency ward in terms of retention requests.  It was pretty much ad hoc until last year.  We have now developed some protocols that must be followed in order to respond to retention requests.  And I will be glad to discuss those further if you like.  But one thing that we have also done and Mike Cusanovich made reference to it, we’ve pretty much stopped the cannibalization of lines in order to deal with equity issues because in that cannibalization often times the money is used to create greater internal inequities in either departments, units or in colleges.  So now we are ask people to take a much more rational approach in terms of dealing with retention issues in their departments.  We have also dealt with equity issues.  This year we are going to annualize the annual equity review process in all the colleges.  The process was recommended by Emrock in 2003 and approved by the Emrock Committee.  And finally, in the Compensation and Benefits work group.  We’re looking at developing more standardized procedures and policies for looking at how we deal with implementing any kind of raises that may come across our desk at the University of Arizona.  You know that the money comes from different pools of money.  We need a more systematic method in responding to those pools of money that we get from time to time. 

Tony Estrada:  Thank you, Juan.  Next we have Peter Medine, Professor of English. 

Peter Medine:  Thank you.  We can begin with a fact.  During the last ten years, faculty salaries at the University of Arizona have fallen ever further behind salaries of peer institutions.  In my own department, English, the longer faculty are here, and the more they advance through the professorial ranks, the further below national averages their salaries are likely to become.  This appears to be the situation in other College of Humanities departments and, I gather, it is pretty much the same in departments all over campus.  The explanation from the President’s Office down to the Department Head’s office is that the legislature in Phoenix appropriates insufficient funds to address the problem of deteriorating salaries.  This explanation would have credibility if it were not for another fact.  Huge raises, repeatedly, go to faculty serving in administrative capacities, department heads and department program directors.  So the question arises, if there are funds for administrative raises, why are there not funds for regular faculty raises.  The practice to move into an administrative position, receive a hefty salary increase, hold the position for a time, return to regular faculty status and retain in perpetuity the salary increase.  In my department between fiscal year 2004 and 2005, six colleagues received permanent outsized raises from 10%-40%, all connected with departmental administrative service.  Again, the question, if there is money for such raises for departmental administrators and if there is money to support the salaries of colleagues at these levels even after they no longer are administrators, why is there no money to address the salary problem overall. To illustrate the situation at a higher administrative institutional level, during the last two years, two senior colleagues of Humanities administrators have received raises ranging from 25%-35%.  I do not contest the level of their salaries per se.  But I do repeat the question, if the legislature is appropriating insufficient funds for the University to address the problem overall, why are there always funds available for large raises for colleagues who hold administrative posts either at the departmental or the college level.  The answer seems inescapable.  People in charge of the money at the University of Arizona from the President and the Provost to the department heads and deans reward administrative service at the expense of research and teaching faculty.  So to conclude with an observation of fact, year in and year out, whether the legislature is miserly or munificent, huge raises go to administrators of all levels, while for the most part, faculty salaries decline relative to national levels.  The problem is not the legislature; the problem is with the University.  The University’s administrators have caused the problem, University administrators perpetuate the problem, University administrators need to solve the problem.  They have the money. 

Tony Estrada:  Thank you very much, Professor Medine.  (applause).  Professor Gibbs.

Professor Gibbs:  Thank you. I agree with the basic thrust of Peter Medine’s points that the University has a serious problem clearly in terms of both absolute faculty salaries also equity within the salary structure. And there are many reasons, obviously, why this is a bad thing.  First and foremost, you might say that it is unfair.  But I am going to point to reasons apart from fairness that make it an inadequate policy to have a salary structure as inequitable as the one we have and specifically it really detracts from the University’s main mission of teaching and teaching service in that it basically distracts faculty in a number of ways.  In the first place, it must be said just as a fact, that within SBS there are faculty whose salaries are simply sufficiently low that they are having some difficulty meeting some of their expenses.  And the result of that is several things:  Significant numbers of faculty over a significant period of time have been forced to teach summer courses repeatedly.  And basically, what this has to be considered is a distraction from their research agendas.  You get faculty who are active in research, accomplished researchers who never the less are teaching 25% more than they are supposed to be teaching simply because they need the money.  That seems to be an inadequate policy by a University to create a situation like that.  Secondly, faculty whose salaries are too low often cut back or even eliminate their participation in scholarly conferences.  It is a fact that most departments have fairly limited budgets to fund conference participation and people tend to pay it out of pocket.  If your salary is sufficiently low, you have to cut something, and frequently what you will do is you will cut participation in conferences.  That is not in the University’s interest to do that.  It detracts from the basic research profile of the University.  It simply does not make sense that the University creates a situation like this.  Thirdly, and this is much more subjective and harder to define, but never-the-less it is my impression.  A significant number of departments, let’s face it, do have some problems with regard to adversarial relationships among faculty and poor morale related to that.  Fights and so on break out resulting sometimes, in extreme cases, in CAFT appeals lawsuits.  All of these are very debilitating to departments and to individuals and most importantly they distract people from the main task of their job, which is research, teaching and service.  One of the principle causes of these types of problems in my experience at least, is low salaries and inequitable salaries.  And so there are a series of hidden costs the University pays basically in this type of salary inequity structure and I’d say they fit into these categories, as well as of course, as the even more unaccountable problem of simply low morale and the fact that that also saps our ability and to some extent the willingness to do our jobs properly.  One more point that I would like to make on a slightly different topic is that in addition to salaries, there is another problem, too, which is a closely related issue of just quality of life, which again could be improved on the campus.  And I’ll just cite one example of that.  The University of Arizona is one of the very few campuses at least among universities in the country that has no on-site childcare, for example.  One has to ask why is it that universities that are less well-endowed than we do can afford to do this and we can’t. 

Tony Estrada:  Thank you very much.  Professor Reid.

Ed Reid:  Good Afternoon.  The College of Fine Arts embraced the Focused Excellence concept immediately when President Likins introduced it to the University.  We recognized that this concept accurately described what was already occurring in our college and on local, national and international stages.  Our students and faculty members perform as part of various international conferences and proudly represent the excellence found here at the U of A.  Even with this world-class faculty, Fine Arts faculty members at the U of A are among the lowest paid based on national, state and campus data.  According to the higher education arts data services or HEADS, which compared 47 public institutions with similarly-sized programs, our assistant professors are being compensated at levels recognized as third-tier pay.  The U of A’s $42,600 average salary for assistant professors is technically below the 25^th percentile figure listed in the HEADS report.  To be compensated equally with tier-one schools to which a member of the Association of American Universities should be compared, our assistant professors should be earning $51,000, a difference of $8,300.  The low compensation issue is almost as anemic with associate and full professors in Music and the other schools in Fine Arts.  They are receiving compensation just equal to tier-two institutions.  Within our state of Arizona, ASU assistant professors in Music are receiving $6,600 more on average than our U of A colleagues.  Full professors in Music at ASU are paid more than $3,000 more than the professors here at the U of A.  On our campus, the comparisons include Optical Science assistant professors receiving $26,000 more in salary than Music.  Educational Psychiatry assistant professor receiving $11,000 more.  The Department of Classics within Humanities shows a $4,000 difference.  This inequity is now proving to be quite harmful to our core programs. Last year, we lost two of our four Music Education faculty members, both assistant professors to better offers.  Those two talented and hard-working colleagues were making $42,000 before being lured away from us.  Students in Music Education represent at least 40% of our population.  There is now only one full-time professor when there should be five.  Recent U of A Music Education graduates make more money in Phoenix as high school band directors than our assistant and some of our associate professors.  This is particularly troubling to our faculty.  To be competitive, we need to make drastic changes in our starting pay for assistant professors.  The inequity on the national, state, and local levels is having an adverse affect on a program that has clearly been performing as a tier-one school but is being rewarded at the tier-three level. Thank you.

Tony Estrada:  Thank you, Professor Reid.  Now Professor Gary Rhoades.

Gary Rhoades:  Three minutes of fame.  What to say about salaries.  I feel we need a big sign up here that says “More.”  I am speaking not just as a representative of the College of Education, which is like Music, one of the lower paid fields within most universities, but also as a scholar in the Center for the Study of Higher Education, which is an interdisciplinary group of people who actually study these issues.  So there is research on these matters and I just briefly want to share a few kinda national trends to put what we are experiencing in a broader perspective.  The first issue has to do with just what the level of salary increases is.  And it is relatively low across the board for faculty nationally.  There are several national surveys whether it is the AAUP or the Oklahoma State survey or others.  They all find basically, just what I suggested, that the increase…..in fact, two years ago, the AAUP ran an analysis comparing increase in faculty salaries to increase in tuition dollars.   Cause often times, faculty are blamed as   labor costs for the increase in tuition.  What they found is an extraordinary disconnect between the size of the increase in faculty salaries, which is around the cost of living and just slightly more and the increase in tuition, which nationally is quite dramatic and obviously at our own institution has led the pack for public…for flagship public universities.  The flip side of that argument, which the AAUP did not make, is that somehow those tuition increases, which generate increased income for the institution, do not translate into increased salaries for faculty members.  So that is one trend – just a general pattern of increases in faculty salaries.  Second patterns have to do with salary differentiated and salary dispersion.  Nationally, and over the past ten or fifteen years, there has been increasing dispersion between the salaries of faculty in public and private sector institutions on the order of sometimes 20-30% and the increase continues in recent years, which is partly why we find ourselves getting raided so often not only by first-tier private universities, but also by second-tier.  There is increased dispersion within universities between fields. And there is a good deal of research on this to try to understand, well why is that?  Is it because of market differences between fields?  So there are economists, there are sociologists, labor economists studying these matters and what they find is the differences between fields can be in part be explained by the market, but not all of the differences can be explained by the market.  So the gaps between Engineering and Education or Law and Music cannot be explained entirely by differences of market.  I can refer you to some of those studies later on.  The same has been found for the gender gap and the salaries between men and women which persists and can be understood not only as a function of taking place within fields, but as a function of investment in different fields of higher education which are more or less feminized.  And those differences, Marcia Bellis, in particular, a sociologist who has published widely on this, has found that you cannot explain those differences by factors like productivity, time and rank, quality of work and market.  Those differences, the gender gap, goes beyond those factors and the gender gap increases as you move higher up the higher education hierarchy.  Two thoughts about recommendations:  One is that our current equity adjustment mechanism is so focused within field, simply will not address one key dimension of inequities in higher education which is differences across field that are not explained by productivity and not explained by market factors outside the University.  Second point is that as a public university, there is some research from a fellow at Penn State University, Roger Geiger, that suggests that public should increasingly find more success in pursuing recruitment strategies that go not for attacking the market to attract star laureate faculty at the full level because the gap between us and the private sector at that level is the greatest.  But instead public universities would be better served to recruit more aggressively for targets of opportunity at the junior levels of either assistant professor or early associate when we are still at least within the ballpark of salaries with our aspirant peer private and more heavily-resourced public universities.  Thanks.

Tony Estrada:  Thank you very much.  I believe we now have Dr. Likins.

Peter Likins: Thank you all.  I will try to respond succinctly to each of the two major issues before us here.  One:  The supply of money that comes into this place to be used for salaries.  Two:  The distribution of those dollars once they arrive here.  A very important part of my job is generating the resources required to enable the employees of the University to do the work of the University.  And that requires dealing with the legislature or dealing with the benefactors or any sources that I can tap into to achieve that objective.  And let me be very clear, I am not satisfied with my performance in the eight years that I have been in this job.  It’s been a very daunting challenge to generate the dollars we need to do justice to our people and I know that.  It has been a tough environment.  I won’t make excuses.  I’ll tell you, I have tried as hard as a human being can try to generate those particular dollars because I know that there is no dollar more important than those we use to pay our people.  We raised a lot of money from the private sector in our Campaign Arizona, but only a small fraction of those dollars endowed chairs to pay faculty.  It is mostly a matter of generating resources from either general fund allocation from the legislature or tuition increases.  Our tuition a few years ago was the lowest in America among America’s 50 senior public universities.  It is now 40^th out of 50 – it is still a very low tuition.  And the dollars we receive from the legislature for compensation (and that’s salaries, but also those indirect costs associated with employee benefits) have not been adequate to maintain competitiveness even within an environment in which nationally higher education has not been well-treated.  Now let me shift then to the question of how dollars are distributed once they get here.  Firstly, my own role in this place in distributing those dollars is very, very limited.  But I do have the same kind of perception as an observer participant over the decades that Professor Rhoades has as an expert in the subject and that is there are certain fundamental trends, which we can decry or we can praise, but they are real.  One of those fundamental trends that has to do with the flow of revenues into the place is a very, very dramatic transfer over thirty years in public higher education of financial responsibility from taxpayers to tuition payers.  We participated rather late in that transfer, but we are participating now quite vigorously in the transfer from taxpayers to tuition payers.  If you add up the two revenue streams, however, we are going down – not up.  That’s reality.  Another of the fundamental trends is that divergence between public and privates – Professor Rhoades has addressed the matter – another of the fundamental trends is the increasing divergence among fields.  When I became an assistant professor at UCLA in 1964, you were an assistant professor step I, step II, step III and it didn’t matter whether you were an English professor or a professor of Electrical Engineering.  The marketplace began to break that down thirty, forty years ago and now pay is a field variable.  Again, Professor Rhoades is more expert than I in understanding exactly what’s driven those changes.  But those changes are real.  They are not a peculiarity of this place.  Another of the, in my opinion, distressing, but fundamental, changes is in the compensation of administrators relative to faculty.  That’s real.  It wasn’t very long ago that public university presidents were not paid anything like private university presidents. They were paid as public servants as they, in my opinion, should properly consider themselves.  And I took an $80,000 per year pay cut to come to this job from a much less demanding private university presidency.  I did that because I came here as a servant of the people and I see myself in that way right now.  But I have now over the eight or nine years of my presidency watched the marketplace for public university presidents really escalate and some of you know that when the ASU presidency was changed, that is to say when Michael Crow became president there a few years ago, the marketplace had changed so dramatically that his salary was dramatically higher than his predecessor received and I was offered the compensating dollars and I accepted a $60,000 per year pay raise and I give it back every year.  That is my statement, my personal statement of my belief that we executives in higher education are in fact being, via marketplace phenomena, driven into higher compensation than is appropriate and equitable in terms of our status relative to faculty.  I cannot deny that that’s real.  And it does permeate the levels of the institution.  My perception is that is very much a marketplace phenomenon, much less in evidence in this University than at our neighbor up the road.  There is another set of issues that we as University administrators always need to face when we decide how to use compensation dollars.  It was mentioned in the context of cannibalizing lines.  When we have so many dollars for managing personnel, do we have more faculty less well paid or fewer faculty better paid.  Those are trade-offs that different schools make in different ways.  We have made those trade-offs very differently than ASU, which has a very much higher student/faculty ratio. 

Tony Estrada:  Thank you very much, President Likins. 

Question and Answer Period

Tony Estrada:  Now for you all if anyone would like to come up to the microphones.  We have open microphones on either aisle to ask the panel a question.  Please state your name when you come up. 

Man.  I am an assistant professor in the School of Public Administration and Affairs.  We are in the Eller College of Management.  The question that I have, or I just wanted to know the panel’s thoughts on today are on the issue of retention and merit raises.  The concern that I have as an assistant professor, is what I often hear about as retention raises.  And that is that they generally go to people who get offers.  And as an assistant professor, what that tells me is that the incentive structure for me being an warmly accepted employee is that I should go out on the market as often as possible and as fast as possible in order to get a raise.  And I have been told this by senior colleagues and that worries me because sometimes a small little pat on back as a merit raise can do so much to reward and increase loyalty to faculty members.  I know this is a problem nationally.  This isn’t just a problem here, but it is going to get worse because demographics tell us that the baby boomers are going to retire.  We have a massive generation of so called Millennial coming in and so where are we going to find our faculty members if we don’t keep the ones we have.  And I appreciate this real nice opportunity today.  I didn’t want to vent anger or anything of that sort.  I really would like to know the thoughts on that. 

George Davis:  Thank you for those observations.  I think you are right on top of the most significant issue that we have – one of the very most significant issues we have with respect to compensation, recruitment and retention.  I’ll test this in my response here.  My own sense of the University administration signaling that you need to go out and get a job – the job offer – if you want a salary kick, in my own view, was at its most extreme about a year to a year and a half ago.  And I don’t know if you feel that my sense of chronology is accurate or not, but with the deep budget cuts that began in 2001 and 2002 and with the promise of more to come expressed through the actions of the legislature, there was a period in which forces of attempting to retain faculty were extremely difficult and in many, many, many cases, department heads or deans, deans were coming to my office saying, “You know, I’ve got faculty here that have job offers.”  I went to our All Funds budget and was able to, on average, pull about $300,000 a year to try to address some of the retention challenges.  I will admit, particularly earlier on, 2001, 2002, many of the adjustments that I made were in direct response that somebody was already interviewed and was about to get an offer.  Yet at the same time, I think, our incentive to create an internal salary package, which we did in 2004 wasn’t much.  It was about $2.4 M.  It was an attempt to try to get out in front of it, so as to discourage that particular incentive that you are concerned about.  And then we follow that up in short order by basically asking the state for a single decision package, which is key personnel, to again try to get out in front and have a process in which their would be distribution of dollars made at the college and departmental level.  But I don’t at all doubt that the situation remains one where cues come to assistant and associate professors and maybe others saying “Am I supposed to waste some time going out to go through a drill?  It doesn’t sound like integrity to me” and then come back under those circumstances, get an offer.  That’s a bad cycle and to the extent that we have incentivized that, that’s a problem for this administration.  But we are really aware and we are trying to do something about it. 

Woman:  I could not agree more with the issues that you have addressed, but I believe one of the issues that is very important that has not been addressed is the lack of transparency in salaries.  Peter Medine mentioned the difference between administrators, people who have served in administrative positions and people who serve only in faculty positions.  I am one of those who has been in the role of administrator and don’t object what administrators getting more – getting some reward for trying to herd cats, for whatever time they are in an administrative position.  But still there should be some type of transparency in what people get and what people retain on their administrative salary or how the salaries are increased from year to year.  Thank you.  Are there efforts in that area, by the way, of making salaries more transparent? 

Peter Likins:  I need firstly to say that at a certain level, salaries are entirely public knowledge.  My own compensation is public knowledge. We don’t reveal everybody’s salary in the University, nor do we feel that we should.  But there is another question that you raise, that Professor Medine raised also, that we do need to address.  That is the problem that arises when people receive additional compensation for service in administrative roles and then return to the faculty and carry in perpetuity, carry that incremental compensation for the rest of their lives.  That is not an appropriate way for an institution to behave.  We have in recent years attempted to not formularize, but at least establish in advance when we provide administrative appointments of professors an understanding of what their return strategy would look like financially.  Except that is usually a conversation the Provost has.

George Davis:  In my very first conversation with Pete and one of the first conversations when he asked me to serve as Provost and we finally got to salary, he made it very clear and I was welcoming this, that we had at that point in time had to determine what my return salary would be to Geosciences.  I didn’t know if he had in mind about returning me within five months or six months, but we really had to get that straight because there had been such abuses over the years.  A member of central administration goes right back to faculty responsibilities and opportunities carrying if not all, a great portion of the administrative salary.  And I do that routinely in all the recruitments of Vice Presidents and Deans.  That particular routine business involves conversations with deans and ultimately department heads to try to figure out what’s the similarly situated position for this individual faculty and this market at this particular level. I am not as clearly aware as I should be in regard to the salary changes of Department Heads that move back to faculty positions.  But let me say this, if I may, in terms of the initial setting of salaries, let’s speak in terms of deans, there is no search committee that I have been involved with in college level dean appointments that are saying to me as Provost, “Don’t pay very much money for the dean you are recruiting for our college.”  Rather the reverse is the case.  There is anxiety that maybe our administration might not put on the table the kind of dollars that are necessary to recruit in the national market a really outstanding person.  And that same kind of emphasis on market clearly comes into the so-called end game where individual candidates in most cases have been interviewing at two or three or four different places.  And so the fundamental height of salaries for administration and the market is one that will probably continue in the ways that we have experienced and what Pete has referred to over the past ten years.  That I don’t think we can do much about if we want to be as competitive as possible as a University.  But we can take tremendous care as to what the return salaries should be. 

Pete Likins:  With all respect, I must correct my Provost in one important point in particular.  He makes reference to the negotiation between the two of us.  The truth of the matter is when I called his home to ask George if he would serve as Provost, he was on a mountain somewhere in Peru or Bolivia.  I spoke to his wife and told her my intentions and she said, “Do we get basketball tickets?”  Having been assured that basketball tickets were available, she said, “We accept.”  Then we talked later about these small matters of compensation. 

Professor Medine:  Let me underline a fact and it is important for us to keep this fact in mind.  We do not object to levels of salary.  That’s not the point.  The point is outsized raises when we are told that there is no money for faculty raises.  That’s the point.  Transparency, all you have to do is go to the Circulation Desk at the Library, you’ll get the most studied document in the entire University Library and I urge each of you to do this every year.  In fact, to have the departments do it, but I do it myself.  Second point here is, if people in the departments were properly compensated, there would be no need at the time of becoming a program director or a department head to gouge the University.  If, for example in my discipline, probably the average salary for a senior full professor ---------- will run $100,000.  If somebody were to assume the department headship, go up to fiscal appointment, roughly 20% raise, do the job for five years, get any other appropriate raises along the line, go back to the regular salary, with the appropriate raises that everyone else is eligible for, and then get a year’s sabbatical, it would be fine.  But that’s not the way we do it.  It’s usually a one shot affair and you’d better make hay while the sun shines.  And that’s the institution – that’s the arrangement that we have found ourselves in and it is a deleterious one.  One final small point.  We do not have one department head in English.  We have five.  We have four others who are receiving compensation for jobs they are no longer performing.  That’s a very, very deleterious situation.

Peter Likins:  I must say that at the level of deans, vice provosts and vice presidents, I believe it is our practice now to discuss at the time of the appointment, the re-entry compensation logic and it usually begins with consultation within the department to see where that individual would be placed relative to peers.  So it is not a formulaic adjustment from the administrative salary.  There is a consultation that has the purpose of putting that professor back among academic peers being compensated as professors.  Typically, there is a year sabbatical.  It takes that long to recover from service as an administrator and redefine yourself as a faculty member.  That is a benefit that comes from the service as an administrator.  But I do not believe we any longer do what you described at the level at least that I can see of deans, vice provosts and vice presidents.  I believe we put them back in a faculty context, scaling back of course from a twelve-month to academic year compensation. 

Gary Rhoades:  I actually wanted to go back to Roger’s question about to get a real raise, you have to get a letter.  And I think in an institution like this one, which is relatively under-resourced relative to its competitors who people are getting from this sort of game of trying to counter-offer.  If you are in that game at the point of having to make a counter-offer, it is a dead loss.  What you need to do is what I think we have started to do a little bit of and that is to try to do more by way of preemptive strikes.  Once someone is out in the market, we can’t compete and we just enhance the inequities that Juan talked about earlier.  Second point is, we have ourselves wrapped in a discourse of excellence, which suggests that only a very small proportion of people in our University deserve raises because all raises now are essentially merit raises.  I am reminded of a math head I interviewed some years ago in a study of about 400 faculty and heads in research universities like this one who said, “I’m given the prescription from my dean and then from the provost that I can only give merit raises to 25% of my faculty.  What that presumes is that only 25% of my faculty is meritorious.  And that’s not true.”  And the situation that we put ourselves in, I think, is we put assistant professors and associate professors in a position where, for several years, they may be getting really modest – at best- raises.  And when you are in this mind-set of we can only give even insignificant raises to people who are truly exceptional, who are truly meritorious and only 20 or 40 or 50 percent of our faculty are truly meritorious, then we are sending the message to the other 50 or 75 percent, “Go get a letter.”

Man:  First, thank you to the Faculty Senate and SPBAC for sponsoring this forum and to all of you for the statements and information you have shared with us. The biggest problem is that the legislature doesn’t appropriate enough money.  And we can’t do much about that, but I think we can do some things with the money that we control.  And I think that one of the things that I would recommend that SPBAC and Faculty Senate look at is the system that has been here that has caused so many problems and so many inequities and has led to many abuses that have already been identified here.  It is the same system operating now and perhaps there is more of a consciousness about the system now, but I think we need some guidelines and some rules so that when the next administration comes in, they could be handed to them and the corrections that have been made that are operating now – the new administration now, we as the faculty, because they work for us, they have to abide by these rules to prevent these abuses.  We need a system that treats everybody fairly and always recognizes merit.  The concept of key personnel, which was introduced just the last round, has merit but gets divisive.  I think it is very divisive.  I think it puts departments in very difficult situations figuring out who is key personnel and who is not.  When we are hired here, we are hired because we have certain qualifications and that in itself tells us that we are going to be key personnel.  And the other problem is that departments are so burdened with compression problems and inequities and so forth that there is always the temptation to not pay attention to the rules that come down, and I have the key personnel rules here with me.  This has happened here.  So the result, once evaluations are made within departments, don’t always come out the way that they should and then the administration looks at the results and goes along with them.  And so what good are rules if they are not going to be observed.  But I think the concept itself of key personnel is flawed and divisive.  We ought to go back to what we had before which is merit.  You always reward merit and as Professor Rhoades was saying, don’t force departments to choose five people in any department who get merit and the others don’t because lots of people are meritorious.  My final point has to do with buildings.  Employees have been subsidizing the maintenance and operation of buildings on this campus.  And that is wrong under any circumstances, but especially in the budgetary climate we have been forced to live.  It is the responsibility of the state to maintain and operate those buildings, not to take money from tuition or other sources – money that is unrestricted, not to take money from there that ought to be going for employee compensation, not just faculty but all employees, and putting the burden on employees to pay for that.  Perhaps the outgoing President and the incoming President should sign a pledge that they will not commit the University to build new buildings if the money is not there to pay for them and to maintain them.  Thank you.

Peter Likins:  Both Professor Martinez and Professor Rhoades have raised concerns about salary allocations that go to less than half of the faculty whether its key personnel monies or whether it's interpreted as University policy.  Let me try to put our behavior in some kind of context.  In a typical year, in a normal year when the economy is in normal shape, we receive from the state, all state employees, receive from the state a certain percentage increase.  Usually that comes with rules.  Once in awhile, the state will say, every employee of the state including University employees receives a sum of money - $1500.  And then we have no discretion at all, it is just automatically allocated.  Sometimes the state will say the increase is three percent and you in the University can allocate one of those three percent on the basis of what you perceive as equity or merit or market, but the other fraction must be automatically allocated.  We receive instructions from the state.  During a period of time when the state was providing zero or virtually zero in dollars for additional compensation, we developed a strategy that worked.  We were desperate for money, some kind of money to pay our people.  We argued – I argued – before the legislature that there was a cost to us when faculty were fleeing and carrying with them their capacity to generate resources.  Very narrow interpretation of key personnel.  But I argued, we needed money in order to keep people here who are generating the money that enabled us to function.  And it worked; it worked in the legislative political arena.  I asked for $10M, I got $4.3M.  Once those dollars came to us, then I had an obligation to make sure the Provost and others administered those dollars in a way that was consistent with the rhetoric that I used in the legislature.  I prefer not to use that rhetoric.  I’d rather not seek funds for so-called key personnel.  I certainly don’t like the idea that key personnel have anything to do with revenue generation.  But that was the political environment when I saw no monies coming for state employees as salary increases.  I have no regret at having pursued that money.  It was at least $4.3M infused into the system even if only one of four or one of three faculty members received benefit.  A small, small fraction of non-faculty employees received the benefit of those dollars. I hope you would agree, although I recognize that the divisiveness that comes from the administration, that that infusion of $4.3M into our payroll was a good thing.  But I think you will also agree that if this year, the economy has recovered in the state of Arizona, we can get for all state employees a 5% increase or more – I mean, something substantial.  Well, then the necessity of getting this very restricted key personnel money disappears. 

Man:  I have just three points.  First, I want to respond to something that Professor Medine started talking about and that is the way that we, at least in the English Department, have witnessed administrative raises – be administered.  People are making – senior people are making salaries that are tens and tens and tens – count them – four – tens of thousands of dollars below the national averages that are published in the AAUDE figures.  They are suddenly promoted to department head.  It’s a promotion – let’s face it.  They are promoted to department head; they get a 40, 50, 60,000 dollar raise over a period of a few years.  How are you going to bring those people – this is Pete Likins – how are you going to bring those people back down to what their non-administrative full professor peers are making without being inhumane?  You can’t do it.  So what do you do?  You have a dean negotiate in advance some way of assuring that what these people wind up with is far more than anyone who hasn’t been an administrator. And I can’t deal in an argument with you now, but I have the evidence, it’s over there, it is in the book.  And it happens year after year after year.  I have two other points that I want to make and I will make them very quickly.  I have even written them down.  I think what we have amounts to, with the differential that’s been going on for thirty years – the differential treatment between administrative salaries and faculty salaries amounts to a de facto policy of keeping faculty salaries artificially low and the more we sit here and talk about it in faculty forum and don’t really address the problem, the worse it gets.  And it’s been getting worse and worse and worse.  My second point, the present administration inherited the problem, but their policies have, over the years, exacerbated it.  And the fact that we are here in a faculty forum in the twilight of this administration talking about the issue instead of having the administration present us with a plan to solve the problems, speaks volumes.  This is not yet being treated seriously.  You are not doing it.  Everything you said, Pete Likins, today, in response to Peter Medine and Gary Rhoades and George Davis, you too, everything you said is a response to a problem – not taking the initiative.  What is this about key personnel?  Why wasn’t this anticipated – it has been going on for thirty years.  Let’s have some leadership here, guys.  Give us a plan how you are going to treat the faculty the way you treat each other.  Give us something like real raises year after year after year.  Am I angry?  You bet.  Am I bitter? No. 

Man from the College of Medicine.  I have been here for three years.  When I first arrived here, I was offered a salary of $55,000, at the same time, a friend of mine got a job in Texas in the same position for $75,000.  Anyway, I thought, well, I needed a job, so I came here.  In the three years that I have been here, I was lucky to get last year a couple of grants from NIH bringing a total of $600,000 per year which brings $30,000 to the University, I guess, per year.  However, I cannot raise my salary to a decent level.  Why?  I am not asking the state to raise my salary, but if I have more money that I am bringing from my effort, why I cannot raise my salary.  I know some other people do.  Like in my department, they negotiate.  I don’t know how this negotiation goes around – under the table or something.  I don’t know those dealings.  How do I do it?  I’m a researcher, not a negotiator.  So how does it work?  

George Davis:  Your position in the College of Medicine in what department?  -----   And you’re a tenure track?  But not yet tenured?  You are on twelve-month appointment as a member of the College of Medicine?  You may or may not be aware that with respect to the College of Medicine and also the College of Pharmacy, Pete Likins and I have been emphasizing that one of the ways that one can actually increase the salary base would be in ways that don’t presume that your whole fundamental salary base is state funded, but instead create a situation where your state base comprises, let’s say, 85% of your twelve-month salary and the rest would be supplemented by your grants in a way that overall you, in effect, and the dean or department head gives you an increase.  We’ve had a lot of difficulty trying to implement that for a couple of reasons.  The first steps of implementation in Pharmacy, piloted for a year, we had to just turn off because there were some dangers of violation of policy with respect to sponsored projects.  And then we restarted it again.  There is anxiety, what happens if the grant doesn’t come in.  We don’t think that is a problem, if a department or a larger unit like a college creates a kind of a rainy day fund so that if you have a hiatus in your grant activity, you can be covered at that newly set salary level.  So we would provide encouragement for you to create the situation where there is a higher salary.  In the meantime, your department head has to try to figure out whether or not the salary level you are seeking is one that is “appropriate” with respect to peers and with respect to responsibilities and it doesn’t immediately create a domino effect of inequity within the unit.   But department heads, theoretically, can manage that through a succession of adjustments in ways. 

Man:  So what you are saying is sacrifice state line for the duration of the grant.  And if I lose it, I will go back to where I was? 

George Davis:  In most Colleges of Medicine in this nation, individual faculty members’ salaries do not have such a high percentage of state funding as we do here.  And we think of that as a missed opportunity in the College of Medicine and the University.  If we could somehow break that pattern in proper ways, then it offers the opportunity to actually increase the size of the faculty in the College of Medicine to allow us to be more competitive.  So we’re saying it ought to be possible to have your state funding reach a level – not 100% - but maybe 85% in just the way you are describing.  You move in some grant funding and make certain that there is a rainy day fund if there is a small interruption in your grant productivity. 

Peter Likins:  With apologies, I’d like to jump in on this same subject.  I have spent about half of my academic career in private universities where it is perfectly normal for faculty who have access to research contracts to pay 25% even 50% of their salaries from research contracts.  Public universities have not generally moved that way and when I came here, in fact just a year ago at a forum not too different than this one, we talked about ten different ways in which we might restructure the way we manage money in this house.  I tried really hard to establish a university policy that would enable faculty members with a sustained record of research funding to increase their salaries, but in the process, to offload a portion of the salary currently received from the state so those dollars could move towards members of the University faculty who don’t have access to research contracts.  Because you gotta remember if you reward only those with research contracts, you are exacerbating this problem of field  disparity.  So I had this really neat strategy, and I had worked it all out, and I was really proud of my authorship and it bombed.  It just didn’t work in this place, for a lot of reasons, having in part to do with the established patterns in existing colleges because some colleges already have a practice of using contract dollars for faculty salaries.  Often times, contract dollars in this culture are used to buy out teaching time rather than to increase compensation.  So I tried very hard to get this University, one year ago, to buy into a University strategy and I failed.  OK, sometimes my aspirations aren’t realized.  What has emerged instead, I think, is an encouragement to deans within their colleges to try to develop such strategies.  I really do believe that this University must find ways to rely more for faculty compensation on research contract revenues and less and less on state revenues.  Just because that’s the total dynamic of the universe in which we live.  But right now in this University, that’s being managed on a college by college basis. 

Woman:  I apologize for keeping this over, but I can’t help but notice that on a panel of eleven people, there is one woman, and there is Tony chairing here, that next time we have such an event, I would hope that you would find more women to speak on this issue.  It seems to me that one of the things they find in the private sector is that your salary is best predicted by your power to set salaries.  I give you a piece of evidence A here.  And I thank Professor Rhoades for mentioning the issue.  So I would hope that in the future, gender disparities and racial disparities would be on the table for discussion whenever raises are occurring.  I think that the sense is that we need some more concrete measures in place.  I have watched this issue of arbitrariness and head salaries and step-down salaries for heads for years.  And I have watched people say there is a policy and then one gets one deal and another gets another deal.  So I think it is time we have one coherent policy that is applied systematically in all cases.  Now that said, I think you have to realize that some people who take an administrative position move to it from a compressed salary, so that they are not even on par with other full professors.  So you need to understand that salary setting will be a complicated matter.  I think we need to move much further into identifying sources of revenues to address this problem.  When we are doing billion dollar campaigns and the only way we can imagine money for salaries is in endowed chairs, I think we have had a serious failure of imagination and that we should have had a fund in that that was large and labeled appropriately so that we can begin to deal with this.  And I think that we also, as we seek to identify these kinds of sources, have to tag some of our tuition increases for faculty raises.  I know at my alma mater that the now-stepping-down provost, when they increased tuition, put a lot of it to faculty lines and faculty salaries.  I know that would be the priority in my college and I know it would benefit my department enormously.  Finally, I think we need to understand that there are many different roads to poor salaries.  So a one-size-fits-all, “oh, all we need is merit money” or “all we need is cost of living” – that will simply leave inequities in place.  We have to address the multi-faceted nature of this problem.  And to the degree that the money is not adequate to it, then I think that sense of grievance is going to persist.  So my sense partly is, anyone who can get anything who deserves it, I’m all for it, but that that is not an equitable solution.  I think that you need to start now and transition into the new administration with plans already in place. 

George Davis:  This issue that relates to the upward adjustment of department head salaries and then a much less significant adjustment upon return to the faculty is one that I would like to return to in Faculty Senate, Senate Executive Committee or SPBAC.  The protocols that Pete and I have been using with respect to the deans are a very straight forward one.  It’s one in which, and I don’t think what I am going to describe what was expressed before as a potential concern is going to upset the possibility of landing a faculty member who is choosing to rise, so to speak, to a department head position.  But in essence, you take the existing salary, expand it from academic to fiscal, if it is presumably an academic salary, you add an administrative stipend that is very distinctly referenced in the letter of offer and then you basically say in the letter of offer when you return to the faculty, the administrative stipend will be removed, and you will go back to the faculty salary that has been agreed upon in negotiations with deans and looking at what the peer situation is, but with the understanding that we would be open to adjustments to that base salary in ways that are consistent with the salary adjustment opportunities that would have been available to you as a faculty member during the period of time in which you were a department head.  And so you go back over the track record over three years or five years or ten years and identify what those adjustments were and then work with the department head and dean at that point in time to see if that is rational relative to peers who are currently within the department.  I would like to have a chance to report back on that. 

Man.  I am a professor in the English Department.  I would like to put some of the issues brought up by Professor Medine and Professor Dahood into a historical context.  When I came here in 1967, there wasn’t this big gap between administration and faculty.  In fact, I was on an intramural department football team and we played the administration in football.  Why was administration so good in those days?  Because they were a bunch of good ‘ole boys who were jocks.  And they were tough guys.  And we drank together after games.  No way is that going to happen today because what you guys have done is create not just a  separate social class, you’ve created a caste system.  It is because of those salaries you have given yourselves.  A good example of this, I think, and how pernicious this has been, especially on how it has effected my own department, is that what’s its done is created an attitude of careerism within my department.  That is to say, teaching and research are not valued as much as becoming an administrator because that’s where the money is.  At a recent department meeting, when Professor Medine was addressing the salary inequities, one professor in our department, full professor, a guy in a three-piece suit with an earring in his ear, said that there was nothing you could do about this because the market determined everything.  So my question to this guy, which I never asked, was what is the motive behind your wishing to keep the same salary inequity within the department because that is what you are really saying.  You want to keep things as they are.  Now I think what is really pernicious about this is that administrators are valued more than faculty.  That is not a point that can be argued because it just permeates the atmosphere of this University.  And especially our department.  What’s pernicious about this, is that indirectly, the indirect effect, is that you are punishing research and scholarship, research and teaching indirectly by this system that you created.  Let me give you one example, and I’ll be brief because I know people want to get out of here.  I inherited a film program called the International Art Society.  It started back in 1953 by two guys; one guy in the French Department Bob Hammond, another guy in the English Department Art Grant.  They wanted in those days, there wasn’t any Casa Video, there weren’t DVDs; there weren’t tapes of films.  They wanted to bring a little cultural life to University life through foreign film.  I inherited this program in 1971 and I ran it for 18 years before I gave it up and then we jump started it again. Now in the old days, in the old days, if I ran into a problem, running this little fly-by-night film program, that was very popular on campus, I could go see David Butler, David Windsor or Art Grant who had moved into administration and they would solve problems for me.  There is no way that I can talk to any of you guys about any particular problem that I would have with International Arts today.  I’m still running that program.  And that program is about to do a nose-dive because we don’t have the money to support it.  There is money to give administrators for these enormous salary increases.  There is no money to support a film program of this nature on campus when every other university worth its salt has a film program like this one – from Berkley to Stanford to the University of Oregon, to Wisconsin, to Minnesota, I can name them.  There are programs like International Arts and ours is gonna go under because we don’t have the money to run it, but we got money for other things considered more important.  And I think, frankly, that you guys are in danger of ruining this place if you don’t do something radically to change the injustice of this system. 

Woman:  I would like to associate myself with Karen Anderson’s final remarks and the remarks that a couple of other people have made today.  That is, you are very good at addressing individual problems.  And that when people come up and explain their circumstance to you, you say, “This is what you should do as an individual.”  As somebody said, it’s a response.  We in the faculty, especially those of us who are suffering from the compression issue, would like to see a plan, we would like to see an action, we would like to see you do something about this situation; we would like to see movement – not just excuses. 

Man from College of Fine Arts.  I have been here 35 years and I didn’t go into administration.  Yes, the longer you stay here, the worse it gets.  There was a plan about three or four years ago, an equity scheme and I would like to, if there is a way – it was scrubbed after one year. It was going to last longer.  At least in our department, it was scrubbed after a year.  Equity program, well-funded, as a way to resolve the inequities. 

Man:  My response is that I have a student exam.  I’m 15 minutes late.  Can we call it?  My response about the equity adjustment process in this institution is the equity adjustment is built on finding someone within your field and comparing yourself to them.  When the systemic inequities include field-based differences, but go beyond that then that particular kind of adjustment mechanism, which always has a smaller pot of money than the regular salary mechanism is doomed to fail in terms of reducing inequities. 

Antonio Estrada:  There are no more questions from the audience.  I want to thank you all for being here. And we have heard you, I hope.  We have all heard you and we will come back ------.

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