[Vision2020] Idaho Faculty Salary Survey

[nickgier at roadrunner.com]

Dear Visionaries:

Usually the faculty union is able to published faculty salaries much earlier in the year, but we did not get the data until last month.  The most telling contrast is President Nellis' 487 percent increase over 29 years vs. 211 percent increase for UI full professors.  (CPI for that period is 218.) For 11 administrative positions the increase was 280 percent.

Idaho Faculty Salary Survey 2010-11

We have published a UI salary survey every year since 1974. Individual faculty data come from the UI Budget Office. UI Salary data and analyses going back to 2000-2001 can be found at <www.idaho-aft.org/salaries.htm>.
UI full professors are 23% behind their peers on Ph.D.-granting campuses, while UI associate and assistant professors are 14% and 17% behind re-spectively. Since FY82, when the full professor differential was 17%, UI fulls have lost 6% to their peers.

Also at the URL above you can find UI salaries by department and unit; an all Idaho campus survey with UI administration salaries; a national survey by discipline; and a UI survey by discipline. The superb Oklahoma State study by discipline is no longer available to us.

ISU, BSU, and LCSC Salaries Now Included

With aid of the annual salary survey done by the American Association of University Professors we are now able to add faculty salaries from ISU, BSU, and LCSC. We urge faculty from these campuses to gather their department and unit salaries in the same way that the UI union has done for years.
BSU faculty suffer a much greater differential than their peers: 34% for fulls; 22% for associates; and 20% for assistants. The ISU gap just as bad: 33%/23%/22%. For B.A./B.S. institutions LCSC is also way behind: 33%/31%/ 26%.
Some BSU and ISU faculty have higher teaching loads but the same research expectations, so they should at least have salary equity with the UI.

NIC, CSI, CWI Salaries Coming Next Year

We will publish Idaho 2-year campus salaries in next year’s survey. For the time being faculty there can compare their salaries with the national averages for ranked and non-ranked faculty. CSI faculty have rank but no tenure; NIC faculty have tenure but no rank; CWI faculty have neither rank nor tenure.
For many years NIC faculty have enjoyed the ad-vantage of a salary step system, and after several years of no funding for the steps, the NIC president and board authorized money for the steps. In good years NIC faculty receive cost-of-living raises on top of the automatic steps. The union has always argued that that merit pay should be a separate appropriation and should be awarded by extra steps.

UI Administrative Raises up 273% over 29 Years vs. Full Professors at 211%; CPI is 218

In terms of cost of living, UI full professors have suffered a 7% pay cut over 29 years, while UI administrators have enjoyed a 55% pay raise. (We wish we had FY82 data for the other ranks, but we were lucky to find these full professor salaries in an old issue of Faculty Advocate.) ISU, BSU, and LCSC professors have lost much more compared to the CPI.

Most fortunate, however, is the fact that we have UI administrative salaries from FY82. These were years before the corporate model for higher education had taken its full and disastrous effect. Please note that 29 years ago UI deans made pretty much the same salary, and that the president earned only $7-14,000 more than his deans.

Those who justify huge administrative salaries say: "This is what the market demands, and we are still paying less than peer institutions." If faculty salaries had been keeping up, this would have been persuasive. Former UI President Elizabeth Zinser justified her huge salary increase by claiming that it “would raise all boats.” But, as the State Board of Education continues to approve these administrative increases each year, faculty salaries have fallen further and further behind.

During the period 1990-1995 raises for UI higher administrators rose by 21.3 percent compared to 16.5 percent for faculty. When the AFT made these increases an issue in 1995, the next year top administrator pay rose only 2.33 percent, about 3 percent lower than the faculty.

UI’s Duane Nellis’ $335,005 is 487% over Richard Gibb’s 1981 Salary; 
>From Three Times to Eight Times Entry Level Professors

In 1972 entry level professors made about $10,000, and then President Ernest Hartung made about $30,000. When President Richard Gibb was hired in 1977, his salary had risen to four times entry level faculty. (In a 1977 interview with the AFT president, Gibb contended that top faculty should make more than he did.) Faculty complaints became more vocal when Elizabeth Zinser’s FY 94 salary was $125,039, five times entry level salaries. The differential with entry level faculty has now risen to over eight times.

Pay Equity at the Presidential Level Why not for Idaho’s Professors?

When the SBOE met Duane Nellis half way on his salary demands, they then decided that the ISU and BSU executives would receive essentially the same pay. This action puts the lie to the UI’s status as Idaho’s “flag ship institution. Each of our major universities have outstanding faculty and most of them do cutting-edge research. So why should ISU and BSU salaries lag more than 10 percent behind the UI?

Thank the AFT for Your Promotion Increase

For many years the AFT urged the UI administration to increase the promotion increments in order to alleviate salary compression in the upper ranks. The increments used to be $1,000 for promotion to associate and $1,500 to full professor. We take some credit for the fact that UI President Robert Hoover raised those increments to $5,000 and $6,500 respectively. In the 2000s they were boosted to $6,000 and $8,500 at the UI, and we would like to see the same amounts for BSU, ISU, and LCSC.

Across the Board Raises before Merit Pay; otherwise Many Faculty Lose Pay to Inflation

The Hoover administration committed itself to "across the board increases" for "all employees showing at least satisfactory performance." This promise stands first in a list that includes promotions, merit pay, and equity adjustments. The AFT position has always been that as a long as salaries do not keep up with the cost of living, then merit pay is a moot point. When legislative raises are applied according to merit, many faculty end up with pays cuts because of the decline in general buying power. Merit pay must be funded by a separate appropriation.

Collective Bargaining is the Only Answer

During the late 1960s there was a large expansion of our public higher education system. This was good for educational opportunity, but bad in the way that this system developed according to a business model. University presidents became less like academic leaders and more like CEOs, and their salaries, as well as those of their management teams, have skyrocketed.

A natural response to the industrialization of the uni-versity was the rise of faculty unions. They now represent a large majority of faculty in states where collective bargaining is allowed. (Idaho, unfortun-ately, is one of the 19 where it is not permitted.) Over 320,000 faculty on 1,130 campuses are now under union contracts.