[Vision2020] UI Full Profs 26% Behind; UI Pres. 513% raise since 1982 vs. 226% for Full Profs.

[Nicholas Gier]

Visionaries:

I would support higher administration salaries if faculty salaries had kept
pace, which of course they have not.

The UI faculty union has published salary surveys every year since 1976,
the only exceptions being those years without raises. The attached file
UIFY2015.pdf will show salaries for each department and percentage raises
from FY14 to FY15.

*UI Full Profs 26% Behind National Average in Ph.D.-granting Institutions*

We have national salaries for full professors and principal administrators
all the way back to 1982.  (See attached file Survey15.pdf.) For FY82 UI
full professors were only 17 percent behind their peers at Ph.D.-granting
institutions.  For that rank there is now a 26 percent gap.

Fourteen years ago, UI associate professors were 13 percent behind, but now
they lag 17 percent.  During that same year, UI assistant professors were
deficient by only 9 percent, but now they are 19 percent behind.  Look at
Table III in the attached file Survey15.pdf to see where professors would
be if we had gone to a salary step system in 1976.

*UI Administrative Raises Up 395% over 33 Years **vs. Full Professors at
226%; CPI at 236*

In 1995 we thought that we had succeeded in curbing excessive increases in
administrative raises, but as Table II shows, they have outstripped full
professors by 169 percent over 33 years. During the period 1990-1995 raises
for the higher administration rose by 21.34 percent compared to 16.5
percent for faculty. When the AFT made these increases an issue in 1995,
the next year administrator pay rose only 2.33 percent, and since then
their annual raises have not been larger than the faculty’s.  The huge
differentials since then have been due to new people hired at “market”
rates.  *For example, the new provost was hired at 31 percent above his
predecessor.*


*Staben’s $350,000 is a 513% increase over Gibb’s 1982 Salary;New Provost’s
$280,000 is 433% increase since 1982; UI Fulls at 226%*

In 1972 new assistant professors made about $10,000 and President Ernest
Hartung made about $30,000. When President Richard Gibb was hired in 1977,
his salary had risen to four times that of entry level faculty. Faculty
complaints became more vocal when Elizabeth Zinser’s FY94 salary was
$125,039, five times entry level salaries. Zinser promised that her “high
tide” wage would float all faculty boats, but instead our boats have been
swamped. Chuck Staben’s $350,000 is now seven times that of entry level
liberal arts faculty.

Those who justify these 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. But,
as the State Board of Education (our Regents) continues to approve these
administrative increases each year, faculty salaries have fallen further
and further behind.

*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 bloated management teams, have
skyrocketed. (The UI has just added a new Vice-President for
Infrastructure.) A natural response to the industrialization of the
university was the rise of faculty unions. They now represent a large
majority of faculty in states where collective bargaining is allowed.
Idaho, unfortunately, is not one of them.

*An Idaho University Salary Step System*

A central feature of these union contracts is a salary step system that
guarantees cost of living increases as well as raises above that in good
years. It also provides for substantial promotion increments. If UI faculty
had gone for our salary step proposal in 1976 (see Table III), we would now
be at the top of our peers rather than at the bottom. Furthermore, faculty
without “market value”–those in the library, humanities, and social
sciences–would be making decent wages.

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they
shall never sit in.

--Greek proverb

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance
from another. This immaturity is self- imposed when its cause lies not in
lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without
guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own
understand-ing!—that is the motto of enlightenment.

--Immanuel Kant
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