This note is provided as a correction to some inaccurate and possibly
misleading information presented by Vice-Chancellor Brown at last week's
budget hearings. Although I attended the hearings on Thursday and Friday, I
was unable to attend the hearings on Wednesday when Dr. Brown made his
presentation. My comments are based on the summary made available online by
Mary Scott. They do not necessarily represent the views of faculty senate,
the Budget & Economic Status committee, the United Campus Workers, the UTC
department of economics, or anyone else that might take umbrage at my usual
political incorrectness. I hope they will be accepted as an addendum to the
notes previously circulated on the budget hearings. If not, I will read
them into the record so that they will be kept in the minutes of faculty
senate.
On p.10 of his slide show, Dr Brown presents a table stating that salaries
of UTC professors grew at an annual rate of 3.6% between 2001 and 2006,while
the national average rate of growth for "Professor Salary" was 2.6% over the
same period.
On the face of it, this is puzzling. In a table immediately following this
he states that faculty salaries did not increase in 2002, increased by 2.0%
in 2003, by 3.0% in 2004, between 2.0% and 3.0% in 2005, and between1.0% and
2.0% in 2006. [In fact, the correct numbers for 2005 were between 1.5% and
3.0%.] From the numbers in this table, faculty salaries MUST have increased
in nominal terms by between 1.5% and 2.0% annually.
Any non-recurring bonus, as in Oct 2004, will of course have no impact on
the annual growth rate since it is not incorporated into base pay. If it is
counted as increasing salary in 2004 it must be seen, pari passu, as
decreasing the RATE of increase in 2005 by an equivalent amount. Of course,
longevity raises are incorporated into the salary base, but for someone with
an average annual base pay of $50,000 the $100 for longevity increase would
add only 0.2% to annual rate of salary growth. This would be slightly less
for those with salaries over $50,000 and slightly more for those with lower
salaries, but the notion of a 3.6% rate of growth is evidently impossible.
Other figures in Dr Brown's first table are likewise suspect. The numbers
for "Peer Average Professor Salary Increase" are notoriously bogus because
it is well known that THEC can and does manipulate the constitution of peer
institutions in ways that make UTC appear better by setting it next to
increasingly run down institutions. Dr Brown does list the peer
institutions on p.11 of his slide show, but there are problems with that
page as well.
No doubt there are some perfectly innocent explanations for many of these
discrepancies. For example, Dr Brown's figures may include compression
adjustments that took place a few years ago, but if this is the case he
doesn't say so. Probably he is viewing salary numbers from the perspective
of the employer, as outlays, rather than from the perspective of the
employee, as income.
It may be, also, that he arrives at increases by including a few extremely
high salaries that have been assumed by the academic affairs budget when
they were previously listed elsewhere. This would be the case for a handful
of SIM center professors who are now paid out of the academic budget, having
run through their Foundation funds ahead of schedule. These have impacted
the academic budget to the tune of a quarter million a pop for several years
running recently.
This sort of thing may also explain some odd-looking numbers on p.11 of Dr
Brown's slide show. Is it really credible that NCA&T cut salaries of full
professors by almost eleven percent last year? One plausible explanation
would be that NCA&T managed to shed some burden that had been their
equivalent of the SIM Center.
A larger problem with Dr Brown's numbers, however, and one that may explain
some of the problems, is that he uses numbers from AAUP, which are averages
across disciplines for entire institutions, instead of figures from the CUPA
data base, which breaks these out by discipline within institutions.
Two years ago the Budget & Economic Status Committee of faculty senate went
to a great deal of effort to develop figures that were truly comparable in
most cases for use in determining the size of salary gaps that needed to be
addressed in awarding compression adjustments. These efforts turned up many
unexplained errors in figures the administration had been using. Those of
us on the B&ES committee THOUGHT we had reached an understanding with the
administration about how to compare UTC salaries with national averages.
Now it seems that the administration is prepared to return to its old
unreliable ways when it suits them.
The problem with the administration's habits in these matters is that they
are insidiously misleading. Dr. Brown's slides state that in 2004-05
assistant professors were paid 96% of the national average, associate
professors 99%, and full professors 95%. The B&ES committee's work in the
same year found the correct numbers to be 95% for assistant, 94% for
associate, and 85% for full professors.
Furthermore, these numbers are getting worse for UTC, not better. A recent
article from Inside Higher Ed (Mar.12, 2007) states that faculty salaries
increased by 3.8% last year, based on CUPA data. It went on to state that
faculty salaries had increased by 3.4% the previous year and 3.2% the year
before that. Dr Brown's numbers either directly contradict these or else
become all but impossible to reconcile over a five year period.
Anyone reading this is asked to watch any press statements coming from the
administration in the weeks ahead. The numbers in Dr Brown's slide show are
not his alone. If they are left unchallenged they will enter the record and
will be quoted authoritatively by spokespersons for UTC. They are the
official politically correct line the administration will stick to, and they
are WRONG.
Respectfully submitted,
Fritz Efaw.
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