|
Speaking Out
Status of Faculty Salaries? The Senate Committee on the Economic Status of the Faculty, (Almanac Supplement, March 25, 2003), said the average Full Professor, in the rank for the 10-year period, 1992-2001 (with the exclusions noted there), had cumulative compound salary increments amounting to 59.6% of the 1992 base. Subtracting the official cumulative CPI of 30.9% from that total yields an average net base salary gain of 28.7% (what I call the net economic gain). So I checked on one high-performing case and found instead, a net economic gain of 6.1% over ten years, not 28.7%. If your figures are like that, read on. How many long-time SAS colleagues have a cumulative compounded increment with net economic gains of 7% or less for ten years, say, 37% or less over your 1992 base? I wondered how to find out enough to do something about it. In SEC (2001, I think) I had questioned whether there may be a pattern of such disadvantage, when we were discussing an earlier Report on the Economic Status of the Faculty, when the Provost was present. There was considerable concern expressed at possible inequities, but it wafted away in vagueness over how to determine any pattern (without administration initiative), even though SEC was aware that a pattern of disadvantage by age or years of service could have bad consequences, magnified by published explanations of tuition increases to parents. I did suggest a class-action kind of grievance for similarly situated productive faculty, but it was unclear how such a class would be identified. Maybe this would help. I invite colleagues who have demonstrable results similar to what I illustrated to e-mail me with the information (exact percentages of 2001 on 1992 base salary, and years of service, but not specific salary amounts). If a large enough sample comes to hand, I will bring the matter back to public discussion, especially of collective grievance as a remedy. --James F. Ross,
Professor of Philosophy
Response from SCESF The SCESF presents such calculations based on averages for aggregates for groups of faculty members, as provided by the Provost's Office. Based on the information provided to the SCESF for the 2002-03 academic year, as Professor Ross suggests, "the average Full Professor, in the rank for the 10-year period, 1992-2001 (with the exclusions noted there), had cumulative compound salary increments amounting to 59.6% of the 1992 base. Subtracting the official cumulative CPI of 30.9% from that total, yields an average net base salary gain of 28.7%." Of course, as with any average, there may be considerable dispersion around the mean. In order to protect the confidentiality of individual faculty members, the SCESF does not have access to individual data with which to characterize such dispersion. If it were possible to obtain a random sample of experiences of people in this group without violating concerns about confidentiality, it would be of interest to do so to learn more about the distribution of salary changes over time. We have some concerns, however, about whether the procedures suggested by Professor Ross would result in a random sample because we expect that faculty members who choose to provide such information would be a selected, not a random, sample. In addition, the anecdotal example given by Professor Ross represents one individual within one school at Penn, for which this average (given in Table 1 of the report) does not correspond. These (Table 1) are University-wide averages, and not averages by school by rank. If you wanted to do a more rigorous comparison by rank (Professor) and by school (say SAS) versus CPI, then Table 3 would be more appropriate where the report accurately notes that 96% of Humanities, 80% of Natural Sciences, and 83% of Social Science Full Professors in Arts and Sciences received cumulative raises (albeit from 1996-2002) above CPI. We thank Professor Ross for his questioning, as that is exactly the purpose of this report. We want each individual faculty member to have the opportunity to make data-based assessments of their own individual salary performance, and more importantly the school as a whole against our peer institutions. --Eric Bradlow, Associate Professor of Marketing & Statistics, 2002-2003 SCESF Chair --Jere Behrman, Professor of Economics, 2003-2004 SCESF Chair
Almanac, Vol. 50, No. 10, October 28, 2003 |
|
