2024-2025 Faculty Senate Reports: Reports of the Senate Committee on Faculty and the Academic Mission (SCOF) and the Senate Committee on Faculty Development, Diversity, and Equity (SCFDDE)
Report on Charges
1. Working jointly, explore how the Faculty Senate could more effectively represent the interests of non-standing faculty, with attention paid to the following: differences in the composition of the non-standing faculty across schools and departments, the fact that there are both full-time and part-time non-standing faculty who teach in programs, centers, and departments, and the potential impact of better representing non-standing faculty on the ability and effectiveness of the Faculty Senate to represent standing faculty.
It is worth highlighting that the goals of existing Faculty Senate committees at Penn are encumbered by the exclusion of associated faculty and academic support staff. (Throughout this report, the term “non-standing faculty” is used interchangeably with “associated faculty and academic support staff.”) The Senate Committee on the Economic Status of the Faculty, for instance, is currently empowered only to explore issues regarding compensation for standing faculty, even though economic issues such as gender or racial pay inequities, wage stagnation and loss of real wages, and lack of retirement contributions often affect associated faculty and academic support staff much more pervasively and seriously. Likewise, the Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility is charged with addressing a universal issue that disproportionately affects associated faculty and academic support staff who are much more vulnerable to losing their employment on the grounds of their speech (and some of whom are broadly prevented from exercising their rights to freedom in teaching as specialists in their areas of instruction); in the absence of associated faculty and academic support staff, that committee likewise may not be able to address the ways in which academic freedom violations affect the majority of Penn faculty.
In light of limitations identified in our current model of faculty governance, we focused a great deal of attention on alternative models used by peer institutions. In Penn’s current model, only standing faculty are voting members of the University-wide Faculty Senate. While this model is successful at promoting the interests of standing faculty at the University level, it does not offer formal mechanisms for promoting the interests of associated faculty and academic support staff in University-level deliberations. This creates challenges for efforts such as the one we are currently undertaking related to associated faculty and academic support staff where we have had to find more informal ways to hear the perspectives of those who would be most impacted by these University-wide changes. Our informal data gathering, mostly through focus groups that we organized last year, also revealed inconsistencies in voting privileges at the school and department level, suggesting the need for more consistent University-wide guidelines that schools and departments can adapt to their unique contexts.
In consultation with peer institutions, we have identified three models that include non-standing faculty (elsewhere known by other terminology) as voting members of the university-wide Faculty Senate. The first of these models is a single governing body with proportional representation of both standing and full-time non-standing faculty members. In this model, all Faculty Senate representatives meet together as one governing body and serve on standing and ad-hoc committees together (Cornell University, Georgetown University, and the University of Delaware also allow full-time non-tenure-track faculty to participate fully in governance as voting members and as elected representatives or officers.) Such a model would require a “districting plan” to allocate representation on the Faculty Senate Executive Committee (SEC) to faculty in each department, program, and center across the twelve schools; it would have the advantage of equalizing voting rights and representation for all faculty. The second model is for the university-wide Faculty Senate to consist of two separate faculty councils—one composed of standing faculty and the other of non-standing faculty. These councils meet separately to discuss issues specific to their ranks while coming together on university-wide committees to represent general faculty interests (New York University offers a model of this governance structure). Such a model offers the opportunity to ensure that both standing and non-standing faculty have space to pursue their respective agendas in ways that also allow them to come together to address issues that affect all faculty. A third model that exists at some institutions (such as Caltech) is the inclusion of non-standing faculty as members and even chairs of senate committees and of university committees. While this does not fully address the need of faculty for democratic representation in a voting body, it does at least give non-standing faculty an active role in governance.
Based on these findings, deliberations related to any reform of our faculty governance structure need to address the following two major questions:
- Who is entitled to representation on the University Faculty Senate? In our current model, only standing faculty have representation. This policy is inconsistent with the national recommendations of the American Association of University Professors since 2014 regarding the inclusion of all faculty, tenure-track and non-tenure-track, in governance. The three major alternative models we have identified include all full-time associated faculty and academic support staff; some universities also count part-time faculty as voting members.
- How is representation allotted? In our current model, representation is allotted to standing faculty members either as at-large representatives, through proportional representation of the various schools as constituency representatives, and through specific seats allotted to assistant professors. There are currently no formal mechanisms for incorporating the perspectives of associated faculty and academic support staff. While we did pilot having non-voting members of the academic support staff on our two committees last year, the Tri-Chairs did not continue that practice this year. The three major models we have identified are (1) to maintain one governing body and expand it to include representation of both standing and non-standing faculty; such representation could be proportional to the size of departments/programs and schools; (2) to have separate governing bodies for standing and non-standing faculty that work independently but collaborate on University-wide standing and ad-hoc committees to represent faculty concerns, it could also be proportional to the scale of faculty ranks either in general or within department, or it could be evenly balanced or determined by a ratio of standing to non-standing seats and (3) allow non-standing faculty participation in standing committees of the Faculty Senate.
We recommend that in the 2025-2026 academic year, the Faculty Senate convene an ad-hoc committee that includes equitable representation of standing faculty, associated faculty, and academic support staff from across the University charged with proposing answers to these questions as well as developing a transition plan for any changes they recommend be made to our faculty governance structure to better represent associated faculty and academic support staff at the University level. Alternatively, SCFDDE and/or SCOF could serve this function if SEC prefers to use its existing committee structure to continue this important work.
2. Working jointly, develop a proposal to revise the title and description of ranks currently within the ‘Academic Support Staff’ category (Faculty Handbook Section II.B.) and explore if and how to replace that category with a new teaching track that acknowledges the pedagogical work done by individuals hired in this track and seeks to identify improved professional pathways for faculty who currently fall under this category.
As part of our data gathering, we first reviewed the findings of last year’s focus groups with non-standing faculty and associate deans from the eight non-health schools. We also developed recommendations based on what we learned and shared them with SEC in May 2025. We gathered more insights this year through consultations with administrators and faculty at peer institutions. We also consulted with administrators from three of Penn’s health schools (i.e., the Perelman School of Medicine, the School of Dental Medicine, the School of Nursing, and the School of Veterinary Medicine) which have an academic clinician track that already has many of the characteristics we recommended for this new teaching track. (The School of Nursing does not have the academic clinician track.) From these consultations we learned that the health schools are also interested in having a new teaching track that would better meet some of their teaching needs than the academic clinician track; we are therefore developing the teaching track proposal as an option for all schools across the University. We also consulted with the Penn Association for Senior and Emeritus Faculty (PASEF), whose membership would increase significantly with these changes; current PASEF members noted a need to address inequities in retirement benefits for non-standing faculty.
These deliberations led us to identify key criteria that we feel are essential for a new teaching track that we incorporated into a proposal presented to SEC in May 2025. In line with our recommendation from last year, this proposal calls for the elimination of the misleadingly titled academic support staff designation and for the new teaching track (incorporating faculty currently classified as academic support staff as well as future teaching faculty hires) to be considered part of the associated faculty. Secondly, the draft proposal emphasizes that while faculty in this teaching track can be encouraged to conduct research, their primary responsibility is teaching and related service work such as curriculum and program development and implementation and that they should be evaluated accordingly. Teaching excellence, meanwhile, should not be based solely on student evaluation scores (which, as SCOF has noted in past reports, research has shown to be heavily discriminatory and unreliable) but on a comprehensive assessment by faculty colleagues of course development, assignment design, pedagogical effectiveness in the classroom, quality of feedback to students, curricular contribution, learning outcomes, mentorship, and other program-specific measures. Criteria for retention and promotion will necessarily be discipline-specific; to ensure clear communication and internally consistent review procedures, departments and programs would need to make their evaluation process, timeline, and criteria available in writing to all teaching-track faculty. (These measures would address notable issues identified in our committee’s survey last year, which found that only 13% of lecturers agreed that professional pathways existed for them at Penn and that under 10% had received written guidelines from their departments or programs on the process and criteria that would determine their reappointment, termination, or promotion if applicable.) We also lay out a clear pathway for promotion, with steps (analogous to practice faculty ranks) from assistant to associate to full, an initial 3-year appointment term renewable for another 3 years at the assistant level, review for promotion to teaching associate professor after the 6th year, and the option to seek promotion to full after 5 more years in recognition of significant achievement. In addition, to avoid the creation of a two-tier system, we included a plan for transitioning those currently in academic support staff positions into the new teaching track.
Our focus groups both with non-standing faculty and with associate deans suggest multiple advantages of a more regularized teaching track that recognizes faculty and their professional teaching experience with appropriate titles and accords them greater job security and an established pathway for career development. There is strong evidence from peer institutions that such a teaching track not only could improve the recognition and professional advancement of non-standing faculty but also that it would help academic programs at Penn successfully hire, retain, and promote the most qualified instructors; that more stable employment of teaching faculty would benefit students and programs by creating greater curricular stability within the programs these faculty serve; and that it would reduce the administrative burden involved in frequent re-evaluation of faculty on short-term contracts and the loss of institutional knowledge that results from high levels of turnover. Our hope is to continue to engage with key stakeholders in fall 2025 including the Council of Deans and non-standing faculty across the University with a final proposal ready by spring 2026 where appropriate procedures will be followed to begin the process of making formal revisions to the faculty handbook. A key thought partner here would be the ad-hoc committee we recommended to be developed in response to our first charge.
Some key questions that remain to be answered include:
- What caps will be placed on this new teaching track at each school that will protect tenure density while addressing schools’ teaching needs in ways that improve the working conditions for those currently classified as academic support staff?
- What caps will be placed on other existing associated faculty ranks in each school to balance out the effects of implementing the new teaching track?
- What mechanisms will be put into place to enforce these caps?
- What will be the timeline for transitioning those who are currently in academic support staff positions into this new teaching track?
- How will this new teaching track be incorporated into PASEF?
- How to ensure equal access to personnel benefits (including medical, dental, and vision care, retirement, tuition benefits, medical and parental leave, etc.)
SCOF Supplement
3. Review how community-engaged and public scholarship are recorded and evaluated across departments and schools in processes of promotion and tenure of the faculty and compile/suggest best practices.
While the committee has not yet been able to gather sufficient information to assess departments’ and schools’ current processes for evaluating community-engaged and public scholarship, we can offer recommendations of best practices informed by colleagues’ research and service in this area. SCOF consulted last year with Matt Hartley, professor and board of advisors chair of education and chair of the Penn Provost’s Ad Hoc Faculty Committee on Community Engaged Scholarship, and Ira Harkavy, associate vice president and founding director of the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, both of whom contributed to that committee’s 2022 report on engaged scholarship. We have also been guided by the insight of Herman Beavers, the Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt President’s Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies and a member of the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Valuing the Public Humanities, who co-authored that committee’s Guidelines for Evaluating Publicly Engaged Humanities Scholarship in Language and Literature Programs. Drawing on the guidance of both, we recommend that requests for outside letters in a tenure review (where applicable to a department’s expectations) explicitly state the value that the department and Penn place on community-engaged and public scholarship—work addressing real-world problems in partnership with communities beyond the university and/or work partly or primarily addressed to the public—to ensure that those elements of the dossier receive due consideration. At the departmental level and at the level of schools’ Personnel Committees and of the Provost’s Staff Conference, we also reiterate the guidance of Penn’s Ad Hoc Faculty Committee on Community Engaged Scholarship that such work by faculty should not be recognized as an add-on or alternative to scholarship but as a mode of scholarship, whether in the context of research, teaching, or service. Departments and peer colleagues will necessarily continue to determine what counts as scholarship within a given discipline. Regarding substantive criteria in the review process, we also draw on the guidance of the MLA’s Ad Hoc Committee that community engaged and public scholarship be assessed on four broad grounds: its “scope and impact”; the fit between the project’s goals and its “form and dissemination”; extent of outcomes or future prospects; and the “nature and extent of collaboration” between the faculty member and any collaborators or communities involved.
4. Examine challenges to the tenure system that have been posed by some outside of the university, evaluate the potential of such challenges to alter the current system of tenure, and recommend how (if at all) the Faculty Senate should respond to such challenges.
The most drastic recent challenges to tenure take multiple forms: retraction of federal research funding via the NIH and other agencies, without which some Penn faculty working on grant-supported projects may be impeded from meeting tenure expectations; politicians and governing boards’ censorship of entire areas of study; executive orders to place academic programs (such as Columbia University’s Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department) under receivership; legislation to institute post-tenure reviews (such as the recent SB 1 bill in Ohio and recent bills in several other states) subjecting faculty to potential revocation of tenure on political grounds by boards of governors; and pressure from donors, trustees, alumni, politicians, media, and others attempting to exercise inappropriate influence over faculty appointments, evaluation, and disciplinary procedure—matters that are and must remain within the purview of faculty governance. Since the retraction of federal funding is impacting Penn faculty in ways we do not yet have adequate data to measure, the University might recognize the need to meet temporary research funding shortfalls as one of several means of protecting tenure.
Another serious long-term challenge to the system of tenure is simply the growing prevalence of contingent academic employment. When the majority of Penn faculty are employed in non-tenure-track positions, this broad lack of job security erodes the necessary protections of tenure and due process that are meant to ensure academic freedom. The increasing rarity of those essential protections weakens them not only for faculty on contingent appointments but arguably also for faculty in general. The archives of previous SCOF deliberations show that disproportionate hiring of non-standing faculty and the resulting decline of tenure at Penn are issues stretching back decades. A 1976 issue of Almanac announces the introduction of the clinician educator track at the Medical School and caps that track at 25%; a March 1998 memo from the chair of the Faculty Senate and the chair of SCOF to the associate provost expresses “grave concern” at the discovery that the CE track in the Medical School outnumbers tenure-track faculty, in violation of a 40% cap approved by the Senate in 1983. The CE track is currently capped at 70% in the Medical School; the academic clinician track (introduced in the Medical School in 2004 and in the Veterinary and Dental Schools a decade later) has grown even faster and is now capped at 60% in the Veterinary and Dental Schools and at 70% in PSOM. Previous committee reports and correspondence illustrate that—for understandable reasons—SCOF and the Faculty Senate have tended to address concerns about the erosion of tenure density by proposing and maintaining caps on certain hiring categories. Just over a decade ago in 2013, SCOF rejected a proposal from SAS to eliminate caps on lecturers in foreign languages and senior lecturers in foreign languages, recommending an increase in the cap rather than its elimination. The caps, however (as detailed in our report on charge #5 below and as suggested by their periodic rise over time), have not consistently proven successful in restraining the growth of non-tenure-track ranks. Their implementation in some cases limits professional advancement for long-serving non-tenure-track faculty by preventing departments and programs from promoting faculty members who might not meet Penn’s expectations for tenure (whether because their positions do not facilitate research and publication or because research is not their primary interest) but who are nonetheless indispensable to the programs they serve. Caps on senior lecturers in particular do nothing to restrict hiring of lecturers in the first place; they instead make those lecturers’ conditions of employment less secure and limit their retention and promotion. The joint SCFDDE/SCOF proposal for a teaching-track would not only address these issues but might also arguably restrain further erosion of tenure by reducing existing incentives to hire more non-tenure-track faculty.
While it is not yet clear whether or how the Faculty Senate can respond to threats to tenure at a national as well as institutional scale, recommendations might include the following:
- University and school administrators as well as department chairs and program directors should vocally defend both individual faculty and academic programs against all attempts to limit the protections of tenure, to subject any faculty member’s tenure to re-evaluation, or to suspend or terminate academic programs.
- Relatedly, research by Faculty First Responders shows that administrators and chairs can more successfully protect the autonomy of the university and of academic programs in the long term if they defend faculty from campaigns of targeted harassment intended to provoke institutions to censure, discipline, or fire faculty members—attacks that endanger academic freedom and the tenure system designed to protect it.
- The tri-chairs could propose that SCOF continue this charge next year specifically by requesting that the deans of all schools report on the rate of denials of tenure in comparison with previous years, on the impact of funding cuts on promotion timelines, and on any anomalies (including attempts at external interference) in tenure-track faculty reappointment or tenure reviews.
5. Consider any matters affecting faculty size, appointments, and tracks brought to the committee by individual schools.
Responding to requests initiated by three schools, SCOF devoted significant time and attention this year to the evaluation of three proposals to raise existing caps on certain categories of non-standing faculty: a proposal from the Graduate School of Education to create an advanced senior lecturer track and to set the cumulative cap on both senior lecturers and advanced senior lecturers at 40% (up from 35% currently); a proposal from the Weitzman School of Design to raise the cap on senior lecturers from 20% to 30% that would enable them to retain three existing faculty in fine arts and architecture whose contracts would be set to expire; and a proposal from the School of Veterinary Medicine to raise the cap on clinician educators from 50% to 60% (which reflects the existing ratio rather than a target). The committee reviewed written reports and demographic data from the three schools, met with associate deans and faculty from each to ask questions, and voted unanimously in October 2024 to approve all three proposals. Since the GSE and Weitzman School proposals do not raise the proportion of non-standing to standing faculty but instead enable the earned promotion of a small number of current Penn lecturers, both requests proved uncontroversial. The proposal from the SVM raised more questions and required an additional meeting for further deliberation before voting. As the committee learned, the school had exceeded its cap largely due to an unexpected number of retirements and departures of tenured faculty in 2022, which resulted in CEs outnumbering tenure-track faculty. Since the school cannot change the reality that CEs are already at 59.8%, and since it has identified tenure-track hiring as its priority over the next five years and does not plan to expand the CE track further, SCOF ultimately voted to approve the proposal.
When the three proposals were subsequently presented to the Senate Executive Committee in November 2024, SEC members raised similar concerns and, after approving the GSE and Weitzman proposals, voted in a follow-up meeting in January 2025 to reject the Veterinary School’s proposal. SCOF was asked to advise the school’s associate dean of faculty affairs on next steps and recommended that the school submit a modified proposal that might do one or more of the following: illustrate how the school could boost tenure-track hiring—a challenging goal in the face of federal funding cuts; elaborate on its argument that the proposed 60% ratio is essential to SVM’s continued functioning; commit to transitioning existing CE faculty to the tenure track wherever possible; and outline explicit measures for maintaining compliance with approved ratios going forward. More effective mechanisms for enforcing existing caps might be useful to all schools.
SCOF Membership 2024-2025
- Jessica Dine (Perelman School of Medicine)
- Julia Hartmann (School of Arts and Sciences)
- Lea Ann Matura (School of Nursing)
- Jeffrey Saven (School of Arts and Sciences)
- Emily Steinlight (School of Arts and Sciences), Chair
- Yu Zhang (Penn Dental Medicine)
Ex officio:
- Roger Allen (SAS, PASEF non-voting member)
- Eric Feldman (Law, Faculty Senate Chair)
- Kathleen Brown (SAS, Faculty Senate Chair-Elect)
- Vivian Gadsden (GSE, Faculty Senate Past Chair)
SCFDDE Supplement
3. Review and comment on data from the 2022 Faculty Survey received from the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty, with a specific focus on data that may reflect and/or reinforce inequalities related to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, and more, where appropriate.
Our review of the 2022 Faculty Survey revealed that faculty currently classified under the academic support staff designation were not included as part of the pool of faculty during the survey administration. This makes it impossible to be able to identify disparities between standing and associated faculty and academic support staff who do the bulk of the teaching in many schools and programs across the University. The recommendations that we are making above would address these concerns by eliminating the academic support staff category. Should any surveys be conducted before these changes can be enacted, we recommend that academic support staff be included.
4. Continue to gather and examine data that can help to identify trends in gender, race and ethnicity in division, department chair, and deanship leadership at the University over the past five or more years, with the goal of eliminating such disparities.
We did not have success in identifying a clear source of data that could identify these trends. In light of the difficulty in locating this information we make the following recommendations:
- The University should develop mechanisms for collecting demographic data related to department chairs, deans and other senior level positions across the University. It should report this information on the university composition dashboard.
- The Faculty Senate should host a convening next year that will bring together stakeholders to discuss how we can use this information along with the rest of the information on the university composition dashboard in ways that maximize diversity and are compliant with federal antidiscrimination policies.
SCFDDE Membership 2024-2025
- Hydar Ali (Dental Medicine)
- Antonella Cianferoni (PSOM/Pediatrics)
- Nelson Flores (GSE, Chair)
- Carmen Guerra (PSOM/Medicine)
- Krithika Lingappan (PSOM/Pediatrics)
- Davesh Soneji (SAS/South Asian Studies)
Ex officio:
- Sherrill Adams (Dental Medicine, PASEF non-voting member)
- Eric Feldman (Law, Faculty Senate Chair)
- Kathleen Brown (SAS, Faculty Senate Chair-Elect)
- Vivian Gadsden (GSE, Faculty Senate Past Chair)
2024-2025 Faculty Senate Reports: Report of the Senate Committee on the Economic Status of the Faculty (SCESF)
Abbreviations Used:
- SCESF or Committee–Senate Committee on the Economic Status of the Faculty.
- VP-Faculty–the Vice Provost for Faculty, i.e. Laura W. Perna.
- IR&A–Office of Institutional Research & Analysis, led by Stacey J. Lopez.
- PSOM–the Perelman School of Medicine.
I. Introduction
We are preparing this report during a challenging time for U.S. higher education institutions. Hiring and retaining the preeminent faculty is the cornerstone of maintaining and, hopefully, increasing Penn’s prominence as a leading university. The times of great upheaval might expose Penn to the danger of losing out in the competition for faculty, but they may also provide unrivaled opportunities for outcompeting other schools. Faculty compensation policy is an important strategic tool that Penn wields. SCESF believes that to take advantage of the opportunities it is important to develop faculty compensation policies guided by sound theoretical and empirical analysis. Penn has some of the world’s leading experts among its faculty who can contribute to such analysis. Yet, it is our impression that Penn’s administration does not sufficiently incorporate such an analysis into its decision-making, in part because it lacks the required data. For this reason, SCESF has engaged in extensive independent research that has demonstrated how the missing data can be obtained and productively employed.
The report is structured as follows. In Section II we briefly describe the data that University shares with SCESF and some limitations of these data. In Section III we review the key issues encountered by SCESF this year and its main findings. While we hope that the faculty will find the entire report worth reading, we think Section III is the most essential. In Section IV we provide a detailed analysis of the data provided to the committee by the VP-Faculty. In Section V we summarize this year’s specific issues of concern and SCESF recommendations.
II. Preliminaries and Penn Faculty Salary Data
Penn salary data used in this report was provided to the committee by the VP-Faculty and prepared by IR&A. The data provided to SCESF preserve the anonymity of individuals. Salaries pertain to the aggregated 9-month (academic year) base salary data in Fiscal Year 2024 (July 1, 2023, through June 30, 2024) for 1,347 members of the tenure-line faculty (748 professors, 294 associate professors, and 305 assistant professors). The salaries of deans and faculty on phased retirement are excluded.
As in past years, these data also exclude tenure-line faculty from the Perelman School of Medicine, except for those in basic science departments[1]; as well as more than 1,000 clinician educators in the standing faculty from the Perelman School of Medicine, and the Schools of Dental Medicine, Veterinary Medicine, and Nursing. We emphasize that these exclusions are highly consequential. The University reports that we currently have 2,878 standing faculty.[2] Thus, the base salary data that we received is for less than half of the standing faculty, and there are 1,531 standing faculty whose economic status we cannot assess.
An academic year base salary is that paid for the normal academic duties (teaching, research, and service) for a nine-month academic year, irrespective of whether the salary is disbursed over a nine- or twelve-month period or paid from general operating funds and/or from designated funds. In the four healthcare schools listed above, which have some or all standing faculty on a 12-month or “annualized” base, salaries have been adjusted to be comparable with salaries reported on a 9-month basis. Note that “summer money”—additional income paid from various sources for all or parts of up to three summer months—is not included in the academic year base salaries, nor are other emoluments such as compensation for clinical work, administrative stipends, pay for extra teaching, etc.
III. Key Developments and Findings
III.1. Comparing Salaries of Penn Faculty in their Respective Fields with Peer Institutions.
In years prior, the stated goal of Penn administration was to provide faculty compensation, on average, in the middle of the upper half, or the 75th percentile, of Penn’s peer Ivy Plus universities (eight Ivy League schools plus Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford). This year, the VP-Faculty explained to SCESF that Penn no longer sets quantifiable goals in terms of Penn’s faculty salaries relative to peers or in terms of recruitment and retention rates.[3] Nevertheless, to compare faculty compensation at Penn to its peers, the VP-Faculty supplied the committee with the comparison of the University-wide average base salaries at Penn and other Ivy Plus universities. The relative standing of Penn has been declining in recent years according to this metric. The committee sought to understand whether such comparisons might be misleading as they do not take into account differences between institutions in the distribution of faculty across departments and schools. For example, Wharton pays relatively high salaries, raising Penn’s University-wide average salary, but this average salary cannot be meaningfully compared to the average salary at another university that does not have a business school or where the business school is much smaller relative to the size of the faculty.
Last year, the committee attempted to address this concern by requesting IR&A to use its access to confidential institutional data from the American Association of Universities Data Exchange (AAUDE) but the discovered that AAUDE data limitations preclude informative analysis.[4] Thus, the VP-Faculty confirmed in a meeting with SCESF that the University administration currently is not able to compare Penn’s salaries within schools and disciplines to those at its peer institutions. In an attempt to fill this void, this year SCESF engaged in two data collection efforts. These efforts can help the central University administration to benchmark salaries by discipline and can eventually provide a database relevant to the deans and department chairs in setting salaries for individual faculty members.
First, we scraped data from many Ivy Plus University websites to collect data on the number of faculty by academic field and rank (the sample can be expanded to include a larger cohort of peer institutions if administrative support were provided to SCESF). With this data, we can perform the following analysis. Consider a peer institution, e.g., Princeton. Suppose we assign to each faculty member at Princeton the corresponding average salary by field and rank at Penn. We can then use the counts of faculty by field and rank at Princeton to compute a measure of the average salary at Penn were it to have Princeton’s faculty composition. Comparing this to the actual average salary at Princeton then sheds light on how Penn and Princeton’s salaries compare, holding fixed faculty composition. In other words, this comparison reveals the difference in salaries between Penn and Princeton holding the composition of faculty across disciplines fixed and only changing the relevant field-specific salaries.
To implement this full analysis, the committee only needed data on average salaries by department and rank but the administration declined to share it with the committee. A request by the committee for more aggregated data on average salaries at the level of school rather than department was also declined. Instead, the committee was able to reconstruct salary levels by school and rank at Penn from other statistics provided to it by the University.
The results are revealing. Continuing with the comparison between Penn and Princeton, Table 5 below (provided by Penn) implies that in FY24 the raw average salary of assistant professors at Princeton was 9.4% lower than the average salary of assistant professors at Penn. In contrast, holding the distribution of assistant professors across schools fixed as described above, our analysis reveals that Princeton pays 19.3% more to its assistant professors than Penn does. At the level of the associate professors, without controlling for composition Table 5 implies that Princeton’s salaries are 8.5% higher than salaries at Penn. In contrast, when controlling for composition, we find that the average salary of associate professors is 27.7% higher at Princeton. Finally, at the full professor level, controlling for faculty composition reveals that Princeton pays 36% to 55% more,[5] while the comparison of unadjusted average salaries in Table 5 implies a Princeton premium of only 10.4%. The reason for these discrepancies is clear: Princeton does not have the high paying schools of business, law, etc., the presence of which at Penn significantly raises its University-wide average salary and leads to a potentially distorted picture of Penn’s competitive standing. In other words, when accounting for differences in faculty distribution across fields between Penn and at least one peer Ivy League institution, Penn’s compensation appears less favorable than the data provided to the committee by the University might suggest.
Our second data collection effort focused on faculty salaries in all fields at flagship state universities which often make salary data public. The list of such universities includes University of California (UC) Berkeley, UC Los Angeles, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, UC Davis, University of Maryland, University of North Carolina, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin Madison, University of Minnesota, Ohio State University, among many others. These universities do not belong to Penn’s Ivy Plus group of peers, and yet they can provide a very relevant benchmark for faculty salaries by discipline. SCESF collected compensation data for most of these universities this year. This was challenging as state databases typically contain the name of the individual and the employer. After collecting data on all employees of a given university, we had to query university databases or scrape university websites to identify each individual faculty status, rank, and department affiliation. The remaining labor-intensive task is to map the departments at other universities to their counterparts at Penn. We have so far implemented the entire procedure for the University of California Berkeley.
The comparison with UC Berkeley is once again revealing. Without controlling for composition, the university-wide average salary at Berkley is lower than at Penn at every rank. Yet, we find that in most individual schools/disciplines salaries are higher at Berkeley than at Penn; for example, associate professors of economics are paid 50% more at Berkeley than at Penn. Again, the difference in the University wide averages is driven by the fact that schools such as Annenberg and Wharton pay much higher salaries and represent a significantly larger share of faculty at Penn than the corresponding School of Journalism and Haas School of Business do at Berkeley. If we construct the average salary at Penn using the faculty counts by field at Berkeley, the average salary at Penn will decline by over 10%. Performing this experiment in reverse, if we construct the average salary at Berkeley using the faculty counts by field at Penn, the average salary at Berkeley will increase by over 10%. Thus, even for a university like Berkeley, which is much more similar to Penn in terms of its faculty composition by school/discipline than Princeton, the distribution of faculty across fields has a large impact on the comparison of average salaries across schools. What is more relevant is the comparison of average salaries by school or department. We hope our exploratory analyses serve as proof of concept that more meaningful data could be made available, and helpful to department chairs, deans, and VP-Faculty at Penn in designing competitive faculty compensation policies. We encourage the University administration to work with SCESF in the collection and analysis of these data or in at least supplying SCESF with the necessary and complete data to enable such analysis.
III.2. Faculty Salaries and Inflation
Our second analysis considered faculty salary growth rate as compared to inflation. The average annual rate of inflation was higher by approximately 2.3 percentage points over FY20-24 period than over the preceding FY04-19 period.[6] The average growth rate of annual salaries by rank at Penn remained approximately the same in FY20-24 as in FY04-19. In contrast, average salaries in the economy, on average grew 1.7 to 2.4 percentage points faster in the latter high inflation period. Thus, in the low inflation period Penn and the rest of the economy experienced the annual real salary growth of between 1 and 2 percent. In the last 5 years, however, the real salary growth remained positive for the rest of the economy, while real faculty salaries at Penn have declined by almost 2 percentage points per year, adding up over 5 years to roughly a 10% decline. This back-of-the-envelope calculation significantly underestimates the impact of uncompensated inflation on Penn faculty salaries as it does not take into account the effect of compounding, the impact on retirement contributions, etc.[7] A more thorough analysis was provided in 2022 and 2024 SCESF reports.[8]
We also compared salary growth of Penn faculty to that of Penn administration. To do so, we obtained data from Form 990 that Penn filed with the IRS for years 2019 and 2022 (the latest filing at the time of writing). In this form, Penn reports compensation of all its officers and key employees (mostly PSOM administrators). We matched 19 individuals who worked in the same positions in Penn administration for the entire year 2019 and 2022 and computed the average salaries of these individuals in the two years. We find that from 2019 to 2022 the average salary of Penn officers increased by 24.3% and of Penn key employees by 42.5%, more than enough to compensate these employees for inflation and deliver significant real wage growth. In comparison, over the same period, the average faculty salaries at Penn grew by 10%, 7.5%, and 12% for professors, associate professors, and assistant professors, respectively.
III.3. AAUP Benefits Data
In the meeting with the committee, the VP-Faculty suggested that relatively low salaries at Penn are compensated by above-average benefits compared to peer institutions, without providing evidence. An attempt by the committee to quantify the generosity of benefits at Penn on its own ran into a peculiar obstacle. Most of Penn’s peer universities benchmark the generosity of their benefits using the data from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Faculty Compensation Survey.[9] The survey collects data from institutions on the expenditure per full-time faculty (in dollars or as a percentage of average salary) on retirement contributions and medical insurance. Participating institutions are asked by AAUP to include all full-time faculty in their reporting, including non-tenure track (NTT) faculty. Penn, however, is an outlier, as it excludes NTT faculty from its report.[10] It seems reasonable to expect that benefit spending is higher on tenured and tenure-track faculty than on NTT faculty (they are excluded from some benefits, such as Faculty Income Allowance Plan; moreover, NTT Faculty receive lower salaries and thus lower retirement contributions and they are probably more likely to self-select into cheaper health insurance plans). By choosing to report the statistics on a different sample than Penn’s peers, the value of Penn’s benefit contributions appears to be inflated and not comparable to other universities. SCESF continues to maintain that faculty access to reliable information is essential to morale, accountability, and good governance at Penn.[11]
III.4. Consequences of 2022 Course Schedule Changes
In FY22, Penn introduced a University-wide course schedule change that effectively increased the length of class meeting times by 10 minutes. As discussed in 2022 and 2024 SCESF’s reports, depending on the frequency and length of class meetings, this is equivalent to increasing the length of the semester by well over a week. This implied increase in the length of the teaching semester was not needed to satisfy Middle States accreditation requirements. Moreover, it was uncompensated, and it reinforces the concerns regarding Penn’s ability to attract and retain high quality faculty essential to maintaining Penn’s prominence. Considering this, SCESF recommended evaluating the possibility of shortening the length of the semester accordingly. SCESF received the following response from the VP-Faculty:
“The University standardized start times for courses in 2021 to build in travel time between class meetings and provide time for students and instructors to continue discussions after the end of a class meeting without having to rush to the next class meeting. The new time grid does not increase or decrease the scheduled amount of instructional time. Per the University Policy on Class Meeting Times, the available teaching blocks remain unchanged and the duration of class meetings remains at the discretion of the instructor, up to the scheduled class end time. Because total instructional time has not changed, the academic calendar will remain unchanged.”
The committee is concerned that under the new University Policy, instructors are expected to finish each class meeting ten minutes earlier, but that expectation has not been made clear to faculty and students. The committee highlighted in prior year reports how this policy puts instructors in a difficult position if students perceive them as cutting minutes of formal instruction.[12] In March 2023, the University conducted a survey assessing how instructors use the extra 10 minutes of each class meeting; SCESF requested but did not receive the results of this survey. Even without such systematic evidence, SCESF members are aware of difficulties in recruitment in some of their respective departments due to excessive teaching demands at Penn. Shortening the length of the semester is a possible alternative to counterbalance longer class times that we hope that the VP-Faculty would consider advancing on behalf of Penn faculty.
III.5. Compensation of Standing Faculty Clinician Educators
SCESF is charged with reviewing the compensation of standing faculty Clinician Educators but does not receive sufficient data to do so. The committee urges University leadership to set a transparent policy regarding access to data from Perelman School of Medicine (as well as the other health schools), where a majority of standing faculty in the clinician educator track work. Contrary to our understanding of an agreement between the committee and University leadership set last year, FY23 compensation data regarding clinician educators in the PSOM were provided to IR&A for analysis but the results of this work were not shared with the committee. The VP-Faculty told the committee that her office does not oversee clinical educator standing faculty salaries at PSOM. Thus, salaries of the majority of Penn standing faculty are not monitored at the University level.
This year, in an attempt to find a compromise solution, the committee engaged directly with PSOM leadership to develop a mutually agreed upon framework for the analysis of PSOM Clinician-Educator data. We held several meetings and shared with PSOM recommendations of the Association of American Medical Colleges for designing such an analysis and the examples of implementation of such an analysis at various U.S. medical schools. Following these discussions, PSOM has conducted and presented SCESF with the results of a study of potential differences in compensation by gender and has offered the following statement for inclusion in this publication:
The Perelman School of Medicine analyzed the total base salaries of 579 faculty on the clinician-educator track in the school’s clinical departments (excluding those with appointments at CHOP). We considered the following factors: clinical department, academic rank, years in academic rank, presence of a leadership role, Veterans Affairs-based activity, regional compensation market, type of doctoral degree (MD, PhD, MD/PhD), and gender.
In stepwise models, we initially observed a significant gender difference in base salary. However, this difference was no longer significant after adjusting for clinical department, academic rank, and years in rank. Other considered factors had little impact on this conclusion. In summary, we found no evidence of systemic disparity in pay associated with gender after adjusting for department, rank, and years in rank.
SCESF looks forward to its continued collaboration with PSOM during the coming year. It also looks forward to expanding the scope of such analysis to include clinician educators in all other schools at Penn.
III.6. Data on Total Compensation
As historically, the University provided SCESF with data only on base salaries. Although base salaries are a dominant form of faculty compensation, a significant but unaccounted portion of the compensation for many faculty members comes from sources such as summer salaries, administrative stipends, performance bonuses, pay for additional teaching, and support from grants and contracts. The distribution of total compensation, inclusive of such additional sources, is thus more informative about the economic status of the faculty that this committee is charged with assessing. The competition between universities in recruiting faculty is also based on total compensation packages they offer rather than base salaries. Yet, the University administration assesses neither the distribution of total salaries across faculty at Penn nor the comparability of Penn’s total compensation packages to those at competing institutions.
Last year, SCESF convinced the VP-Faculty to share with the committee readily accessible data on the distribution of total compensation defined as the amount reported in Box 1 of IRS Form W-2 issued by Penn to each faculty member. SCESF was disappointed when it was told that total compensation data would not be provided by the University more than once every five years. We note that many leading public universities make public both base salaries and total compensation of faculty, making the competitive analysis of Penn compensation strategy straightforward (and we think essential) to implement.
III.7. Maintaining Open Communication
For the first time in many years, the University administration did not publish a formal response to the issues of concern raised by SCESF in last year’s report and did not share the response with the committee. SCESF firmly believes that maintaining dialogue and shared governance practices between faculty and University administration bring measurable added value to the faculty experience at Penn. We remain in favor of maintaining the tradition of open dialog and transparency around issues of concern raised by the committee in performance of its duties.
IV. Review of Data Provided to SCESF
In this section we provide a detailed review of Penn base salary data tables provided to the committee by the VP-Faculty.
IV.1. The Distribution of Base Salaries and their Changes
Table 1 reports the statistics of the distribution of salary increases by academic rank for faculty members continuing at Penn but not necessarily continuing in rank. Tables 6, 7, and 8 provide additional statistics of the distribution of wage increases by rank separately for different schools and academic areas but refer to faculty continuing in rank. These tables include salary increases from all sources (e.g., merit, market, retention).
According to Table 1, in FY24, the median salary increase was 4.3% and the mean was 6.2%. The mean and median increases were similar for the three academic ranks. Tables 6, 7, and 8 indicate that in FY24, with a few exceptions, the increases were also similar across schools and that the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of wage increases were similar as well, suggesting that higher mean than median salary growth in Table 1 was driven by changes in ranks (promotions) or large increases for a small share of faculty continuing in rank. The exceptions were Nursing and Graduate Education. While 50% of professors in Nursing received a salary increase of no more than 4.1%, 25% received a salary increase of 11.2% or more. Similarly, while 50% of professors in Graduate Education received a salary increase of no more than 4.8%, 25% received a salary increase of 9.2% or more. Table 3 further emphasizes the dispersion of the distribution of salary increases in Graduate Education by highlighting that 22.2% of professors received increases that were lower than 3.6%—the rise in Philadelphia area CPI. Interestingly, the same two schools were outliers in FY23 when the distribution of salary increases among associate and assistant professors exhibited a similarly large dispersion.[13]
To put these salary increases into perspective, one must consider the dynamics of inflation. If prices grow faster than salaries, the real purchasing power of faculty salaries declines. In FY24, Consumer Price Index (CPI) in Philadelphia region grew by 3.6%, faster than the U.S. average CPI growth of 3%. Thus, the median and mean salaries grew by about one percentage point more than the rate of growth in prices. It is important to note that this slight real salary growth in FY 24 is negligeable relative to the decline in the faculty’s real incomes over the preceding three years. Specifically, in FY21 there was a salary freeze while consumer prices increased by 5%, so that real purchasing power of faculty salaries declined by 5%. In FY22, there was also a significant increase in CPI of approximately 9% while median salary at Penn grew by only 3%. The rate of inflation moderated somewhat in FY23 to around 3% with median Penn salary growing by 4.5%. Thus, the real salaries declined sharply in FY21 and FY22 and the slight increases in FY23 and FY24 did not offset the loss of real salaries in the previous two years. An extensive analysis of the effects of uncompensated inflation was provided in 2024 SCESF report and we do not include it in this year’s report as no substantive conclusions were affected.[14]
Table 2 indicates that in FY24 across all schools and academic areas 91.7% of continuing faculty received salary increases exceeding the rate of inflation. There is some variation across school with Weitzman being an outlier with only 73.9% of faculty receiving such increases. According to Table 3, there is significantly more pronounced variation across schools in the share of continuing professors receiving salary increases that exceed the rate of inflation, ranging from 68.8% at Weitzman to 100% at Annenberg and Nursing. With the data available to us, we cannot determine to what extent the variation is accounted for by different overall salary budgets versus administrative decisions.
Note that statistics such as the mean salary increase are not the same as the increase in the mean salary. Indeed, we have seen in Table 1 that the mean salary increases for the three academic ranks were 5.9%, 7.6%, and 5.4%. The corresponding increases in the mean salaries for the three academic ranks can be computed from the data provided in Table 9 and are equal to 4.8%, 5.7%, and 2.8%. There are two interpretations of this comparison, which are not mutually exclusive. First, it could be that individuals with larger salary increases in each rank were those who received lower salaries to begin with. This would lead to some compression of salary distributions within ranks and would imply that the cost of the salary increase to the University is smaller than the mean salary increase in Table 1. Second, this could be driven by promotions. While the sample in Table 1 is faculty continuing at Penn, the sample in Table 9 is faculty continuing at Penn in the same rank. Thus, promotions across ranks will be captured by Table 1 but not by Table 9 in the year when they take place. We cannot disentangle the importance of these two potential explanations given the data available to us, but the second one appears less relevant for assistant professors for whom the distinction between those continuing at Penn and those continuing in rank at Penn is less likely to significantly affect salary comparisons. We are also not entirely confident in comparability of data in Tables 1-3 and 6-8 with data in Tables 9-10. We have been noticing surprising patterns regarding such a comparison in all our reports since FY21 but have been continuously reassured by the VP-Faculty and IR&A that all their calculations have been checked and are correct. Nevertheless, similar patterns emerge once again in FY24. For example, the mean salary for assistant professors increased by only 2.8% according to Table 9. At the same time, according to Table 8, 75% of salary increases for assistant professors exceeded 4.1%. Moreover, while we do not have this number specifically for assistant professors, the information in Tables 2 and 3 indicates that close to 92% of assistant and associate professors received a salary increase of over 3.6%. While these patterns can be mathematically consistent (e.g., if it is the highest paid assistant professors who received near zero salary increase) they do not appear entirely plausible, and we do not have access to the data required to verify this.
Table 9 reveals additional information about the distribution of salaries and their changes. Across all ranks and all years, the mean salaries are higher than the median. This indicates that the distribution of salaries across faculty is skewed to the right: salaries above the median are further above it than the salaries below the median are from it. A few very high salaries could also produce this result. The two columns of ratios in Table 9 are also informative. The column “Not Weighted” reports the ratio of the mean or median for each rank each year to the corresponding mean or median of assistant professors in the same year (shown in the “Amount” column). For example, the unweighted ratio of the mean associate professor salary in FY24 ($163,950) to that of assistant professors ($153,421) is 1.07. This ratio has declined in FY22 and FY23 to 1.04 but rose back almost to its level of 1.08 in FY21. This suggests some compression of relative salaries of associate professors to those of assistant professors in the years when inflation spiked. Presumably, this happens because wages of newly hired assistant professors are more reflective of the market conditions and are better indexed to inflation. Note, however, that the ratio in the column “Not Weighted” is affected by how faculty at different ranks are distributed across schools that pay different salary levels. The column “Weighted” adjusts for this composition. When weighted by school, these ratios are in essence the average salary differential by rank within schools: continuing associate professors are paid on average 23% more than continuing assistant professors. The fact that the weighted salary premium of associate professors exceeds the unweighted one implies that associate professors tend to be concentrated in lower-paying schools. The school-adjusted (weighted) ratio of average salaries of continuing professors to assistant professors has remained fairly stable over the years at around 1.87.
Table 10 presents the same rank—and Academic Year—specific medians shown in Table 9, now bracketed by Q1 and Q3 salaries (representing salaries at the 25th and 75th percentiles of salary distribution). The interquartile range (IQR) is the difference between these two quantities. The ratio of the IQR to the median is particularly informative because it adjusts for the fact that the dispersion as measured by the IQR alone could be expected to increase as average salaries grow. With respect to trends over time, dispersion of professors’ salaries was increasing by about 1% annually, from 0.49 in FY14 [15] to 0.56 in FY22 and then dropped to 0.53 in FY23 and rebounded to 0.54 in FY24; dispersion in the salaries of associate professors rose sharply in FY24 to 0.33—the highest value in at least a decade; and dispersion in the salary of assistant professors continues to decline sharply from 0.82 in FY14 to only 0.63 in FY24. These trends are consistent with the within-rank salary compression suggested by the noted above fact that in FY24 the change in the mean salary within ranks was smaller than the corresponding mean salary change. The dispersion among assistant professors continues to exceed that among professors. Moreover, 75th percentile (Q3) salaries for assistant professors continue to exceed those for associate professors, due to the correlated school differences in (a) salaries and (b) proportions of faculty at the rank of associate professor.
IV.2. Comparing Base Salaries at Penn and Peer Institutions
The most relevant comparisons, of course, are with the pay for faculty elsewhere. The only set of comparisons provided to us by the University this year in Table 5 is based on the data from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Salary Surveys. The disadvantage of this dataset is that it reports one average salary level per institution, and it is not possible to adjust it for the differences in composition of schools and departments across universities. For example, as noted above, if Wharton pays relatively high wages and represents a larger share of faculty at Penn than business schools at other universities (some of which may not even have a business school), this will appear as Penn paying a relatively high average salary but will not be informative about the comparison of salaries within schools. The advantage of this dataset, however, is that we know the identity of schools supplying the data and can keep the same comparison group of institutions over time. Specifically, Table 5 displays Penn’s mean faculty salary by academic rank together with mean salaries at other Ivy Plus universities (eight Ivy League schools plus Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford) expressed as percentages of Penn’s mean salary.
Among the 12 comparison institutions, Penn’s rank for professors fell from 7th in FY22 to 9th in FY23 and recovered to 8th in FY24 by overtaking Dartmouth by 0.6%. In terms of the relative pay of associate professors, Penn’s position fell from 6th in FY22 to 8th in FY23 and remained 8th in FY24. Penn used to be 2nd or 3rd in the ranking of assistant professor salaries in recent years but fell to 4th in FY22 and FY23 and to 5th in FY24. The recent decline in Penn’s relative salaries is concerning and SCESF demands the University take measures to address it.
Penn’s Faculty Climate Surveys also capture faculty concerns with the decline in Penn’s relative salaries.[16] Comparing 2023 and 2015 surveys, we observe that the share of faculty who were satisfied or very satisfied with their salary declined from 59% in 2015 to only 55% in 2023. Moreover, the share of the standing faculty responding that an increase in salary was a factor in their considering leaving Penn has increased sharply from 61% in 2015 to 67% in 2023, making it the number one reason. We do not have access to the microdata from the survey to compute cross-tabulations, but it does not appear to be a coincidence that overall satisfaction with being a faculty member at Penn has declined by the same percentage as the share of faculty who are satisfied with their salaries.
The comparisons in Table 5 are affected by the cost-of-living differentials across locations where these universities are located. Philadelphia is cheaper to live in than, e.g., Boston, New York, or Palo Alto. Thus, the same base salary goes further in Philadelphia. Table 5-Adjusted contains data with base salaries across Ivy Plus universities adjusted using Mercer Cost of Living indices. While the surface take-away from this table is that salaries at Penn are quite competitive once costs of living are taken into account, the precise inference is challenging. First, it is unclear whether this adjustment is appropriate. For example, a major driver of the cost-of-living differences across locations is the cost of housing. While universities may pay comparable base salaries, universities located in high-cost housing markets (e.g., Columbia, New York University, Stanford) offer housing or housing subsidies. No housing subsidies or allowances are included in base salary data in Table 5 for any university, implying that adjusting the base salary for the cost of housing is not the right thing to do. Moreover, the cost-of-living adjustments appear implausible. For example, the Mercer index implies that the costs of living in Hannover, NH rose 2.5 times faster than in Philadelphia between FY19 and FY24 while the official data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals that the consumer price index for Hanover, NH region increased less than for the Philadelphia region over the same period. Thus, we do not think that the patterns revealed by the data in Table 5-Adjusted are fully credible.
As mentioned above, salaries vary significantly across schools and disciplines even at the same academic rank. Thus, the comparison of average salaries across universities is affected by the differences in the faculty distribution across schools and disciplines. More revealing evidence would compare average faculty salaries across universities in the same academic field and rank.
In the past, the University has provided us with the data from the American Association of Universities Data Exchange (AAUDE), which enabled such an analysis and painted a less favorable picture of Penn’s competitive standing. In FY24 the University did not share these data with the SCESF and explained that its decision was based on the concern of whether the data set is representative of Penn’s peer institutions.[17] In the meeting with the SCESF, the VP-Faculty has explained that the University administration currently does not attempt to compare Penn’s salaries within schools and disciplines to those at its peer institutions. This motivated SCESF to attempt to fill this void by undertaking two data collection efforts on its own, as described above in Section III.1.
IV.3. Comparing Benefits at Penn and Peer Institutions
This year, the committee did not prepare the usual table describing retirement and tuition benefits at Penn and other institutions because there are no major changes, and the analysis provided in last year’s report remains unchanged.[18] Instead, we have attempted to address an important limitation of our traditional analysis of benefits which excluded the comparisons with peer institutions in medical, vision, and dental insurance. We attempted to fill this gap using the AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey data but were unable to do so because Penn reports data to the survey in a way that violates the survey guidelines and differently from Penn’s peer institutions. This issue was discussed in Section III.6 above and we think it should be rectified by the administration.
IV. 4. Distribution of Base Salaries by Gender and Race
Table 12 indicates that the average base salary for women at Penn is lower than the mean salary for men at the same rank. Column “Unweighted” indicates that in FY24 at the professor level the difference is $24,690 (or 9.7%), at the associate professor level it is $3,814 (or 2.4%), and at the assistant professor level it is $7,388 (or 4.9%).
Women have historically been disproportionately represented in departments and schools that have lower salaries. To assess the importance of these compositional differences for the observed gender gap in base salaries, Table 12 features a second column for women, which recalculates the mean salaries of women by weighting their school-specific salaries by the proportion of all male faculty found in those schools. This weighted mean—what would the average salary be across all female faculty if female faculty maintained their own salaries, but were distributed across the University in the same proportion as males?—can then be compared with the existing (same) average male salary at Penn. The results are instructive. A very substantial portion of the actual, unweighted wage disparity stems from differences in gender ratios in faculty across the different schools. Specifically, after re-weighting, at the professor level the difference between male and female average base salaries falls to $7,235 (or 2.7%), at the associate professor level it becomes negative at -$9,756 (or -5.6% indicating that women’s salaries after reweighting are higher than men’s), and at the assistant professor level it declines to $2,106 (or 1.4%). Note that the adjustment is based only on the gender composition across schools without considering smaller divisions and departments within schools, which may also contribute to the observed gender gap in base salaries.
It is important to emphasize that, overall, women are paid significantly less than men at Penn. The statistical adjustment only reveals that to a large extent this is due to the fact that women are more likely to be employed in lower-paying schools. We do not have access to data (e.g., on the hiring process) that can reveal the reasons for the tendency of men and women to concentrate in different schools.
Considering the dynamics of salary differences between men and women over time, several noticeable patterns emerge. For professors, from FY20 to FY24, both unweighted and weighted male salary premia have steadily increased from $15,642 to $24,690 and from $1,808 to $7,235, respectively. For assistant professors, unweighted male premium declined over the same period from $13,198 to $7,388 while the weighted male premium has increased from $1,336 to $2,106. This appears to suggest that the distribution of salaries for female assistant professors across schools/disciplines is becoming more balanced, but some gender gap remains. For associate professors, the weighted male premium declined from $15,239 in FY20 to $3,814 in FY24, while the weighted premium has declined over the same period from $5,037 to -$9,756. Thus, female associate professors earn more than their male counterparts in the same schools in FY24. However, with the data available to us, we also cannot exclude the possibility that women stay longer in the associate professor rank in those schools.
The University also shared with SCESF a regression analysis that controls for a wider range of faculty attributes. This analysis regresses the log of base salary on gender, coarse indicators for race/ethnicity, academic rank, time in rank, status as a department or endowed chair, and academic field. The academic field is roughly grouped at the school level, retaining some of the heterogeneity present in the weighted analysis of Table 12.[19]
In FY24, the regression analysis shows that, without adjustment for field, rank, or time in rank, women have a base salary that is 14.5% lower than that of male faculty. Adjustment for rank reduces this gap to 6.3% because there are proportionally fewer women in higher-paid ranks. Adding controls for academic field turns this gap into a female premium of 0.4%, which is congruent with what was observed after direct re-weighting in Table 12. Finally, adding controls for status as an endowed professor, department chair, or other administrator reduces female premium to the statistically insignificant 0.1%.
The regression analysis also gives us some visibility into base salary differences based on race/ethnicity. The regression includes two indicator variables, one for underrepresented minority (URM) status (African American/Black, Hispanic, and Native American/Alaska Native) and the other for Asian/Pacific Islander.[20] Thus, the control group contains faculty of all other races and ethnicities, predominantly white. The regression analysis shows that, without adjustment for field, rank, or time in rank, URM faculty have a base salary that is 2.2% lower than that of the control group. Adjustment for rank turns this gap into a premium of 7.6%, indicating that URM individuals are disproportionately concentrated at lower academic ranks, but are paid well relative to other individuals of the same rank. Adding controls for the academic field further increases the URM premium in base salaries to 11.5%. Finally, adding controls for status as an endowed professor, department chair, or other administrator reveals URM premium of 10.8%. In contrast, Asian faculty members start with a base salary that is 9.3% lower than in the control group. The gap decreases to 4.6% after controlling for academic rank and to 0.8% after controlling for academic rank and school. Finally, adding controls for status as an endowed professor, department chair, or other administrator reveals an Asian faculty premium of 0.3%, which is not statistically different from zero. All the regression-based estimates described up to this point have remained fairly similar over the last 10 years, with a slight increase of URM faculty premium and a catch up of Asian faculty wages over time.
At the request of the Faculty Senate, the University has also provided us the estimates from a regression that, in addition to all other regressors mentioned above, included interaction terms for URM and Asian indicators and gender. This extended model was estimated on the full sample and separately for the three academic ranks. The point estimates on the interaction terms are not statistically significant, in part because of the samples becoming very small, and should be interpreted with caution. Yet, they provide our only window on the interrelationship between gender and race/ethnicity in base salaries. On the sample that includes all academic ranks, a male URM faculty earns a 10.4% salary premium, while a female URM faculty member earns an 11.0% premium relative to her peers. On the sample of professors, a URM male can, on average, expect to earn a 17.4% premium, while the expected premium of a URM female is 17.8%. Among associate professors, the corresponding numbers are 5.8% and 12.3%, while on the sample of assistant professors they are 0.9% and 1.9%, respectively. In contrast, on the sample that includes all academic ranks, a male Asian faculty member earns 0.1% less, while a female Asian faculty member earns a 0.8% premium relative to her peers. On the sample of professors, an Asian male can, on average, expect to earn 2.4% less, while the expected shortfall of an Asian female is 5.0%. Among associate professors, the corresponding numbers are a premium of 2.5% and 3.4%, while on the sample of assistant professors they are -1.8% and 0.1%, respectively.
V. Issues of Concern and Recommendations from SCESF
Penn’s continued prominence as an eminent university requires academic excellence across all tracks, schools and disciplines, and this excellence is based directly on the quality of the faculty recruited to, and retained by, our university. We encourage the President, Provost, Deans, and the faculty-at-large to partner together to monitor closely faculty compensation across the entire University to maintain Penn’s competitive position with peer institutions and to ensure appropriate compensation distribution.
In accordance with Faculty Senate policy, we present the following issues of concern and our recommendations to address these issues.
A. Being Prepared to Face the Challenges and Opportunities of Our Times
Issue of Concern:
This time of the unprecedented upheaval for elite higher education institutions is certain to present Penn with both challenges and opportunities in recruiting and retaining the highest caliber faculty. To be prepared to face these challenges and seize the opportunities, it is essential that Penn administration and the VP-Faculty, who is the primary advocate for faculty members in the University, have accurate, complete, and verifiable data when making decisions in a very competitive landscape. SCESF has identified highly relevant data sources that the VP office could use to better inform compensating-setting.
In response to the charge given to SCESF and the data provided to it by the University, the committee is largely unable to determine how Penn faculty are compensated relative to peer institutions, to ensure adequate distribution of total compensation, to assess salaries being paid to over half of the standing faculty who are clinician educators, the relative value of benefits provided to faculty compared to peer institutions, and whether University policy governing faculty compensation is based on accurate, complete, and appropriate data. Without substantive changes in the way it interacts with University leadership, the function and value of the SCESF is compromised.
SCESF Recommendation:
The administration should restore the practice of articulating measurable metrics on faculty compensation, recruitment and retention against which it can benchmark its successes and failures and be held accountable.
Understanding the competitiveness of Penn’s compensation by academic discipline seems essential in guiding sound decisions. Penn’s administration lacks data needed to enable such analysis. SCESF has proposed several strategies for obtaining relevant data from public sources but lacks resources (albeit modest) needed to fully implement this data analysis. We encourage the administration to partner with SCESF in developing this data infrastructure and to facilitate SCESF’s efforts to identify and learn from new data sources.
We trust the VP-Faculty to advocate on behalf of all members of the standing faculty, regardless of the fact that PSOM and University of Pennsylvania Health System employ many of these individuals. The committee supports a VP-Faculty with responsibility for overseeing faculty compensation across the entire University and providing full data to SCESF. Hiring and retaining the best faculty in every field of study contributes to the prominence of Penn, and faculty in the health schools and system is no exception. For SCESF to be able to represent the entire standing faculty, as it is charged, it needs to be provided with the clinician educator data. We applaud PSOM leadership for its work with SCESF this year on conducting a study of the distribution of pay at PSOM by gender. We look forward to the VP-Faculty’s help in expanding such analysis to other schools employing clinician educators.
Maintaining trust and collaborative relationship between University leadership, VP-Faculty and SCESF is vital. This year’s SCESF received neither faculty compensation data beyond base salaries nor PSOM clinician educator data that was promised to it. During these turbulent times for the elite institutions of higher education, collecting and analyzing hard data is essential. SCESF continues to extend its offer to the VP-Faculty to help with such an analysis.
While SCESF appreciates the willingness of VP-Faculty to discuss SCESF’s concerns privately with the committee, we believe that the entire faculty body should be informed of the administration’s views, and we thus urge VP-Faculty to recommit to maintaining a long-standing tradition of publishing the administration’s responses to the concerns raised by the SCESF in the University of Pennsylvania Almanac.
B. Improving Penn’s Competitive Standing
Issue of Concern:
To attract and retain an eminent faculty, the University must provide faculty salaries that are competitive with peer institutions in the top tier of US research universities. Penn’s previous Vice Provosts for Faculty’s stated goals were to provide compensation, on average, in the middle of the upper half, or the 75th percentile, of our most relevant peer group, the Ivy Plus institutions.[21] As mentioned in Section III, the current VP-Faculty has no corresponding quantifiable objectives, which concerns our committee. Whatever benchmark is used, however, comparisons of mean salaries at Penn to this peer group show that Penn is losing ground in the last few years. Out of twelve Ivy Plus institutions, the rank of mean salary of professors fell to 8th or 9th, for associate professors to 8th, and for assistant professors to 5th. SCESF suspects the decline to be even more pronounced in most individual fields of study but were limited in our ability to obtain requisite data from Penn to quantify the extent of such decline. Even based on the comparison of University-wide mean salaries, Penn salaries are approaching the middle of the bottom half rather than the upper half of our peer institutions. A decline in Penn’s salaries, relative to its market cohort in highly competitive institutions of higher learning, erodes Penn’s ability to compete with peers to retain the best talent. Penn faculty have adopted the ad hoc practice of re-aligning their salary by obtaining outside offers to establish their market value. However, these base salary adjustments provide only a temporary correction and disadvantage faculty who are not geographically mobile.
SCESF Recommendation:
SCESF recommends that faculty salary data for our peer institutions (provided in Table 5) be used in the rolling 5-year University budget process to determine an appropriate parameter for annual salary increases for Penn faculty and that peers-within-disciplines (e.g., AAUDE information in Table 4 in prior year reports) be used by deans to correct faculty salaries and provide Penn’s faculty with competitive compensation. If AAUDE data continues to be unusable for these purposes due to non-response by our peer institutions and the inability of IR&A to benchmark Penn data to that of a specific set of peer institutions, the administration should partner with SCESF to build a data set of compensation by field at flagship public universities such as Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc. that make their compensation data public. While not an ideal comparison group to Penn, these institutions compete with Penn in many fields and provide a useful benchmark for compensation levels and trends by discipline. Ignoring these easily accessible data and operating in the data vacuum inhibits Penn’s ability to compete effectively.
C. Adjusting Salaries for Inflation
Issue of Concern:
Average salary at Penn grew much less than the cost of living over the last four years. This lowered the real incomes of the faculty and resulted in the decline of Penn’s competitive standing vis-à-vis its peers as described in the Issue of Concern B. It is quite possible given the current macroeconomic environment that inflation will spike again in the near future. This gives rise to concern regarding the way Penn implements salary increases in times of high inflation. Salary guidance from the University in recent years provided for merit increases but not for cost-of-living adjustments. Cost of living adjustments to salaries were provided by the University in the past when inflation rates substantially impacted real salaries of the faculty. As discussed in SCESF’s 2024 Report,[22] the policy of rewarding merit but not adjusting salaries for inflation implies that the burden of inflation is not shared equally by faculty and varies with school affiliation, gender, age, etc. In fact, the idea of rewarding merit implies that equally productive individuals in the same discipline should receive similar salaries. But the implementation of the merit-based policy implies that spikes in inflation introduce arbitrary and persistent salary differences between such individuals.
SCESF Recommendation:
SCESF recommends that there should be a base salary increase to compensate faculty for the change in the cost of living (at least partially). This is not an increase in real salaries, just an adjustment of the nominal salaries required to maintain the same standard of living for the faculty. This salary adjustment should be applied uniformly to all standing faculty within schools. Separately from this adjustment, SCESF recommends maintaining the merit increase program designed to recognize and reward the valuable contributions of faculty as evidenced by scholarship, research, teaching, and service. Such a two-tier policy was adopted by Penn in prior periods of high inflation and SCESF recommends reintroducing it.[23]
D. Reassessing the Length of a Teaching Semester
Issue of Concern:
In FY22, Penn introduced University-wide course schedule changes that effectively increased the length of class meeting times by 10 minutes. As discussed in Section III.4, this increase (unnecessary to meet accreditation standards) is equivalent, depending on the frequency and length of class meetings, to increasing the length of the semester by well over a week without additional compensation.
SCESF Recommendation:
To the extent that the new course schedule is deemed to be a success, and the University decides to keep it in place, SCESF recommends evaluating the possibility of shortening the length of the semester accordingly. In the meantime, the administration should explicitly inform students that, as no increase in teaching time has occurred since the introduction of the policy, instructors are expected to finish class 10 minutes ahead of the scheduled time. Finally, the administration should verify that its Policy on Class Meeting Times is effective and that instructors are indeed comfortable finishing the class 10 minutes ahead of schedule.
E. Technical Request
Issue of Concern:
For the last several years SCESF has made a technical request that IR&A adopts certain standards around statistical reporting. We have decided to state this request publicly in the spirit of transparency.
SCESF Recommendation:
To report statistical significance of regression coefficients provided to SCESF at the conventional 1, 5, and 10%. Moreover, all coefficients should be reported with at least one or two non-zero numbers to the left of the decimal point, e.g., the coefficient of 0.09335 should reported not as 9.3%, as is done presently, but should be multiplied by one hundred or one thousand and reported as 9.33 or 93.35. Similarly, the coefficient of 0.002572 should not be reported as 0%, as is done presently, but should be multiplied by one or ten thousand and reported as 2.57 or 25.72. Notes to the tables should report what number each coefficient was multiplied by.
VIII. Members of the Committee
Aislinn Bohren (SAS/Economics)
Femida Handy (Social Policy and Practice)
Allison K. Hoffman (Law)
Anh Le (Dental Medicine)
Iourii Manovskii (SAS/Economics), Chair
Mark Oyama (Veterinary Medicine)
Petra Todd (SAS/Economics)
Ex Officio:
Eric Feldman (Law, Faculty Senate Chair)
Kathleen Brown (SAS/History, Faculty Senate Chair-Elect)
Vivian Gadsden (Education, Faculty Senate Past Chair)
The committee gratefully acknowledges the essential and invaluable assistance of J. Patrick Walsh of the Office of the Faculty Senate. The committee also notes that this year’s report directly benefited from presentation and analysis described in reports from previous years and, where appropriate, some previous text is included here.
NOTE: Footnotes and tables for the SCESF report can be found here.
President J. Larry Jameson has announced that Mark F. Dingfield has been named executive vice president of the University of Pennsylvania, effective August 2025 and pending approval by Penn’s Board of Trustees. Dr. Dingfield succeeds Craig Carnaroli, who has served as senior executive vice president since 2004.
Provost John L. Jackson, Jr. has announced two new vice provosts at the University of Pennsylvania. Russell Composto is the vice provost for undergraduate education and Kelly Jordan-Sciutto the vice provost for graduate education, both effective July 1, 2025. These two new positions assume many of the administrative and oversight roles formerly held by the deputy provost and the vice provost for education. 
Provost John L. Jackson, Jr. has announced the appointment of David Meaney as vice provost for research, beginning August 1, 2025. Dr. Meaney is currently the senior associate dean for faculty development and strategic initiatives and the inaugural Solomon R. Pollack Professor of Bioengineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science. 
Vice President for Public Safety Kathleen Shields Anderson has announced that Derrick E. Wood has been selected to serve as chief of police for the University of Pennsylvania Police Department (UPPD) following a wide-ranging search.
Dr. Fang has been named the inaugural Norman C. Grosman Professor of Economics. Dr. Fang, who joined the Penn faculty in 2009, served as the Class of 1965 Term Professor and Joseph M. Cohen Term Professor of Economics before being appointed to the Grosman Professorship. He has also served as chair of the department of economics.
Dr. Davis has been named the Paul F. Miller, Jr. and E. Warren Shafer Miller Professor of History of Art. Dr. Davis joined Penn’s department of history of art as an assistant professor in 2002, before becoming an associate professor in 2008 and a full professor in 2016. She has served as the undergraduate chair, graduate chair, and department chair.
Dr. Khoury has been named the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Physics and Astronomy. Dr. Khoury joined the department of physics and astronomy in 2009 and served as the associate chair for undergraduate affairs from 2014 to 2018. He is the current co-director of Penn’s Center for Particle Cosmology.
Dr. Song has been named the inaugural Schiffman Family Presidential Associate Professor of Sociology. Dr. Song joined Penn’s department of sociology in 2019 as an associate professor of sociology and demography. In 2021, she received the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association (ASA).
Wharton School dean Erika James has announced the appointment of Cait Lamberton, the Alberto I. Duran President’s Distinguished Professor of Marketing, as vice dean and director of the Wharton undergraduate division, effective July 1, 2025.
Kayla Storrs, who most recently served as the associate director of people, culture, and belonging at University of Oklahoma (OU) Athletics, has been named the head of community engagement and well-being at Penn. The position is shared between the Division of Recreation and Intercollegiate Athletics and Wellness at Penn.
Provost John L. Jackson, Jr. and Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action Michael Mann have announced the appointment of Stephen Decina as Penn’s inaugural executive director of climate science, policy, and action. 
Norman I. Badler, an emeritus professor in the department of computer and information science (CIS) in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, died on May 15. He was 77.
Leonard A. Lauder, W’54, an emeritus Penn trustee and a longtime member of the Penn community, died on June 14. He was 92.
Russell E. Palmer Jr., former dean of the Wharton School and an emeritus member of Penn’s Board of Trustees, died on June 14. He was 90.
David Fajgenbaum, an associate professor of medicine (translational medicine and human genetics) in the Perelman School of Medicine, will have a movie made based on his memoir, Chasing My Cure: A Doctor’s Race to Turn Hope into Action. 
Joseph S. Francisco, the President’s Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science and a professor of chemistry in the School of Arts & Sciences, has received the 2025 Pauling Award in recognition of his pioneering studies of the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere. His groundbreaking research reshaped scientific understanding of atmospheric processes, including pioneering air-water/microdroplet chemistry.
Leslie Richards, a professor of practice in the department of city and regional planning in the Weitzman School of Design, has received the 2025 Government Service Award from the Philadelphia section of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). The award is presented annually to individuals who have made significant contributions to the civil engineering profession in the Philadelphia area.
Victor Pickard, co-director of the Media, Inequality & Change Center at the Annenberg School for Communication, has received the 2025 C. Edwin Baker Award for the Advancement of Scholarship on Media, Markets and Democracy. The award is given annually by the Philosophy, Theory & Critique and Communication Law & Policy divisions of the International Communication Association for scholarly and related work that has made a significant contribution to the development, reach, and influence of scholarship on media, markets, and democracy. Dr. Pickard shares the 2025 award with Pablo J. Boczkowski of Northwestern University.
Nancy A. Speck, the John W. Eckman Professor in Medical Science II and chair of the department of cell and developmental biology in the Perelman School of Medicine, has been named the 2025 recipient of the E. Donnall Thomas Lecture and Prize from the American Society of Hematology (ASH). The award presentation and lecture will take place at the ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition, to be held from December 7-10, 2025, in Orlando, Florida.
