OSU faculty wonder where the funds are going to come from

Faculty at Oregon State University, underpaid in comparison to their peers at other institutions, will receive average raises of 4 percent early next year. This comes on top of the 6 percent boosts they saw last year.

OSU President Ed Ray mandated these salary increases in the summer of 2005, as part of a two-year plan to bring faculty paychecks closer to national norms.

While faculty agree that providing competitive compensation is necessary to attract and retain top scholars, some are concerned about how departments and colleges will come up with the money to cover these raises required by OSU upper administration but not linked to additional funding.

“I don’t think there’s anyone around who doesn’t want the raise, but I don’t think there’s anyone who doesn’t understand that it’s coming at a cost. It’s a bittersweet pill,” said David McMurray, associate professor and chairman of anthropology.

The raises will take effect Jan. 1 for 12-month faculty, and Feb. 2 for nine-month faculty.

Departments and colleges are required to provide average raises of between 2 and 4 percent, and most are expected to award 4 percent raises, according to Bill Boggess, Faculty Senate president and associate dean of the College of Agricultural Sciences.

Individual faculty members may be awarded increases ranging from 0 to 8 percent, with the expected average being 4 percent.

When the state-mandated freeze on all public employees’ salaries was lifted at the end of the 2003-05 biennium, OSU was able to offer cost-of-living and merit-based raises to its faculty.

Salaries at OSU, and other Oregon University System institutions, lag behind the average compensation rates at peer universities, putting the state’s higher education system at a disadvantage in wooing and keeping faculty, officials claim.

“At its core, the university is only as good as its faculty. It’s very hard to attract and retain quality faculty without being able to offer competitive salaries,” Boggess said.

Past studies have pegged OSU salaries at about 80 percent of the national average at comparable universities, although this varies by discipline and rank, according to Provost Sabah Randhawa.

OSU salaries are more competitive in professional programs such as pharmacy, oceanic sciences and engineering, while the liberal arts and general sciences departments lag behind, Randhawa said.

He also noted that, due to salary compression, the salary gap increases with rank. For example, OSU pays new hires, who usually come in as junior faculty, at near the market rate. Full professors who have been at OSU for a long time are more likely to get shortchanged.

In the past, OSU has lost faculty due to its inability to offer competitive salaries.

Bill Gerwick left the College of Pharmacy in 2005 after 21 years to join the University of California at San Diego’s Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

At the time, he said he’d be making double there what he made at OSU.

Though the raises may be necessary, OSU’s state-approved budget for the current biennium only covers a portion of the increase in salary expenditures. That has left deans and department chairs scrambling to pay for the lion’s share of raises out of their existing budgets.

In the anthropology department, next year’s raises will be felt in the classroom, McMurray said.

“A 4 percent raise will eat up the money we get from the college to hire teaching assistants. About four graduate TA slots a quarter will be lost,” he said.

The dean’s office will absorb the cost of raises for departments within the College of Liberal Arts for the remainder of the fiscal year, but departments will be on their own after July 1, McMurray said.

The reduction in teaching assistantships will hurt graduate students who rely on the positions to help pay rising tuition costs, according to McMurray. It also will result in heavier work loads for faculty who teach big courses, because they won’t have as many graduate students to help with grading, lead study groups and proctor exams.

If more raises are mandated in the future, his department will have nothing left to cut except overhead budgets for items such as telephones, Internet and photocopying.

“(The raises) are just a way to run a leaner operation. They’re trying to trim away the fat, but really there is no fat. It’s constant belt-tightening disguised as a raise,” according to McMurray.

In the College of Forestry, administrators also are cutting costs to finance the salary increases.

“We’re leaving vacated positions vacant,” said Dean Hal Salwasser.

This will result in heavier teaching loads for remaining faculty, and some classes no longer being offered, he said.

Joseph Krause, professor of French and chairman of the foreign languages and literatures department, said he wished OSU had waited to decide on the latest raises until after Measure 48 and other proposed legislation key to education had been decided by voters in the November election.

Next year, about 2 percent of his department’s budget will go toward these raises. This probably will mean fewer adjunct faculty and graduate teaching assistants, and fewer classes available to students, Krause said, calling the situation a “process of slow amputation.”

“I think in terms of helping boost faculty morale, periodic raises are necessary. But I don’t know why OSU has again chosen to provide raises in a self-funded way in a critical time of budget crisis,” Krause said.

Mary Ann Albright covers higher education. She can be reached at maryann.albright@lee.net or 758-9518.