Meeting of the Truman State University Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)
October 16, 2018, 4:00- PM, in BH100
Present: Marc Rice (president, via Skype), Marc Becker (secretary), Mark Hatala (vice-president), William Alexander, Sergio Escobar, Masahiro Hara, Terry Olson, Matthew Tornatore
Report from Terry Olson on salary committee.
Mandate has been shrunk—used to be staffing and compensation committee, and now just compensation. The administration is putting together a staffing and workload committee. This university doesn’t have a workload or compensation philosophy document, and (except for a few departments with failed searches) we haven’t updated starting salary schedules and they haven’t been adjusted in four years even though we have had a 6 percent increase in inflation over that period. Helps explain why our salaries are not attractive. These are the problems that a lack of a staffing document creates. Is there difference in disciplines in subareas? Our starting salary schedule doesn’t reflect that, but national data indicates it could matter. We don’t have information on that—we lack important documents and goals. What do we want to achieve?
Times that the committee has not been optimistic. More than $2M in salary damage that needs to be fixed. We don’t have a pool of money to solve that problem, but one solution is rightsizing the faculty. This would create a big enough pool of money to address the problem and is about the only available answer. We don’t have to give pink slips, but we can do it through attrition. If we replace 45 with 41 we can still save money because of lower salaries and cheaper pension plans (Mosers is expensive for Truman). Difference between 6 percent for new hires and 20+ for existing people in Mosers. Even with replacement there are still expenses both because senior higher salary people are replaced with newer lower salary and rank replacements and significant pension cost differences. Last year we could have gotten $3.2M out of rightsizing the faculty. We can’t right-size the faculty all at once, but over a period of years we must accomplish that.
Mark H: we always balance the budget on the backs of the faculty. Can’t we chop from the top?
Terry: not part of our charge. There was a separate staff committee, but neither of the two committees was charged with looking at upper administration, athletics, or auxiliary functions. The answer is that we have to cut the number of employees and give remaining members bigger slices of the pie. If Dixon had implemented her 16:1 plan in 2006 it would have freed up $1.9M. People didn’t want to cut faculty lines, but it was the answer then and it is the answer now. Too many administers have been reluctant to say no, but that is starting to change. Problem is low FTE and too few adjuncts. We have no idea how new gen ed will play out and what new requirements will be and in this situation it would make sense to hire more adjuncts until we see what happens.
Mark H: problem is that we are changing the culture with adjunct hires because they don’t have the dedication to the university that tenured faculty do. We’re coasting on hires that we made in the 1980s and 1990s, and then the place craters.
Terry: lots of things should have been done long ago that weren’t done. Faculty are doing research when they should be teaching instead. Confident in group of leaders we have now. Without those leaders we wouldn’t have had the 3 percent increase we had this year. We have 40 faculty lines too many. We may need to decide whether to continue small programs where faculty are aging. Some programs don’t pay off, and people don’t look carefully at data when making decisions. Some people want to teach in narrow fields. And we sometimes don’t efficiently allocate teaching of JINS the new freshman seminars and other things. Some faculty can actually increase their credit hour generation by teaching such classes and less in their home area.
Mark H: should we get rid of course releases or increase pay for department chairs?
Terry: we’re too generous in course releases for chairs. The normal is 9 credit hours a year at Truman, and nationally it is 6. Some of this was done unilaterally by Barbara Dixon. We have about 12 FTE faculty lines tied up in chair release at present. In some departments, people other than the chair also have releases. We don’t have uniform guidance on releases and sometimes releases are granted at a lower level of administration than should likely be appropriate for uniform standards. Chair stipends haven’t increased in 12 years.
Sergio asked a question about what AAUP could do on the compensation issue. Terry’s response was a possible joint forum, like in November 2015 that was well attended and educational, and possibly surveying the faculty on compensation and other issues. Mark Hatala also asked about the possibility of AAUP looking at administrative salaries compared to other schools. Terry said that wasn’t part of the faculty compensation committee charge, but AAUP could do that if it wanted.