The Commission on Faculty Compensation and Economic Benefits has issued its annual report for 2011-2012 [PDF]. The commission rightly identifies a looming crisis in compensation for faculty and staff at UW-Madison. The report provides not only a thoughtful and sober analysis of the magnitude of the problem and of the role of sharply declining state support in exacerbating the problem; it also offers a fairly exhaustive itemization of options available to help mitigate the crisis; e.g., increased efficiencies, alternative revenue sources, and “temporary incentives.” (more…)
Archive for the ‘Retention’ Category
Responding to decreased state support: A modest proposal.
Monday, March 5th, 2012Does absolute pay matter? Maybe not. Do pay raises matter? You bet.
Tuesday, April 26th, 2011Prof. Sara Goldrick-Rab’s blog, the Education Optimists, has been a goldmine of thoughtful and thorough deconstructions of the Public Authority proposal, and she has posed a number of pointed questions about the NBP, many of which have gone more or less unanswered by NBP proponents. Yesterday, she posed a new question:
What I am questioning is whether raising faculty salaries is the most cost-effective way to achieve the goal of retaining talent and whether efforts to raise faculty salaries should be a driving force behind the New Badger Partnership.
She then goes on to examine in some detail the role of absolute salary relative to other factors in faculty retention: (more…)
Happy Furlough Day?
Friday, November 27th, 2009For those of us on the faculty, the concept of “furlough days” is as disconnected from reality as the concept of “sick days.”
Every month we have to fill out and submit a form that lists the specific hours on specific days that we took “sick leave.” The bureaucratic fiction behind this ritual is that faculty work 9-5 days and 40-hour weeks and that any day missed because of a cold is a day of productivity lost forever.
The Toxic Two Percent
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007After months of delay, the budget numbers are now in. State lawmakers have approved a pay package that boosts UW System faculty and academic staff pay by 2 percent for AY 2007-2008, 2 percent again for AY 2008-2009, and another 1 percent in April 2009. For reference, faculty salaries systemwide are about 8.5 percent behind peer colleges and universities, and academic staff salaries are about 20 percent behind, according to System President Kevin Reilly. Clearly this package will do little to close those gaps. And undoubtedly, there will continue to be handwringing over a brain drain as some of the best and brightest on this campus get recruited away by universities willing to pay substantially more.
Saving the University (so far) from a far more severe haemorrhage of talent is a surprisingly simple fact: Many of us still love the University of Wisconsin and the city of Madison enough to ignore the lure of higher pay.