Truth be told — and I doubt that many of the commission members would disagree, many of the options cited in the report are more or less analogous to those available to shipwreck survivors stranded in a lifeboat far out at sea:

• “As shown by the Greek philosopher Zeno,  scarce rations may be extended indefinitely by distributing exactly half of what remains on each successive day.”
• “Consumption of leather articles such as belts, wallets, and shoes  provides a welcome, if temporary, relief from the physical sensations of starvation.”
• “Even when drinking water has run out, under no circumstances should survivors succumb to the temptation to drink seawater or urine.  Those who disregard this advice may partially mask the flavor by mixing in a tablespoon of  Crystal Light Raspberry Ice Tea mix.”
• “When rescue remains an unlikely prospect even as morale and physical well-being continue to plummet, take a discreet look around you and identify the fellow survivors least likely to be in any condition to put up a spirited fight.  As a rough guide, one such individual will adequately feed ten for several days, or up to a week in cooler weather.”
• “Sleep with one eye open.”

Please note:  these were not actual commission recommendations.

One actual commission recommendation in particular, however, stands out as providing more than just superficial and temporary relief.  Indeed it was precisely this recommendation that was singled out by “On Campus” reporter Deborah Ziff at the Wisconsin State Journal.  Paraphrased, it goes like this:

• “Increasing the percentage of out-of-state students admitted to the University can significantly increase total tuition revenue without the need for politically untenable increases in tuition rates.”

Yes!  This is self-evidently true, and in recognition of its potential importance for the future of the university, I wish this option had been as prominent in the actual commission report as it was in Ms. Ziff’s very short article.  I therefore would like to take this opportunity to propose the following refinement:

1. To be more in line with our national peer universities, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and  the University of Minnesota should agree to terminate their unusual tuition reciprocity arrangement and to charge full out-of-state tuition to each other’s residents.
2. The above reciprocity arrangement should then be replaced by a new one in which the two universities each agree to reject their own in-state applicants while giving preference to those from the other state.

The logical result of this arrangement will be that UW-Madison’s student body will soon be made up entirely of Minnesota residents and other out-of-state students, all paying $25,421 tuition per year rather than the $9,671 paid by in-state students, while Wisconsin students will all go to Minnesota and elsewhere.

If we conservatively estimate that 25,000 in-state students currently on the UW-Madison campus would soon be replaced by out-of-state students paying $15,750 per head more, that represents $394M in new revenue to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  All without raising tuition rates.

The logic and spirit of this proposal are completely consistent both with recent trends in  state support for our university and with reason 3 in the very first paragraph of this official explanation of UW-Madison admission policies.  I cannot imagine why it would not be universally embraced by politicians and administrators alike as an innovative and far-reaching solution to the university’s current budget woes.

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:

What other factors are affecting [retention] decisions– and how important are they, relative to absolute salary? For example, what role does the quality of life in Madison play? How about salary inequity (among UW-Madison professors)? The shared governance system? Campus climate? The tenure and promotion system? Gender and/or racial bias in that system? The presence or absence of unions?

I think Sara’s questions are good ones, but I also think there is there is an extremely important aspect to the salary question that is being overlooked, and not just by Sara.

I’ll set the stage with the following confession: I’m reasonably content with my overall level of compensation while being very dissatisfied with the chronic pattern of negligible raises.

Does this sound contradictory?  It’s not, and here’s why.   Every year we have a merit exercise in which each member of our department gets ranked by his/her peers in the areas of research, teaching, and service.   The effort involved in this assessment is substantial, entailing the preparation of 3-year activity reports and in-person interviews.  And of course there is the exposure factor — it can be nerve-wracking for otherwise independent scholars and teachers to open up their entire professional life to review and ranking by their immediate colleagues.

There used to be a tangible point to this exercise — to determine the apportionment of the department’s overall raise pool.  Those who demonstrated sustained excellence and high productivity received a significantly larger raise (typically a couple percent more) than those ranked lower.  Over time, these differential raises accumulated, leading to significantly higher overall salaries for those who contributed on a consistently high level.  In short, one was recognized and rewarded for excellence even without having to disrupt one’s own life — and others’ — with insincere applications for faculty positions elsewhere.

For most of the ten years I have been on the faculty at UW-Madison, the merit review, when it occurs at all, has been a hollow exercise.  It now serves only to draw stinging attention to the unwillingness of the State of Wisconsin to reward faculty for continuing to do their job well.   The most highly ranked colleagues in my department  have been receiving approximately the same raise  as those ranked near the bottom — that is, next to nothing.   To put it another way, at most a few hundred dollars in raises per year, on average, separate those who put in 60 hours per week, who spend considerable time on the road traveling to conferences, working late grading papers and reading theses, and serving on advisory committees, from those who understandably opt instead to devote more time to their long-suffering families and/or to non-academic pursuits.

More recently, we have not only had no raises, we’ve had furloughs.  Again, these pay cuts strike everyone equally, regardless of merit.

A few days ago, I did the calculation and discovered that my inflation-adjusted salary today is within a few hundred dollars of what it was in 2000, despite a promotion to full professor in the interim, and despite having been ranked solidly in the upper half of my department for most of those years.  And that tiny improvement in real pay over ten years may soon be completely erased by Governor Walker’s Budget Repair Bill.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the realization that my efforts over the years have not had a measurable impact on my net compensation is vastly more demoralizing to me than the knowledge that my salary is some modest percentage below that of my peers at other universities.  It honestly makes me reassess the point of ever again staying past 5pm, which has been the norm for all of my career.

Absolute salary does matter on some level, but as Sara says, it may not be the most important factor in recruitment and retention.   My point here is that pay raises are important for reasons that may have little to do with retention and everything to do with rewarding continued high productivity and excellent scholarship by the many tenured UW-Madison faculty who, for whatever personal reasons, choose not to apply for jobs elsewhere.

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 reality, of course, is  that most of us continue to work on evenings and weekends when those in many other careers have punched out at 5pm and left their work behind to focus completely on their families, home responsibilities, and maybe even a little recreation.  Most of us faculty simply do what needs to be done to meet our teaching, research and service obligations, regardless of whether that means a 40- or  80-hour week.

Whatever days we’re taken out of action by illness will be made up sooner or later.  Lectures have to be rescheduled; exams and homework assignments have to be written and graded; papers have to be submitted by conference deadlines.  By the end of a typical academic year, the same stuff will have been done — has to be done — with or without any days off for illness in between.

The same is patently true for furlough days as well.  No one is actually taking those days off, even if we aren’t physically in our office.  This long Thanksgiving weekend, I have theses to read, journal papers to revise, and course notes to develop.  And sometime before Monday, I will do all three.

In short, the furlough is really nothing more than a pay cut for equal work, and everyone affected knows this.  Only the state bureaucrats can’t seem to come right out and say it, requiring us instead to go through the ridiculous and meaningless exercise of choosing the dates for our four flexible furlough days  this academic year (today, of course, is a non-flexible one).

We have been instructed not to schedule our personal furlough days in such a way that the University’s functions are actually impaired in any visible way.  Classes must still be taught.  Offices must still be open.  In other words, the same work must get done.

An unfortunate consequence of this policy is that we give credence to the corrosive myth that the faculty have so much idle time on their hands that they can all go fishing for 8 days in a calendar year and no one will miss them.  This myth plays right into the hands of those who are already predisposed to oppose increases in the University’s budget for faculty salaries and retention packages.   Those folks might say, “You faculty bums took off eight days last year and the University kept humming along without even a hiccup.  Say, why don’t you just go ahead and take eight unpaid days off every year?”

For all that, is there anything about the furlough we can be thankful for?   Todd Finkelmeyer of the Cap Times suggests that there is:  the extra day to spend with families that we might not otherwise have. And in that, he’s right.  Though, as I said, the day taken off now will just come out of future time off.   For University faculty, it’s a zero sum exercise.

But here’s what I am thankful for:  the furlough, for all its illogic, is still a temporary pay cut of about 3%.   By default, there will be no more furloughs in two years unless active steps are taken to impose them again.   By contrast, an actual salary cut, labeled honestly as such, would require active steps to reverse it in future years.   I’d much rather be in the first of these two positions.

But ultimately, what will matter for faculty morale (and,  therefore,  for both productivity and retention) is whether we have any hope of returning soon to a fiscal climate in which excellence in teaching and research is  rewarded in any meaningful way.   For readers who are new to this site, here is a piece from two years ago on that topic.   But keep in mind that that article was based on old information — part of the meager raise package referred to then was subsequently revoked.

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.

Take me, for example. Seven years ago, I was fortunate enough to get an offer from UW-Madison after ten years on the faculty at another Big Ten university. I didn’t have to think twice. I jumped at the chance to move to Madison even though I knew that my net compensation would not change appreciably after allowing for the higher cost of living here.

Of course, I could not have anticipated that most of the next seven years would also bring miserly pay raises in the range of 1 to 2 percent. Had I simply stayed where I was, I would most likely be about 10% further ahead — a significant difference when facing kids’ college expenses. Nevertheless, I still don’t regret my decision to move here.

More to the point, since my hiring, I haven’t submitted a single application for another position. Why not? Well, because (a) I don’t intend to move, and (b) having served on many recruitment committees, I can’t bring myself to waste people’s time at another university in a bid to extract a grudging pay raise from my home institution.

So, from the State of Wisconsin’s perspective at least, where’s the problem? Plenty of folks like me are sticking around despite uncompetitive salaries simply because they like Madison. It makes perfect economic sense for lawmakers to capitalize on that loyalty by keeping pay raises as low as possible.

Or does it?

There’s a not-so-obvious toxic effect of chronically low pay raises that I think most commentators to date have missed: In addition to making our salaries less competitive relative to those offered elsewhere, small pay raises make our annual merit review exercises effectively meaningless. We are being saddled with one of the worst shortcomings of unionization without any of its compensating benefits.

It is not lost on anybody that, in a 2-percent year, the spread in pay hike between the least and most productive members of the department may amount to about that same 2 percent, or between $750 and $1500 in annual take home pay for the majority of academic staff and faculty. That is laughably small compensation for doing the considerable extra work needed to stay at the top of the merit scale in one’s department.

How many hours in extra labor and away from home and family does it take for a scientist to do the research and write the proposals needed to consistently bring in, say, half a million per year in federal research dollars, as compared with the colleague who brings in just enough to cover his/her summer salary? How many hours are spent after dinner reading theses by the faculty member who advises eight students, versus the one who advises only one or two? How many additional hours writing and submitting 5-6 research papers versus one or two?

When the two-percent year is an anomaly, it can be weathered and won’t have a lasting effect on a faculty or staff morale or work ethic. But when it becomes a chronic pattern, as it has been for the last several years, anyone with a modest grasp of the math starts to question his/her priorities. Why should I kill myself for a shot at a few hundred more dollars per year?

Indeed, any reasonably talented and energetic individual begins to uncover far more effective ways of increasing one’s net annual income with far less personal sacrifice. That same $1500 of extra take-home pay can be gotten by way of a mere 1-2 hours per month of outside consulting. Or by starting even the smallest of small businesses on the side. Or by self-publishing a low-level textbook that sells even 100 copies per year.

None of the above outside activities is dishonorable. But wouldn’t the citizens of Wisconsin prefer to see the state’s brightest minds rewarded, not penalized, for devoting those same extra hours to exemplary scholarship, research, and teaching?