“One of our highest priorities will be to support a growing proportion of essential and predictable costs (faculty salaries, financial aid) through the endowment.”
– The University Strategic Plan
“We aim to pay our faculty a competitive salary, but the budget reality of the day ultimately determines what is possible and the ultimate decision maker on this is the Board of Trustees.”
– Vice President for Finance and Administration John Meerts
Bureaucratic excuses and idyllic promises are no longer satisfying University faculty, and we would like to extend our full support to our professors’ cause.
The administration, and especially President Doug Bennet, needs to decide which policy to follow: the one it advocates, where professors are valued above everything else, or the one it employs, where faculty satisfaction is marginalized. We hope, for everyone’s sake, that it’s the former.
Faculty salary raises did not keep up with inflation last year, while tuition went up 5.4 percent, well above the inflation rate. The administration blamed increasing costs—especially labor costs, salaries, and benefits—for the tuition increase, while simultaneously pointing to budget restrictions for the low professor salary raise. We are not buying it anymore. Either you charge students higher tuition to free up the budget, or stunt tuition increases to ease our, and our families’, burden. Playing one off the other stinks of mismanagement.
While the University lags behind the bulk of its peer schools in faculty compensation, Bennet’s salary ranks second in the 15-school group. Administrators involved in the presidential search maintain that to get a top-notch president you have to pay top dollar. Fair enough. But do we want to get (or keep) a top-notch faculty? What kind of dollar priority do we put on professors? And what is more important, a first-rate set of professors or a top-notch president?
These are questions the administration and the Board of Trustees need to resolve. Not that these issues are cloudy in our minds. Let’s get the best professors available and keep them happy and worry about the rest later. Is it unreasonable to suggest the president’s salary rank match that of the faculty? Are we oversimplifying? Maybe. But are our priorities responsible? Absolutely.
A few final questions: if the student body and the faculty are both dissatisfied with the current situation, who is left? The administration. And the administration acts out the decisions of the Board of Trustees. So who do the Board of Trustees represent, and who do they have in mind when making decisions? If they make a decision that restricts us now, then they must be looking to the future. So what’s Wesleyan’s future without top-notch faculty?
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