Dear Ms. Pachner:
Thank you for taking the time to respond to the recent Argus article detailing faculty frustration over declining salaries and pensions. We welcome the students’ perspective on this important topic, and we hope that you and your peers will become increasingly engaged in the process whereby institutional priorities are decided. This is a particularly timely discussion, since we are searching for a new president this year.
The facts are that Wesleyan faculty salaries compare poorly to those at our comparable institutions, and that faculty raises are on track to fall below the level of inflation for yet another year. Similarly, the institutional faculty pension contributions have been cut to barely half of what they used to be, and they are currently among the lowest of our comparable schools. Low salaries create significant hardships for the faculty in the short term, and the combination of poor salaries and poor pensions will make it very difficult for faculty members to retire in a timely manner down the road. Furthermore, declining salaries (in real dollars or by comparison) send the unambiguous message to the faculty that their contributions to the university are worth less and less every year.
When members of the faculty have raised these issues with the administration the responses have ranged from denial (i.e. the situation isn’t so bad), to delay (i.e. we’ll fix it later), or to pit the faculty against the students (i.e. if we raise faculty salaries, we will have to cut back on programs for the students). We don’t find any of these responses satisfactory. The recent fundraising campaign brought in over $275 million new dollars to the university (the strength of the Wesleyan faculty played no small role in that success). The university has also borrowed some $200 million dollars to help fund the numerous building projects that have either been completed or are underway on campus. That amounts to roughly half a billion dollars worth of investment and spending decisions ranging from administration increases (two new vice president positions were created last year alone) to new facilities. We would encourage you, and all of the students to take a close look at where that money – and your growing tuition costs– are going. We can assure you that it isn’t going into your professor’s pockets or into their pension plans (Wesleyan’s previous president wrote much the same thing in his September 5th letter to The New York Times).
We don’t question the need to improve student facilities, the importance of financial aid, or the value of an efficient administration. The issue is not whether the new campus center should be one percent smaller but how the university decides to spend its money. We would suggest that the recent spending decisions have been unbalanced, and have undermined the fundamental strength of the university: the very professors that teach the classes, mentor the students, and conduct the research and scholarship. Wesleyan wouldn’t be ranked 6th in its class nationwide for academic reputation without them.
Signed,
Wesleyan faculty members: Michael McAlear, Claire Potter, Nina Felshin, Indira Karamcheti, Alfred Turco, Catherine Poisson, Henry Goldschmidt, Ashraf Rushdy, Leo Lensing, Paul Schwaber, Krishna Winston, Elizabeth Traube, Peter Gottschalk, Peter Mark, Erik Grimmer Solem, Howard Needler, Mary Ann Clawson, Jeremy Zwelling, Ulrich Plass, Jill Morawski, Jan Willis, Douglas Foyle, Elizabeth McAlister, Ellen Widmer, Christina Crosby, Philip Scowcroft
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