A new policy will standardize why and how faculty members receive bonus pay after the University Senate voted overwhelmingly to approve it yesterday.
Right now, each department has its own policies to determine when faculty members deserve bonuses. While the new policy wouldn’t make those processes uniform, it aims to ensure that each department’s method is fair, representative and transparent. Each department will be required to present its process to the senate’s Faculty Affairs Committee, which will make sure it meets eight guidelines already in existence.
“We requested copies of merit pay plans from all units on the campus that are supposed to have one,” said Eric Kasischke, a geography professor and chairman of the Faculty Merit Pay Task Force. “We got about 75 percent of the plans back. We found that less than 5 percent had all eight components.”
The eight components include having an appeals process, informing faculty members in writing and weighing several years of performance when issuing merit pay.
Some senators feared revising merit pay was a backdoor way of implementing a post-tenure review policy, which the senate shot down last March. That policy would have allowed departmental committees to review tenured faculty members on a yearly basis and possibly increase or decrease their salaries based on performance.
Mark Leone, an anthropology professor who serves on the Senate Executive Committee, asked whether there was any mechanism in the recommendations whereby salary could be lost or taken away, as would have been the case if the post-tenure review policy has passed.
But Kasischke was adamant the committee had remained focused exclusively on faculty merit pay and didn’t deal with salary decreases.
“We did not consider anything that had to do with the post-tenure review debate of last year,” Kasischke said. “We only wanted to discuss merit pay, and that has nothing to do with pay reduction.”
The committee did, however, recommend that Provost Nariman Farvardin develop a plan to address salary compression and equity issues. Some faculty were concerned salaries didn’t rise along with professors’ academic standing.
“In my department, this is a serious issue,” said senator Lisa Mar, a history professor. “We often hire faculty at the beginning level and as they progress toward tenure, we then lose the faculty because there’s not a way for them to jump to the next rank.”
Several senators voiced frustration that some faculty members who aren’t tenured or tenure-track — such as research and library faculty — weren’t considered in the committee’s report.
Senator Jordan Goodman, a physics professor who was on the task force, said that while it was important for a review of those faculty members to take place, their pay was a separate issue that shouldn’t be included in the vote.
Legislators added an amendment to clarify who is meant by faculty — tenure, tenure-track and library faculty — throughout the report. Another amendment, which was proposed by the executive committee and passed by the senate, stated that each unit should post its approved plan on its website so faculty can review it.
The committee also recommended colleges and departments develop procedures to make sure new faculty members are aware of the merit pay process. It also suggested the policy be revised so that all years are accounted for when considering merit pay, even those when bonuses were not available. Bonuses were not available this year because of the university’s decreased budget.
The senate voted in favor of the recommendations 73-4.
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