This story about efforts by the University of California to get more funds for faculty salaries are indicative of issues confronting all state university systems (and bear in mind that California may still have the best-funded system of higher education in the country); I have bolded a few especially notable bits:
University of California administrators want to spend an estimated $70 million over the next four years to boost the salaries of professors whose pay is not deemed competitive in the academic job market....
If eventually adopted by the regents, the change in pay scales would increase the baseline salaries by about 10 percent. They now range from $48,000 for a starting assistant professor to $133,500 for a full professor with the most experience....
In recent years...UC has needed to offer salaries above scale to attract and retain the best candidates for teaching positions. Those already paid above scale would not get the large bump, just merit increases and annual cost-of-living increases.
"We were concerned by the rising tide of (over-scale) salaries," [UC spokesman] Hume said.
That has created an unequal system, in which 75 percent of UC's professors are paid over scale, and has undermined a peer review system, in which individual faculty members are evaluated by their colleagues for raises.
Over-scale salaries are largely going to new hires and to people who are at risk of being recruited by other institutions, said UCLA law Professor Susan French, a member of the group working on the salary scale issue.
"There is resentment and tension, particularly as more recent hires are paid more than faculty who have been at UC longer," said French, who was speaking for herself and not for the Academic Senate.
The university has about 9,200 tenure-track professors in fields outside of medicine. They have traditionally moved up the salary scale through merit pay raises granted under the university's peer review system.
But with the UC salary scale lagging so far behind other major universities, Hume said, higher salaries are needed to attract and retain top faculty. At UC Merced, where new faculty was hired to open the campus a couple of years ago, 87 percent of the faculty is paid over scale. The other campuses range from 58 percent over scale at UC Riverside to 71 percent at UC Berkeley and 87 percent at UC Davis.
"It would be healthier to get the great majority of faculty back into the peer review process," said John Oakley, chairman of the UC Academic Senate, which represents faculty.
The pay scales do not include other perks that many professors get, such as housing subsidies and paid sabbaticals. However, UC officials have noted that professors at other universities also get those perks and that UC has to provide them to be competitive....
"There is concern about the time it is taking to bring back salaries to competitive levels. Every year that we delay bringing the scales back to competitive levels, the problem gets worse," French said.
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