October 14, 2002
Colleagues,
Last year, the Faculty Salary Study Committee collected data from peer institutions in Texas in order to examine the issue of salaries on our campus. These comparisons, made at the discipline level, also took into account the cost-of-living differences in the areas where our peer institutions are located. While the general conclusion of the study was that UNT faculty salaries are typically lower than those for our peers, such is not always the case. Rather than interpreting the committee’s findings, I simply refer you to that report (it is attached as a Current Issue after the October Newsletter http://www.unt.edu/facsenate/Sal-Study-10-02..htm ).
As well, I would like to point out that the minutes of the September, 2002 Faculty Senate meeting (approved at last week’s Faculty Senate meeting) are listed on the Web Page under "Minutes."
Following is a summary-transcript of the comments made by President Pohl at the October 9 Faculty Senate meeting. All of the following, except for explanatory comments which are indicated with brackets, is a direct quote.
********
Richard Rafes is trying to put together a fairly comprehensive plan on transportation. It involves both looking at parking spaces and also keeping cars off campus and using a shuttle system. We’ll see how that’s going to work. We are looking at the possibility of a garage, but we haven’t really been able to make that go through the numbers just right; it’s just very, very expensive. […] The space that we’re looking at for a garage currently, and that probably changes every couple of weeks, is an area to the west of Chilton Hall and to the East of the PEB.
We’re trying to get one constructed and open by next fall. It’s probably 50-50 at best. […] I think we’ll be able to open a much larger residence hall the following fall. I suspect it might be six or eight hundred beds. The one, if we get it done to open next fall, might be in the 250 to 300-bed range.
Engineering College
You need to keep focused that our original plan was about a twelve-year plan in ramping up that Engineering College. That’s important to keep in mind because you aren’t going to see a lot of things happen immediately. […] We have special requests in there [the state legislature], and our number one request is for two million dollars a year for the next six years to jump-start the College of Engineering. If we don’t get those, that means we won’t be speeding up our twelve-year plan.
We have awards of this year of about 31 million; I haven’t seen the final number, but that’s probably pretty close. That’s a dramatic increase over last year. It looks like we’ll be somewhere around 13 million in restricted research which is also a dramatic increase. Those increases are in the neighborhood of 40 or 50% as I recall, so lots of good progress. The 13 million, however, if that’s the final number, is not sufficient to trigger our continued inclusion in the excellence funding; we needed 15 million to do that. So one of the issues will be whether the state legislature simply goes ahead with the current excellence-funding plan, in which case we fall out of excellence funding, […] or if the legislature will deal with the excellence funding legislation.
[The Coordinating Board’s recently released report] is the first time that the Coordinating Board has made any estimates of the costs of Closing the Gaps. They’ve done it by region; I’m sure they have the detailed data, but I haven’t seen it if they’ve made it available yet. But to give you kind of a general feel for that, what they have done is they have taken the self-reported targets that all the schools submitted, and they said, “Let’s suppose those targets are accurate.” [… In] the Metroplex, by 2015, we would have to accommodate, according to our own targets, 114,000 more students […]; they’d need about 4½ million square feet of building space, and they would need 3,150 faculty to do that. […] Keep in mind that the legislature has never agreed to address the issue of whether they accept Closing the Gap, and even if they say they would accept it as a target, it doesn’t mean that they would necessarily fund it. So we’re a long way from funding.
I have the first candidate Friday of the Dean of the College of Engineering [with the other four candidates to follow next week].
I think there are three or four candidates for the VP for Research and Technology Transfer [and will be meeting with them over the next three or four weeks].
[The letters to about twenty individuals inviting them to serve on the Provost search were to go out either Thursday or Friday. No final decision has been made about whether to use a professional search firm or not.] Don Grose has agreed to chair that committee, and on that committee we’re extending invitations to some department chairs, faculty, obviously, a vice president, and we’ll try to do some balancing on there, to get different disciplines represented and so forth. So as soon as I get acceptances, we’ll get that published.
The last number that I saw was just about 30,190. […] That represent[s] about an 8% growth; that was roughly, very roughly, 4% true growth and about 4% in retention
49% of our students are getting some form of instruction off the web. […] It appears that 18% of our students are, in fact, enrolled in a course—one or more courses—that qualify as distant ed or mediated instruction. Technically that just means that at least 51% of the course is offered on the web. […] We appear to have 12% of our students who are enrolled only in web courses.
I’m including the President of the Student Government Association in Presidential Staff meetings. […] I’ve indicated to our student leadership that we’d be willing to work with them to show them how possibly to get a bill drafted [to authorize a student regent] and at least get it considered.
I don’t want to alarm you on either one of those or get your hopes up on either one of those. My sense is that the salaries probably fell a little bit behind this year relative to the Texas schools where our stated goal was to not only at least achieve parity with them but to move ahead if we could. It looks like we’ve fallen behind because they were able to give higher percentage increases. The salary data that I’ve seen is controversial because first of all I believe that the market drives salaries, so I have no illusion and I have no interest in supporting anything that looks like equal salaries. I’m only interested in meeting market, meaning that full professors in one discipline don’t get paid the same as full professors in other disciplines, or in any other rank for that matter. When you look at discipline by rank, then you have the issue of some of the classification systems that the academic disciplines at some of the institutions that we’re using as reference, and we’re using only Texas institutions, do things differently than we do. For example, Texas Tech kind of has a College of Business, and they don’t have a lot of departments, and yet salaries vary widely within College of Business disciplines. Well, that’s true in other disciplines as well; it just depends on how they’re organized.
We also have a situation where we have a very large and a nationally recognized College of Music, a very large and nationally recognized School of Visual Arts, and I could probably pick out some others, and it’s not clear that some of the other Texas schools that we’re looking at, if those are the right comparison groups. Now, I understand that “right” is politically charged; my only comeback is, so far the legislature has not been willing to have us use an Oklahoma Study or any type of a national study or any type of a regional study. They only want us to look internally. There has been some movement in the last legislative session to look externally, but not at salaries in particular. There has been some work in the interim on biotechnology. […]
The other thing to keep in mind on the data that I’ve seen on our salary studies—not only is there an issue of comparability with these other Texas schools because of the way they categorize academic disciplines, but there’s also the issue of what do we do with faculty whose salaries are above the average of the comparable schools. That is, is the issue we want to bring everybody’s salary who is below the average up to the average, in which case our average would be above their average? Do we want to bring people with salaries who are above the average down? Well, that doesn’t seem that anybody would want to vote for that. So we have some methodological issues to deal with.
The other thing is that the data that I’ve seen—I think the data that I looked at was maybe a year old or so, it might have been last year’s—my recollection is […] that it was in the order of a half-million dollars that we were under before this last round of salary increases, with all those caveats about the data isn’t very clean. My recollection is, if you tried to bring everybody who was below these comparable averages up, but you didn’t try to reduce anybody’s salary—just brought them up—, then it was more like a million dollars difference. Having said that, a major chunk of that, of that million dollars, maybe a major chunk was five or six hundred thousand, is in one college; it is the College of Business. So salaries are not widely discrepant; they weren’t a year ago from other colleges, but they appear to be under. They not only appear to be under, the latest data appears that we fell further behind given the amount of increase that we provided relative to what other schools did. So we’re going to take a look at salaries and try to get a better handle on that, and I’ll try to get that data out on the web so that we can all take a look at it.
Then on teaching loads. This will be probably a very controversial issue, and I’m not trying to make it controversial. I think all of you have seen the data or different pieces of data that compare our faculty from about 1990, 91 to maybe last year, or something like that. While the number of faculty has increased, when you look at how you define faculty, what’s happened is the mix of tenured/tenure-track versus others has changed. And what’s really happened is the number of non-tenured/tenure-track has increased as a percentage, or, said differently, the number of tenured/tenure-track has decreased as a percentage. We need to look at that and see if that is a long-range trend, are there any optimal points that we want to look at, and I think we could probably debate that ad naseum, and that would probably not be the same by academic disciplines. I think we’ll make different cases in different disciplines.
There’s another issue, and I think this is the part that will probably be more controversial, that we need to look at. I have a hypothesis, and so I’m going to underline that, hypothesis; I think it’s testable, and that will be part of the data that we’ll try to generate. I want to see what the teaching loads really look like on campus. In kind of a gross-cut way, what we find is that full professors and associate professors don’t generate student credit hours sufficient to pay for their salaries. Now, remember, you have to generate more than that because you have to generate things for all these other offices that come out of those funding formulas like the library, or the Provost’s office, or the Registrar, or advising, or financial aid or anything else. But when we look at in a gross way, full professors and associate professors, their teaching loads, I’m going to say, are small—you can say, “Wait a minute; how are you defining that?” I’m simply saying that as a group, neither of those classes generate enough money just to pay for their own salaries; they’re not contributing anything to overhead. Assistant Professors cover their own salaries and generate some amount of overhead, I mean, to cover all these over services. And the other group, whatever that is, Lecturers, part-time Adjuncts, they generate a tremendous amount of money.
Another way of looking at that is at the undergraduate level, I may be wrong in this statistic, […] I think it’s around 38%, it might be as high as 48%, but I think it’s 38%, of the student credit hours at the undergraduate level are generated by tenured/tenure-track; in other words, most of our students are taught by non-tenured/tenure-track faculty. And where we get into loads, I think we need to look probably at the number of centers that we have and whether center directors are having teaching released time. We’ll also need to look at the number of graduate programs that we have to see if we’re really teaching five or six students and if we want to do that or if we don’t want to do that and what the implications are for everyone. Again, I think that this analysis will not be something that can be applied to the university as a whole; I think it’s going to be applied, probably not even on a college-by-college basis, but more at a department level. For example, we might all as a community agree that Freshman English courses shouldn’t be taught with anything over than—and mark down whatever you think: tenured/tenure-track faculty, or adjuncts, or TA’s, or whatever, and the class size shouldn’t be more than 24, or 19, or whatever. But then we can see what the implication of that is, in terms of the finances in looking at that. If there is a way that we can economize, and I hate to use that word because you’re going to jump to the conclusion that that means teaching more, and I can’t tell you that it won’t mean that, but I want us all to look at the data. If we can economize, the only way we would want to do that is if we can tie directly an incentive to the dollars saved back to faculty and possibly back to faculty salaries. I’ve worked quite a bit with Phil Diebel to try to get some incentive systems built in, and Phil is very receptive to that mode. At the moment we have three incentives that are kind of broad-ax approaches to incentives; they accrue at the college or school level, and particularly in Arts and Sciences it washes out individual department efforts. And so we probably need incentive systems that go down to the department level. It may be that we need incentive systems that go down to the faculty member level, I don’t know. But I’m going to try to get enough data together and make it available to everyone that at least we can have an informed discussion about all of this. So, two broad issues: salaries, and the other one teaching loads.
Now, teaching loads will also probably take us a little bit farther down the road in the area that I’m particularly interested in and that is reexamining the track system that we have now. I’m not convinced, but I can be convinced, I’m not convinced that we have necessarily enough flexibility in those existing tracks. I think going forward we ought to have the possibility of a research-faculty member who, really, will do teaching, but probably more as a mentor in perhaps working with a small number of graduate students. I think we need a teaching track for individuals who are primarily doing teaching, and I think there are lots of variations in there. We don’t currently have that much latitude, so I’d like for us to re-look at that, but that’s going to tie into this whole modeling effort and see what the implications of that are.
[To a suggestion that release time for research activities be included in the examination of teaching loads, Dr. Pohl said the following.]
That’s a good point; we certainly would want to do that. I just want to caution everyone that that Excellence Funding money that we’re looking at defines “excellence” very, very, very narrowly. It doesn’t speak to scholarship; it speaks to funded research only. The majority of our faculty are doing scholarship, not research, and the majority don’t have, really, any or very many opportunities to do funded research. So, for example, in engineering and the sciences, it may make perfect sense to talk about teaching load in terms of funded research—how many dollars come in, and how we want to do a trade-off there. In the English department, that comparison doesn’t work at all. On the other hand, the types of publications that you are doing, or whether it’s a long-term research project that you’re doing, or some other metric may be the important part of the trade-off.
Send comments or questions to Sue Young, syoung@unt.edu, at the Faculty Senate Office, Telephone (940) 565-2053.