The Big Picture: Why Are We Proposing This?
The goal of the UW faculty salary policy is to recruit, reward, and retain outstanding faculty members. To achieve this, a salary policy must across long periods of time maintain faculty salary levels that match or exceed salaries at competing institutions for faculty at all career stages. This is more challenging than one might at first guess, for a variety of reasons. A person’s salary is the result of the salary level at which he or she was hired combined with the raises received since. Typical entry point salaries and raise rates vary by discipline. The flow of funds to support annual raises varies here and elsewhere with time. And two faculty members in the same discipline, at the same rank, and with an identical number of years of service may deserve to have different salary levels, due to differences in their merit. A successful salary policy must accommodate all of these variables.
We have fifteen years of experience with the current UW faculty salary policy. It was a large improvement over its predecessor. At least prior to the four-year salary freeze, the current system allowed faculty to be hired at market-competitive salary levels, and the mix of "regular merit," "additional merit," and promotion raises (and occasionally unit adjustments) yielded reasonable salary levels for Assistant and Associate Professors.
But two major flaws in the current system are also clear: For one, it affords too low a salary trajectory on average for long-serving faculty members, particularly full Professors. Whereas, prior to the four-year freeze, faculty salaries of Assistant and Associate were close to off-campus disciplinary peer levels, full Professor salaries were and still are well below peer levels. This suggests that raises for full Professors at UW from all sources (regular merit, additional merit, unit adjustments, and retentions) are on average too small in the current system. Furthermore, too much of the current system freezes during bad financial times, causing salaries at all ranks to fall behind.
In 2011, the Faculty Senate passed a resolution calling on President Young to work with the senate to "reestablish a sound and fair faculty salary policy." In response, he created a joint faculty/administration Salary Policy Working Group, charging it to recommend a new faculty salary policy. He told the group, "Everything is on the table."
The policy that's before you now is the fruit of that effort. After several years of discussion, financial modeling, and consultation with people in every part of the university, we have proposed a new salary system that retains the strengths of the current system but remedies the weaknesses. And we have an administration and a Board of Regents who are unusually committed to shared governance, which gives us a historic opportunity to enact a salary policy that has been designed by faculty.
Would you prefer something simpler? Of course! Who wouldn't? But it's important to note that when this policy was first proposed in the working group, it was marvelously simple -- "What if we had step advancements with fairly large raises, faster or slower depending on merit, supplemented by annual cost-of-living raises?" It's only after we started trying to address all the details of how it could be implemented, how to forestall people gaming the system, how to address various unintended consequences, how to ensure that everyone's rights are protected, and how to be responsive to the vastly different economic situations in different parts of the university, that it became complicated. Simpler alternatives might be tempting, but ultimately they'll have to deal with all the same complications we did.
