University Times

AUniversity Senate committee has given Pitt's administration unsatisfactory marks for the way it allocated this year's salary raises.

The administration increased the pool of money available for faculty and staff salaries by 4.5 percent, effective July 1. Of that total, 2 percent was earmarked for cost-of-living raises ("maintenance of real salary" raises is the term used in Pitt's salary policy) for employees who earned satisfactory job performance evaluations.

According to the Senate's budget policies committee, allocating only 2 percent for salary maintenance is unfair and unjustified in a year when Pitt's salary budget increased by 4.5 percent, and following a year in which inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) went up by 2.7 percent.

"A maintenance component of only 2 percent assures that some faculty performing satisfactorily will receive cuts in real pay," committee chairperson Philip K. Wion wrote in a Sept. 5 letter to Chancellor Mark Nordenberg. "Even worse, it makes it highly likely that some faculty nominally receiving merit increases will also in fact suffer real cuts."

A professor who was awarded a 2 percent raise for satisfactory performance plus a merit increase of up to 0.6 percent still would have lost ground to inflation, Wion pointed out.

Such "unsatisfactory raises for satisfactory, or even meritorious, performance" seem to violate the spirit of Pitt's salary policy, according to Wion's committee, which limited its protests to faculty raises because the group does not represent staff employees.

Wion and Chancellor Nordenberg squared off on the issue at Monday's Senate Council meeting.

Nordenberg defended his division of this year's 4.5 percent salary raise funds, which included:

* 2 percent distributed to responsibility centers for maintenance of salaries of employees judged to have done satisfactory work.

* 2 percent distributed to responsibility centers for merit, market and equity adjustments.

* 0.5 percent allocated by the provost and senior vice chancellor for Health Sciences to targeted units to meet merit and market needs.

The chancellor said, "Our approach this summer did, in fact, provide high degrees of flexibility from unit to unit" in distributing salary monies. Depending on employees' job evaluations, schools and departments could spread merit increase monies widely, he noted.

"It is my own view," Nordenberg said, "that merit, market and equity are extremely important not only in terms of fair allocations but also in terms of allocations that will fuel our aspirations to be something that is measurably better than a satisfactory institution."

One year after faculty, staff and administrators serving on the University Planning and Budgeting Committee (UPBC) re-evaluated Pitt's salary policy — sharpening wording, agreeing on how the document should be interpreted — Nordenberg and Wion disagreed about the policy's content.

Nordenberg said, "One reading of the salary policy can give salary maintenance as a component a form of primacy over merit, market and equity. I do not read the policy that way, never have read the policy that way….UPBC does not read the policy that way either, as reflected in their recommendations over the last several years."

Wion replied, "As an English professor, I know that different readers read document language differently. So do lawyers. But I don't think there's quite the ambiguity in the policy that the chancellor indicated."

It's true, Wion said, that UPBC last summer recommended less than 2.7 percent for salary maintenance to reward satisfactory performance — it recommended 2.4 percent — but that was assuming that the total pool would increase by 4 percent, not 4.5 percent as approved by Chancellor Nordenberg.

Wion thanked the chancellor for the added 0.5 percent. But he pointed out, "The pool got larger. The maintenance component got smaller."

The salary policy states that the maintenance component may be less than inflation in years when salary increase funds are "severely constrained," Wion said. "But an increase of 4.5 percent [in the salary pool] in a year when inflation was 2.7 percent doesn't seem to me to be severely constrained. Nor would it to the UPBC," of which Wion is a member.

Nordenberg countered: "One of the key sentences of the policy is the expressed aspiration that the size of the total pool for increases should be sufficiently large to provide adequate funds for all purposes. It's after that sentence that the policy goes into how the salary maintenance pool should be calculated and tied to the CPI.

"When, as has been true year after year, the salary pool is not sufficiently large to provide adequate funds for all four purposes [maintenance, merit, market, equity], then there are balancing decisions to be made with respect to each of the four components," the chancellor said.

Wion acknowledged that, under the salary policy, the chancellor makes the final call on the salary pool's size and how it is divided. But according to the policy, the chancellor should first consult with UPBC and, ultimately, he should explain his decisions to faculty and staff, Wion said.

According to Wion, Nordenberg's July 26 University Update, which announced this year's raise distribution, failed to give a rationale for devoting less to salary maintenance than the UPBC and the Senate's budget policies committee had recommended.

Executive Vice Chancellor Jerome Cochran, an administrative appointee to Senate Council, said a primary reason that Pitt could increase its salary raise pool by as much as 4.5 percent was that the University negotiated a new, single-provider employee health insurance contract with UPMC Health Plan.

Pitt had been anticipating a double-digit increase in its health insurance costs but ended up with a contract with no premium increases for the University or its employees.

This year was "especially beneficial" for faculty and staff, Cochran said, "when you look at compensation in its entirety, including benefits."

Psychology professor James Holland responded, "With regard to health insurance, it was a nice year for employees but it was also a nice year for the University, which should have been able thereby to have reflected that in a better [adherence to the] salary policy."

— Bruce Steele