University Times

As Pitt prepares its state funding request for the next fiscal year, a University Senate committee is calling on the administration to continue closing the gap between faculty salaries here and average pay among Pitt’s fellow members of the Association of American Universities (AAU).

In a Sept. 12 letter to Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg, the Senate’s budget policies committee (BPC) recommended increasing the pool of money for faculty salaries by at least 4 percent for the fiscal year that will begin on July 1, 2004.

“For more rapid improvement in our comparative standing, an increase of 5-6 percent would be desirable,” BPC members wrote.

“For many years,” the committee noted, “faculty salaries at Pitt have fallen short of the University’s stated goal of at least the median for each academic rank” within the AAU, a group of 62 prominent North American research universities that includes public institutions (Pitt and Penn State among them) as well as private schools such as Harvard and Stanford.

“This goal had been attained, at least for some ranks, in the early 1990s, but the salary freeze in FY96 and comparatively low increases in subsequent years caused a significant deterioration in Pitt’s salary rankings with respect to these peer institutions,” BPC wrote.

Last year, average salaries among full professors at the Pittsburgh campus trailed the AAU median by $2,600. Among associate professors the gap was $4,500, and among assistant professors it was $2,300. Faculty librarians ranked near the bottom of their comparison group (AAU schools that also belong to the Association of Research Libraries) and trailed the AAU/ARL median by $3,400.

The gap between average salaries at Pitt regional campuses and at AAU branch campuses ranged between $3,600 and $11,200.

State lawmakers have not given Pitt a deadline yet for submitting its FY 2004-05 appropriation request, said Arthur G. Ramicone, vice chancellor for Budget and Controller. (Nor had Harrisburg yet approved Pitt’s appropriation for the current fiscal year as the University Times went to press.) Pitt’s annual appropriation request includes, among other things, the University’s proposals for raising salaries and tuition for the following year.

BPC gives the chancellor its own recommendations early each fall, in the hope that the committee’s advice will figure into the administration’s decision.

Last year, BPC’s recommendation jibed with that of the administration: Pitt’s appropriation request to Harrisburg proposed increasing the pool of money for employee salaries by 4 percent, the same percentage that BPC had recommended.

As of this summer, inflation was running at an annual rate of 2 percent. That factor — combined with the low salary raises that many AAU public universities likely will be awarding next year due to plummeting endowment earnings and severe cuts in their state funding (even worse than Pitt’s expected 5 percent reduction for the current year) — make it likely that Pitt would gain more ground in AAU pay comparisons if it increased its salary pool by 4 percent, according to BPC.

Last year, the average salary raise for full-time Pitt faculty (4.47 percent) exceeded both the base salary increase allotted to schools and other responsibility units (2.5 percent) and the University’s overall salary pool increase (3.5 percent).

The difference was due largely to the fact that salary funds are distributed based on each unit’s budget number of faculty members, regardless of how many of those positions are filled at the time. In addition, units enjoy some flexibility in allocating their salary monies between faculty and staff, and even between full- and part-time employees.

The senior administration also distributed additional salary funds to units where national competition is driving salaries upward at rates above the average for most faculty.
Salary raises among Pittsburgh campus faculty last year averaged 6.9 percent for full professors, 4 percent for associate professors, 5.3 percent for assistant professors and 7 percent for librarians.

For each rank, those percentage increases were higher than the average among the AAU’s 33 other public universities — thus, Pitt gained ground in this year’s AAU rankings. For salaries of full, associate and assistant professors, Pitt now ranks at, or above, the median among the AAU publics.

However, among all 62 AAU members, including private universities, Pitt faculty salaries rank 36th for full professors, 42nd for associate professors and 39th for assistant professors.

Last year’s hefty faculty pay raises here (hefty compared with raises at most other AAU schools, at least) reflected the Pitt administration’s commitment to substantially raise librarians’ pay, hire assistant profs at the AAU median for their disciplines and provide market raises to retain star professors.

Continuing associate professors benefit least under that set of strategies, noted BPC chairperson Phil Wion, himself an associate professor of English.

While Pitt’s ostensible goal remains reaching the salary median for each professorial rank within the entire AAU, members of BPC and other Senate groups have grudgingly come around to the administration’s argument that AAU private members such as the Ivy League universities enjoy a nearly insurmountable — and growing — advantage over public AAU institutions in the faculty salary stakes.

Even in bad economic times, the elite private schools’ multi-billion-dollar endowments generate more than enough income to pay those universities’ operating costs. Also, privates are free from state government regulation and reliance on shrinking state appropriations. Some, like M.I.T. and Harvard, can hike their tuitions virtually as high as they like and still choose among the country’s best and brightest students.

BPC wants to confer with Pitt senior administrators this year to agree on a new salary target. Committee chairperson Wion suggested that Pitt should strive to rank among the top one-fifth of AAU public universities for faculty pay.

But Robert F. Pack, vice provost for Academic Planning and Resources Management, protested that that goal, too, would be unrealistic.

Pack, the Provost office’s liaison to BPC, pointed out that reaching the top fifth among AAU private schools would require Pitt to rank 7th in a field that also includes elite universities located in high-cost areas where salaries are bound to remain high (UC-Berkeley, UCLA and the State University of Stony Brook, among them) as well as other prestigious schools (the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia and the University of Wisconsin, among others) that “aren’t likely to drop out of the chase” in bidding for top faculty.

Ramicone and Provost James V. Maher would not comment on BPC’s recommendation until Pitt submits its appropriation request to Harrisburg.

—Bruce Steele