University Times

To the editor:

In his recent letter addressing regional faculty salaries, Provost Maher provides a useful account of the complex process by which faculty raises are determined.

However, I have to differ with his assertion that “no . . . agreed upon group of campuses exists against which to benchmark the faculty at the regional campuses.” The reason that “the regional campuses of AAU universities have been used by some in reporting salaries” is because this is the only regional comparison group that has ever been formally agreed upon by representatives of both the administration and the faculty.

This group was recommended in a set of “Principles, Goals and Recommendations for Faculty Salary Policy” offered by the Senate Budget Policies Committee and approved by Faculty Assembly and Senate Council in May 1986.

In June 1986 President Wesley Posvar formed a Joint Faculty/Administrative Committee on Salary Policy to “study the implementation” of this policy, which he noted “has been accepted by the administration.” In its April 1987 report, this Joint Committee identified AAU regional campuses as the appropriate “reference group” for Pitt’s regionals. Its cover letter to President Posvar noted that the report was “agreed to by consensus, except for the identification of reference groups for the regional campuses, where the recommendation represents a majority view” – a sign that even then not everybody was happy with the designated group. However, in October 1987 the co-chairs of the Joint Committee noted that “the administration adopted that recommendation [concerning the goal which included the reference groups] effective with the salary increments for FY88.”

Since March 1987, the agreed-upon comparison groups have provided the basis for the “Peer Group Analysis” of “Average Salaries of Faculty and Librarians” prepared annually by the Office of Institutional Research.

The comparison groups were also included by reference in the Salary Increase policy recommended by a joint faculty/staff/administration committee, approved by Faculty Assembly and Senate Council, and accepted by the administration, in 1993. This policy was carefully re-examined by a joint faculty/staff/administration subcommittee of the University Planning and Budgeting Committee in 1999, and at its meeting of May 18, 1999, the UPBC unanimously approved a motion concluding that “the current salary increase policy is sound, and no change is recommended at present.”

In his letter, the Provost mentions that “we [the administration, presumably] have carefully studied the salary structures at our regional campuses and informally benchmarked them against a wide variety of small, non-research campuses in the East and Midwest.”

Although the possibility of identifying a reference group more appropriate than the AAU regionals has often been mentioned, in UPBC, SBPC and elsewhere, no process comparable to those which produced and reaffirmed this agreed-upon group has been pursued. The current interest in the topic suggests that this would be a good time for representatives of the faculty and administration to sit down together and see if formal agreement on a more appropriate reference group can be achieved.

Philip K. Wion, A
ssociate Professor of English,
Former Chair, SBPC

The progress we have made in bringing salaries of University employees up to, or at least much closer to, peer group standards is something of which we all can be proud. This progress rests on a sincere effort to ascertain who are the peer groups and what are their salary ranges. And of course, allocating market funds to one group of employees of the University has obvious implications for other University employees, so it is quite important to all that the determinations of market challenges be done carefully.

The comparison group of AAU public regional campuses to which Professor Wion refers has a peculiar history and an even more peculiar set of campuses to which to compare our regional campuses. The campuses on that list vary widely from our own regional campuses in size, composition of programs and roles (both within their universities and within their systems). While the history cited by Professor Wion demonstrates that the administration has always been willing to provide data on these campuses as information originally requested by the Senate, there has not been a corresponding commitment to use such comparison data for any significant administrative decisions. While there has always been general agreement that, by mission and stature, the AAU universities are the natural peer group for the Pittsburgh Campus, the next step to comparing the AAU regionals to our regional campuses, when it has appeared historically, has always appeared more as an afterthought than as the result of a careful analysis.

In the mid-90s the UPBC revisited many aspects of the allocations of University funds, and in recognition of the serious financial challenges faced by higher education, recommended a variety of changes to our then-routine practices. When those discussions touched on salary allocations and competitiveness, considerable discussion centered on whether the Pittsburgh Campus, faced with challenges unique to public higher education, should focus its attention more heavily on the public AAU universities than on the entire AAU. At those discussions administrative members of the committee made it plain that the problems with the lack of similarity between our regional campuses and those in the AAU public regional group made use of data from that group for administrative and budgetary decisions unrealistic. The committee never affirmed the use of that comparison group in any way. While some other proposals for better comparison groups have emanated from different regional campuses and from my office and have been discussed between my office and the presidents of the regional campuses, no group has as yet been affirmed from those discussions either.

More recently when the UPBC considered possible changes in the University’s salary policy, extended debates considered how rigorously the policies constrained administrative decisions on allocations of salary increase funds by purpose (maintenance, merit, market and equity) with no significant part of the discussion focused on the choice of regional comparison groups. The existing salary policy was reaffirmed only after all agreed to interpret it in such a way that reaffirming it left the administration discretion to depart from the letter of the statements of allocation-by-purpose to allocate salaries for the good of the University.

No element of that vote can reasonably be taken as a reaffirmation of the AAU regional campus group which had been explicitly disavowed in numerous discussions of that committee over several years with no element of its defense in the debate leading up to the vote.