University Times

Nearly one-third of Pitt's 1,652 full-time, continuing faculty members outside the medical school got salary raises last summer below the previous year's 3.4 percent inflation rate — even though their supervisors judged that they had done not only "satisfactory" but "meritorious" work.

Meanwhile, 378 of the 1,652 faculty members got raises of more than 6 percent — in some cases, considerably more, although not all raises came out of Pitt's salary pool. For example, a dozen dental medicine professors paid through the VA Hospital got 25 percent raises last year, one reason the dental school boasted the highest percentage increase in salary budget (nearly 9.6 percent) of any Pitt school. See chart.

Those facts appear in an analysis of last year's salary increases for full-time continuing faculty, prepared by Pitt's Office of Institutional Research for the University Senate budget policies committee (BPC). School of Medicine faculty were excluded from most of the report's tables and charts because medicine is not covered by the University's salary policy. (Unlike other Pitt schools, medicine is entirely self-supporting.) Some of the report's revelations pleased BPC members. For example, most of the faculty who got raises of more than 6 percent were in the middle salary ranges, not the most highly paid professors.

Also, the report showed that the average salary raise for full-time, continuing faculty outside the medical school was 5.38 percent, which actually was more than the 4 percent increase in the pool of money for salaries last year. Institutional Research attributed that anomaly mainly to the fact that each unit received at least a 3.5 percent salary budget increase based on its budgeted number of faculty members, regardless of how many of those positions were filled at the time. The more vacancies a school had, the more money there was to spread around for raises to the school's continuing faculty.

Two BPC members, English professors Phil Wion and Stephen Carr, said there was little consolation in learning that the average raise was 5.38 percent when 526 faculty members took cuts in real pay, despite performing meritoriously.

Wion's comments at BPC's April 12 meeting echoed the following paragraph from a letter he wrote to Chancellor Mark Nordenberg last summer: "It cannot be good for the University if significant numbers of hard-working, deserving faculty and staff are repeatedly required to sacrifice their material well-being in order to subsidize significantly larger increases for colleagues or expenditures for other purposes, no matter how worthy in themselves."

The chancellor distributed last summer's 4 percent salary pool increase as follows: 2.5 percent for "maintenance of real salary for doing satisfactory work"; 1.0 percent for unit-level merit increases; and 0.5 percent for market and equity needs in certain schools, as determined by Pitt senior officials.

Prior to Nordenberg's announcement of how he would distribute salary raise funds, BPC had grudgingly endorsed a 2.5 percent "maintenance" component but protested that a 4 percent salary pool increase wasn't enough to meet Pitt's salary policy goals.

Stingy state appropriations represent the biggest hindrance to awarding adequate maintenance, merit and equity raises, administrators and faculty here agree. Pitt salary funds come almost entirely from two sources: the state appropriation and tuition revenue. Pitt's overall state appropriation increased by just 0.6 percent last year, prompting a 7.5 percent tuition hike, Pitt's largest in 13 years. Gov. Mark Schweiker has recommended a 5 percent cut in Pitt's appropriation for next year.

— Bruce Steele