Fearless Sifting

The Wisconsin State Journal article that inspired this post earlier today cited an another article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about how our other faculty were being raided by other schools and impacting it back to the chancellor story by discussing how that made us less attractive to prospective chancellor. Unfortunately, The Chronicle of Higher Education wants to you to pay money, so if you want to read the entire thing for yourself you will need to brush up on your LexisNexis search skills. It’s titled “Wisconsin’s Flagship Is Raided for Scholars” by Robin Wilson on April 18, 2008. I won’t bore with the details of how underpaid so many of our professors are (if you don’t realize it’s a problem then I really recommend you read the article for yourself).

The article brings up several interesting points that leads me to believe that our financial troubles and lack of ability to bring our professors’ salaries up to par might be caused in part by our low professor salaries. Obviously, raising them will cost more money in the short term, but it would definitely help out our long term financial prospects and in fact our current position might be caused in part by a slow downward spiral of professor salaries.

First, as the article says, losing professors ends up costing us even more money when we have to replace them.

Faculty turnover is expensive. Over all, across the disciplines, Madison figures that it spends an average of $1.2-million in start-up costs for each new professor. It typically takes eight years for a professor to bring in enough research money to cover that cost. A professor who stays at Madison for 25 years after earning tenure brings in an average of about $13-million in research money. But the university loses many professors before they even pay off the initial investment.

So while other schools are using their professors to bring in research money to the school, we’re wasting money on professors when we can’t even get them to stay for more than a couple of years. Sounds like the way to fix budget issues to me.

The problem just isn’t in the political science department, though they may be the most striking example, having lost 9 professors last year.

The School of Education at Madison has also been a target of outside recruiters. Last year 15 faculty members received job offers and six left, including four in the department of curriculum and instruction. That department, which is ranked No. 1 in the country by U.S. News, lost James Gee, who took several million dollars in grants with him to Arizona State. The school fell from No. 8 to No. 12 in the national rankings this year.

Not only do we have to pay money to replace professors who leave, but we also lose out on all of the research money that our best professors bring in. That’s just more professors, TA’s and facilities that we have to pay for, through tuition or money from the state legislature. Losing millions of dollars in research money over a few hundred thousand dollars in salary isn’t exactly the best way to save money.

There is also a downward spiral that results from losing faculty that just exacerbates the situation. Even the professors we pay well enough are thinking of leaving because they don’t want to be the caught in the middle of the rotation of their colleagues that would be better fitting of the Brewer’s pitching staff.

But even professors whom Madison has rewarded worry about the university’s future. Ken Ono has an endowed chair in mathematics that pays him $149,000 for nine months, almost double what other full professors in the department earn. His faculty group in number theory is one of the best in the country. But while he is happy, he knows that other universities will keep trying to pick off his lower-paid colleagues. In the past four years, the math department has lost seven professors.

“I’m scared,” says Mr. Ono. “One of my closest colleagues is a full professor who is paid less than some new tenure-track assistant professors at other universities. I fear that he will be lured away. In my line of work, losing one or two colleagues can be devastating.“

That’s why Mr. Ono is looking around himself. He’s had five job offers since he started at Madison, in 2000, and has turned them all down. But his departure could be just a matter of time. Two new offers are on the table, and he is considering them more seriously than he has any others.

Thus there is a spillover effect that doesn’t even allow us to hang onto our best professors even by being willing to pay them enough. This downward spiral effect can be seen on a macro level too.

About 400 professors at Madison received job offers from other colleges in the past four years. That is double the number who received offers in the four years before that. While in some years the university has been able to hang on to as many as 80 percent of those with outside offers, the proportion slipped to 63 percent last year.

And as we lose more and more faculty we are also losing the ability to increase their salaries.

Professors say Madison is a prime target for other universities looking to hire because average faculty raises are so low. Even if a professor is getting research grants, producing journal articles, and writing books, the most he or she would have received over the past few years is about a 2-percent annual raise. Some professors report that years have gone by with no raise at all. On average, faculty salaries nationwide are up by 3.8 percent this year, the same as last year, according to the American Association of University Professors.

Losing faculty costs us money, both in expenditures to replace them and in the money that they take with them. Losing professors causes us to lose even more because we both don’t have they money to pay them and the high-turnover environment that is created. I don’t know if increasing salaries would have prevented the financial mess we are in right now but it certainly can’t be helping. I think this is on situation however where the only solution might be to throw large quantities of money at it. Professors need to be looked at not as an expense but rather as an investment. An investment in the future. A future that’s looking pretty bleak right now.