And Another One Moves On

My doctoral student successfully defended his dissertation today! Woo hoo!

Today I asked for a raise. I framed it partly as an equity issue because a new faculty member in my area is joining us this fall at a salary 5K more than what I'm making. (This phenomenon is called compression).

I learned many interesting things about money in this meeting with my department chair. In particular, there are several different pots of money that a dept. chair here can use to get a person a raise: a) equity pot, b) compression pot, c) promotion pot, d) high demand pot, e) retention pot.

The equity pot? Empty. Has been for a few years. No money in the equity pot, which means no raises to address salary inequities. This is confusing to me because you'd think such a thing would be actionable, but whatever.

The compression pot seems like it should apply to me, but it is only for full professors at certain points in their careers. The department doesn't get to choose who to put up for a compression raise. There's some sort of formula.

The promotion pot refers to the raises you get when you get tenure and full. Obviously I want to try to get a raise before I go up for tenure, so that my tenure raise will happen on top of the other raise.

The high demand pot is for faculty who are deemed high demand faculty. These are people in high need areas who are productive and successful and tend to get wooed away to other schools. Departments in our college fight each other over this money. The dean has the final say and the typical raise she tends to give from this pot is 3K, which is quite small in my opinion.

The retention pot gets activated when you get an outside job offer from another university. Then they will try to retain a faculty member by giving him or her a raise and other perks. Often this raise is not quite as good as actually matching the other university's salary offer. Because we're lame that way, and we don't have any money.

My department chair offered to go after the high demand pot to get me a raise. She wants to avoid having me go on the market and get another offer, for obvious reasons. She said that I am a good candidate for the high demand raise, so she will put my name forward with the dean and advocate for a higher-than-usual raise because I could be making so much more at a different institution. Ultimately the final decision will be up to the dean in terms of whether to offer a raise, and how much, and the dean's decision will determine whether I go on the market. Meanwhile, though, I'm glad I asked!

Here are some family pictures after I got home today, looking a bit wilted after a day of work and walking 3 miles in the heat and humidity. It is so humid today that I'm surprised it's not actually raining right now! Hence we all look a little wet, but I don't mind. I like this weather.