Merit Pay

For the last 6 years we've had no cost of living raises, no merit raises, and then we had furloughs (temporary pay cuts) and then starting last year a permanent pay cut. But, every year we do a yearly merit exercise where we have to report on our productivity (how much we've published, the talks we gave, the service we did, what our teaching evaluation scores were, etc.) It's a time-consuming exercise for the 7-person committee who ranks every individual faculty member in the department. They read through our reports, they read some sample publications for each person, and then they rank each of us on a scale of 1-5, except it's really a scale of 1-10 because they'll do stuff like give you a 4.5.

So anyway, in the past few years people have been grumbling about doing this exercise, which is also time consuming for each of us to put our reports together, when there hasn't been any money for merit raises anyway. The justification for continuing to do the exercise is that they use a formula that combines your score for your current year with your average score for the past couple of years, to even out the natural ebbs and flows in productivity. So I guess the idea was that we'd need that historical merit data should money ever come back for merit raises.

This year, however, there is money for a small (I think 2-3%) merit raise! The legislators released this money with the stipulation that it is to go to at most 1/3 of the people on campus. So 2/3 won't get any raise at all. Which is kind of interesting to me, actually, because there's a new human resources proposal out now which has as a recommendation a total doing away with cost-of-living raises, which have admittedly been theoretical rather than actual in the past 6 years, and a complete reliance on merit pay alone to get raises. But if it only ever goes to the top 1/3 (however you measure that), I guess it'd kind of suck to be a decent professor, better than 60% of your peers, but never get any raise year to year, not even for a cost of living increase.

(This is why new assistant professors come in making a lot more money than people who have been around 5-10 years. Those people's salaries have stagnated while the budget for new salaries goes up each year so that we can successfully recruit new faculty.)

Anyway, Mentor was curious what'll happen to this merit money. How will it be allocated? Will the chair just use the formula we've established based on our merit exercise and use that to determine the top-scoring 1/3 faculty? He asked our chair, who cryptically responded "I have a list of people in mind." What does that mean? Meanwhile, there is a recommendation that people who have received market adjustments in the past couple of years (like me) not be first for consideration.

Which is fine, because I did get that raise, plus I am getting my tenure raise now, so I'm in good shape. However, if this is the only year for a while that the money will come for merit raises, it's bad timing on my part. For the past several years I've gotten a perfect 5 out of 5 on my merit rating, but that probably won't last. It made sense that I did that in the years leading up to tenure, but it's a pace that probably isn't sustainable forever. Too bad that I'm probably not going to be eligible this time around since my scores put me on the top, but easy come, easy go.

I have no idea why people are against cost of living increases. Isn't that, like, kind of normal in most industries? Like, you get more pay over time the longer you've been there? Maybe people don't like it for professors because they're worried about that mythical tenured deadwood I hear about sometimes. In our department there is one guy who isn't really research active. He's close to retirement and his salary is lower than an assistant professor's salary. It's less than half of what our strongest full professors make. So I guess you can coast on your research after you have tenure, just putting your time in on teaching and service, but your salary will suck.