In Which We Are Fucked Up

The legislature released money for a raise this year to go to at most 30% of faculty. It is not to be a cost of living raise, and when I read the memo about allocation guidelines, it's not strictly a merit raise either. It's supposed to address compression and retention concerns, and of course merit does factor into that.

As somebody is already getting a tenure bump, I knew I was off the table for a raise, and I'm okay with that. It's time to let others who are salary compressed get an increase to alleviate their compression.

Our dean told us that only 6 faculty (out of our department of roughly 40) could get a raise, so we had to choose those 6 people.

The problem with faculty governance is that if you don't create clear and transparent criteria to guide decisions like this, it can devolve into favoritism and croneyism. We have a committee of 7 people who make decisions about these things. It consists of 6 fulls and a non-voting assistant. The fulls decided that all of the raises should go to fulls. Three who are currently on the committee. So they chose themselves and three of their friends for the raise.

The kicker is that 4 out of the 6 raises went to the four top-paid members of our department. That's right: the four people already making the most money are the ones who are getting raises. The extremely salary compressed people, like Mentor and my assistant professor friend in my area, get nothing. Moreover, none of those 4 top-paid people are flight risks. They're all solidly here for good, and three of them are super close to retirement.

Mid career people are flight risks. They're now bigger flight risks, because they're all really ticked off. Mentor has already called our colleague at a university we both like to see about applying for a position there. Honestly I can't blame him.

It is ironic because our department is internationally famous for focusing research on issues of equity, diversity, and social justice. But not when it comes to ourselves. Then these very same scholars who have made their fortune from studying the less fortunate have chosen to line their own pockets, making the rich richer and screwing over everybody else.