As the UA prepares to send $13.9 million back to the state to satisfy a mandated budget cut, faculty recruitment has become more difficult for deans and department heads, who fear a faculty-retention issue known as "brain drain" will intensify if the university doesn't have the money to recruit and keep top faculty.

Throughout the late 1990s and into this decade, University of Arizona administrators have been faced with increased competition from other institutions looking to use higher salaries to lure away valuable university faculty.

Yet, officials remained optimistic in the face of brain drain and hold out hope that a cure to low faculty retention rates could be just around the corner.

A university hiring freeze, implemented in October to free up money for the budget cuts, prevented hiring from taking place most of the semester. That freeze was lifted just more than a week ago for adjunct faculty and is expected to end Saturday for the rest of the university.

With enrollment increasing, the number of faculty decreasing and recruitment from private universities becoming more aggressive, academic leaders predict that brain drain is only beginning to simmer.

Washing away false hopes

Deans and department heads, optimistic only months ago about the future of faculty retention, now say they worry that the problem is intensifying.

Last spring, the state Legislature approved a two-year, 5 percent salary increase for all state employees. In most other states, large research institutions similar to the UA have a 6 percent to 9 percent yearly salary increase for faculty, where the UA had long dished out only 2 percent to 3 percent more for faculty each year.

Now, however, university officials are unsure whether those planned increases will actually happen. Republican Gov. Jane Dee Hull recommended to the state Legislature earlier this month that it cut the increase to only 3 percent and push the pay date from April 2002 to June 2002.

"The conversations we are hearing about the state level... include having the increases in April in full or reduced form, June in full or reduced form, or it could not arrive at all," UA Provost George Davis said.

Still, Davis remains optimistic and said at last week's Campus Town Hall that he hopes the increases will arrive on schedule.

"We're proceeding in a way that assumes the salary increases will happen in April," he said.

He said the ultimate decision the state makes will be influenced by how lawmakers choose to cut the budget. They might only deal with cuts for the 2002 fiscal year and wait until next year to address the rest of the shortfall.

"Most of the conversation is focused on this year, but we are also incredibly concerned about the second year," he said.

UA President Peter Likins reminded faculty at a Faculty Senate meeting this month that the salary increases would come directly from the state, not from the university, which means he does not have control over any cuts in those salary hikes.

Likins said he does not agree with Hull's recommendations, but said she is faced with the "challenge" of how to minimize the cuts for the three state universities.

William Mishler, head of the political science department, said that if the increases don't take place, faculty are not going to fight for them - they'll simply search for a position someplace else.

"A huge gap has opened up in private and public institutions," he said. "It looked like we had addressed that and now we may pull out. It is demoralizing, and it will encourage people to dust off their resumes."

The political science department experienced a net loss of three faculty members last year, Mishler said.

The university had authorized two searches for faculty members, but now those have been taken away because of the hiring freeze.

Mishler said he is particularly concerned about the field of judicial public law. He said there is a huge demand for classes in that study, but the department has not been able to fill the vacant positions.

He said political science could end the year with five or six fewer faculty members between people retiring early and others taking jobs elsewhere.

"If the salary increases are cut, it will mean that rather than having two people looking at jobs this year, we could have three or four people looking this year," he said.

Deeper waters waiting

Mark Zupan, dean of the college of business, said faculty in his college are paid 20 percent to 50 percent below market value. That makes it difficult, he said, to retain faculty in an already transient field of study.

Nevertheless, he said the college has been able to keep its notability. The department of management information systems has consistently been ranked as the No. 5 program in the country.

"It just amazes me that we continue to keep the rankings," he said. "When people do these rankings, they look at the quality of your people. News that someone prominent has left does not help us."

Zupan said that in 1989, the college had 115 faculty members. Now that number is down to 80, and in just the past five years, student enrollment in the college has jumped 25 percent.

According to the Association of American Universities Data Exchange, the mean salary for a tenured professor in the college of business at the UA is $105,900 a year. The mean for other peer institutions is $114,700 a year, and that gap grows to more than $15,000 a year when looking at average high salaries between the UA and peer institutions.

Zupan said other schools are not only offering better salaries, they are also adding perks that he says the UA cannot compete with, including lower teaching loads and more research dollars.

"There are always ways of people being creative with students," he said. "But fundamentally, learning also occurs with more than just lectures. And it's much easier to do that with 30 or 40 students in a class than with 300."

Richard Cosgrove, head of the history department, said he is far from optimistic about faculty retention in his department. He said many of the department's retention problems have been caused by the retirement of faculty. But now, once they leave, their positions are not replaced.

"What happens now is that when a person retires, there is not an automatic rehiring," he said. "It goes back into a pool in the college."

That pool could be filled with dozens of positions from a number of departments.

Cosgrove said the history department has only 29 faculty to teach classes for 404 majors, and that the situation may get worse if private institutions continue rising in prominence.

"This is the golden age for private universities," he said. "Their endowments are rising."

Students left out to dry

As faculty funnel out of the UA, students and other faculty are left to deal with accelerating problems. Suzanne Dovi, assistant professor of political science, said larger class sizes can be a challenge, particularly in introductory level courses.

She said that at times, she has been forced to change assignments to accommodate larger classes.

Dovi, who has only been at the UA three years, said she knows she could make several thousand dollars more at another university, but despite that, she chooses to stay.

"I feel like I really belong in public education," she said. "I like that it is accessible to so many students."

That attitude is one that officials are hoping will blind faculty to low salaries and large work loads, particularly for assistant professors like Dovi who are prime candidates for positions at other institutions.

"We've had a few who have been with us for 30 years," Zupan said. "We can find really young talent and it is sad to lose them after five years."

He said "the bloom is off the rose" for the UA, and the university must get more aggressive in the battle to retain faculty.

"It's as if faculty, staff and graduate students are not part of the university at all," Mishler said. "All the talk is about compromising with the governor - giving up some of this and giving up some of that."