Increase may use money to boost faculty retention

More than $6 million that would come largely from a potential tuition hike might go toward increasing salaries across the university, especially in the form of merit-based bonuses for faculty and staff.

Administrators are considering a plan that would use funds from a tuition increase and other sources to help reverse a trend that has seen the UA lose hundreds of faculty members to higher-paying universities, said Vice Provost Elizabeth Ervin.

The proposal would create a pool of over $6.5 million from sources within the university. It would be the first university-wide effort to fund salaries from sources other than the state Legislature, and would come at a time when Arizona's universities are trying to decrease their dependence on dwindling state funds.

In the last two years, state budget cuts have drained more than $30 million from the UA's coffers, and Republican lawmakers have proposed cutting an additional $16 million this year.

Those cuts have made it virtually impossible for the UA to offer its employees raises, and have prompted top administrators to call last month for the university to search for alternative funding sources for salaries.

"Clearly the state is both currently unable and historically unwilling to fund university salaries adequately, and the longer we delay in doing something about this truth, the worse things will become," Ervin wrote in the proposal.

A proposed $1,000 tuition hike would generate almost $14 million for the university in addition to more than $20 million for financial aid. President Pete Likins said last week that much of that $14 million would likely be used to increase salaries.

Deans and other administrators have seen the proposal to create the $6.5 million pool, and Ervin said they responded favorably to the idea of increasing salaries, but are concerned about where the money would come from.

In addition to revenue from a tuition hike, money could come from reallocating funds from vacant positions, a possibility that concerns Eugene Sander, dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Normally, Sander would be able to use that money to recruit new professors to his college, which has lost 53 faculty in recent years.

"I'm so thin in certain areas that I need to put all my savings back into replacements," Sander said.

Sander emphasized the need, though, to increase faculty salaries and reward people whose work merits higher pay.

"The most important asset that we provide students is a really talented faculty," Sander said. "If we can't find a way to be creative and to keep them from migrating elsewhere, we're not doing an effective job."

Faculty and staff whose contributions were deemed excellent or vital to the UA's changing mission would earn merit-based raises, and not everybody would receive the same increase, Ervin said.

"There would be ways to reward excellence and ways to underscore areas of emphasis in Focused Excellence," she said.

Faculty salaries at the UA average 9.4 percent lower than at comparable universities, and full professors here make 11 percent less. The raises that faculty could see under the new proposal would only make a small dent in that margin, but might help slow the process of faculty departures, Ervin said.

"Over time, 2 percent isn't going to accomplish the big goal of making salaries competitive as they used to be," she said.

The raises would also come at a time when staff are facing rising health insurance premiums, but aren't getting salary increases from the state.

"What that amounts to is a salary cut," Ervin said.

Some UA staff members expressed concern on a university listserv yesterday that the raises might not include them, but Ervin said the raises would impact staff as well as faculty.

Staff would welcome a salary boost, said Lisa Wakefield, who chairs the Staff Advisory Council, a group that represents UA's lower-level staff members like secretaries and maintenance staff.

"Anything that will get people a raise because we're so below the average will help keep us where we need to be," she said.