faculty pay

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AAUP / AFT Affiliation Agreement

Byadmin

The AAUP and AFT have drafted a new affiliation agreement that will be voted on at the June AAUP meeting. Some details: “Under the terms of this affiliation agreement, all AAUP members, by virtue of their membership in the AAUP, will also be members of the AFT/AFL-CIO… AAUP members and AAUP chapters will have access to AFT support and services, including specific AFT member benefits… This affiliation will not result in an increase in national AAUP dues and, for current AAUP members, AFT per capita will be covered as part of the AAUP dues… The national AAUP and its chapters…

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UCOP Study Shows Decline in Faculty Compensation

Byhigbie

A year ago Colleen Lye and James Vernon, co-chairs of the Berkeley Faculty Association, drew the attention of faculty across the ten campuses of the University of California to the continuing degradation of their pensions, benefits and salaries. Increasing employee contributions to health insurance and pensions were compounding the negative impact of slow salary group, they argued, and retirees faced fewer choices for healthcare. Now UCOP’s own study of total remuneration has confirmed much of their argument. The executive summary of this document contains the following depressing bullet points: Between 2009 and 2014, UC’s total remuneration fell from 2% below…

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The Degradation of Faculty Welfare and Compensation

Byuclafaculty

Colleen Lye and James Vernon (UC Berkeley Faculty Association) UC faculty need to wake up to the systematic degradation of their pay and benefits.  In 2009, when the salary furlough temporarily cut faculty salaries between 6 and 10%, faculty were outraged.  Yet since then our compensation has been hit by a more serious, and seemingly permanent, double blow. First, despite modest salary rises of 3% and 2% in October 2011 and July 2013, faculty take-home pay has been effectively cut as employee contributions to pension and healthcare have escalated.  Faculty now pay more for retirement and healthcare programs that offer less.  Secondly, faculty are…

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Not a thumbs up moment for Janet in her new job

Byuclafaculty

The University of Michigan has raided UC San Diego, hiring a pair of young computer scientists who’ve been drawing attention for their efforts to help Google find better ways to operate online. Jason Mars, an assistant professor, and Lingjia Tang, a member of the research faculty, decided to leave UCSD’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering only a year after they arrived. Mars is the first African American in the department’s history to hold a tenure track position. “They’re both excellent researchers. This is the single biggest setback I’ve had as chair,” said Rajesh Gupta, who took over the fast…

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Public-Private Pay

Byuclafaculty

From time to time, news sources such as the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Chronicle update their databases of pay of state employees including UC. Yours truly from time to time has posted objections on privacy and ID theft grounds to such posting and has challenged the news sources to post their own payroll data.  Not surprisingly, they have yet to agree – and for good reason. It’s not that there cannot be salary abuses – either in the public or the private sector.  But there are ways to deal with that problem, mainly by posting pay by occupation…

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UC Payroll Data Online

Byuclafaculty

You can find the data for calendar year 2012, including the chart above, at http://compensation.universityofcalifornia.edu/payroll2012/.  [Click on the chart to enlarge it.]  Among the interesting figures is that about one eighth of payroll goes to ladder faculty, another eighth to other instructors, and about 6% to TAs.  By the way, if you don’t want to be in the database, apparently you need to become a student for part of the year: Pursuant to federal student privacy laws, the names of all employees who were UC students (including medical residents) at any point during a given calendar year have been redacted…

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Cost of Living

Byuclafaculty

We often make faculty salary comparisons based on nominal dollars.  However, price levels (the “costs of living”) vary from location to location; a dollar may buy more or less depending on where you are. There have been private surveys that purport to tell you the relative price level in various locations but they typically have unknown methodology.  Now the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis has released estimates of relative price levels by state and selected metro areas.  Aboveyou can see the results by state for 2011.  With the U.S. average = 100, some metro areas in California are San Francisco…

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Lessons to be Learned

Byuclafaculty

Today’s LA Times carries the story of two neuroscientists recruited by USC from UCLA: Arthur Toga and Paul Thompson will move to the USC Keck School of Medicine campus next fall, along with scores of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and staffers who now work at UCLA’s Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, known as LONI. In establishing a new institute at the USC campus in Boyle Heights, they will also move substantial government and private grants that fund the lab’s $12-million annual budget as well as some of the highly sophisticated equipment used to investigate the brain’s inner workings.  (The move)…raises concerns…

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For the Record

Byuclafaculty

Back in mid-December, the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) produced a report saying all was well with UC faculty compensation, despite concerns about pay lags.  No one seems to have paid much attention to the LAO report so far, which is a Good Thing, since the report was poorly done. It is unclear what suddenly motivated the LAO to issue the report just when UC was entering intersession and the ability to respond was limited. In any event, the University Committee on Faculty Welfare (UCFW) prepared a response which was recently posted on the Academic Senate website.  For the record –…

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Legislative Analyst Says Everything’s OK With UC Faculty Pay

Byuclafaculty

Legislative Analyst’s summary: In this report, we assess UC’s ability to recruit and retain tenured and tenure-track faculty. We find that (1) UC has been hiring candidates who have received their highest degree from some of the most selective universities in the nation, (2) UC has a long history of hiring its top choice faculty candidates, (3) most new entry-level faculty stay at UC long enough to earn tenure, (4) less than 2 percent of faculty resign from UC each year, and (5) UC’s faculty compensation is competitive with other top universities. These findings indicate that UC generally has been…