The April 18, 2008 Chronicle of Higher Education includes the article, “Wisconsin’s Flagship is Raided for Scholars.” If you don’t have a subscription, you can look for the article in Lexis-Nexis. A few highlights:
- “Even if a professor is getting research grants, producing journal articles, and writing books, the most he or she would have received over the past few years is about a 2-percent annual raise.” (compared to 3.8% average nationally, per the AAUP)
- “Madison’s average salary is at the bottom of a list of 12 public universities that it considers its peers. The university paid full professors $103,543 last year, about 13 percent less than the average for that group.”
Interestingly, the article talked about a variety of factors (e.g. cuts in benefits other than salary such as travel and release time), but addressed the fact that Madison publishes salaries by name only by way of a little story about a faculty member recruited by another university. I’m all for public information and transparency, but salaries have not been published at this level of detail at other universities, even many public ones. It sure makes it easier for other universities to “shop” for faculty.
Of course, there’s the issue of academic staff and staff salaries. Whatever a study there would reveal, I think the national spotlight on faculty salaries confirms the need to keep academic staff salaries coupled to faculty salaries. This issue has been on the table at both UC and UW over the past year, and while I’m certainly not an expert on the issue, no one is writing cover stories about the need to compete in this area. I’m not at all familiar with the issues around staff salaries, but again, the issues are not as publicized.
