News > September 20, 2007

By Blake Brittain | Staff writer

Concerns about teacher salaries have always been a sensitive issue at the university. Under the budget initiative that was introduced in the 2003-’04 school year, faculty salaries were frozen, causing a great deal of tension between teachers and the administration. While University President Nathan O. Hatch’s administration has made it a priority to increase teacher salaries, some faculty members fear that it might be too little, too late. From 2002 to 2005, the average salary of a full-time professor increased by only $471, from $102,408 to $102,879, with professor salaries actually decreasing between 2002 and 2004.

click to enlarge

Graphic: Mean Full Professor Salaries for NC Peer Institutions (Caitlin Kenney/Old Gold & Black)

“Under the previous administration, there was actually salary slippage,” said David Coates, faculty senate president and Worrell professor of political science. “This particularly affected junior faculty.”

Instructor salaries decreased by over $1,500 between 2002 and 2004, from $40,816 to $39,342. The teacher salary hierarchy, from highest to lowest pay, is professor, associate, assistant and instructor.

The budget initiative, which included the faculty pay freeze, was introduced in 2003-’04, focused on attempting to recover lost endowment money.

“Some of the endowment was lost in 2001,” said Charles Kennedy, professor of political science and chair of the University Senate’s standing committee on university oversight, “but no other major school has frozen salaries in the entire United States. We are the only school in the United States that did this.”

“We lost approximately 3.5 to 4 times as much ground as other schools during this (freeze),” Kennedy said.

“It was an insane, totally indefensible idea with no justification.”

The Hatch administration has attempted to close the gap caused by the freeze since the time Hatch was inaugurated as university president in 2005.

The administration has also been especially focused on increasing junior faculty salaries during its tenure.

“For the last two years, President Hatch has made compensation a priority, with a faculty salary pool that permitted an average 6 percent increase in 2007 and a pool that permitted an average increase of 10 percent in 2008,” Jill Tiefenthaler, Provost and professor of economics, said.

“In addition, there have been recent significant improvements in the costs and coverage for health benefits for faculty and staff,” Tiefenthaler said.

Hatch sent a statement out to the university community earlier this year.

“With regard to faculty increases, we must consider carefully those in the assistant professor ranks, where the greatest salary disparity exists between Wake Forest and a group of peer institutions,” he said of the often-discussed subject.

However, in the 2006-’07 school year, the average mean assistant professor salary at the university, including graduate schools, still lagged behind 14 other schools in North Carolina.

“It was a generous increase, maybe better than any other North Carolina school,” Kennedy said.

“However, assuming that everyone else is increasing (salaries) by 5 percent, we’re only making up about 5 percent of ground.”

The past few years have also yielded marked raises in full professor salaries. Since 2005, the average professor salary has risen by nearly $8,000, to $110,417 in 2007.

“The (Hatch) administration very quickly realized that the situation could not continue without affecting Wake Forest,” Coates said.

“If you don’t pay the faculty at the market rate, it makes it difficult to attract – or sometimes even to retain – the kind of teachers and researchers that the university needs to implement its mission.”

“Competitive faculty salaries are a top priority for this administration because attracting and retaining the best teacher-scholars is essential to our mission,” Tiefenthaler said.

The university still lags behind similar institutions in paying their full-time professors.

Full-time professors make nearly $16,000 less on average than UNC-Chapel Hill professors, $25,000 less than Vanderbilt professors and $32,000 less than Duke professors.

“Despite heroic efforts, the gap is so wide that it’s hard to contemplate closing it without raises of 20 percent, which isn’t likely,” Kennedy said.

“We still have more work to do,” Tiefenthaler said.

“The administration started to play catch-up by increasing the salary pool by 10 percent,” Coates said.

“They have good intentions, and may have made some impact, but other institutions are improving too.”

“This is a problem that won’t be solved with one improvement,” Coates added.

Tiefenthaler said that the administration will remain committed to addressing the issue of faculty salaries in the future.

“Faculty compensation will remain a high budget priority in coming years,” Tiefenthaler said of future goals at the university.

“Nancy Suttenfield, senior vice president and chief financial officer, and I will be establishing faculty compensation goals to assure that we attract and retain the very best faculty.”

While professors generally applaud the work of the Hatch administration on the faculty salary issue, many believe that it will be very difficult to undo the damage caused by the previous administration’s budget initiative.

“The current administration is doing what it can to address this problem,” Kennedy said, “but it inherited a mess.”