Understanding Faculty Salary at GVSU Event

Understanding Faculty Salaries at GVSU: 

Current Process, Proposals, and Critical Perspectives

A Faculty Forum Organized by the advocacy chapter of the American Association of University Professors at GVSU 

Wednesday January 18, 2023

7:00 PM

To register and get a Zoom link: https://gvsu-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYkfumrrDksGNV1QncS4eQjINrv1ZRrS8d3

How a university spends its money says what it values most, especially when budgets are tight. The recent American Association of University Professor’s report on the economic status of the profession for 2020-21 found that “real wages for full-time faculty decreased 0.4 percent, the first decrease since the Great Recession, after adjusting for inflation”. Not only the public, but many faculty themselves express confusion about how salary, raises, merit increases, and overall compensation work. At this open forum, the GVSU AAUP Advocacy Chapter teams up with the Chair of the Faculty Salary and Budget Committee (FSBC) to answer these questions and consider how GVSU faculty have weathered the pandemic, as well as how this compares to other public universities in Michigan. A representative from the GVSU chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) will also review parallel discussions regarding student wages on campus. There will be plenty of time for Q&A and open discussion; colleagues are welcome and encouraged to attend! 

Speakers / Panelists 

Bob Hollister, FSBC

Matt Boekins, Joel Stillerman, AAUP

Foster Thorburn, YDSA

Co-sponsored by the GVSU advocacy chapter of the American Association of University 

Professors and the Young Democratic Socialists of America GVSU chapter. Free and open to the public.

For more information, contact: aaup.gvsu@gmail.com or GVSUYDSA@gmail.com

Printable Flyer 

Coverage of the Event in the GVSU Newspaper, The Lanthorn 

Synopsis of event 

The initial idea for this panel discussion derived from conversations that happened amongst faculty in summer 2022 after the GVSU Board of Trustee’s decision about faculty pay increases, which fell noticeably short of the Faculty Salary and Budget Committee’s recommendation. In addition to concerns about faculty salary and the merit review process, these conversations also revealed some potential misunderstandings about how the salary and merit processes at GVSU work. A main goal of this event was thus to be informative and to offer an opportunity for colleagues to raise questions. Three additional themes from the conversations that began over the summer are relevant to tonight’s discussion.

First, the straightforward idea that how a university spends its money says what it values, so discussions about compensation are discussions about university values. Faculty labor conditions are student learning conditions, so this is a conversation close to the heart of the university’s mission.

Second, that the university’s laudable commitment to inclusion and equity needs, if it is to be serious, to include commitment to economic equity, including equitable and fair pay.

Third, that no group on campus—faculty, staff, students—is an island. That there are, for example, parallels among the concerns of student workers on campus about wages and the concerns of faculty about compensation.

Synopsis of Panelist Presentations

Bob Hollister is Professor of Biology and head of the Arctic Ecology Program at GVSU and has been Chair of the Faculty Salary and Budget Committee (FSBC), part of GVSU’s Faculty Governance, for a number of years. 

Bob went over key information available on FSBC’s website concerning compensation and the budget, and highlighted main features of the merit review process. FSBC has traditionally recommended an annual faculty salary increase of Consumer Price Index (CPI) + 1.5%, and sought to keep faculty salaries at all ranks comparable to those at peer institutions in the state of Michigan. Annual salary increases have three distinct components: the promotional increment, special salary adjustment, and merit / salary-increment. Bob also provided an overview of the university budget and noted that as enrollments continue to decline that budgets will continue to become more difficult to support meaningful raises unless we reduce the number of faculty.  More information about faculty compensation and the university budget is available on the FSBC website, as is contact information for FSBC representatives from various colleges. 

Matt Boelkins, Professor of Mathematics at GVSU and regular contributor to AAUP at GVSU discussions, relied on publicly available salary data to compare the changes, over a time period of 11 years, of the salaries of top administration and of faculty as measured by the cost of tuition in those years. The upshot of Matt’s presentation was that the salaries of the top ten administrators at GVSU as measured by the number of full-tuition paying students it would take to pay each salary (in real dollars, not adjusted for inflation), have risen from 2012-13 to 2022-23, while faculty salaries, as measured by the same metric, have decreased. In addition, some top earners at GVSU received significant pay increases in the 2020-21 (when faculty salary increases, other than for promotion, were frozen) and 2021-22 periods. In short, if where a university spends its money says what it values most, GVSU has placed a lot of value in top administrative salaries in the last ten years.  

Joel Stillerman, Professor of Sociology and in Honors at GVSU, and also President of the GVSU AAUP Advocacy Chapter, presented some key findings from the AAUP Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession for 2020-21, most notably that “real wages for full-time faculty decreased 0.4 percent, the first decrease since the Great Recession, after adjusting for inflation (the Consumer Price Index, or CPI, increased 1.4 percent in 2020)”.  Thus, even where faculty at a university such as GVSU are doing well as measured by colleague salaries at peer-institutions, there are reasons to be concerned about the direction of faculty salary. The report also highlights a decrease in the number of fulltime faculty members at institutions surveyed, highlighting concerns about equity of pay and working conditions for contingent and non-tenure faculty.

Stillerman highlighted the experience of many faculty in recent years: the stresses of the Covid pandemic, the sudden shift to remote teaching with which most faculty had little experience, increases in teaching load, a salary increase freeze, multi-level planning initiatives, increased student needs related to mental health and support, and changes in admission policy at the university. Stillerman emphasized that all of this has led to a situation of high levels of exhaustion and low morale among faculty, a situation that is not sustainable if the university wants to continue to achieve its mission in the medium and long term. He stressed the need for administrators and leaders to work closely with faculty and suggested, on the topic of faculty salary, that restoring the faculty salary increase that was foregone in 2020-21 would be a very meaningful positive step that the administration could take.

Offering a student perspective on wages at GVSU, Foster Thorburn, a student majoring in Political Science and Statistics, spoke on behalf of the GVSU Young Democratic Socialists of America about wages for student workers at GVSU. Foster’s comments echoed and substantiated recent Student Senate legislation calling for increases in student wages on campus in part by reviewing the Student Wage Rate Chart.  Foster stressed that wages for student workers on campus are currently in many cases lower than those for similar work in off-campus venues, and that wage-increases for on-campus workers also tend to lag behind state requirements or increases for work at off-campus venues. Foster presented data suggesting that increasing student wages would not require increasing the cost of e.g. student meal plans on campus. Anyone who wants to express their support for these efforts is encouraged to consider signing the YDSA at GVSU petition on the issue.

With questions or to request to be added to the listserv hosted by AAUP@GVSU, write to: aaup.gvsu@gmail.com