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  • Compromise and Precedent

    By Dean Dad May 21, 2008 11:17 pm

    Money shortages create all manner of frictions.

    Say you have a large group that believes, with varying levels of truth, that it's underpaid. Say that there's nowhere near enough money floating around to bring the entire group up to the level it wants. (Not that this ever happens, but bear with me.) Barring a visit from the Money Fairy, or a really drastic, from-the-ground-up restructuring in which absolutely everything is on the table, you basically have four choices:

    1. Just say no, and leave it at that. Let the discontent and/or injustice continue.
    2. Take what little money you have, and divide it across the board. Hope that a truly paltry increase will paper things over.
    3. Take what little money you have, and ask the group to propose a fair internal division.
    4. Do triage, and target relatively meaningful increases to the worst cases. Leave the rest alone.

    The astute reader will notice quickly that all four options suck.

    The first option is the easiest, and in some ways, the best. It's evenhanded, it saves money, and it's easy to implement. Its only drawback is that it completely ignores the underlying problem.

    The second option is also evenhanded, and also easy to implement. But it manages to both burn your budget and leave the problem unsolved, making it the worst of both worlds.

    The third option looks good on paper, but flops in practice. In the absence of a union, how do you even know who to talk to? Who gets to represent whom? And with a union, the first move will always be "the total number has to be much bigger." Well, yes, and I'd love to have washboard abs. Not. Gonna. Happen. (The second move is usually "that's your problem," thereby defeating the purpose of the conversation.) It's theoretically possible that this could work. In the settings I've seen, nope.

    The fourth option sometimes wins by default, but that doesn't make it right. The impulse to craft a political compromise will quickly crash headfirst into legalistic arguments from parity and precedent. "How come they got increases and we didn't? How was this decision made?" Suddenly, you're defending your right to even make a decision. And heaven help you if the protected classes aren't evenly distributed between groups. Allegations of favoritism – and worse – will fly from the first day.

    And anything like this will be the hardest, by far, to implement, since you'll need documentation for criteria, verification, application, etc. You'll annoy nearly everybody, make a bunch of new enemies, and put the beneficiaries in an awkward position. Although in some ways it's the 'right' answer, it's also the most dangerous and internally costly.

    The shame of it is that the fourth option actually comes closest to fairness, assuming that the decision-maker is accountable. Options one and two don't even try to address fairness. Option three sounds fair, but in practice it usually rewards the squeakiest wheels, rather than the most deserving.

    The tension between legal arguments and political ones is chronic and painful. Legal arguments are based on uniformity, process, and elephantine memory. Political arguments are based on what can actually be done at the moment. With infinite resources, it's possible to satisfy both; simply raise the floor as high as it takes to stop the complaining. But with strapped resources, you have to make a choice.

    So a quick survey of my wise and worldly readers: which option would you choose?

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Comments on Compromise and Precedent

  • Posted by Paul Roehl , Adjunct equity on May 22, 2008 at 6:55pm EDT

  • This stuff is just so depressing. If you google the above whine you’ll soon discover it’s plagiarized from an infamous directive written by Marie Antoinette in 1784. If I recall correctly it was written to placate accountants outraged over shoe expenditures. And certainly such justifications almost always feed the core of revolutionary actions. How is it that our progressive academic leaders become so adept at the justification of oppression? How is it that they become such marmish nitpickers doling out the tiniest crumbs from the most Byzantine bureaucratic systems? Adjuncts will always be treated like crap; they will always make half the wage of their tenured counterparts for the same classroom hour. Why? Because administrators are remarkable apologists for inequity.

  • Salary inequities, etc.
  • Posted on May 22, 2008 at 11:00pm EDT

  • Our small university faces several problems.

    1. We haven't had an across the board pay increase in several years.

    2. Our range of salaries is VERY small, with a top salary for full profs only about $6,000 more than the salary for new profs with a Ph.D.

    3. Our budgeting philosophy has always been "Raises IF . . ." As in: we'll give the faculty a raise IF our FTE is HERE.

    I've been here for 5 years, and I've been the Dean of my school for 1 year. We've just hired two new professors, both with doctorates.

    Prof 1, who has no classroom experience, will be making $1,000 less than MY base salary (Dean's stipend is added to base salary.) Prof 2, who has one year under his belt as a full-time visiting professor and three years of part-time adjuncting, will have a base salary the same as mine.

    Our president doesn't give a rip about raising salaries. He refuses to raise funds, and--with our current budgeting philosophy (#3 above)--our current revenue streams are tapped, so we NEED him to raise funds.

    Luckily, he has announced his retirement. We're crossing our fingers and praying that the next president has a different philosophy, and some serious fundraising skills.

  • Small University that needs a fund raising President
  • Posted by Roger Erickson on May 23, 2008 at 11:15am EDT

  • Addition to last comment I made.
    It is difficult to distinguish between willful and witless inaction.

  • Pay equity
  • Posted by Jeffrey , English Prof on May 23, 2008 at 12:50pm EDT

  • Yes, all four options suck. Here, we go with option 3, with the union doling out crumbs "equitably." But adjuncts aren't always treated like crap, as one commenter put it; our union (an AFT affiliate) has negotiated the definition of "pay equity" and the state legislature has stepped up with significant increases to adjunct salaries, up over %50 easily in the past 8 years. Plus, the vast majority of our adjuncts receive the same benefits as FT faculty. Still, the situation sucks for other reasons . . . but pay is getting a little better.

  • Posted by Paul Roehl , You've got to be kidding on May 24, 2008 at 5:30pm EDT

  • The very notion that it is necessary to “define” the term pay equity speaks volumes as to the sincerity of those in power. There are few schools across the country that actually give benefits to adjunct faculty, and in most cases those benefits are so costly adjuncts can’t afford them. Shame on anyone for suggesting that things are getting better for part time instructors. They aren’t. The system is corrupt to the core and blind to its own corruption.

  • Posted by Jonathan Dresner on May 26, 2008 at 9:15pm EDT

  • I have no administrative experience to speak of, but my inclination would be #4 -- bringing the worst cases closer to median. It's not likely that the worst cases are actually the ones doing the grumbling (your best bet as a manager would be to identify the grumblers and give them the raise; unfair, but effective) but it makes the aggregate numbers better and really does redress something that's problematic.

    I've actually argued for this before in our union, that salary compression needs to be addressed along with, perhaps even before, general salary raises. But I get outvoted every time.

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