Update: KEZI’s Susan Gager has a story on pay and the union effort, with a brief interview with Prof Dan Pope.
5/3/2011: Professors Sarah Douglas and Marie Vitulli have prepared a careful comparison of faculty pay at UO with that of our “comparator” institutions, and posted it on the UO AAUP website along with reports from previous years. This is an important step in monitoring the administration’s progress on this issue. The short version, using averages?
The Full Professor and Instructor categories are still at 80% of our peers while Associates are at 86%. As mentioned above, Assistant Professor salaries are at 93.6% of the peer average, closest of all the ranks to the level of 100% called for in the 2007- 2008 Update on the Senate Budget Committee White Paper of 1999-2000.
So, no real progress on pay. As we reported earlier, there is also no real progress on hiring new faculty to meet the needs of our new students. So where is all the money from tuition increases and new students going?
The supporting material to the report is quite interesting, with this plot of the distribution of (full) salaries. They don’t have the full distribution for other schools, so they can’t say whether the pay gap would be different if they used medians instead of means. Their data excludes retired faculty on 600 hours appointments, such as Dave Frohnmayer, whose FTE salary is apparently the highest at UO, slightly over $200,000, plus another $35,000 or so if you count his questionable retroactive summer pay.
Dog the Statistics Dog says:
Yes, most all income distributions are negatively skewed like that one.
The US distribution of household income is like that with a big difference between median and average.
In 2005 average US household income was $63K
but the median was 46K –> big difference.
For the UO distribution, the top 3 salaries should certainly not be included in the calculation of the average. Moreover, sigma-clipping (sigma = a standard deviation) can be done in a systematic way in these kinds of distributions to best represent what the “average or typical is”
For this dog, the most telling aspect of the actual distribution is that essentially 45% of our full professors are paid less than 90K a year. This is bad by any academic comparative standards.
“This is an important step in monitoring the administration’s progress on this issue.”
I commend Professors Douglas and Vitulli, but really, this is something the UO Senate Budget Committee should be doing, and something they did do up to 2008, if I’m not mistaken.