'This is not what you worked so hard for': Noncompetitive salaries hurting morale at U of L

Courier Journal

Update: Univeristy of Louisville trustees approved a new budget Thursday that include raises for faculty and staff. Read more here: Trustees approved a new budget Thursday that includes a raise for U of L

Recent surveys indicate salary levels are still a major issue for the University of Louisville's faculty and staff, with concerns about inequitable compensation hurting employee morale despite the wave of optimism President Neeli Bendapudi has inspired.

"It is getting worse, not better," U of L political science professor Melissa Merry, who is president of Louisville's chapter of the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, said of employees' compensation situation.

The university has gone two straight years without providing any schoolwide raises, although its board of trustees is expected to approve a budget soon for the upcoming fiscal year that includes a 2% across-the-board salary increase starting in January 2020.

However, Merry and other professors say university employees' financial concerns have compounded over the years as their salaries failed to keep up with the market rates for similar positions at other schools (as well as inflation).

Meanwhile, U of L has suffered significant budget cuts over the past decade, further complicating its challenges with compensation.

The AAUP chapter at U of L surveyed faculty members this spring and found that 94% of the 460 responses it received from employees indicated that recent budget cuts negatively affected morale within their departments.

"In over 25 years at U of L, I've never seen morale this low," one respondent wrote. Another commented: "My unit has been threatened, stabilized, threatened, stabilized, and threatened again with closure. This is demoralizing and extremely disruptive."

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Of the people who responded to the AAUP survey:

76% indicated a lack of salary increases has affected their (or their family's) economic well-being
87% agreed the lack of raises decreased their overall job satisfaction
71% have looked for other job opportunities
60% agreed budget cuts prevented their department from making an attractive enough employment offer to successfully hire a preferred job candidate
46% said budget cuts prevented their department from making a counteroffer sufficient enough to keep a faculty member from leaving the university
54% agreed budget cuts have prevented their departments from enrolling the best qualified graduate students

"This is a state of emergency," one person wrote to the AAUP. "Every single colleague I have is searching for a job."

A fall 2018 campus climate and diversity survey the university conducted also reflected employees' dissatisfaction with their compensation.

About 32% of the roughly 1,800 respondents considered the compensation provided by U of L to be poor, and only around 23% considered it "good" or "excellent."

And while about 96% considered overall compensation important to their job satisfaction, around 51% disagreed that they were being fairly compensated for their duties and responsibilities.

Employees had a more positive perspective on other aspects of U of L. For example, about 68% agreed the school's senior leaders are good communicators, while 53% felt they were transparent, 57% considered them honest and 51% saw them as supportive.

University officials acknowledge there are legitimate problems with employees' compensation that must be addressed. Provost Beth Boehm said Bendapudi hopes to start with the 2% increase next year and then institute a recurring 2% annual raise.

"We do need to invest in our people, and I think that's absolutely critical," she said.

However, Boehm acknowledged that a 2% raise, even if it's consistently given out each year, won't entirely resolve the university's salary struggles.

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And there's a big gap between the 2% raise that's in the works for faculty and staff next year and the roughly 11.5% salary increase, totaling $75,000, that U of L's board of trustees recently voted to give Bendapudi, along with a $20,000 boost to her guaranteed bonus. (Bendapudi plans to donate the money from that raise to the university.)

Merry, of U of L's AAUP chapter, said there was good logic behind the trustees' decision to give Bendapudi such a big raise — namely, to help bring her pay up to the rates earned by other university presidents working at her level.

However, Merry noted that Bendapudi isn't the only employee getting paid less than her peers. "What bothered me and others was how that logic didn't extend beyond the president," she explained.

"The 2% would be a start," she said. "But that's just a way to keep up with the cost of living and inflation. It doesn't really address these systemic inequities between what we make at U of L and what other people in similar positions make at our peer institutions."

The university implemented salary increases a few years ago that were part of a plan to address the pay equity issues employees were experiencing in phases, Boehm said. However, the subsequent raises U of L planned for haven't been provided yet.

"That's something that we dropped the ball on," she said.

U of L is still dealing with the fallout from a 5% budget cut it instituted for the current fiscal year, which ends this month, she said, and the amount of money it receives from Kentucky's state government is shrinking year after year. (Kentucky's per-student spending plummeted by nearly $3,000, or 27.2%, from 2008-18, according to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)

"We do have new leadership with a new attitude, but that new leadership didn't come with a magic wand that could magically create new buckets of money for us," Boehm said. "It is a hard fix, and I don't think anyone has tried to promise that we're going to fix it soon."

Since fiscal year 2009-10, Louisville didn't offer a percentage salary increase in four of those 10 years, according to data U of L provided.

And it isn't the only public university in Kentucky that hasn't consistently provided annual raises. U of L's data indicated every other state university, with the exception of Western Kentucky University, offered no pool of money for annual salary increases in at least three of the last 10 fiscal years. (WKU went only two years with no raises.)

Louisville spokesman John Karman noted that employee benefits, such as offering a "generous" retirement package and allowing eligible workers and their dependents to take certain classes at U of L tuition-free, are also a key part of employees' total compensation.

The AAUP survey indicated faculty are concerned about recent benefit cuts, although salary appeared to be the bigger issue. About 75% of the respondents to U of L's campus climate survey agreed the benefits offered meet their needs.

Faculty exodus

Merry and other U of L professors expressed concern about the loss of quality faculty members who have left the university for higher-paying jobs.

"It's the best people who are leaving," Merry said. "This is something that hurts students in the end."

A January 2019 university presentation showed a 3.6% decline in U of L's number of full-time faculty since 2016, with 66 fewer faculty members.

At the individual college level, U of L's College of Arts and Sciences had a 5.9% dip in full-time faculty since 2016, while the College of Education and Human Development saw a 10.2% decline, and the School of Medicine experienced a 3.9% decrease.

On the flip side, the College of Business's full-time faculty total stayed the same.

Avery Kolers, a professor of philosophy at U of L, said faculty members are "sharply underpaid" compared with their peers nationwide.

"It creates bad incentives where people feel like the only way to get a raise is to get a job offer elsewhere, so what gets rewarded (if anything gets rewarded) is a willingness to leave rather than a commitment to the place," he said. "The problem is austerity just grinds down everybody ..."

Getting a promotion is another way to get a salary bump, he said, but such opportunities are somewhat limited for faculty.

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Several years ago, a different university provost issued a report on a faculty salary study that compared salaries at U of L to the median salaries for a group of peer universities.

For the university overall, the aggregate salary was about 91% of the aggregate benchmark salary for the peer university group. Bringing Louisville faculty up to their peers' compensation levels was projected to cost about $11.4 million at the time.

The percentage difference between U of L's salary levels and its peers' varied by individual college as well as by (and within) departments. For example, the College of Business's aggregate salary level was 96% of the benchmark, while the law school's was just 80%.

David Swanson, an associate professor who served on a salary committee for the College of Arts and Sciences, said their most recent findings are that tenured and tenure-track faculty members within that college earn salaries that are, on average, 82% of what their counterparts at Louisville's benchmark schools make.

As for U of L staff, a June 2014 university presentation said a study showed staff salaries were at about 92% of the market. As with faculty, there were significant variations, with some salaries deemed as low as 61% of the market level and others as high as about 142% of the market.

Boehm acknowledged that some faculty and staff members have left the university because they could earn more at other schools. She recalled a great employee who loved working in the college of education but got recruited for a higher-level job at another institution making double her Louisville salary.

However, Boehm emphasized there's always some attrition at any workplace and "people aren't running" for the exits at U of L, noting that job satisfaction isn't solely about money. She also said the university continues to attract new, top-quality hires.

Getting other job offers in order to negotiate a raise isn't an uncommon tactic in the world of higher education, Boehm said, and she has made counteroffers that kept some faculty members in Louisville.

"The budget reality is I can't do that for everybody," she explained. "I think we have seen some faculty and staff — really good staff — leave because they could get increases elsewhere."

Not just a faculty issue

Concerns about compensation aren't limited to full-time faculty members.

"It’s felt by faculty, it’s felt by academic staff and particularly felt by physical plant staff," said professor David Owen, the vice chairman of U of L's Faculty Senate. "There’s an optimism that things will get better under the new leadership, but President Bendapudi has not been here long enough to institute the kinds of ... changes that we need."

Owen, who is part of a group that's examining workplace issues to help Bendapudi craft a new strategic plan, said he has spoken with physical plant employees who were discouraged, frustrated and felt like they didn't have a voice at the university.

“It was enlightening," he said. "I had heard stories and problems coming out of physical plant for a long time, but it was very impactful to hear directly from them."

Physical plant employees said they're expected to clean more buildings than they used to without receiving a commensurate increase in pay and noted they could make more working for most other institutions or companies in the city.

They also said they'd faced bullying by supervisors and other people with authority, Owen said. He expects Bendapudi will take their concerns seriously.

John Smith, chairman of U of L's Staff Senate and assistant director of the university's intramural sports department, said Louisville is struggling to be competitive in some job markets, such as custodial and trade work.

“They’re not satisfied with where their salaries are, by and large," he said of the university's staff members.

There's "no doubt" there are morale issues, Smith said, although there's hope the situation will improve. "I think they’re optimistic now that Dr. Bendapudi has talked about wanting to get to a place of having regular pay raises that people can count on," he said.

Another Louisville professor and AAUP member, Dawn Heinecken, said she's worried about the university's part-time lecturers, who teach many of U of L's courses with no guarantee of long-term employment.

Like many colleges, U of L has become increasingly reliant on these lecturers, who often are treated as "disposable workers."

"This is a national problem," she explained. "This isn't just U of L."

Heinecken also pointed out that people who work in academia are expected to earn high-level degrees, such as a master's or Ph.D., and often begin their careers later in life with considerable student debts, which is why compensation is such a serious issue.

"(They're) working 80 hours a week easily," she said of many professors. "Life is hard everywhere, but this not what you worked so hard for."

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Morgan Watkins: 502-582-4502; mwatkins@courierjournal.com; Twitter: @morganwatkins26. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/morganw.