BY MARTIN KICH One of the biggest issues for just about every AAUP collective-bargaining unit in the country is healthcare costs. Most of our institutions are self-insured, and although good benefits packages have long been one of the salient advantages of public-sector employment in general, many of our institutions have been trying to move employees…
BY MICHAEL C. BEHRENT Faculty at public institutions in many states are experiencing declining real salaries. This is particularly true in states where legislators are hostile to public higher education on principle. North Carolina is one such state. Faculty salaries in the University of North Carolina system have stagnated since the 2008 crisis. The past…
BY CHELSEA FOWLER As discussed in my Equal Pay Day blog post, the gender disparities that exist in faculty ranks are persistent and consistent. Without meaningful efforts by individuals and at the institutional level, female faculty members will likely continue to face challenges breaking through the proverbial glass ceiling to the highest faculty ranks. Below is…
BY CHELSEA FOWLER Today is Equal Pay Day.* Tomorrow, April 11, 2018, the AAUP will release the 2017–18 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, which discusses salary and compensation across higher education institutions. There has been a growing trend in the United States in the past two decades of women’s postsecondary educational…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The statistics on salaries are from ESPN (cited at the end of the post). In a piece for Business Insider, Matthew Michaels has added the governor’s salaries and median household incomes for each state as comparative measures. The listing is from the lowest “highest salary” to the highest. See the…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH About a week ago, I posted Rudy Fichtenbaum’s speech rallying our chapter members at Wright State before we marched as a group across campus to an open forum being hosted by our university’s President, its chief Financial Officer, and the Chair of our board of Trustees. [See https://academeblog.org/2018/02/09/rudy-rallies-wright-state-faculty/.] What follows is…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following News Brief has been distributed by Education Dive: A professor at Youngstown State University has decided against teaching an optional summer class for students because the institution decided to cut his pay for the class by 43% after fewer students enrolled than the required 15, according to WKBN…
BY GWENDOLYN BRADLEY Guidance issued late last year by the United States Department of Labor heightens the potential for faculty on contingent appointments to get unemployment compensation over breaks between semesters. The guidance, Unemployment Insurance Program Letter No. 05-17, explains the unemployment compensation standards applied to contingent faculty members and increases the likelihood that they will be…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today more than 12,000 University of California (UC) administrative, clerical and support workers, members of Teamsters Local 2010, walked off the job to protest numerous unfair labor practices and violations of state law committed by the UC administration. The walkout at all ten UC campuses, five medical centers and three national laboratories…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH What follows is a news release from the American Institutes for Research. It turns out (1) that hiring more adjunct and full-time non-tenure-eligible faculty has reduced instructional budgets but has not reduced institutional budgets and (2) that the reliance on contingent faculty has an inverse correlation with the compensation of tenure-eligible…