The Elm Student Newspaper
WC Salaries Face Scrutiny
Volume 80, Issue 25
May 1, 2009
By Alisha George
Editor-in-Chief
The top three administrators of Washington College are being paid far above the national average, according to findings for the fiscal year 2005-2006 by the Chronicle of Higher Education. At the same time, numbers show that full professors here are paid less than the average.
The II(2)B comparable group, which encompasses typically baccalaureate private colleges, including church affiliated schools, shows that President Baird Tipson is paid 31 percent above the average salary for that category. In Provost Crhistopher Ames’ case, it is 30 percent above the average, and for Director of Development Beth Herman, it’s 42 percent above the average.
However, according to the IIB private and independent group, full professors at WC are getting 4.7 percent below the average.
The mean salary for college Presidents in the category for the 2005-2006 year was $195,500, for Provosts was $121,896 and for Directors of Development was $110,518 according to the IIB group. The mean for full professors is $94,333 according to the IIB private independent group.
Tipson made $285,000, Ames made $175,000 and Herman made $192,122 during the same year. The average full professor at WC made $90,100.
Dr. George Spilich, Professor of Psychology, wrote a memo addressing this in comparison to faculty compensation, where he poses the question of high administrative salaries, “Is the college getting its money’s worth?”
Responding to his salary, Tipson said, “It is not uncommon to see Presidents make considerably more [than I do].”
He said that salaries are largely determined by market purposes, and said that he didn’t set his salary, but that the Board of Visitors and Governors set it.
“Is it right? It’s hard to know what right means. It was ethical and appropriate,” said Tipson.
When asked to respond to the information about her salary, Herman said she had not yet studied Dr. Spilich’s memo because she has been on the road.
“Vice Presidents are paid a range of salaries depending on their experience,” said Herman.
When asked if there has been any animosity between her and faculty because of her compensation, she said, “I have had a wonderful working relationship with the faculty.”
Ames said that in the memo, Spilich compares WC administrative salaries to a big, less elite group of colleges, the IIB group, which he said includes non-comparable colleges to WC. Ames said that if we compare faculty salaries to both groups, we find that our faculty salaries are in the top 20 percent of IIB institutions but only around the middle of the IIB Private/Independent subgroup. He said the data Spilich wants really isn’t available.
Ames responded to Spilich’s memo with his own report, where he discussed and rebutted some information shared in the original document.
“The Chronicle data is explicitly for the entire IIB group: the Chronicle does not offer data subdivided into the private, independent category on this [administrative salary] metric,” said Ames in his memo.
Though Spilich declined to comment about his memo or Ames’ response, in his memo he said, “When possible, we should compare ourselves to the IIB-pr or IIB independent group.”
Ames agreed with this, because he said it is a group that includes only private, non-religious affiliated, four-year undergraduate institutions.
Using those agreed upon means, Spilich stated that at the assistant professor level, salaries are competitive with those at comparable institutions. At the associate professor level, salaries are very good compared with colleagues at other institutions but at the full professor level, “…it is clear that salaries are not keeping up with inflation or with those at comparable institutions.”
Dr. John Taylor, the Chair of the Political Science Department and Pre-Law advisor, who is retiring at the end of this year, said that when the current senior full professors were young, the college was not hitting the mark for them as assistant and associate professors.
“They’ve never been paid adequately. That is why the failure to aggressively eliminate the shortfall for current full professors is especially unfair,” said Taylor.
But he said, “I think the administration is sincere in trying to bring salaries up to par.”
Tipson said when hiring new faculty, the school must pay the competitive prices that the market demands.
When asked what points he thought Spilich wanted to make as a result of the memo and what he wanted to see accomplished, Ames said, “That full professors’ salaries lag behind our benchmark more than others.” Ames agreed and said it needs to be addressed.
“I think we have a target, which is the comparison group, and yes, we are below it,” said Ames.
“It wasn’t a legitimate list of peers,” said Ames about the other colleges to which Spilich compares WC’s faculty and administrative salaries later in his memo.
Spilich uses Dickinson, Franklin and Marshall, Gettysburg, Haverford, Lafayette, Mansfield, University of Richmond, Washington and Lee, Christopher Newport and Bucknell as comparison schools when comparing faculty salaries. He finds that full professor salaries at all of these schools are higher than at WC by an average of about 15 percent.
Ames said in his response that such schools as Dickinson, Franklin and Marshall, and Gettysburg that were mentioned are aspiration or reach schools compared to WC.
“I would think that it would be immediately apparent that these are not realistic peer institutions for Washington College,” said Ames, bolded in his memo.
None of the schools Spilich names are schools WC would consider true peer institutions. The school considers peer schools to include Allegany, Goucher, Hobart and William Smith, Juniata, Muhlenberg, St. Mary’s MD, Ursinus, and Washington and Jefferson, colleges Ames clarified on the last page of his memo.
“One of my biggest concerns is it never said anything about our agreed upon salary goal and progress we’ve made towards it,” said Ames.
Ames said when looking at comparison groups, we need to make sure we are compared to the more elite group of four year private and independent colleges in the American Association for University Professors, or AAUP, categories. For school salary goals, he said, we look at the subgroup and last year we almost met our salary goal by accomplishing it up to 99.5 percent.
In Ames’ memo, it stated that WC has made progress towards this goal for at least the past three years. The goal was to be right smack in the middle, when it comes to salaries, of truly comparable institutions said Tipson.
“We’ve almost hit it,” said Ames about the salary goal. He said this means we were giving higher raises then other institutions, but there is no way of knowing that until the data is published much later.
“All-ranks is the agreed upon benchmark [for faculty salaries in the IIB private and independent group],” said Taylor. “All-ranks is not the one agreed upon standard, it is the only one the administration has agreed to.”
Taylor said it would be more accurate to have separate goals for assistant, associate and full professors. He thinks meeting the all ranks standard is a reasonable intermediate objective, but should not be the definitive benchmark.
“It’s entirely possible to hit the benchmark of all ranks without hitting this rank by rank target,” said Taylor, since they have not met the mark for full professors.
“We can’t say we’re paying our faculty fairly if we’re only fairly paying some of the faculty,” said Taylor. He said full time faculty should be paid to the standard of their peers.
Tipson thinks now, with the economic downturn, it is going to take the school a long time to meet the mid-point goal. This is because, he said, money to pay the faculty comes from tuition but the school is trying to keep the tuition as low as possible.
Tipson said at the April 27th faculty meeting that the Board of Visitors and Governors passed a budget for next year that was based on a conservative number of students and didn’t include any faculty salary increases. He said they are being cautious because 2011 could be worse than this year.
Tipson said they reminded the Board that the goal is to make progress towards the agreed upon salary target and that the school doesn’t want to lose any progress it has made.
“What we really want to do is postpone the decision,” he said about the budget.
“By losing that raise, faculty are also losing pension contributions that would have come from that raise,” said Taylor.
“We’d rather be stingy with faculty salary increases and preserve people’s jobs,” said Tipson. He said that has been the culture of WC and most administrative, faculty and staff agree. He added that we probably won’t lose progress towards the benchmark goal because he guessed WC’s situation is comparable to other places, so our progress towards the goal will probably stay about the same.
Ames said Spilich’s memo can’t detail the progress the school has made towards closing the salary gap for faculty members at WC compared to comparable institutions.
“You can’t measure that with one year of salary data,” said Ames, which is what Spilich references in his memo.
Spilich mentions that one of the reasons associate and assistant professors are paid higher than the AAUP averages is possibly because it takes longer for them to receive tenure than it does at other schools.
Ames said for assistant professors, it takes six years to receive tenure everywhere but for associate professors, there is no way of knowing how long it will take. This may be the reason Spilich said in his memo that associate professors are stuck at that level for an unusually long period of time because Ames said at that level, the associate professors can then choose to go up to full professors whenever they want—or whenever the professor and their department chair feels they are ready. There is no set time, said Ames, so it depends on when they chose to apply to be full professors.
Ames agreed that some professors are at the associate level for a long time, though at some institutions there’s a six-year minimum. The problem, he said, is usually the number of published works a professor has, since there needs to be significant amounts. Carol Wilson, chair of the History Department, received the status of full professor last semester.
Ames said he debated for awhile about sending out the response, and even mentions in his memo that, “If there exists a manual on how to be a good dean, I suspect it says, ‘Thou shalt not get into a public argument about faculty salaries, for it is sure to be a no-win situation.’”
Ames said he compiled the report and sent it out to faculty because he thinks there was data omitted that is really important and that the comparisons made were not balanced ones.
“I’m hoping that people see it as useful and helpful,” said Ames. He said he has only received a few brief comments regarding the memo.
“I thought [the response memo by Ames] was very fair,” said Tipson. He said it is important that when information is not accurate, someone try to correct it. Administration, he added, haven’t gotten the same raises faculty have.
Tipson said he has huge respect for Spilich and was surprised by the statements he made.
In the memo by Dr. Spilich, he also stated, “An administrator said to me once in a discussion regarding this issue of compensation for full professors that the overall quality of that older group is not as high as the quality of the younger faculty, and this accounts for the faculty disparity.”
Ames said in response, “I certainly wouldn’t echo that.” He said they’ve had some across the board raises which may have hurt faculty, but he said, “I don’t think it’s an issue of quality.”
Over the last 30-40 years, the expectations for scholarly productivity have increased, said Ames. Despite this, Ames said WC still has great senior faculty.
Ames agreed with the statement in Spilich’s memo that said senior faculty is often the go-to people for a variety of things, and added, “I don’t think we have a problem with our senior faculty.”
Spilich said in his memo that Tipson once stated, “the greatest burden should fall upon those able to shoulder it.”
To help relieve said employees, the college puts into place graduated pay increases to help the economic burden on lower paid workers, said Ames. Tipson said he would like a system in place to act accordingly towards lower paid employees because it’s harder for them to adjust during times like these.
“So the burden doesn’t fall more heavily on people who can’t bear it,” said Tipson.
“In our current economy, faculty jobs are considerably more secure then other jobs,” said Ames. He added that in part, as a consequence, faculty members have less mobility then with other jobs.
“In some ways, that’s a consequence of tenure,” said Ames. In other jobs, such as a business executive, for instance, may change companies in order to obtain a higher salary, he said.
Ames said that most senior administrators do not have tenure, though he has tenure as a member of the faculty because he came in with tenure, which is not unusual for Deans. As Dean, he and other senior administrators serve at the pleasure of the President, who serves at the pleasure of the Board, but Ames could be relieved of those duties and still serve as a Professor of English.
In response to implications Spilich makes that President Toll and Provost Scholz worked up to their high salaries while he and Tipson received high salaries coming here, Ames said, “[Toll] probably could have commanded a higher salary.”
Ames said Toll took a lower salary because of his interest in coming here. Ames also said the main determinate of salary is what the candidate for the position is currently making. Ames said he had five years prior experience as a Provost and Tipson had eight years prior experience as a college President before coming here. To get the best candidate to come here, he said, the school generally has to exceed their current salary in order to get them to come here.
All the salaries from the school come from the same pool, said Ames, because he thinks it’s considered fairer. Sometimes WC treats faculty and staff differently, like give them different raises. The raise last year was based on current salaries.
Spilich outlines in his memo that key administrators at IIB private institutions, on average, make 22 percent less than at WC in the Athletics department, 17 percent less in the Information Technologies department, and but make nine percent more in the Admissions department than at WC.
“One could argue that Director of Admissions is equal to Development/Advancement in its criticality to our mission or even more critical considering our relatively modest endowment and our subsequent reliance on tuition income,” said Spilich in his memo, though the latter position makes a great deal more each year.
Ames responded to that by saying salary for these positions is often in relation to current salaries.
Spilich warned in his memo, “However, I ask you to consider what will happen if faculty salaries continue to stay on the wish list. I suspect the faculty will adapt, but not in a positive fashion.” He goes on to talk about the high level of dedication faculty have towards students and the school as a whole, and that cannot be compromised.
Spilich further suggested in his memo that a faculty forum be held sometime in the relatively near future before the College Budget is completely set. Ames said as far as he knows, that did not occur.
“What disturbs me (and has led to this long memo) is that the memo to faculty goes to such pains to make our salaries look as weak as possible. And I just don’t think that forms a good basis for discussion and goal-setting,” said Ames in his response. He said that responses may not be enough, and may not be fast enough, but administration is working to make it happen.
Spilich came to the conclusion in his memo that, “…times are tough and are likely to get tougher. Sacrifice may be needed. What would be a fair sacrifice for faculty? What level of sacrifice is appropriate for the top administrators at the College?”