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On Thu, Mar 30, 2023 at 8:00 PM James N. Gregory <gregoryj@uw.edu> wrote:
Next Thursday, the faculty senate will vote on a drastic revision of the faculty merit/salary system. Please pay attention. It will affect all of us.
The proposal is derived from the UC Berkeley system where every two or three years all faculty undergo a performance review. I recognize the formula because I earned tenure at Berkeley. But this is an alarmingly deficient version. Deficient because in the UC version, successful performance reviews lead to a guaranteed salary increase of at least $4000 (and up to $15,000 at the full professor level). The guaranteed increases are listed in this published schedule.
The proposal coming to the Senate includes no commitments about raises.
And it is also deficient in another way. We will face annual reviews in addition to the 3-year reviews. At Berkeley (and other UC campuses) there are no annual reviews. All faculty receive a cost-of-living increase. Imagine that!
So what will this mean? Professor Vigdor and the Provost Richards think that in addition to the 2% which will go to those who pass the annual “ordinary” review, a faculty-wide total of another 1-2% may be available for “extraordinary” raises. That is not much. The strenuous three-year performance reviews will be very strenuous indeed if the majority of faculty are rejected and condemned to a perpetual cycle of 2% salary decreases.
I know the current salary system is an abomination. We endure annual reviews only to earn 2% raises some years, 0% others, and modest sums doled out to departments under the labels “extra merit” or “unit adjustment” when we are lucky. If the new proposal promised to add money to the current system, I would support it. But it doesn’t. It merely rearranges the categories while adding an onerous new level of performance reviews.
EQUITY
The proposal strips away language about compression and equity. Read the track changes and see how language about compression and equity in the current merit review is deleted (lines 65-67). Under the current system, departments like mine have tried to fight compression by allocating the occasional pots of extra money (extra merit, unit adjustment) for that purpose. But the proposed system will reduce a department’s ability to do that or anything else. Salary issues will be decided by deans not departments. This is not stated outright. You need to read the code revisions closely to see how that will happen.
Here is how things will work in practice: All funds beyond 2% will be siphoned into the “extraordinary” category. Where until now we have occasionally received extra merit and unit adjustment funds, those will disappear. And to pool money for extraordinary raises, the provost will decide that “ordinary” means 2% and only 2%, year after year.
SERVICE BURDEN
Finally think about the added service burden on senior colleagues who will be called upon to conduct these performance reviews, rigorous reviews for 1/3 of the department each year. And think about the new responsibilities for department chairs. Notice the 78 lines of code specifying the duties of department chairs to meet with each person under review, to provide detailed feedback and instructions about future duties, and then to write and share a careful account of the meeting and expectations. And those reviewed have the right to appeal an evaluation after which colleges must appoint an ad hoc committee of full professors (more service) to review the matter. See lines 235 to 313 of Section 24-57.
This proposal is badly conceived and ripe with unintended consequences. The Berkeley model of strenuous performance evaluations works because it delivers promised raises. To impose it without similar resources would be cruel and disastrous.
Please contact your faculty senator and ask them to vote against this legislation.
JimJames N. Gregory———————–Professor, HistoryUniversity of WashingtonSeattle, WA 98195206-543-7792http://faculty.washington.edu/gregoryj/
_______________________________________________
AAUP-UW FACULTY ISSUES AND CONCERNS listserve
aaup@u.washington.edu
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Dear Jim,Thank you for raising these concerns. I would like to raise a couple issues as well. I’ll try to keep this brief.
On page 2 under the “Background and Rationale” section, it states, “These ratings would help establish a faculty member’s prioritization for salary adjustment via the mechanisms we currently refer to as “extra merit” and “unit adjustment.” Unit adjustments, in particular, may consider equity in addition to performance ratings and this would continue to be the case.” In the next paragraph it states, “Thus faculty at the rank of associate or full receiving an outstanding performance assessment in a year where budget restrictions do not permit the funding of raises beyond merit can continue to be prioritized in the following 1-2 years.”
In the decade that I’ve been at UW, literally no one in my unit has been awarded extra merit (that’s our own doing) and we have never experienced a unit adjustment. In addition, we are always in a position where budgets are restricted. In lean years, they’re restricted. In fat years they are restricted. When enrollment was booming and we had more students than we knew what to do with, we were somehow still in a budget crisis.
So this means in my unit, and units similar to mine, is that we can expect to take a pay cut, in real wages, year over year with no hopes for raises that even come close to cost of living (set aside inflation). Am I correct in this calculation?
Simon Sinek has a wonderful book called, “Leaders Eat Last,” which means that leaders of organizations make sacrifices before rank and file members. I might feel better about this policy (and policies like this) if our leaders (i.e., administrators) “ate last,” but I suspect that, on average, their pay has not only kept up with inflation, but has surpassed it.
We, faculty and staff, have been called upon by the administration to make extraordinary sacrifices over the past three years. This seems to be just one more sacrifice that administrators are asking of us that they are unwilling to make themselves.
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“I acknowledge that the land on which I live is within the aboriginal territory of the suq̀ʷabš “People of Clear Salt Water” (Suquamish People). Expert fisherman, canoe builders and basket weavers, the suq̀ʷabš live in harmony with the lands and waterways along Washington’s Central Salish Sea as they have for thousands of years. Here, the suq̀ʷabš live and protect the land and waters of their ancestors for future generations as promised by the Point Elliot Treaty of 1855.” Suquamish People******************************************
Salude,
Charlie R. Collins, Ph.D.
Associate ProfessorUniversity of Washington Bothell
School of Interdisciplinary Arts and SciencesDirector, Collaboratory for Community TransformationZoom Meeting Room: https://washington.zoom.us/j/3414103139
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On Mar 31, 2023, at 9:24 AM, Duane W Storti <storti@uw.edu> wrote:Kudos to Jim Gregory for another insightful analysis of proposed legislation.
Now allow me to offer a somewhat more emotional perspective. Here is a recounting of my experience reading the proposal:I read through the initial bland paragraph regarding emeritus status, and then I came to the beginning of the gist which involves revision of Section 24-55 whose current title, “Procedure for Salary Increases Based Upon Merit”, is replaced by “Procedure for Salary Increases Based Upon Annual Review.” The first sentence of that section, which currently reads:
“Faculty at the University of Washington shall be reviewed annually by their colleagues, according to the procedures detailed in this section, to evaluate their merit and to arrive at a recommendation for an appropriate merit salary increase.”
was changed by striking out the second comma and everything after it to become:
“Faculty at the University of Washington shall be reviewed annually by their colleagues, according to the procedures detailed in this section.”
The effect of this change is to wipe out the last vestige of recommendations by faculty of salary increases to address merit, including equity considerations. The faculty role in making salary increase recommendations is something that faculty worked long and hard to establish, and this proposal would give it away for no good reason.
At that point, I thought the proposal was a joke.
Not only does it eradicate the role of the faculty in merit and equity recommendations, it eradicates the merit-based salary system itself; the very system that we have long (and proudly) touted. The one serious problem that the merit-based salary system has suffered from is underfunding, and this proposal does nothing to address that issue.
But despite what I see as no real upside and ample downside, the Senate Executive Committee has acted to forward this proposal to the Senate for consideration without crucial amendments that Jim submitted that could have made the proposal at least palatable.
The bottom line is that if this proposal is not a bad joke, it is at least a very bad deal. I join in urging you to learn what is in the proposal and to contact your senator about voting to prevent enactment.
Sincerely,Duane StortiProfessor of Mechanical EngineeringUW-Seattle
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On Mar 31, 2023, at 3:03 PM, Pedro J Verdugo <verdugo@uw.edu> wrote:
How about proposing a periodical performance evaluation of all administrators every 3 years, conducted by a panel of full professors? With the authority to recommend even dismissals of people like the collection of itinerant Presidents we suffer for ten or more consecutive years, or of chaps like Richards for that matter?
History demonstrate that the UW attained an extraordinary degree of faculty excellence without the need of input from imported administrators. It’s time to reconnect with our roots; when the government of the UW was in the hands of our colleagues, not of foreigners with initiative.
Pedro
Pedro Verdugo MD FRSC
Emeritus Professor
Depts. of Internal Medicine & Bioengineering
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On Mar 31, 2023, at 6:57 PM, Eva Cherniavsky (president of the AAUP chapter) wrote:
Dear Colleagues,
My thanks to Jim Gregory, Charlie Collins, and Duane Storti for their astute and cogent analyses of the Class A legislation regarding the faculty merit/salary system.
Our current salary “system” (if it even merits that designation) is an affront: every year, we work to document merit in order to receive less than a cost-of-living increase. I did not think it was possible to come up with anything worse, until I read the proposed legislation.
I won’t repeat what has already been so well said, but I do want to summarize some main take-aways.
· The proposed legislation leaves the current review process in place. (It merely substitutes the word “satisfactory” for the word “merit.”
· On top of the existing structure of annual reviews, it imposes mandatory Career Development Reviews (CDRs)– annually for assistant professors, ever two years for associates, and every three for full. Depending on the composition of a department faculty, somewhere between half to a third will undergo this considerably more arduous review in any given year.
· The payoff for this extraordinary workload escalation: exactly nothing. A CDR that determines “outstanding performance” means that the faculty member is “prioritized” for an extraordinary salary increase. Outstanding performance makes you eligible for an “extraordinary” (more than 2%) raise If there’s money in the budget. But as Charlie points out, there simply never is. Inasmuch as the gambit is to fund these “extraordinary” raises with a faculty-wide total of another 1%-2%, then, as Jim correctly observes, the majority of faculty in line for such raises will be turned down.
In my view, the weakness of the proposal – and, indeed, the real damage it threatens to inflict – cannot be addressed via tweaks and amendments. It should be voted down. Administrators and faculty leaders invested in repairing our broken salary system need to go back to the drawing board and come up with something that is actually reparative. An unfunded version of the UC review system, layered on top of our current annual review, is the worst of all possible worlds.
Respectfully, Eva
Eva Cherniavsky
Andrew R. Hilen Professor of American Studies
Director of Graduate Studies
Department of English
Box 354330
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
https://washington.zoom.us/j/9500707851
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On Apr 1, 2023, at 3:28 PM, Jack Lee <johnmlee@uw.edu> wrote:
Dear colleagues,
I’d like to offer a little historical perspective on the proposed revisions to the merit review process. (This message is kind of long, so for those who want the punch line up front, I recommend voting against it.)
The faculty senate and the UW AAUP chapter have been sounding alarms since the mid-1990s about the dysfunctionality of our faculty salary system. The basic problem was then, and I think still is, that we hire new faculty members at competitive market salaries, but then raises over the course of most faculty members’ careers are too small, with the result that most senior faculty members end up with salaries that are far below peer averages, and often barely higher than the initial salaries of new assistant professors (the problem of “compression”).
The first attempt to address the problem was when the current salary and merit review system was enacted, around 2000. That policy is the result of extensive negotiations between the faculty senate and the administration — the administration (and the state government) wanted some form of post-tenure review, while the faculty senate wanted some commitment to regular salary increases for those whose reviews deemed them to be meritorious. The result was the current code language mandating annual merit reviews coupled to at least 2% annual raises supplemented when possible by other kinds of raises (“additional merit” and “unit adjustments”). It was very clear to the faculty who passed the policy that this was a quid-pro-quo agreement.
That policy was a step in the right direction. But the first decade’s worth of experience proved that the mandated raises were still far too small to address the compression problem, as well as exposing a number of other problems with the policy, including widespread resentment of the annual review process that too often resulted in zero or trivial additional raises, over-reliance on pre-emptive retention raises to get around the faculty’s role in deciding how to allocate available salary funds, and too many opportunities for even the inadequate 2% to be canceled.
The situation came to a head around 2011, when, after several years of salary freezes and minuscule raises, the Faculty Senate passed a resolution calling on then-President Young to establish a task force to design a “sound and fair faculty salary policy.” The task force consisted of six faculty members appointed by the faculty senate leadership, and six administrators appointed by the president (including then-Provost Ana Mari Cauce). I ended up co-chairing the task force along with Bob Stacey, then dean of CAS.
After four years of work, that task force proposed a major revision to our salary and merit-review procedures, which you can read about here. The main ingredients were (1) annual cost-of-living raises based on CPI, (2) 12% promotion raises, (3) significant performance reviews only every four years on average, (4) a system of “tiers” (more or less like the UC’s “steps”), with tier advancements occurring every four years on average (faster for those whose performance reviews are very high, slower for those whose performance is rated lower), and coming with 8% raises on top of the CPI adjustments. In addition, there was a flexible category called “variable raises” that could be used in various ways if funds were available, and some procedures whereby the president, in consultation with the Senate Committee on Planning and Budgeting, could lessen or postpone parts of the mandated raises in times of severe financial distress (without which the regents would never have agreed to the policy).
Our task force did extensive financial modeling, based on detailed data about UW faculty salaries coupled with all the data we could find from peer institutions. From that modeling we drew a few crucial conclusions: (1) The amount of additional funds going into the UW salary pool each year, on a percentage basis, was essentially identical to the corresponding average amount at peer institutions (this is visible in the fact that while our salaries were not catching up with peers over time, they weren’t falling farther behind either); (2) The mandated raises in our proposed system could be funded without any increase in the overall additional funds going into salaries annually (the main source of additional funds would be a vast decrease in the need for retention raises); and (3) with as little as an extra 0.5% per year invested in “variable raises,” the system would not cure existing compression but could ensure that the next generation of faculty members will not experience the same level of compression.
Our philosophy was that hundreds of little decisions are made each year by the president, the provost, and the Senate Committee on Planning and Budgeting about how to allocate each new chunk of funds that comes in from the legislature, tuition, and other sources, and our goal in codifying the various mandated raises was to put a thumb on the scale when those decisions are made. Instead of raises being the last thing funded after allocating money to other priorities (new programs, new buildings, new administrative positions, etc.), funding for the salary system would have to be one of the first things allocated. I was also told by a state legislator that this kind of system might actually influence state appropriations by establishing regular raises as a necessary expense rather than as an optional afterthought.
In the end, the senate passed the policy, but the faculty voted it down. (My own explanation for why that happened was that faculty and deans in most of the professional schools, which were much less afflicted by compression, didn’t see much advantage to the policy, and managed to convince enough other faculty members that the proposal was too complicated and labor-intensive to justify the anticipated advantages. But others may have different analyses.)
Anyway, I’m not writing to try to convince you to revisit our salary proposal. Instead, my point is this: The current proposal is all about strengthening the performance review system without any corresponding strengthening of the tools to fight salary compression. The special committee that developed this proposal made the point that it is not within the authority of the faculty to make more money available for salaries. This is certainly true. However, the experience of both the 2000 proposal and our 2016 proposal demonstrates that it is within the faculty’s authority (subject of course to presidential approval) to stipulate how salary funds are distributed, and this can have an effect on how much money goes to salaries as opposed to other priorities. President Cauce (she was president by the time our salary policy came to a vote) said she would sign our proposal if the faculty passed it, so such priority changes are not outside the realm of possibility.
I’m no longer eligible to vote. But if I were, I would vote against this proposal, and I encourage you to do so too. If there is going to be a major overhaul of faculty performance reviews, it’s in the best interest of the faculty to ensure that it’s coupled with an overhaul of the salary system that might finally start making progress against compression.
Stay well,Jack Lee_______________________________________________
John M Lee, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics Box 354350, University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-4350
johnmlee@uw.edu
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On Apr 1, 2023, at 10:45 PM, Aaron B Katz {he, him, his} <garlyk@uw.edu> wrote:
To state the obvious, in response to Jack Lee’s one point, that “it is not within the authority of the faculty to make more money available for salaries” … it would be within the scope of contractual negotiations if the faculty had a recognized union with such authority.
Aaron
Aaron Katz, Principal Lecturer EmeritusSchool of Public HealthUniversity of Washington