The merit raise is here, and all’s well… or maybe not

First, the $750K raise pool includes both the actual extra salary money available, and the fringe benefits on that extra salary (retirement, worker's comp, and Medicare - 16.19 percent of salary). That leaves $645,500 available for actually increasing people's salaries. Second, Provost Benoit originally decided that only 30 percent of the faculty in each academic unit (department or school) could get a merit raise, evidently an arbitrary decision on the proportion of faculty in any unit who are actually meritorious. While one dean argued for more latitude, some of the others wanted an even stricter limit, some as little as 10 percent. In the end, the limits are 50 percent of faculty in the departments of the College of Arts and Sciences, and 30 percent or 20 percent in the departments and schools of the other colleges.

Astoundingly, one department chair actually told me that they were advised that if they used numerical merit ratings of faculty to determine who got a raise, and a merit score tie created a situation in which giving a raise to both faculty would cause the department limit on the percent of faculty getting the merit increase to be exceeded, they should use the alphabetical position of the faculty names to determine who got the raise and who didn't! And we spend so much time trying to teach our students to think analytically.

Now, the provost will hold back some of the raise pool money for "special cases." And then the deans also will hold back some of the money for "special cases," and some more for raises for the department chairs and school directors in their colleges. One administrator I know estimated (strictly off the record) that about 75 percent of the raise money would actually trickle down to the departments and schools.

In addition, only Group I faculty are eligible for this raise. This doesn't actually mean that none of OU's Group II or Group IV faculty (OU-speak for non-tenure-track faculty) are meritorious and deserve a raise. What it actually means is that the annual Ohio faculty salary survey, conducted by our State Conference of the American Association of University Professors, only includes the salaries of tenured and tenure-track faculty. So all of this extra raise-pool money will go into those salaries to minimize the embarrassment to the university when OU's faculty salaries fall even further in the rankings than they did last year. No one outside the university will ever know how poorly we pay our non-tenure-track faculty, so the hell with them.

And then there is one last provision. All of the raises recommended by the department chairs, school directors and deans will have to be approved by the provost. Does this mean that the provost believes that she is better able to determine who among the faculty is meritorious than the deans or the chairs and directors, who are much closer to their faculty? That seems unlikely. But what does it mean? Beats me.

Finally, to add insult to injury, these ground rules for distributing the merit-raise pool were not discussed with the Faculty Senate or its leadership prior to being promulgated, a stark comment on the fictional status of shared governance at OU. Actually, this decision not to consult the Senate puzzles me, since the Senate is actually powerless to influence such policies in any way. Thus, the provost could have paid lip service to shared governance by consulting the Senate, while remaining secure in the knowledge that her policies would remain intact. So why did the provost snub the Senate? Beats me.

So there you have it. No, not everyone is happy about the authorization of the merit raise pool. Those unfortunate enough to be really good faculty working in a really good department or school are liable to be left out of the merit-raise process because of arbitrary and capricious top-down micro-managing by our administration. No wonder so many faculty you encounter on campus these days are disgruntled and angry.

Editor's note: Ken Brown of Athens is a professor in OU's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.