The American Association of University Professors came out with a report this week that documents that what has been flat wage growth for full-time professors has, if you add inflation into the mix, turned into an average 5 percent decrease in full-time faculty salaries.
The flat wage growth, according to the AAUP, extends back to the financial shock of the 2008 recession, but this is the first time faculty compensation has fallen by 5 percent since the AAUP began tracking this data in 1972.
You’d be tempted to think there’s one bright spot in the report, which is that tenure density among employed faculty has increased (e.g., more faculty in the survey are tenure-track or tenured) but that’s likely just because a tremendous number of contingent or adjunct faculty were laid off at the start of the pandemic and haven’t been rehired.
Overall, the AAUP report is pretty consistent with my own experience as a tenured faculty member working at a top liberal-arts college that has an endowment that was at about $3 billion before the recent downturn in the market. We don’t have merit pay and you don’t get a major bump in salary at tenure and promotion. Instead, we get steady annual raises that are supposed to be set via comparison to faculty salaries in a selected group of peer institutions, with the policy being that our average salaries in each rank (assistant, associate, full) should be slightly above the average of our comparison group.
In 2008, we froze salaries for an academic year, a decision that was fully consultative, meaning that there was a huge series of ad hoc committee meetings over the summer that the financial crisis set in where members of the community (faculty, staff, administrative leaders and trustees) discussed the situation and the options on the table. When the decision to freeze salaries and to defer hiring for the year came down, there was a sense that we’d all agreed to it, with the specific goal of avoiding any lay-offs. That’s the last time we approached this kind of decision-making in this spirit, which I think is a broad shift that has set in across most of higher education—in fact, in 2008, we were probably one of the last institutions doing that kind of shared governance in relation to financial decisions.
In the intervening years between then and now, I served as department chair and had a chance to talk to some other chairs as well as to faculty who have served on a committee that makes recommendations about faculty compensation, a committee that seems to have less and less of a role in actual policy. I’m not a person who is especially motivated by money—like a lot of people growing up in an upper middle-class household, I have some weird dysfunctional phobias about seeming to care too much about what I make or to be too invested in my investments. But it was hard after 2008 for me to ignore that the faculty who were in the most senior cohort of full professors had average salaries way ahead of my own cohort, whereas the salaries of faculty hired around the same time I was and the salary of people hired six to eight years after us were barely differentiated. That was what a one-year freeze and relatively flat increases afterwards had wrought. (There were some locally weird distortions also that had to do with faculty staying in the associate rank longer than those of us promoted on schedule and receiving outsize salary increases because that rank was further off the comparison group target. That much I think has been addressed.)
We had another freeze at the start of the pandemic, a miniscule increase the year after coupled with a significant jump in the cost of our HMO plan, and this year a ‘normal’ increase that will nevertheless be below the rate of inflation. That’s very precisely the pattern the AAUP documents in its report. Despite two years of strong performance for our very large endowment, faculty at my institution are losing ground financially, doing less well in real wages than our recently-retired predecessors over the course of our career.
At other institutions, it’s been worse in so many ways. The thing is, even if you’re making a comfortable living, in a capitalist society, to know that you collectively are doing less well than the generation before you even when you are doing the same work that they did is a bad feeling, especially when it’s hard on the face of it to explain why that should be the case when the employer’s finances appear to be very strong. There are a fair number of colleges and universities that are in genuine financial peril at the moment, but there are many which are not.
It’s a bad feeling for faculty coming out of a pandemic where many of us invested a great deal of uncompensated time retooling and rethinking our pedagogies to deal with teaching remotely. I don’t think anybody feels like the last three years have been easier or less work such that a decrease in compensation is justified or fair.
I’ve also always accepted that faculty work in a selective elite institution has crucial non-monetary compensations that would be worth a great deal if you had to put a price tag on them. The control over your own schedule, the relatively flat hierarchies that mean you generally don’t have a direct supervisor who constantly monitors your work, the ability to pursue your scholarship as you see fit (at least in theory) and the sense that scholarship matters to the institution, and at least for me crucially the sense that your stake in your institution is acknowledged and respected and you share in the shaping of its future.
These are compensations that were formerly shared in many other professions besides academia but that neoliberal styles of management have sought to eliminate elsewhere. They’re also very much on the way out in higher education. For most teaching faculty, the massive shift to contingency has robbed faculty in many places not just of a decent wage and job security and of all these other compensating factors as a result. But even in places where job security is high and tenure remains the norm, faculty feel their autonomy eroding, respect for scholarly work disappearing among administrative leaders and trustees, and shared governance being steadily and often pervasively reduced at many institutions.
Those kinds of structured inclusions and sense of respect were what led many faculty to feel that even if they didn’t have the money they wished—even if their monetary compensation was not commensurate with what many peers with professional credentials that were as difficult to obtain as an academic doctorate would see as lifetime earnings—they were still satisfied. That they would work for love of the profession and love of their employing institution.
There are a great many voices in the wider community of faculty today who look on that attitude with bitter regret, who believe that it is the root of the complacency that allowed contingency to take hold. That this is the pied piper that still leads people to pursue academic degrees and hope to enter the profession despite the long odds, because they hope to find a laboring haven in a heartless world, a vocation where you can get paid a comfortable wage and feel included and respected within your employing institution.
Folly or not, this feeling has been a powerful motivator for several generations of faculty. When you get less money and less love, however, it’s going to be hard to keep on doing all the kinds of work that was voluntarily and often enthusiastically done, the work that no one in charge notices or remembers. They will notice when it stops, if it stops, because it’s what has greased the gears and sprockets of the institutional machinery. At places that are given over to contingency already, controlled by leaders who disdain their faculty, the machine is grinding on empty, an oily smoke drifting up from its broken interior. The clamor and stench may be enough that students who have a choice will choose to be elsewhere. But the people who broke the whole thing might be as happy with that outcome as otherwise. It’s plain that at some of the institutions that have closed or might soon close, there are leaders who have welcomed their failure, much as there are eager “disruptors” circling about hoping to push their inferior online product to customers who have no other options anyway.
I know it’s foolish to still cherish feelings of belonging and mission when all the signals coming from the other side of things aren’t reciprocal. I am just such a fool, perhaps too old a fool to become fully wise. But I’ve decided to become a dues-paying member of the AAUP for the first time, so perhaps this old dog can still learn a few new tricks.
Image credit: Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
A long-standing belief I have is that much of the dysfunction in faculty hiring markets is that the salary paid to TT faculty is well above the "market clearing price". That is, colleges pay faculty substantially more than they would need to in order to hire enough faculty. I think one subtext of the points you're making is that we're about to find out, in many cases, what happens when that is no longer true.