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When it comes to the University of Maine’s faculty, the school will never be forced to choose between quality and quantity, the administration insists. But because of decreased resources and departments getting stretched thin, some faculty members worry fellow professors won’t find teaching incentives adequate.
“Our salaries at the University of Maine have been low for a long time. There’s been a lot of commitment to make them larger, but there hasn’t been much money to make them larger,” said James McClymer, professor of physics at UMaine as well as the president of the Associate Faculties of the Universities of Maine – the University of Maine System’s faculty union – and vice president of the state faculty union.
Maine ranks as the 46th worst state in terms of assistant professor salaries among land grant universities, according to Joe Carr, director of University Relations. For all faculty positions – professor, associate professor, assistant professor and lecturer/instructor – Maine ranks 34th. UMaine’s Office of Institutional Studies reached this ranking using 2007 and 2008 data reported to the federal government. Carr acknowledged it is difficult to keep high-achieving faculty members who are often tempted to leave Maine for more lucrative pay in other states. He does not believe UMaine will ever lose its competitive edge in attracting quality professors.
“The university’s quality and reputation are directly related to the faculty; and it’s important to do all we can to first recruit and then retain and promote the faculty that . make the university what it is,” Carr said.
The University of Maine System’s Board of Trustees, meeting March 16, approved the pomotion of five UMaine faculty members to professor or associate professor and tenure for 13 other Orono professors. Pay raises accompanying these promotions amount to 6.5 or 7.5 percent of their previous salary – depending on the person – and will have little impact on the university’s budget, according to McClymer. The pay raises of all 18 faculty members totals $80,403 and will go into effect Sept. 1, according to the Office of Human Resources.
The promotion process is important to inciting teachers’ willingness to stay at UMaine, Carr said. Some faculty members are concerned it might not be enough, and – if it is not – that UMaine doesn’t have the resources to provide extra incentives.
“If the salaries don’t continue going up, people are going to vote with their feet. No one will come here, faculty will look elsewhere, you’ll have a decline in morale. That’s one reason I think we’re all interested in raising salaries – not just the faculty but the administration. It’s a way of rewarding, attracting and keeping people who are trying to do a good job,” McClymer said.
UMaine professors get offers to work elsewhere, McClymer said, and while one faculty member might not decide to pursue it, another may choose differently. In terms of the latter, UMaine’s administration has to make sure the professor wants to stay here, or it risks losing them to the better offer.
“Faculty will occasionally just get fed up and start looking elsewhere or we get recruited to work elsewhere. Mostly, we love what we do, we like where we’re at, but once in a while we wake up and notice that the pay is terrible; $10,000 or $12,000 less than we would make anywhere else. … It has different impacts on some of us,” McClymer said.
Not every professor expects to leave UMaine the instant they are given a better offer.
“I perfectly understand if the administration decides to give less of a percentage in terms of raises they normally give . and I expect such a thing will happen,” said professor Aria Amirbahman, a civil engineering professor who is among the five faculty members recently promoted. “I’m pretty sure I will [get a raise] because it’s part of the contract; however, I might have to get a rain check.”
Amirbahman said it is atypical for professors to have raises delayed, but added that since he began working at UMaine “times haven’t been this bad.”
“Probably those raises, they probably aren’t going to be as much as they were, say, three years ago, two years ago when times were much better. But one thing generally about salaries is that, number one, the University of Maine – or at least the college of engineering – is not very competitive when compared to a lot of colleges of engineering. To keep good faculty here it’s just like anything else, you know – compensating them. It’s not that faculty are greedy or anything, it’s just that other universities could be after you,” Amirbahman said. “We’re just like any other business where you have to promote people.”
Professors are promoted twice during their careers, and it’s an important highlight among higher education teachers than is expected, McClymer said. To not promote someone whenever they are presented for review is damaging to their career.
“When you’re promoted or tenured, that’s your only chance for a really significant salary bump, and that stays with you for the rest of your career,” said associate professor of civil and environmental engineering William G. Davids, another of the five faculty members promoted to professor. “So you take someone who’s relatively young, and you say ‘well economic times are bad, we’re not going to give them a raise.’ For the next 20, 25 years you’ve locked that person into substandard pay relative to other universities, other people in their field.”
The University of Maine System faculty union recently brought an idea before the system administration for an “early retirement incentive,” which essentially would have encouraged retiring faculty members at all system campuses to become half-time for five years. The idea was an extension of phased retirement, where faculty members become half-time for three years before ending their careers. The plan was intended as a quick, short-term way to save money, but the system administration rejected it.
“There was some concern, I guess, from different campuses, that they did not fully understand it or thought it might not work for them. But there was no deep explanation,” McClymer said.
In contrast to keeping quality professors at UMaine with traditional incentives, maintaining faculty seems equally challenging for some departments.
The number of engineering faculty numbers are the lowest they’ve been in 20 years, Amirbahman said, despite record student enrollment. The cost of professors’ raises should not be a concern when compared to staffing a department such as engineering, because the start-up funds an engineering professor requires are greater than the start up funds of teachers of English, for example. This creates an even greater necessity to keep faculty members at UMaine, because new professors can be more costly than their predecessors. In addition, it costs about $5,000 to search for a replacement faculty member, according to Carr, a number that doesn’t include moving expenses, which the university sometimes covers.
“Our raises . that really is not going to amount to much. So that doesn’t really worry me. What worries me is that, presently, our department needs more faculty in order to be able to provide students with the quality education they deserve,” Amirbahman said.
“The world can’t stop because economic times are tough,” Davids said.
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