Faculty compensation system to be reviewed
By Anne Burke
Today Staff Writer
In an address to the Legislative Assembly of the Academic Senate that covered several topics, Chancellor Albert Carnesale said a joint committee of faculty and administrators at UCLA is being formed to look at how faculty compensation is handled and to make recommendations for improvements.
Carnesale told faculty representatives meeting at the Faculty Center Feb. 7 that Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Daniel Neuman has been working with the Academic Senate and its chair, Professor Adrienne Lavine, to establish this committee. At the start of her term in office last year, Lavine identified transparency regarding off-scale salaries as one of her goals.
Carnesale said faculty members have been “enormously tolerant” of salaries that lag behind those at comparable institutions. But he added that there is another reason why the compensation system warrants a review. Some salaries are out of alignment because of off-scale adjustments made to attract and retain the best and brightest of UCLA’s faculty.
In some cases, there are newcomers who are earning more than equally qualified faculty members who have been at UCLA longer, “and that’s not sustainable over the long haul,” Carnesale said. The only solution, he said, is to adjust salaries “where they belong for everyone.”
He also advised faculty members that the UC is considering re-establishing employer and employee contributions to the UC Retirement Plan. Since the early ’90s, no contributions by UC or its employees have been necessary because a large surplus of assets had accrued through successful investment. Because there have been no contributions to the plan for more than 15 years, this surplus has been steadily declining. So contributions will need to be reinstated within the next few years to ensure the plan remains 100% funded.
This topic will be up for discussion before the Board of Regents this year. The earliest that employees would begin paying their own contributions toward retirement would be July 1, 2007, the chancellor said.
On the budget, Carnesale said that UCLA remains healthy despite three years of budget cuts totaling $60 million. These cuts have affected teaching, research, administration and campus infrastructure.
While anticipated cutbacks in federal research funding will likely slow the growth of UCLA’s research enterprise, the university is investing heavily in new research buildings and other infrastructure to remain competitive, he said.
Regarding the recent flurry of news stories focused on Andrew Jones’ charges of liberal bias, Carnesale urged faculty members not to get “carried away” defending themselves.
“There is not some broad attack out there on academic freedom,” Carnesale said. Shared governance, due process and tenure are among the means by which we protect academic freedom, which he defined as “the freedom to seek and speak the truth as he or she sees fit.”
However, Lavine said later that some faculty, who believe that the Jones case was just onemanifestation of a national campaign being waged by conservatives, “feel that we need to be more aggressive in protecting ourselves against that threat.”
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