Regents should ensure raises

Editor,

This is an open letter to the University’s Board of Regents:

On April 5, Gov. Gary Johnson signed the legislative bill that restores faculty and staff compensation to the General Appropriations bill.

This year the Legislature approved a 7 percent pay raise for UNM faculty and a 6.5 percent pay raise for UNM staff. The Legislature’s intent is clear; to reward UNM’s employees for their continued hard work and dedication in making the University a high-quality institution.

In the past decade, the productivity of UNM faculty and staff has skyrocketed. They have obtained more research dollars, taught more students with greater effectiveness, utilized new technologies more quickly and efficiently than at any other time in the institution’s history. They have responded immediately to requests for greater accountability by implementing post-tenure review and student outcomes assessment.

At the same time, UNM faculty and staff have watched their incomes, when adjusted for inflation, decrease and morale on campus plummet.

Optimism is great on campus at this moment that these compensation increases represent the first stage of a multi-year plan to remove the salary gap between UNM and its peer institutions.

At the present time, UNM ranks in the 18th percentile of faculty salaries while maintaining its rank of 29th among 200 research universities in the country. “The Rise of the American Research Universities: Elites and Challengers in the Postwar Era in 1997” described our institution as a “nationally rising public university in research productivity.”

We call on you, the Board of Regents, to make sure that the dollars targeted for faculty and staff raises are dispersed in their entirety to them. In the past, the administration has kept back undisclosed amounts of allocated funds for activities and projects it has deemed necessary. Many times, this is done without a full accounting to the faculty, the staff and the legislators who supported the percentage increases.

We regard anything less than a 7 percent increase for faculty and 6.5 percent increase for staff as a failure of this administration’s four-year plan to bring faculty salaries to the median of our peer institutions. We ask the administration to distribute the fully legislated amount. This amount was voted on not once, but twice by the House and Senate because of the Governor’s earlier veto.

The Legislature made UNM’s human capital the most important priority for higher education this session, and we urge you to do the same.

John Geissman

UNM Faculty Senate president

Diana Robin and

Sylvia Rodriguez

Co-chairpersons, Faculty

Organizing Committee

Hugh Witemeyer

President, American Association of University Professors-UNM chapter