Meeting Minutes: December 9, 2016,  3 pm:

After a few announcements, congratulations to Matt and Lee on their Sanctuary amendment we settled down to a report from Mark Kuperberg on the recent meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee on Faculty salaries.

Mark: The committee was entirely successful; had to be on Board weekend one BOM member from CO (2 BOM members, when no committee meetings); but they elongated property cte meeting into salary meetings Tom never came Greg came for that 15 mins. Two BOM members did attend for 45 mins.

They like wide-ranging discussions. Answered their Qs; had an agenda, but dealt with no items on the agenda.

1. Implement move from total comp to salary + retirement benefits (never discussed; may still happen since Greg Brown is in favor exclude medical benefits, tuition, life insurance, etc. in total compensation) Greg committed to trying to get info BOM asked for.
2. Reconsider last year’s 41 + orig rec (Hardly discussed; did not mention the letter MM sent; 1 thing that came out is 1 bom said is that it seemed symmetric; not an insignificant amount of $; don’t know whether he thought symmetry was an important reason. Total of 2 mins.)
3. Change comparison gp, indexing cost of living (If you change comparison gp, need to look at 102.5 target – big chunk of conversation) Mark thinks we should stay far away from this. OK argument: Swarthmore is a little better than average of comparison group.

Does 102.5 account for Cost of living changes? Mark guesses (difficult to do impirical, esp for out in sticks). Use Colgate or Syracuse. Salaries become astronomical. Almost a wash on average. Pomona vs Colgate, e.g. 102.5 is step up, not just cost of living.

A long discussion followed. It seems that two items will dominate the committee’s discussion: one that they have no agreement on whether our salaries plus retirement ought to be the number of comparison or should it be total compensation which is what it is now. Second, there is the issue of changing comparison schools the BOM says if we change the comparison schools we need to change the per centage of comparison, ie the 102.5%. In our discussion we reiterated that the BOM goal is to not spend a lot of money and In the end they decide.

No movement until more info. Mark agreed to get more data from Greg. Rich and Mark disagree on whether to pursue change of calculations. We still have time before the next budget is set but it was unclear as to what we ought to do.

Professor A went on to outline the purposes of the committee: it operates on Principles: no such thing as back pay. AAUP ought to address calculations and retroactive changes. Recalibrate. Back pay redresses grievances and this committee is not for that.   Adjust for 41 and gender issues. 2. Truncating at very top; trying to being salaries at very top down.

 

The Discussion turned Again to the why the Board made its decision on the 41

Professor z: It seems they are capping our salary at the top.

Professor x: cost of living 37k->54 in today’s dollars. Not enough to live on. Need experiential increases.

Professor z: everyone gets the same number of $ raise. (editor’s note: this is plain not true, it is a myth, the special cases are amazing.}

Professor A: So the BOM took the Poll Pot solution: use Rich’;s model and because over 4.5 million $in salary is owed, and there is no such thing owed as backpay. 4.5 million of over pay for 41.

Professor B: 65 faculty had salaries increased because their salaries were suppressed while only 41 had salaries adjusted down, or rather held to 3.5%.

Professor M: I oppose the very divise way in which they pursued the salary adjustment. Pitting one group against the other.   Salary committee not doing what we need it to do.   Not important to Provost if he doesn’t even to to the meeting. Not moving agenda forward. Not addressing grievances. How do we go forward?

Rich volunteered that he will lead any group of faculty outside of AAUP. When it is done meeting, it will come back with proposal to AAUP.

The Discussion then turned again to the origins of total compensation and 102.5% comparison.

Prof A: we use total compensation not salary & retirement

Prof B: lots of things you never see are included; this includes workmen’s comp, life insurance etc.,…

Prof A: ….medical benefits are the elephants in the room. board members are not idiots, if your goal is not to spend much money, they’re attuned to worrying about that. if you’re attudned to salary + retirement, that could happen but first they want a comparison of medical benefits w.r.t. comparison schoools. To move forward on item 1, that’s gonna have to happen. Greg committed to digging up that information. With respect to item 2, reconsideration of the 41, that was hardly discussed and the letter you sent was not discussed at all, despite arriving the day before. THe one thing that did come out was that one of the board members who had been on the finance committee said they did it b/c of symmetry. If you were going to compensate people who the program said was too low, should also take from folks who were too high. Symmetry is a good principle, but even though that was the whole discussion, and it wasn’t an insignificant amount of money, I don’t know if he said it was a great argument. Out of the half hour meeting, 2 minutes were spent on item 2 or the 41!

Prpfessor A: Item 3 was changing the comparison group, cost-of-living indexing, like that. Board member brought up a point which I agree with, that if you’re going to change comparison group, need to also look at 102.5% target. That target implied a certain group. It’s also up for grabs. I take that as let’s not go near that. That was a big chunk of the conversation. We never got to item 4 and 5.

New guy: Was 102.5% created in respect to cost-of-living?

Professor A: Nobody is old enough to know who did 102.5, why it was total compensation, who picked the comparison group, etc. It’s likely that it all happened at once. The 102.5, I felt — THE board was not adverse to the arrangement; there is some sense that Swarthmore is a better school than the average of the comparison group, so maybe we should spend a little more. If you’re going change the group, it was organically tied to the 102.5.%. In other words, if we change one then the BOM would want to change the other.

My guess is that — it’s not empirical to do cost-of-living adjustment. There are no indices for exactly where they are. Colgate is the poster child. There’s no index for Hamilton NY. If you use Syracuse or Ithaca, their compensation appears astronomical. So they pay something close to national salaries. When you plug in CoLgate, it looks high. The cost of living varies so much it is impossible to make comparisons that way. When we did it, it’s almost a wash. If you average all of them, Colgate to Pomona, comes out close to a wash. 102 is a step up, not just a COL adjustment.

Professor P: Historical info & comment. Historically, 102.5 came about because it was supposed to be 100-105, but Grinstead set a target. It was not meant to be a cost of living adjustment, was meant to be we’re better than average group. Grinstead’s notes were not that helpful.

Professor G: How correlated is comparison group to our “peer benchmarking” schools? Those schools really don’t conform. Haverford faculty are reported to make more; we seem to have anecdotal evidence that various professors are making more, have better benefits.

Professor A: I was not happy. In the end the board members are the decision makers. So the thing is, the idea that we can re-investigate the 102.5 if we change the comparison group, everyone can think what they think, but the committee can do what they’re going to do. It’s a dangerous road to go down.

Professor M: Is that because 102.5% was so hard to come by? I mean we were at 99.9% for years and the Board would not move off it.

Professor A: No because it’s slightly above the average.

Professor F: Isn’t it because there’s 2 outliers who throw the mean off, so everyone else is at 102.5 of the mean? Wouldn’t median make better sense?

Professor A: it would be a lot of work fighting, if we change the comparison group and then go to 100 of the new group, what’s the gain?

Professor G: Two of my friends got jobs at Williams and Bowdoin and got 8K and 12K more.

Professor L: Is there any way to test the gut feeling on the 102 and the group?

 

Professor A: We could revisit this, I’d rather get items 1 and 2 done than this. (advance to salary plus retirement and address the 41 issue) Like I said, I know people have a view that since we have an Engineering department, we should have an Engineering school. I did not expect someone to challenge that 102.5 % figure.

Professor B: The Board is not unreasonable from their perspective. We could choose the 10 most expensive schools at 102.5% the Board would never agree to compare to say Harvard.

Professor M: There is a good argument for not getting deeply involved in that issue. Just identifying comparison schools would take forever. We never get to talk about salaries themselves. Don’t talk about gender disparities, the 41, the squeezing salaries at the top. There are arguments that can be made that we shouldn’t go along with the current system yet we sit at a point of low salaries. Curious why they thought changing target group was a good idea.

Professor A: They didn’t say good or bad. Just that if you change the group, you can change 102.5%

The Discussion moved again back to comparison schools

Professor P: What use would it be to have discussion of principles that go into what schools to include or not. What are the criteria for the group or the figure? Without knowing that, we are shadowboxing here.

Professor F: Are the 10 schools using each others data?

Professor A: We know that’s not true because my salary is not infinity.

Professor F Is this why the US news rankings have slipped – we are slipping because of salary?

Professor H: Nope that is not what they say.

Professor B: It’s worth $ to be in Philadelphia.

Professor C: To compare to williams is ridiculous, who wants to live there. Of course they have to pay higher.

Professor T: I don’t think they need to pay more. They’re good schools.

Professor C: All kinds of benefits come from the NE Corridor: Dual career couples. That’s another issue.

Professor M: Lots of issues here — what is this committee doing? So far nothing. I’m looking for committee to address grievances that are 2 years old. Is that the total summary?

The final charge of the AAUP and future plans

Professor A: Yes. We need to get more data from Greg Brown …

 

The group debated what strategies to take to pressure the board/administration to address the agenda items more quickly. The next Board meeting is at the end of February.

Professor A: My first agenda item is to bug Greg Brown for data. He said he and Robin Shores and HR could get the health benefits data. This will help if we stick to total compensation.

Professor B: You could make your own comparison group out of the AAUP data. Can price it out.

Professor A: Problem is, it was priced again, it was a bigger number than two years ago. Greg Brown is in favor of changing to salary plus retirement, but it was not the big problem last year (long serving associates was), and then it was too much money.

Professor T: On the previous point, what’s the data that Greg wants to get. Sounds like we got it already.

Professor A: Total compensation. We can subtract out things, but it’s not exact.

Professor T: Isn’t this just a red herring, something to put the brakes on?

Professor B: AAUP provides a spreadsheet every year. We are in agreement to receive pages 1&2 of the full report. It gives full details. It’s easy to pull out 2 lines from that report. I think Mark & I are philosophically different on salary + retirement. There’s an open question about moving to this other system. At the moment it sounds like we will gain b/c college is generous about healthcare benefits, but if we switch schemes, they might be less so.

Professor A: I’ll try to explain to Greg that he has the data.

Professor W: I thought the problem was that we don’t have particularly good health coverage compared to peers. That some of the schools have really good health coverage.

The group then debated the relative merits of our healthcare system. University of Penn far superior.

We also revisited the goals of addressing the 41 – whether or not remedying the “clawback” would perpetuate the inequalties. We have discussed this at previous meetings.

AAUP wants to express its appreciation to Matt for work on sanctuary.

Other agenda items: healthcare after retirement.

Frank M. relayed how poorly college handles retirement before 65 the salary is offered in one lump sum, bad tax implications.. Fourteen years ago faculty had a choice as to how to get paid. So now you lose more than half to taxes. Administration would be punished by us staying if it isn’t a good deal to retire. We also have to consider the problem of the poor support of health care in retirement, $1,000 a year. We adjourned near 5 pm, thanks everyone for coming.