The recent pay raises for UNC System chancellors shed light on the value North Carolina’s policymakers place on higher education. Although Chancellor Woodson’s raise from a base of $590,000 to $617,376 may seem high to students, it’s still less than his counterparts receive at peer institutions. Meanwhile, faculty salaries at 11 UNC campuses are still 6 percent below the 50th percentile, according to a 2014 report from the Association of American University Professors (AAUP).
The pay disparity highlights several troubling trends in both our state government and higher education nationally. The fact that the highest-paid employees at the university are non-academic reveals a deeply anti-intellectual mood in state government. The extreme disparity in pay between non-academic employees and faculty raises serious questions about the motives and values of the policymakers who manage the university system.
Despite the governor’s tireless preaching about the need to cut public spending, faculty and students are bearing the real costs of small government. In turn, policymakers’ efforts to keep costs low only make the national trend of academic deterioration worse.
Similar to how the business landscape has changed in the past half-century through excessive pay for CEOs and stagnant pay for rank and file employees, academia is experiencing its own parallel structural shifts. But the problems are even worse for academia when it is managed through a corporate model.
AAUP reports that the average faculty salary at NC State is $101,484, but there are many who earn half that amount or less, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. While higher education jobs as a whole are becoming less worthwhile to jobseekers, the problem is magnified in fields that are viewed as less marketable. Similar to the cycles of lay-offs and outsourcing of corporate jobs, non-tenured contingent faculty, who are typically contracted on a semester-to-semester basis, now significantly outnumber tenured and tenure-track faculty nationally.
The trend toward outsourcing post-secondary instruction to contingent faculty is extremely troubling, as many of these instructors earn minimum wage or less, and are forced to rely on food stamps and other forms of public assistance to survive. With the most desirable tenured positions paying less and less, and contingent positions paying poverty wages, universities under the corporate model are only sustainable as long as faculty and students will tolerate the exploitation.
The stagnation in UNC employee salaries began during the Great Recession of 2008. From 2009 through 2011, neither educators nor state employees as a whole received any pay raises until a 1.2 percent raise in 2012. This year’s 1.5 percent across-the-board raise for state employees certainly increased the pay of UNC faculty, but because of the gulf between administrator and faculty salaries, faculty salaries have still not risen meaningfully since the stagnation began in 2009. Along with the government’s treatment of communities of color and the LGBTQ community, and its exploitation of the environment, the corporatization of our public universities is ultimately a losing strategy for all North Carolinians.
Whether or not Chancellor Woodson deserves to be paid more than half a million dollars per year is not the question at hand. But such a glaring difference between pay for administrators and faculty signals to students and the broader public that our faculty are worth far less than employees who do not directly contribute to the central function of the university: education.
UNC System President Margaret Spellings’ argument for the chancellor pay raises — that they were necessary to make NC State competitive among other similar institutions — is completely undermined by her failure to meaningfully address stagnant faculty pay. NC State as an institution will be demonstrably non-competitive when our brightest and most effective instructors are forced to look for other jobs.
As with our lax environmental regulations and discriminatory social policies, this mandate for high non-academic pay is just one part of the regressive vision of the NC General Assembly and the McCrory Administration. Given that the Triangle is becoming a center of scientific and technological development, lawmakers’ neglect for universities ignores the greater societal benefits of public education.
Low faculty pay, while not exclusive to North Carolina, is not sustainable as instructors are likely to look for work elsewhere. When their positions are all filled by disposable contingent instructors for even lower pay, students, and eventually the entire economy of North Carolina, will suffer enormously, as will its cultural resources. With a weakened university system, which was once considered an exemplar of public higher education in the South, the arts and culture we now enjoy will also disappear.
When the pay of non-academic university employees rises significantly while faculty pay stagnates, students and anyone who cares about a thriving and equitable North Carolina should be deeply concerned, because while our government officials promise to save us money in the short term, we will pay for it in the end.
