Faculty and staff at the University’s flagship campus will see their salary increase for the second year running in the 2014-15 school year, LSU President F. King Alexander announced Friday.
Employees at LSU A&M, the Paul M. Hebert Law Center and the AgCenter will all see an average 3 percent merit pay raise in the upcoming school year, Alexander said in an email memorandum.
The raise is the second in two years for University employees. Last year, faculty and staff across the LSU System received a merit increase averaging 4 percent.
Like last year’s raise, this year’s will be allocated to faculty and staff based on merit, as determined by deans and department heads across the University. Alexander said about $8.2 million went into funding this raise, slightly less than the cost of the 2013-14 raise.
University Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Stuart Bell said the Office of Academic Affairs has spent the last few weeks ensuring that each college and department completed the process of evaluating its employees to determine where the raises would be allocated. All this, he said, was done before the administration was sure a raise was financially viable.
“It wasn’t until the last few weeks that we’ve been able to say, ‘Okay, I think we’re going to be able to get something done here,’” Bell said. “It’s been a tremendous amount of work that [the Office of Finance and Accounting Services] has accomplished over the past few weeks.”
Bell said the last-minute rush was a result of the administration needing to rely on various sources of income. It had to wait until enrollment numbers were finalized, the Louisiana legislative session ended and the University could be sure of the funding it would receive from the state before announcing the increase.
Despite this, Bell said faculty and staff can expect to see their salaries increase at the beginning of their next annual pay period. For faculty who are paid for nine-month periods, their paycheck will increase in the middle of August. Classified employees’ pay will increase Oct. 1, while 12-month staff’s period began July 1, and future paychecks will include the missed wages.
Alexander said he expects around 90 percent of faculty and staff at the three campuses to receive raises, though decisions about who will receive them have not yet been made.
Fair compensation for faculty and staff has been a hot-button issue at the University for several years. Before last year’s raise, University employees had not seen their pay increase for nearly five years, and faculty leaders such as Faculty Senate President Kevin Cope said stagnant wages were to blame for the number of faculty and administrators leaving the University.
Cope said he is pleased with the increase but worries that the University will not be able to continue to make these increases in the future. He said he would like to see a full-scale plan for bringing faculty compensation up to par with other schools to prevent the University from “lurching from year to year.”
“We are still far behind [other universities] in compensation for faculty members,” Cope said. “On the other hand, we recognize we faced economic hardship recently. F. King Alexander and his team are to be commended for the work they have done.”
Cope also said while he is happy to see raises at some of the University’s Baton Rouge campuses, he hopes to see progress at the other schools in the LSU System, where faculty and staff will not receive a raise this year.
Alexander said the administration is hopeful it will be able to raise salaries at the other campuses, but each campus faces individual problems, ranging from student retention to a fiscal deficit. The flagship campus, Law Center and AgCenter are competing with other top-tier schools with more money to offer their faculty and staff, such as Ohio State University and University of California Los Angeles, he said.
The slowdown of pay increases has largely been attributed to diminishing funding from the state, forcing the University to look for alternative sources. Robert Kuhn, associate vice chancellor for budget and planning at the time of the 2013-14 raise, said the funds needed to increase salaries had been “cobbled together” from tuition from increased enrollment, refinanced bonds and unused salaries from vacant positions, among other sources. This year, Alexander used the same phrase, saying the raise had been “cobbled together again.”