Chancellor Emmert has approved financing a University faculty and staff salary increase for the fourth consecutive year.
“Before the year began, we decided the three greatest priorities were faculty and staff pay raises, graduate student stipend support and support for faculty and staff research and scholarship work,” Emmert said.
While administrators still are working on the latter two projects, the faculty and staff raise will appear on many employees’ paychecks in December.
“We’ve been working on this since July when we saw the [student] enrollment numbers,” Emmert said.
The raise will be retroactive on Friday, but the department heads will have until the end of November to decide how specifically to direct their funds. The salary increase will affect faculty’s paychecks in December.
The average increase will be three percent, but an extra one percent will be given to each of the University’s 12 priority programs.
The priority programs, or Foundations of Excellence, have been selected because each has the potential to command national and international attention and heighten the University’s reputation as a rising public research university.
Emmert said during the past four years, the University has granted the faculty and professional staff approximately a 21 percent cumulative raise.
“Cumulative numbers show that among our Southern peers, we’ve had the largest pay raises over the past four years,” Emmert said. “I’m very pleased.”
In 1998, the University was ranked last in the SEC for professors’ salaries. The University moved up to sixth in 2001.
The annual cost of the raise is an estimated $4.2 million, and the money will come from the University’s operating budget through an internal reallocation of resources.
Most faculty members seem pleased by the chancellor’s decision.
“It’s really hard not to be happy about a pay raise,” history professor Gaines Foster said. “[Emmert] has done a really good job of getting faculty raises over the past four or five years.”