I accept and acknowledge Dean Hoft’s apologies for two errors in his email – the incorrect number of instructors at peer institutions was a typographical error and the number of peer institutions, listed as eleven, was actually eight. Since this portion of his email is very short, comprised of a data table and two sentences, there was not much room to make more than two errors. Essentially, every aspect of the email was wrong and misleading.

Unfortunately, Dean Hoft apologizes in a “mistakes were made” manner but fails to accept personal responsibility for what was a clear distortion of the truth. He does not accept responsibility for the data since he cannot confirm them. He explains the incorrect number of peer institutions as if it is the fault of CUPA (“three of the institutions that EMU had asked CUPA to include in the comparison group did not participate in the CUPA survey”). The phraseology suggests that he asked for 11 peer institutions and simply didn’t notice that he only got data from eight. He does not apologize for his conclusion that “EMU faculty salaries exceed the average for every single professorial rank.” This statement is sustained only when using a unique data set that cannot be confirmed. Based on many discussions that both Dean Hoft and I have participated in, I believe that he was aware that there were serious salary inequities and that he should have questioned the data before making such sweeping assertions. Incidentally, Dean Hoft’s September 6 email contained two additional typographical mistakes: the average EMU Professor salary should be $79,905 not $79,605; and the Overall average should be $69,531 not $69,351.

Importantly, Dean Hoft did not address or apologize for his contributions to the administration’s use of their web site in a press release that contained very misleading comparisons. [Click here for background] Although the posting corrected the errors in average EMU Professor salary and average Overall salary made in the email (pointed out above), the release not only used the questionable CUPA data, but also made the even broader claim that “the EMU faculty already earns more each year on average than 11 of its Michigan peer universities.” Simply, this says that our average salary is higher than the average salaries of 11 Michigan peer universities. Such blatant falsehoods do not even come close to reality and are totally unacceptable. The press release had an interesting table that distorted the data and was very misleading. It implied a comparison of our salaries after the offer (the 5-year terms were in a footnote) with current peer salaries. What kind of message does that send to our students? How would you grade a laboratory report that presented data in such a misleading fashion?

I welcome Dean Hoft’s decision to join the discussion using mutually verifiable data. I am disappointed that he has continued to present patently bad data next to usable data. Indeed, not only does he present misleading data alongside valid data, he insists on directing the reader to focus on the misleading data. Hence, he starts out an important paragraph with “As you will see in the attachment, these two surveys show that the overall average faculty salary at EMU is higher than the average of the aggregated faculty salaries of the other institutions.” I pointed out previously that the Instructor category was clearly different at different schools and needed to be excluded. Dean Hoft admits only that the Instructor category “may” be different and continues to present Instructor salaries and data including Instructor salaries as if they had some validity. This appears to be a cynical attempt to distract the reader.

Dean Hoft’s extensive calculations to arrive at an average salary for each school are similarly flawed. As I pointed out in my original analysis, the schools have different mixes of faculty – EMU faculty are more senior with a higher percentage of Professors (49% are full professors at EMU versus an average of 32% at the other universities). This greatly distorts combined averages. The only valid comparison is to compare Professors with Professors, Associates with Associates, and Assistants with Assistants. If he would like to assert that EMU Professors are in some way different from Professors at peer institutions, then that would be a different discussion. In any case, the inclusion of patently misleading data serves only to distract the reader, sway public opinion, and avoid meaningful dialogue.

Below, I present comparisons of salary within each rank. The different universities are ordered independently. Comparisons are easy to interpret. These are the exact same data that Dean Hoft used, but without the distractions. The results are unambiguous. In aggregate, the 308 Professors are paid less than our peers, the 163 Associates at about the average, and the 164 Assistants have higher salaries than our peers. These data show that a very significant proportion of EMUs faculty are underpaid compared to our peers

This situation actually reflects a commendable effort by the administration to get us out of the low paid gutter we’ve been in for so long, by hiring new faculty at competitive wages. Unfortunately, this effort has also created salary compressions (senior faculty earning only a little more than junior faculty) and even some salary inversions (senior faculty earning less than junior faculty). This situation is well known among the senior faculty and the administration. A Joint Salary Equity Task Force was established to study these problems. Dean Hoft served on this task force and declared that one of its goals was to develop ways to ameliorate these problems. The task force completed its job and Dean Hoft has the report. The report clearly states that the way to correct the salary compressions and inversions is to put money into the system. That’s not the story the administration wanted to give during negotiations, therefore, the need for all the distractions.

The decision on which peer institutions to use is always difficult. Limiting the discussion to Michigan public universities is convenient, although not necessarily the most informative. We don’t compete for faculty against only other Michigan schools. The market is larger. Other peer institutions might be the regional MAC schools or the national peers identified by the administration. Use of those peer groups supports the claim of the EMU-AAUP even more strongly than do the Michigan peer data. Keeping with the Michigan peers, I might disagree on the exclusion of UM, MSU, and WSU. I would argue that our work may be different from their work, but not worth less. However, if we are excluding schools that are predominantly Ph.D granting universities, then it is only fair to also exclude schools of a lower category. Therefore, I have reorganized the same IPEDS data presented by Dean Hoft as I did for the AAUP data above and I also eliminated Ferris and Lake Superior State, both of which are rated as Carnegie Masters II schools, a lower category than EMU. As you might expect, the results are much like the AAUP data - in aggregate, Professors are paid less than their peers, Associates at about the average, and Assistants have higher salaries than their peers.

I think what frustrates me the most is all the time, energy and money we end up spending on futile things. The administration doesn’t want to admit how much they spent on the President’s house, so they hide it and everyone ends up wasting all sorts of time and money either to hide the truth, to demonstrate the truth or to make nice with the legislators that are angry over the deception. Administrators don’t want to say why they’re firing employees, so they make up reasons, and the university then must pay large secret settlements. It appears to me that some administrators have their own ideas about the value of shared governance and their own vision about the mission of the university, and we all go running around wasting time on futile efforts to participate when our input will only be discarded until we say the “right” thing. If the administration doesn’t want to pay the university’s professors fair wages, then they should just say so, rather than trying to make it look like they’re already paying us more than do other schools. Wouldn’t it be refreshing if the administration just said, “look, we could pay you more and you’re worth it, but we want to use the money for leased cars, executive secretaries, and campus beautification?” At least then we could have an honest discussion about values.

For More information, see:

The Truth About Average Salaries, Part 1

Letter to the Editor, Detroit News from President Bunsis (correcting errors from only using EMU press releases as a basis for their editorial)

Comparison of Sept 8 proposals by EMU-AAUP and the administration

Joint Salary Task Force Final Report (365k .pdf)