After a Boston University Faculty Council study showed discrepancies between the salaries of men and women professors and between BU and comparable universities, Boston University President Robert Brown pledged last week to examine the issue.
In an email to university faculty sent last Wednesday, Brown vowed to look into the questions raised by the report.
“In the months and years ahead, I will work to commit resources to increase faculty salaries to improve this competitive situation,” he said in the email.
Although both issues raised concern, Brown said the most troubling finding of the report was the pay difference between genders.
“[Provost David Campbell] and I will move quickly to understand this data in detail and to develop a plan to correct discrepancies between men and women faculty with similar accomplishments,” he said.
The Faculty Council, an elected body of professors representing each school within the university, began working on the salary study in 2004, Council chairman Roscoe Giles said.
“It started last year shortly after President Chobanian came into office,” he said. “The university stated its intention to rejoin the American Association of University Professors salary survey. Up until last year, BU had not participated in that survey and had not released data.”
According to Giles, the provost’s office provided the group with faculty salaries as of January 2005 and the council began analyzing the data in the spring. The Faculty Council will report the final results to the AAUP later this fall.
Former Women’s Studies Director Nina Silber said the council’s findings did not surprise her, but they give official support of the problem. “Because BU salaries have only recently been made public, I had only anecdotal evidence about how faculty have been underpaid,” the history professor said.
Psychology professor David Somers called the faculty council’s research concise and said it revealed issues that should be assessed at major universities across the country.
“I’m not at all surprised by the findings,” he said. “Both the gender gap and the overall BU pay disparity issues were known to most of the faculty. The gender gap pay issue is a nationwide issue that cuts across all professions.”
Many professors said the gender gap might not necessarily reflect a salary disparity between women and men, but rather a disparity between among areas of study.
“Part of the problem may be that women faculty members have historically been clustered in disciplines, especially in humanities, that have traditionally received less compensation,” Silber suggested.
Art history professor Jonathan Ribner said the discrepancies between salaries at BU and at other universities can be attributed most notably to the small size of the university’s endowment.
“We are a very under-endowed school,” he said. “We depend a lot on tuition. For as ambitious and big school as we are, we have a very low endowment … I really do think they have very limited funds. It’s not like they’re just sitting on piles of money.”
Ribner said although students enjoy their time at BU, they do not form enough of an emotional connection to make large donations as alumni.
“People don’t get as attached to the school as they do at other places,” he said. “It doesn’t really seem to instill that in people. But at the same time, most of the students who go here seem to like it. It’s just not a ‘rah rah school spirit’ type of school.”
Campbell said the questions raised by the council’s study will not be answered immediately, but both he and Brown have begun their own analysis in addition to the Faculty Council’s ongoing investigation.
“The current problems in both average salary and gender inequities have obviously built up over time and will equally obviously take some time to resolve,” he said in an email.
University administration and faculty agree that the report’s data must be examined further in order to determine what to address next.
Giles said in order to repair the gaps, salaries in individual departments must be studied.
“The remedies for these things are sometimes very local,” he said. “We need to look at each department individually.”
Brown acknowledged salary differences in his faculty email and made it clear that it is one of his top priorities.
“For Boston University to continue to be successful in attracting the highest quality faculty and staff, we must be known as an institution that supports market-based compensation and equitable compensation for all faculty in our community,” he said.
Many faculty did not expect an immediate solution to the problems, but said a long-term plan to address the issues would be appropriate.
“I don’t expect these issues to be cleared up overnight,” Somers said. “The types of salary corrections that are needed will require proper budgetary planning. However, I think that a sensible plan to correct these problems, over say the next three years, could be laid out well before the end of this academic year.”
Giles said the university will be able to complete more in-depth research to find the exact reasons for the salary disparity.
“You can tell from President Brown’s letter to the faculty that there’s an intention to work very actively on this,” he said. “I believe and have confidence that this is true. I know the university is working very hard to get the detailed data that we did not get, so I think that is a very positive thing.”
Ribner said he was most pleased that the administration promised to act immediately.
“President Brown is very concerned about it,” he said. “He wants to address it. This is a big priority for the faculty. That’s really great. I’ve been here for 20 years and people have always griped about it but this is the first time that I’ve heard the central administration say that they really want to do something about it.”