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Faculty Compensation Plan On Slate For OU Trustees Meetings
By: WOUB Staff Writer
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The Ohio University Board of Trustees will discuss and approve the "Total Faculty Compensation Plan" in this week's meetings at Walter Hall in Athens.
Pam Benoit, the Executive Vice President and Provost for Ohio University, chaired a Faculty Compensation Task Force to "analyze the competitiveness of our faculty compensation relative to peer institutions," according to the board's website.
The plan, endorsed by the Faculty Senate in February 2013, intends to:
– Move the average salary for tenure-track faculty on the Athens Campus to the position of 3rd for each rank among the four-year public universities in Ohio– Invest the same percentage in compensation for regional tenure-track faculty– Invest the same percentage in Group 2 faculty on the Athens and regional campuses– Evaluate employee health benefits and the impact of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on total compensation
The recommendations of the task force were presented at the January 2014 meeting of the trustees, and will begin in fiscal year 2015, according to the report. The exact funding needed for the plan isn't fully calculated yet, as it depends partly on the salary numbers of schools in the state during fiscal year 2014.
The final report was vetted by the university and the Faculty Senate and will be presented at Thursday's joint committee board session.
Ohio State is the state's leader in faculty wages, averaging $136,948 for its 961 professors. OSU is also first in average salary of associate professors ($91,994) and assistants ($85,072). OU is eighth in Ohio in professor salary and associate professor wages, and it is sixth in assistant pay. The report claims that with the new plan, the school will stay eighth in professor/associate pay but jump to third in assistant wages.
The school spent $55,476,198 in total wages in 2012-13, and estimates it will gradually rise teacher pay to $64,923,852 total in 2015-16.