Health Sciences

Tenured faculty face pay cuts

By Leilani Nisperos
Staff Writer

In an effort to balance an $11.3 million budget deficit last summer, School of Medicine officials gave tenured basic science faculty on the Health Sciences Campus a 25 percent pay cut.
"The recent salary decrease is a violation of tenure," said law professor Erwin Chemerinsky. "Undermining tenure is a real threat to academic freedom."
"The university can cut my salary 25 to 50 percent and I would have to leave. It's the same as firing me," he said.
A tenured faculty member is given a guarantee of employment that cannot be broken except with proof of cause for removal or a financial emergency on the part of the university, Chemerinsky said.
Currently, that guarantee of economic security provides faculty the academic freedom to engage in sometimes radical research and to criticize the university without fear of reprisal, he said.
Recent proposed changes in the faculty handbook and contract have some faculty members on both the Health Sciences and University Park campuses bristling at what they consider a threat to tenure.
"With the faculty handbook changes, (tenure) is very much threatened," said Dr. Donna Shoupe, president of the Medical Faculty Assembly.
The proposed changes were discussed recently at an open meeting of the Faculty Senate last week.
In a memo sent to Provost Lloyd Armstrong, Dean of the College Morton Schapiro and Dean of Faculty Joseph Aoun, members of the Executive Board of the College Faculty Council called attention to certain wordings of the proposed contract changes, including a section of the contract that changes the renewal of faculty members' "contract" to a renewal of their "employment."
Other contested changes include shortening the nine-month period in which a faculty member can file a grievance to six months and barring lawyers from attending grievance procedures.
"As someone who has chaired grievance procedures, I think (barring lawyers) will hurt faculty members," Chemerinsky said at the meeting.
Armstrong saw the change differently, and said that faculty members who do not agree with the decision of the grievance committee will take the university to court.
Vice Provost Barbara Solomon stressed the importance of remembering that the meeting was a chance to discuss the changes, and that no proposal was being made yet.
She said the focus of the changes is the question of whether the university can require faculty to obtain a portion of their salary from other sources, such as grants. She believes that such action would be specific to the School of Medicine and that the possibility of other departments being required to do so is very unlikely.
Changes in health care nationwide have also caused a decrease in medical school revenue, Solomon said.
On Feb. 16, Chemerinsky and Dr. Joseph Van Der Meulen, vice president for health affairs, debated in a faculty meeting whether economic security should still be coupled with "academic freedom" at the Pharmaceutical Sciences Center.
Van Der Meulen, who said his views are not the same as the university's, believes the two can be separated. He said academic freedom was not the issue because it is guaranteed to all faculty, not just tenured faculty.
Chemerinsky said eliminating economic protection is the same as eliminating tenure, and that economic security is not a kickback, but rather an integral part of tenure.
For many faculty members, the debate was more than a forum for the exploration of differing viewpoints.
At both the debate and the meeting, faculty members questioned administrators. More than one faculty member mentioned the deteriorating morale of many departments.
"Faculty morale, in my opinion, is at an all-time low," Gregory A. Davis, a professor in the Earth Sciences department, wrote in a letter to fellow faculty.
Armstrong, however, told meeting attendees that interaction between faculty and administrators is the best is has been in several decades.
In a later interview, Chemerinsky reaffirmed his belief in the necessity of tenure.
"Without the protection of tenure, faculty members we will be less likely to try novel approaches in scholarship or teaching or in challenging the university," he said.