Today, department chairs in CEHS started letting faculty know that there would be a 3% merit increase this year. After no pay increase at all last year, this is surely welcome news. A friend in CEHS expressed their surprise to me, given the supposed financial trouble the university is in.
I, for one, was not surprised that there apparently was money in the banana stand after all.
Back in March, when President Gold met with AAUP and other faculty leaders, he stated quite clearly that the savings from faculty eliminations would be used to provide raises because not providing raises was not sustainable. There were at least three faculty members from eliminated departments who had not been given a retention offer on that call. Let me tell you, it was something else to hear that my $87,000 dollar salary, and the salaries of the 30-odd others who were not given retention offers, were going to be divided by the rest of the faculty. One of many truly disorienting moments of the last nine months of my life.
Don’t get me wrong, faculty members (and staff, and well, every worker everywhere) deserve a cost-of-living raise, but it should not come on the back of eliminating whole departments and then selectively firing most of those faculty members. Just like strategic cluster hires should not come on the back of cluster fires.
Gold also seemed to imply that this would continue, with departments being downsized and raises being given to the chosen few who remain. And yet, no faculty members are having any input into what a trimmed-down UNL might look like or what the goals and priorities of the university should be.
Cutting faculty out of shared governance and lighting tenure, and contracts generally, on fire is not a way to rebuild trust. And as faculty, we should all stand together and say it is unacceptable to rob Peter to pay Paul.
