Despite the recession, U of C professors need not worry about their compensation.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) reported that the University’s 2010–2011 professorial salaries were the third highest in the country.
Although the ranking has not changed since last year, full-time U of C professors saw the highest salary increase by about $6,000. These numbers come from an annual report published in March by the AAUP titled “It’s Not Over.”
U of C full-time professors received an average salary of $190,400 last year. Harvard and Columbia Universities were the only schools that reported higher salary payments for professors, at $193,800 and $191,400, respectively.
University spokesman Jeremy Manier said that the U of C values its well known faculty and would not let economic factors like the recession affect that fact.
“Through good or challenging economic times, the University of Chicago’s commitment to attracting preeminent faculty in a variety of fields will continue to be strong,” he said. “Our faculty [is] central to the University’s core missions of creating new knowledge and providing life-changing education.”
Several department chairs acknowledged the ranking but declined to comment on the average salary figure or the rest of the report.
The report discussed the residual effects of the economic crisis on professor salaries and universities from December 2007 to June 2009.
The report says that, during the recession, the salary of private university presidents increased three times as much as that of faculty members. The salary of public university presidents increased twice as much as those of faculty members during the same period.
The report also said that though the overall number of full-time faculty hires increased, schools hired more members for non-tenure-track positions than for tenure-track positions.
Over the nearly two-a-half-year period covered in the survey, the number of tenure-track faculty members decreased by over 3% nationally.
The number of contingent (not full-time faculty) and graduate student employees also increased to over 75 percent of instructional staff as of 2009, according to the report.
“Although the ranking has not changed since last year, full-time U of C professors saw the highest salary increase by about $6,000.”
If the writers are referring to just the top three schools, then this statement is correct. However, if the numbers in the graphic are accurate, then Stanford actually had the highest increase, in both real and percentage terms
To the Maroon:
This is a fairly well-written article but it could afford to have a bit more exactitude in its vocabulary. The article fails to distinguish between the levels of rank for professors in tenured appointments. Since the tenure system is a sliding scale that is based on performance and not on hourly work, your article’s use of the term “full-time” is slightly misleading and/or vague. To use the term “full-time” and not clarify your intention to either discuss the average aggregate salary of professors of all ranks at a university with full-time appointments OR to discuss the salary of professors with a full rank, i.e. professors with the title of professor or higher (such as a Distinguished Service post, a Chair or an honorary appointment), you render your conclusions difficult to parse. Does your data speak to the average salary of all professors across all ranks, or does it uniquely speak to professors holding the most senior rank at their university? As well, your article could have benefited from the mention of a further small clarification. Since the universities you have cited have multiple professional schools — such as schools of law, business, and medicine — the figures you have cited will bear a slight inflation, given the fact that different components of universities set their salary benchmarks differently, taking into consideration the fields in which their professors are teaching. Your article should have offered this clarification because its absence may suggest to the uninformed reader that the salary benchmarks you have cited are “university wide” and thus as applicable to professors teaching in a faculty of arts and science as to professors in other parts of the universities in question. Since other professional schools often have much higher salaries (imagine what the chair of surgery makes at a medical school versus the chair of the Italian department in a faculty of arts and sciences at the same university) these figures, without a clarification, suggest that all full professors at these universities are handsomely paid in roughly equal measure. Obviously your description of these salaries as an average does much to imply the variability of salaries across these institutions; however, a more detailed clarification could further elucidate what the survey is actually saying about institutional compensation.
They mean full professors, not full-time professors. The figure they cite is the one given by the Chronicle for the average salary of FULL professors at the University of Chicago.
Should have gone with a better visual. bar graph > funky watermelon slices.
Can’t tell if it’s the areas or the radii that are supposed to be proportional, but it looks like neither. Maybe the gray radii aren’t in proportion to the rest of the money, but only with themselves. Could have conveyed the information with some kind of dollar-bill bar graph.