The numbers don’t lie.

All 20 faculty members who left Kansas University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences during the past year went to jobs with higher salaries.

Some of the numbers are dramatic. A psychology professor will make $91,000 a year more at a medical school. A professor in the natural sciences will make $50,000 more per year, and a history professor will make $49,000 more a year, both at public universities.

“Sometimes I feel we’re a farm club,” said Kathleen McCluskey-Fawcett, interim dean of the college last year.

And the situation may be getting worse.

KU’s faculty salaries already lag salaries at the university’s peers, but the tight state budget meant KU faculty members won’t receive raises this year for the first time in 30 years. KU may fall further behind.

By comparison

According to KU’s Office of Institutional Research and Planning, the average faculty salary at KU was $68,144 during the 2001-2002 school year.

The numbers break down this way: Professors made an average of $84,400; associate professors, $59,600; assistant professors, $50,900; and instructors, $36,900.

The average salary for a continuing faculty member has increased from $45,748 to $69,545 in the last 10 years, or 52 percent. The consumer price index increased 30 percent over that period.

KU officials compare their data to several sets of universities:

l KU ranks fourth out of the six universities in its state-selected cost study peer group. The group includes the universities of Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Oregon.

The average faculty member in that group, not including KU, makes $73,594. That means KU faculty make 92.6 cents for every dollar made by faculty at those universities.

l KU ranks seventh of the Big 12 schools. The average faculty member in the conference makes $71,426. KU faculty make 95.4 cents for every dollar made by Big 12 professors.

l KU ranked 13th out of the 14 public members of the American Association of Universities, which had an average salary of $74,033 last year. KU faculty make 88 cents for every dollar made by the AAU schools.

Closing the gap

Many officials thought the state was on the right track for improving faculty salaries until this year.

KU’s faculty salaries increased 6.4 percent going into the 2001-2002 school year, the largest increase since 1995. The increase was in part due to Senate Bill 345 funding. The 1999 law provided extra money for faculty salaries at state universities, and had translated into an extra 3 percent increase per year on average at KU.

But the Legislature didn’t include the extra money in the state budget. And with KU forced to trim $7.1 million from its budget, administrators decided not to include any salary increases this year.

That left faculty leaders planning for the future.

“I think we have to re-energize 345, from my point of view,” said Tom Beisecker, a communications professor and past president of KU’s Faculty Council. “(Senate Bill) 345 was a commitment made by the state, and 345 is a commitment that ought to be honored by the state.”

Hard to compete

Attracting good faculty to KU will require more money, Beisecker said.

“There is a national job market for faculty members at major research institutions,” he said. “What that means is there have been people in our department who have gotten offers from Arizona, from Santa Barbara, and offers from the East Coast. Faculty who are associated with research institutions are very moveable across the country. You can’t say there’s a Midwest market and that’s it.”

Though he said he’d heard “some grumblings” from faculty members about this year’s stagnant salaries, “from my perspective the expectation was it was an incredibly unusual year.”

“Two years in a row (of no increases) would really start to constitute a trend in the wrong direction,” he said. “It would border on bad faith.”

Beisecker said KU’s goal shouldn’t be to match the average of its peers.

“It should be more than that,” he said. “What we’re saying is our goal is to be average.”

Just increasing faculty salaries won’t attract new professors to KU, said Kim Wilcox, the former executive director of the Kansas Board of Regents who now is dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Cutting operating budgets to preserve salaries doesn’t leave an attractive university for new faculty, he said.

“Universities have been forced to do that for many years,” he said. “We just can’t do that anymore. You can’t sell all your computers just to compete for faculty. What professor wants to come to a school with no computers? There’s a line you can’t go any further, and we’re at that point.”

Raid on KU faculty

It’s not just a matter of attracting new professors to KU. It’s also about keeping current professors here.

McCluskey-Fawcett said KU professors increasingly receive offers from other schools who know the state’s economic instability may have professors looking for other options.

“They seem to be picking off the young full professors, the ones who have gotten promoted and tenured quickly, then on to full (professor) in their early 40s,” she said. “They’ve got a great career ahead of them but still have a good track record.”

The silver lining, she said, may be that other state universities are facing tight budget years, too.

“The good bad news is other schools are in this same boat,” she said. “Other schools are in bad shape, too.”