BOG members said that not only would campus-based increases not be used to boost faculty salaries across the system but that it is the N.C. General Assembly's responsibility to increase faculty pay across the board and not that of campuses.
"We're going to have to do a better job articulating our needs for pay increases across the board to the General Assembly," said BOG Chairman Brad Wilson. "There have been two legislative sessions where there have been no across-the-board increases."
But universities have been given flexibility to increase salaries of certain faculty members they choose to target -- namely those who are most likely to leave for another post outside the system or who do not have pay comparable to that of their colleagues.
In January 2002, the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees approved a $300 campus-initiated tuition increase, 30 percent of which was earmarked for faculty salaries.
Jonathan Ducote, president of the UNC-system Association of Student Governments and a nonvoting member of the BOG, said the move could bode well for students in the future because many campus-initiated tuition increases often are based on chancellors' desire to raise faculty salaries across the board.
"It's just going to be one part of the (tuition) equation that won't be there next year," Ducote said. "Hopefully it's going to be one less thing students are going to have to fight the chancellors for."
But Richard Veit, chairman of the UNC-system Faculty Council and a UNC-Wilmington professor, said not increasing salaries of professors who have not had an across-the-board increase in two years will have a negative effect not only on professors but also on the system as a whole -- now and in the future.
"Last year we received just a token increase that didn't even compensate for the decrease in benefits," Veit said. "This year we had no increases whatsoever, our (medical) co-pay has gone up and, on many campuses, (prices for) our parking has gone up. We're actually going backward."
Ducote said that for now the task of balancing increasing faculty salaries while keeping tuition low looms above the heads of everyone in the UNC system.
