John Ellison, an outgoing member of the Board of Trustees, said goodbye to the board today, just as an issue he has constantly emphasized took center stage.
Bruce Carney, executive vice chancellor and provost, presented statistics to the board about declining faculty retention and emphasized the importance of the issue to maintaining the University’s long-term academic quality.
Carney and Chancellor Holden Thorp both said faculty retention is especially important in the face of looming budget cuts.
“We’re facing an urgent moment where we need to make keeping our faculty a top priority,” Thorp said in the meeting.
This year, the University retained 32 of the 78 faculty members who received outside offers and counter-offers from UNC, Carney said. Forty-six of the 78 faculty members were lost due to failed efforts at retention while 13 were due to lack of funds necessary to make counter-offers. Carney added that both were record numbers.
During the previous year, the University retained 29 of the 58 people to whom it made counter-offers.
Carney and Karen Gil, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said salary increases for faculty are a key option for the University to consider while attempting to maintain faculty retention.
Carney said a one percent raise for faculty would cost $3 million if the raise applied to both fixed-term and tenure-track faculty members.
Thorp said in an interview after the meeting that retention is the top problem for the University associated with budget cuts.
