Salary Offsets
Carolyn is a mechanical engineering (ME) professor at a
prestigious university. She has received a three-year research
award to develop prosthetic limb technology. The $250,000 grant is
awarded by a government institution and funds supplies, equipment,
professional travel, salary offset and graduate student
support.
Carolyn's 30 percent salary offset amounts to 0.3 full-time
equivalents and is intended to reduce her teaching load by 30
percent per year so that she can devote more of her time to
research. As is standard practice, the ME department pools the
salary offsets of each professor in the department and is supposed
to hire the appropriate number of adjunct faculty based on the
accumulated total of full-time equivalents. However, these monies
typically go into a nondesignated departmental fund that is used
not only to pay for adjunct faculty, but also for teaching
assistants (TAs), staff, scholarship awards and general operating
costs. Naturally, there are other sources of income for this fund,
such as tuition, donations and endowment income. Because the salary
offsets are deposited in this nondesignated fund, the resulting
number of full-time equivalents often gets "lost" as the money from
the different sources gets pooled in the fund.
For the 2000-01 academic year, Wilhelm, the department chair,
hired 6 full-time adjunct teachers to reduce the class load of his
faculty members as well as 20 TAs to assist with all of the ME
classes. Money from this departmental fund also was awarded to four
scholarship recipients and paid the salaries of the 12 staff
administrators. For this academic period, Carolyn taught five
classes, one more than is required for full professors. She had
assistance from one TA in two of those classes. Consequently, she
was unable to allocate the expected time to her research that her
salary offset afforded her. This scenario was true for several
other ME faculty members and has been a chronic problem in the eyes
of these professors.
Disturbed by the fact that she was teaching more than the normal
course load, Carolyn surveyed the ME faculty to determine the
number of full-time equivalents being contributed to the
departmental fund by their salary offsets. She learned that her
colleagues' grants contributed a combined 12 full-time equivalents.
Carolyn also discovered that the number of adjunct faculty in other
departments at her university fell short of the number allocated by
their salary offsets.
Discussion Questions:
- Should federal grant money that funds a reduction in class load
for a professor be used solely for this purpose?
- What are some administrative solutions to ensuring that money
from salary offsets is allocated to hiring the proper number of
adjunct faculty?
- What can be done to rectify the imbalance in the teaching load
of the ME faculty?
- Since the three principal responsibilities of a faculty member
are service, teaching and scholarship, should faculty members also
receive a reduction in their expected service contributions upon
receiving a salary offset from a grant?