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K-State Today

May 2, 2012

Special session of Faculty Senate May 14 to discuss faculty and unclassified professionals salaries

Submitted by Candace LaBerge

The Faculty Senate has called a special session to focus on the fundamental problem of faculty and unclassified professionals salaries, especially within the context of the K-State 2025 plan. The session will be at 3 p.m. Monday, May 14, in Hale Library's Hemisphere Room. 

It has been made abundantly clear to us that the ongoing salary situation, which makes it difficult to retain and hire quality individuals, will make achieving 2025 problematic. In an effort to encourage the high prioritization of the alignment of salaries with 2025, we have invited President Schulz, Provost Mason, and Vice President for Administration and Finance Bruce Shubert to a panel discussion on this topic.

The special session is designed to jump start a plan for an appropriate adjustment in salaries. We are creating benchmarks that can be used to guide our efforts over time. This session is not designed to be a complaint session, although there will likely be some depictions of the problems K-State has been and will be facing. Discussions about merit pay, etc., will be handled at a later time in order to not take attention away from the more important task of creating a plan to obtain funds for overall salary improvement over time.

This is not a one- or two-year fix. The invited guests on the panel will be there to listen, observe, and comment when appropriate. Please bring your ideas and recommendations to the session and share them. There will be a question-and-answer format that is designed to enable broad coverage of pertinent issues.

Through a variety of input and numerous discussions we believe the long-standing approaches K-State has used to acquire resources for salary improvement are completely insufficient. This has become particularly apparent when contrasted with the 2025 plan. We have been generating a list of possible approaches to improving this situation and we would like to hear your suggestions at this session.

For information purposes, here is a link to the Faculty Salary and Fringe Benefits reports for the past several years: http://www.k-state.edu/pa/statinfo/reports/faculty/salfringe.htm.

We thank you in advance for your valuable contributions to this session and to shared governance at Kansas State University.

View an announcement for the event here.