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K-State Today

May 11, 2012

Special session of Faculty Senate regarding faculty and unclassified salaries room change

Submitted by Faculty Senate

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 meeting will be at 3 p.m. Monday in the Alumni Center's Banquet Room. This is a new location for the event.

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 their 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. A question-and-answer format will be used 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.

Video streaming is being made available to those who are unable to attend in person. Click the following link, https://www.k-state.edu/facsen/specsession/, and use your eID to access the video stream. If you are not able to attend in person, comments and recommendations during the session may be sent to facsen@ksu.edu and Faculty Senate President Bloodgood will communicate these to the panel as time permits.