Inside Higher Ed, Mizzou Defends President's Right to Cut Faculty Pay 25%:
In the COVID-19–induced chaos of spring 2020, the University of Missouri system quietly added a section to its rules and regulations that allows for individual tenured faculty salaries to be cut by up to 25 percent. This could be for productivity, enrollment or other reasons.
[F. Criteria-Based Salary Reductions for Tenured Faculty: Each chancellor may approve and implement criteria for reducing salaries of faculty members on continuous appointments. Criteria may be established by the chancellor on a university-wide basis, or they may be developed by a college, school, department, or other similar unit for use within that unit and submitted to the chancellor for approval.
1. Criteria must rely on published departmental standards for satisfactory performance or objective and documented indicators of productivity, budget, enrollment or workload needs. Criteria must be developed and applied so that salary reductions will apply on an equitable basis to similarly situated faculty members and will not be used to single out individuals.
2. A faculty member will be notified by the department chair or dean of the amount of any salary reduction, when it will go into effect, and the reason for the reduction based on the established criteria. The faculty member may seek review of the reduction by submitting a written request to the provost within 5 days of being notified. The provost will approve, deny, or modify the salary reduction.
3. The salary reduction may not be more than 25 percent. If it is 10 percent or more, it will be accompanied by a commensurate reduction in FTE if requested by the faculty member.
4. A salary reduction based in whole or in part on performance or productivity criteria will go into effect no earlier than the beginning of the next academic year. A salary reduction based only on criteria concerning budget, enrollment or workload needs can go into effect in the pay period following notice to the faculty member.]
The rule change went largely unnoticed for a year, until news broke last summer that the School of Medicine at the university’s flagship campus at Columbia, or Mizzou, planned to slash multiple professors' salaries by 10 to 25 percent following productivity reviews.
According to information from Mizzou, fewer than 10 professors in three programs—medicine, veterinary medicine and agriculture—have been affected to date. But the system expects that more professors will see pay cuts as additional academic units adopt criteria for evaluating professors under the new policy.
Alarmed by this policy shift, both in substance and how it was adopted, system professors have been fighting it for months.
Mun Choi, system president since 2017 and also Mizzou’s chancellor since 2020, recently told professors that he’s not backing down, however.
“I will not be making changes to the executive order,” Choi said in a memo to Kathleen Trauth, chair of the Faculty Council and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Mizzou. “Individuals who work for the university, whether faculty or staff, must fulfill important responsibilities that contribute to the mission of the university.”
Choi wrote to Trauth in response to a general faculty poll on a set of council resolutions about the state of shared governance at Mizzou. Some 94 percent of faculty respondents said they supported a measure calling on Choi and Mizzou’s provost to “commit to practicing shared governance in line with faculty authority,” as detailed in the university’s bylaws. The same resolution asks that Mizzou publish proposed policy changes and solicit faculty feedback ahead of time and that all changes to the system’s Collected Rules and Regulations—including executive orders like this one—be publicized, with older versions archived for comparison purposes. …
In addition to resolutions, the council and Mizzou’s American Association of University Professors chapter circulated a petition objecting to the new policy on the grounds that it undermines faculty authority and shared governance, ignores existing policies for posttenure review, and violates widely followed AAUP standards in “allowing the imposition of a major sanction without a hearing before a faculty committee or even the opportunity to appeal the sanction to such a committee.”
Some 88 percent of faculty respondents said they supported asking Choi to rescind the new policy on criteria-based salary reductions for tenured professors specifically. (More than 1,000 professors, or about 47 percent of those contacted, voted in the poll.)
