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"On
Record" Candid interviews with President Kirwan for the Ohio State community Question #3: Despite the recent cuts in funding from the state, you have promised to make increases in faculty and staff salaries a priority. How can this be done? Where will the money come from? Can it be done in a way where professors don't find cuts in other things, including things like travel budgets or paper resources, or increases in class sizes and course sections taught? President Kirwan: Well, the basic strategy with compensation is that we want to be one percentage point above the market for the next four or five years in order to get back to an appropriate place in comparison to our peer institutions, regarding salary and compensation. Right now, we figure we’re four to five percentage points behind, on average, across the campus, both with the faculty and the staff. So, I think this is an appropriate strategy. Obviously, we’d like to close that gap immediately…but that’s unrealistic. We’re going to do this - address this salary need and put together this plan - through a combination of cuts, reprogramming in our budget, and the capture of some new revenue coming into the university… through tuition, through contracting grant activity, through private giving and other sorts of revenue enhancements. But, I think it would be disingenuous to say that this can be done without some real pain across the campus. We’re talking about a reprogramming of about $35 million dollars in the administrative, support, and academic units, and that’s a lot of money. So it is going to be a challenge for us. It is going to cause some paring down of budgets to free up the money to do this, but I think the instructions are clear. We’re not to do this by cutting across the board, or cutting down on essential programs. So, its going to be a difficult task, but the objective is to identify those things that are less central to our university, and either eliminate them or pare them back and protect the core…courses for our students, our critical research programs, our important outreach activities. We have to protect that core, but make the cuts elsewhere to create the monies to appropriately reward our faculty and staff. |
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