OU surveys professor's salaries to decide if adjustments are necessary

Amidst budget declines and limited tenured faculty, OU is participating in a national survey to take a more careful look at adjunct faculty salaries.

The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, or CUPA-HR, has been surveying the salaries of adjunct faculty at universities across the nation, according to the organization’s website.

The association defines adjunct faculty as “non-tenured faculty serving in a temporary or auxiliary capacity to teach specific courses on a course-by-course basis,” according to the website. It excludes regular part-time faculty (because they are not paid on a course-by-course basis), graduate assistants, full-time professional staff of the institution and appointees who teach non-credit courses exclusively.

“All the public universities are having to use more of these kinds of folks, because we can’t afford to hire more tenured faculty because of the decline in budget,” said Nancy Mergler, senior vice-president and provost for OU’s Norman campus.

Universities across the country are using this survey to take a closer look at how their adjunct faculty members are being paid, Mergler said. Through this survey, OU can see how other universities are paying adjunct faculty and use that to adjust OU’s adjunct faculty salaries.

Adjunct faculty salary depends on the faculty members’ qualifications and the departments they’re teaching courses in, she said.

For example, adjunct faculty members teaching courses in the College of Engineering will receive a median of $5,800 a course, said Shauna Singleton, financial coordinator for the OU College of Engineering.

Adjunct Ph.D. professors will receive $6,000 a course to teach a course in the Department of History, while non-Ph.D. adjuncts will receive $4,500 a course, said Robert Griswold, department chairman for the Department of History.

Researchers at OU’s Institutional Research and Reporting office have been collecting the salary data in order of faculty rank and discipline, said Cheryl Jorgenson, associate provost and director of OU’s Institutional Research office. This data will be added to the fall 2012 data on the CUPA-HR website.

CUPA-HR’s data collection for 2012 will end Dec. 7, according to its website.

Next spring, when the database is ready for use, CUPA-HR will notify OU and grant the university access to the association’s national data, Jorgenson said. Once the national data is accessible, OU officials will decide which universities to compare data with and decide if they should make any changes to how adjunct faculty members are paid.

Arianna Pickard

Arianna is a former staff member of The Oklahoma Daily who worked as Campus Reporter and Campus Editor.