From an athletics perspective, the Southeastern Conference has always been considered a competitive conference, and in recent years, The University of Mississippi has been a real contender. But when it comes to faculty salaries, the university doesn’t always measure up.
The Institutional Research and Assessment office at UM took the nine-month salaries of full-time faculty in each department and compared them to those across the SEC. Overall, almost every department at The University of Mississippi pays less than the conference’s average for the same position. The departments with the biggest discrepancies include accountancy, business, pharmacy and liberal arts.
For example, the average nine-month salary for associate professors in UM’s College of Liberal Arts is $70,731. The SEC weighted average for the same job is $73,190. That means UM’s associate professors make, on average, 96.64 percent of the salary that their SEC counterparts do.
Rich Forgette, interim dean for the College of Liberal Arts, explained that this issue has been going on at the university for awhile.
“This has been a long-standing problem for The University of Mississippi,” Forgette said. “It is a challenge to hire and retain top faculty with our salaries. The challenge is greatest when recruiting faculty candidates who have multiple job offers. The university has recognized this as a priority in our UM 2020 Strategic Plan.”
The UM 2020 Strategic Plan includes a university-wide strategy to “develop proposals to provide supplemental salary opportunities for productive faculty (e.g., examine extending UM School of Pharmacy policy, compare to peer institutions).”
In fact, the pharmacy school has long recognized its salary challenges. When compared to the SEC, a UM associate professor makes $11,279 less than the conference average.
However, Dean David Allen of the Pharmacy department said they don’t compare themselves to the conference, but to the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy Profile of Faculty. The Pharmacy Profile of Faculty provides analyses on demographic data for full-time pharmacy faculty from colleges of Pharmacy around the nation.
“AACP does (a profile) each year, and we generally receive it in December or January of each academic year,” Allen said. “We target the 50th percentile as the salary level for which to strive.”
Using that measure, the pharmacy school’s high-performing staff is paid within one to two percent of the national 50th percentile average. Salaries within the pharmacy school are dependent on a faculty member’s rank, years within that rank and other factors.
According to UM’s data, the highest full-time faculty salary is $223,567 for a full professor in the business school. The lowest salary is $16,000 for a liberal arts instructor.
The University of Mississippi is hoping to outline a standard, university-wide method for determining merit and equity salary increases to discourage across-the-board salary increases and encourage the rewarding of staff productivity as determined by the annual performance appraisal and goal-setting process, according to the UM 2020 Strategic Plan.
