Last spring, Brown’s Task Force on Faculty Compensation submitted to me its recommendations following an examination of the level and competitiveness of compensation for Brown faculty. The Faculty Executive Committee established the task force with Brown’s senior administration in the Spring 2023 semester.  It was charged to assess faculty compensation in the context of university finances, including gathering faculty input, benchmarking with peer institutions, and evaluation of data across fields and disciplines. The task force’s report resulted from this extensive, faculty-informed and data-driven analysis.

I write today to share the actions the University will take in response to the recommendations and our plans for implementation. In this letter, I also outline Brown’s approach to faculty compensation and review the major conclusions of the task force’s report, in addition to providing responses to its recommendations.

Brown’s Approach to Faculty Compensation

Faculty are the lifeblood of the University. Brown cannot fulfill its mission of education and research without highly productive and skilled educators and scholars who participate fully in departmental and University service. Although many factors go into faculty satisfaction and productivity — including facilities, benefits and a culture that values academic freedom and mutual respect — compensation is undeniably important.

Brown’s past practice in setting faculty compensation has reflected three core values:

1. Faculty compensation should be competitive within Brown’s peer group, allowing the University to recruit, retain and reward faculty colleagues as they make valuable contributions to our community and advance knowledge in their disciplines. A faculty member’s salary should reflect the quality of their teaching (including mentoring and advising), scholarship, and service, as well as aligning with salary levels in their field or discipline at comparable universities.
2. Faculty compensation should keep pace with the cost of living, in the Providence area relative to other areas of the country, and changes in the cost of living over time. In any given year, the size of salary pools should remain sensitive to the macroeconomic environment and how it impacts the financial health of the University. 
3. Brown processes for setting aggregate compensation pools and evaluating performance should be transparent and fair. The public reports of the University Resources Committee (URC), composed of faculty, students and staff in a shared governance model, are intended to provide transparency. 

I appreciate the task force’s work to examine whether Brown is living up to these core values, and how the University can improve. 

The Report’s Key Findings

The report of the Task Force on Faculty Compensation asked and answered important questions that are of great concern to members of Brown’s faculty and administration. I encourage you to read the report in its entirety on the Resources page of the Faculty Governance website. Below, I summarize the main points that I took away from the report and conversations with committee members about findings based on confidential data that was not included in the report.

(1)  Are faculty salaries at Brown competitive with what peer institutions are offering to faculty in the same disciplines and at the same ranks?

An external consultant hired by the task force benchmarked Brown’s faculty salaries against those provided by 20 peer institutions that are members of both the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE). AAU institutions are all research-intensive, and COFHE institutions are all committed to meeting the full financial need of all admitted students. The intersection of these two groups results in a set of universities that have similar stature, values and financial structures as Brown. 

After adjusting for the disciplinary composition of institutions, most importantly whether schools have law schools and/or business schools that typically pay significantly higher salaries, and adjusting for the cost of living, this analysis showed that Brown ranked 11th of the 20 universities in average faculty compensation, just below the median across schools. An average increase in compensation of approximately 5% would bring Brown into the top half of this group.

For reasons of confidentiality, the names of universities that have higher (or lower) adjusted faculty compensation than Brown cannot be made public, and some of the more detailed analysis — for example, comparisons of peer salaries broken out by discipline and by faculty rank (assistant, associate, full) — is not included in the report for the same reason. However, two relevant points can be shared.  First, the consultant determined that all but one of the universities with higher average adjusted compensation than Brown also have larger per-student endowments. Second, the analysis indicates that there is considerable variation across disciplines and ranks. For example, the report notes that, on average, Brown salaries are less competitive for full professors in STEM fields. However, it is also true that there is variation within all ranks and disciplines, with some Brown faculty earning more than peer-group averages within their rank and discipline, and others less.

(2)  Have faculty salary increases kept pace with cos- of-living increases?

On average, growth in faculty salaries at Brown has exceeded inflation over the past nine fiscal years.  However, this is not uniformly the case for each year. Increases in salary pools exceeded the rate of inflation from FY16 to FY20; were less than the rate of inflation in FY21 (when salaries were frozen during a time of constrained resources during the COVID-19 pandemic) and in the high inflation years of FY22 and FY23; and exceeded the rate of inflation in FY24. The survey of faculty and focus groups conducted by the task force indicated a desire to buffer compensation from large increases in the cost of living, should another period of high inflation occur.

(3) Do faculty understand how the salary pool is structured?

The surveys and focus groups indicated that there is not widespread knowledge of how the University’s salary pool is structured. Specifically, there is a lack of knowledge that the total pool that the URC recommends is divided into two components, one for merit (performance-based) pay increases, and another that is used for pay increases associated with promotions, retention and equity adjustments. This lack of knowledge results from the fact that, although the URC discusses the division of the total pool into two components, the annual URC report includes only the funding amounts to be allocated into the aggregate salary pool.     

(4) Are the criteria for merit-based assessment and evaluation of faculty performance appropriate, understood by faculty and department chairs, and fairly applied?

The focus group and survey data collected by the task force indicate a lack of understanding about how Brown’s salary increase process works, specifically the standards used to assess teaching, research and service. Most faculty would prefer annual salary increases to reflect both the cost of living and merit.

Recommendations and Responses   

Recommendation 1:

The task force recommended that the URC vote on the division of the total salary pool between a merit component and a component that is used for promotion, retention and equity (PRE) adjustments, and that this information be included in the URC report. Note that the report refers to the promotions, retention and equity (PRE) pool by its informal name of the “dean’s pool.” The use of this informal name may lead to an inaccurate belief that the disbursement of this pool is at the total discretion of the dean.

I agree with this recommendation. As I noted above, although the division of the total salary pool between the merit and PRE pools is routinely discussed with the URC, it has not been voted on or included in the URC’s annual report. Doing this will provide more clarity to faculty (and staff) about resources that will be available for performance-based increases in compensation. This change will apply to both faculty and staff pools.

Recommendation 2:   

The task force recommended that the merit pool be further divided between a component that reflects performance, and a component that reflects changes in the cost of living, with the stipulation that the performance component should be more than the cost-of-living component. Currently, the URC reviews information on cost-of-living increases as well as market data on salaries to set the salary pool. The task force’s recommendation calls for making the cost-of-living component explicit.

I agree that a component of the total salary pool should reflect changes in the cost of living. However, I do not think that component should be mechanically linked to, or even equal to, changes in the cost of living. Doing this would mean that, in high inflation years, the component based on merit would be inevitably compressed. And, it could lock the University into giving salary increases that are financially imprudent and not reflective of general market conditions in any one year.

My recommendation to the URC is that, in future years, they should divide the total salary pool into three components: (1) a “base” component that reflects changes in the cost of living, which everyone receives; (2) a “merit” component that reflects performance; and (3) a component for promotion, retentions and equity adjustments (PRE). As the task force suggests, the base component should be less than the merit component. This change will apply to both faculty and staff pools.

Recommendations 3 and 4:

The task force recommends a one-time salary increase of approximately 5% for all faculty, to reflect the impacts of the recent inflationary period. The task force also recommends that Brown phase in additional compensation increases over time that will move Brown up firmly into the top half of its peer group for faculty compensation.

Unfortunately, an immediate one-time increase in compensation for all faculty is not possible. Not only would it deepen Brown’s current budget deficit, it also would not align with Brown’s goal of providing competitive compensation. The analyses in the report indicate the compensation of some Brown faculty members, concentrated in certain disciplines and at some ranks, is low relative to peers. However, this is not true for all faculty, especially those who have recently joined the University, been promoted or who have had recent retention offers. Longer-serving faculty, especially those who for a variety of reasons have not sought outside offers, are at greatest risk of having had their salaries fall below peer comparisons.

Because the situation of every faculty member is unique, a more targeted approach is called for. I have asked the provost to establish a fund of $2.5 million that will be used to make one-time market adjustments to the compensation of longer-serving, productive faculty. This amount is benchmarked to be approximately one-third of the total merit pool for faculty, assuming that next year’s merit pool is the same size as it was this year. These increases will be to base pay, i.e. they will not be bonuses, and will take effect on July 1, 2025. 

The provost, in consultation with deans and department chairs, will establish the precise criteria for applying these adjustments, and deans will work closely with department chairs to identify eligible colleagues. (Note that, arising from the recommendations of the Task Force on the Status of Women Faculty, an implementation team has hired an external consultant to conduct an equity review of faculty salaries by gender. Any adjustments to compensation that result from this analysis will be financed by the PRE pool.)

My hope would be to repeat this process over time, as needed, provided resources are available. This approach, combined with continued attention to offering competitive compensation at the time faculty are hired, will move Brown toward the top half of our peer group with respect to average faculty compensation. It will also reduce the incentive for faculty to solicit outside offers to improve their compensation at Brown.

This fund will be for faculty only. It’s important to note that in recent years the University has been aggressive in giving equity adjustments to staff to bring their compensation to market levels. The faculty market adjustment fund will ensure that faculty salaries are also set appropriately.   

Recommendation 5:

The last recommendation is to establish a working group on compensation for research faculty. Last year, the provost charged the dean of the faculty to assess support for research faculty, including the terms of appointment, career development opportunities, benefits, and rights and responsibilities of these colleagues. Although the working group developed several recommendations, its charge did not extend to salaries. Going forward, the dean of faculty will collaborate with the other faculty-facing deans to develop a campus-wide process for reviewing research faculty salaries, paying attention to the core values articulated above.

Clarity in performance standards:

The committee did not make any recommendations related to the finding from their survey that many faculty members feel that standards for evaluating performance are unclear. As these standards are applied at the department level, I will ask the provost to establish a working group of department chairs from across all divisions of the University and a representative from the Committee on Faculty Equity and Diversity (CFED), which is the committee charged with developing “best practices” for conducting faculty performance evaluations and providing clarity to faculty about how the process works. This work should be finalized before the spring 2025 performance review process begins. 

I want to conclude by thanking the task force for its careful work on an important matter. The University remains committed to sustaining a diverse and talented faculty, which is central to our mission of education and research.

Sincerely,                                                                                                

Christina H. Paxson
President