In the two minutes that I've had a chance to sit at the computer today, I've read three articles about the sorry state of professorial salaries.
Salaries for this academic year are 1.2 percent higher than last year, the smallest increase recorded in the survey’s 50 years.
Over all, the average salary for a full professor was $109,843,
compared with $76,566 for an associate professor, $64,433 for an
assistant professor, $47,592 for an instructor and $53,112 for a
lecturer. At every type of institution in almost every class of
faculty, men were paid substantially more, on average, than women.
Actually, most liberal arts faculty start off somewhere in the $40,000 or $50,000 range and never reach the six figure mark. Those numbers are skewed because they include the science, engineering, law, and medicine faculty.
Huffington Post notes that they believe that this recession has also hit non-tenure track faculty, but researchers aren't exactly sure. Why? BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T BOTHER TO INCLUDE THEM IN THE STUDY. Fuckers.
While there are no national data, many anecdotal reports suggest that
part-time faculty members weren't seeing many salary gains this year,
and were in fact experiencing many lost sections, with corresponding
lost income. None of that adjunct economic dislocation is reflected in
the survey.
Apt. 11d 
They don’t want to admit the presence and their dependence on adjuncts. Just like they don’t want to admit that their food is picked by migrant workers… really, adjuncts are well-educated migrant workers — sadly.
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We (staff) got 0% for cost of living raises but for merit raises you could triple that.
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One of the things I am trying to get a handle on is managing decline: we have less money than we thought we had, as a society. How do we climb down? Wages are going to have to drop – real wages – for a lot of the frothier professions. How do you do it? Stop raising them while inflation chips away at their value? Close GM and their workers have to find work at a 1/3 of prior levels? Half the law school class does not get work and the other half start for $30000 less than the previous year’s associates? What do you do about the guy in Jersey who has retired on a pension which is 3x the average wage, and would like the tax payers to make up for the failure of the Jersey pension system to make the assumed 8% return?
I don’t know how you do it, in a way which is remotely fair. But we are going to have to, and it will be unpleasant.
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Many people would love to make that kind of money, especially with that kind of job security. Maybe these underpaid professors should take their skills to the private sector and find out what they’re really worth.
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How do you do it? Stop raising them while inflation chips away at their value?
I think that is indeed the solution that would be preferred by elites if anybody could figure out how to make inflation without creating hyperinflation.
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I read that same article this morning and laughed. I hate when they show six-figure salaries for faculty because it is actually pretty rare. It’s like the old saying about how you are in a bar with a bunch of people and the average salary is 50k. The median is also 50k. Bill Gates walks in. Now the average is like 1.5 mil. but the median is still 50k. All these charts show average, which as you point out include the higher salaries for star faculty, for the business and medical and science faculty, some of whom get paid according to industry rather than academic standards.
After ten years, we still haven’t hit the six-figure mark and even after full professor, I don’t think we will. And Mr. Geeky is in computer science, which typically pays better.
Another issue with faculty salaries is that they tend to be flat across geographic regions. So we moved from rural southern area to here, the salary remained the same.
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They are stagnating, but at a pretty high level. I’m not sure what the complaints are about a career where you start in the 40s and work your way up to the 90s. What are you supposed to do, increase tuition to give raises above the inflation rate?
In any event, maybe we can solve the problem of underpaid adjuncts by outsourcing more of their work to Asia. Are they being underpaid if they don’t have to grade papers on their own time?
http://chronicle.com/article/Outsourced-Grading-With/64954/
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Gah, that HuffPo survey is all kinds of blind to reality, isn’t it?
Well, I’m in Canada at a unionized university with a sunshine law on upper-income earners in the public sector so there’s a fair bit of transparency on what I earn. We’re just starting to fight the “adjunctification” of our discipline, here, though, with desperate attempts to get two tenure-track absences replaced (even one!) while administrators are pushing for what seems to them the most financially responsible end of things. I don’t want to live in interesting times and I don’t want to be the last generation of faculty who were able to teach and research full time.
That said, Ragtime, you must know that many people don’t start that 40k salary level until well into their thirties, after years of underpaid adjuncting and contract teaching. Many can’t work their way up into highest salary levels before they retire, either because of time or from compression. And lots of people have seen their salaries frozen or cut back over the past few years while tuition rises nonetheless.
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One word: furlough.
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Yeah, given the state of state budgets, and the number of faculty employed at public schools, I’m not sure that we can afford to feel horrified by the wage stagnation. What’s the average salary for staff at universities? Are the admin assistants and the janitors doing any better?
My mom works at a big public university (a staff position) and she has to take an extra seven days’ unpaid leave next year. I don’t think she’s all choked up about t-t faculty salaries staying frozen.
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