Faculty Salary Committee Guidelines

Faculty Salary Committee (last updated in February 2023)

“Guidance for the Criteria and Process of Salary Increases” to be followed by the Faculty Salary Committee in making its annual recommendations to the Dean

Statement of General Principles

The Faculty Salary Committee has a mission, which it takes with the utmost seriousness, to provide the dean with recommendations that will assist in distributing funds allocated to merit-based salary increases. The goal as well is to maintain an atmosphere of collegial respect and cooperation on a campus with a small family atmosphere, and to increase faculty awareness about the work performed by their peers. The basic principle actuating committee members is to make recommendations founded in a spirit of fairness and openness so that excellence is at the very least acknowledged by one’s peers, but also, at the dean’s discretion, rewarded with salary increases.

Part A. Criteria

  1. All tenure-line faculty, regardless of hire date or status, are eligible for salary adjustments and are encouraged to respond to the dean's call for annual reports, which provide the committee with the basic tools of their deliberations. The committee strongly encourages applicants to present a summary of their accomplishments in the year under review in the areas of research, teaching and service. However, the committee is only tasked with providing our evaluation of the top performers in teaching and service among the campus tenure-line faculty.
  2. The report must be received by the committee by the deadline stated by the dean in that year for the candidate to be included in the committee’s recommendations.
  3. It is important to note that the committee's assessments concerning those candidates who have demonstrated exemplary performance are not binding on the dean, but are recommendations that the dean may wish to take into account in regard to annual merit adjustments for faculty members.
  4. The standard period of evaluation of the applicant will be the calendar year. That is, the evaluations carried out in Spring will weigh the applicant's accomplishments of the previous January to December period.
  5. Merit is the only proper consideration of the Faculty Salary Committee’s recommendations to the dean. Other, market-related considerations are the purview of the dean in making final decisions about the distribution of salary awards. The standard expectation in rewarding merit should be consistent with the existing mission of the regional campus.
  6. Teaching will be evaluated wholistically. The committee will take into consideration the number of classes taught, and will allow for special leave, which should not affect the committee’s evaluation of an applicant’s teaching record. Student evaluations are notoriously problematic and difficult to weigh, so the committee will review them judiciously, and improvements in SEI’s over the course of a year will be taken into account, as will student comments. In addition, the Faculty Salary Committee is open to evaluating multiple aspects of teaching, in addition to student evaluations. These aspects can include, but are not limited to:
    1. Working with students to apply teaching to community service projects;
    2. Teaching one or more new preps;
    3. Introducing a new course to the course catalog;
    4. Introducing a new course to the Lima campus that is already in the OSU bulletin, or developing an honors option for an existing course on the Lima campus;
    5. Making substantial changes to an existing course on the Lima campus, i.e. changing pedagogy and/or content.
    6. Attending workshops or programs to improve teaching.
  7. Service will also be evaluated as a whole. The committee will consider participation on university-level committees, local campus committees, professional service committees, and all community services during the year under review.

B. Process

Committee members should study the applicants' files in detail before their deliberations and make rankings of all applicants by choosing what they view to be the top quartile within each category (teaching and service). Then the committee should meet and decide how to deliberate. A favorite method in years past is for each member to present and defend his or her rankings, followed by open discussions concerning any differences of opinion. This method usually leads to some degree of consensus on most rankings early on. More difficult decisions between closely-ranked individuals can require extensive discussion, and this is where the applicant's very specific descriptions of innovation or excellence in teaching or service play a role.

The committee will then speak as one voice in its report to the dean, ranking the applicants in alphabetical order within quartiles. One list will include the top quartile in teaching; one list will include the top quartile in service.

These rankings are subjective assessments and recommendations to the dean made by the applicants’ faculty peers, and as such have no independent power over the dean’s final decision over merit raises. Thus, any appeals over salary should be made by the applicant directly to the dean.

The committee will also inform the top performers in each category (teaching and service) that their work has been judged by their peers as exemplary, and that their names have been forwarded to the dean as recommended for merit-based salary increases.

The procedure outlined above for Part B ("Process") is a general guideline. The committee in any given year may decide to proceed differently, depending on the tastes of the committee members, to carry out the mandate outlined in Part A. However, efforts to arrive at a more precise method of ranking have failed in the past. Specifically, ingenious point systems have foundered on disparate interpretations, and the committee has decided that it must maintain flexibility in its deliberations to achieve the greatest degree of fairness.

Finally, the committee strongly recommends that every tenure-line faculty member serve at some point on this committee, as it offers its members truly inspiring views of the excellent and world-class scholarship and service performed every year by the Lima Campus faculty body.