Page 1                January 2000 Mini Med School graduates 350 Floors 4 to 7 Legislative plan is key FCC: Alllied Health and faculty salaries Media Watch

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Floors 4 to 7
U to ask Legislature for
$35 million to complete
Molecular Cellular Biology research building

During the 1998 session, the Minnesota Legislature approved $35 million in bonds towards construction of the Molecular and Cellular Biology Building. When the 2000 session opens Feb. 1, U and Academic Health Center leaders will head back to the State Capitol to ask legislators for the money needed to complete the $70 million project.

Or, as some have characterized this year’s effort, “We’re going back for floors 4 to 7.” The initial $35 million also included funds to recruit faculty for research programs. The building and programs are part of a University-wide molecular and cellular biology initiative that President Mark Yudof has identified as one of his top priorities.

Although some may consider the request in the bag—believing lawmakers would be unlikely to deny funds to complete the building—AHC administrators and legislative relations staff aren’t taking it for granted. A comprehensive effort is in the works to inform legislators about the importance of the investment and engage the support of constituents. The effort will also help lay the foundation for next year’s request for additional funding for medical education. (The legislature usually budgets for capital projects during even years and program funding during odd years.) It also offers the University and the AHC an opportunity to organize and strengthen its state lobbying effort.

Supplemental request
The Medical School has also prepared a supplemental request of $20 million in recurring funds to address its structural deficit and to invest in priority programs. The proposal, developed by a faculty committee chaired by Jonathan Ravdin and Tim Ebner, will now go to Dean Al Michael, Sr. VP Frank Cerra, and President Mark Yudof for consideration. If approved, it will be discussed with legislators. Gov. Jesse Ventura is not supporting any supplemental requests this year.

FCC subcommittee focuses on Allied Health, faculty salaries Dan Feeney, veterinary medicine, chairs the Finance and Planning subcommittee of the Academic Health Center Faculty Consultative Committee.  Recently, he met with AHC Community News to discuss the subcommittee's priorities for the year.

Dan Feeney

What are some of the issues your committee is dealing with?
Feeney: One issue is the recurrent funding problems with the allied health programs (physical therapy, occupational therapy, mortuary science, medical technology, and health informatics). We know that clinical revenue is down, and we know that some of the departments, in which allied health programs are nested, are in financial difficulty. There is uncertainty, year to year, over whether these programs are going to survive. And that has had a demoralizing effect on the faculty of those programs. As a result, our committee has written a letter to Frank Cerra (senior vice president for health sciences) regarding the plight of these groups. He has asked us to come up with a faculty-based proposal for solving this problem. We have met with the directors of these programs and are trying to craft a solution.

How about the issue of faculty salaries?
Feeney: Adherence to the University-wide compensation policy is an issue that we’re investigating. The policy specifies the development of merit procedures within departments, the development of a peer-review system within departments for salary allocation and merit distribution, and a number of similar requirements. It’s supposed to be in place in every department so that individuals within the department have some control over their own destiny—it isn’t supposed to be just what the department chair thinks. Our concern is that there are a number of people who don’t know the policy exists—maybe even up to and including department chairs. We believe that there is a very dramatic variation across the AHC as to the perception, implementation, and utilization of this policy. Right now we are gathering information. Next we’ll send out a questionnaire to departments asking how they handle merit evaluations. We intend to publish the responses so that everyone will know what each department is doing. Second, we want to ensure that what is being said is indeed what is being done. In other words, if there is a very glowing and seemingly organized process for merit raises and peer review articulated by a particular department and the faculty look at that and say, “That isn’t happening at all,” we need to know that.

This whole area of faculty compensation seems complex and confusing.
Feeney: It is. As we speak (on Nov. 9), there are faculty members who don’t know what their raise is for this year, even though the fiscal year began July 1. There are also some concerns about how our clinical revenues, grant revenues, and state revenues are mixed into a merit pool for individual faculty. We suspect, although we don’t know, that in some departments there are merit pools that may draw from all these sources. In other departments, faculty may be drawing from a pool based on the percentage of effort dedicated to a particular endeavor. Are people looking at how salary stratification is occurring across these departments and even within these departments? The point here is we’re trying to achieve a level of uniformity. There’s some concern that the system is so complex that even the chairs don’t fully understand it.

Other issues?
Feeney: An issue that we’re going to begin to look at is merit-based salary equity—is it being addressed on a recurring basis? Another is salary compression. Because salary is not tied to rank at the U, significant variances in the salary of seemingly equally qualified individuals can exist—often due to when they were hired. In addition, although market factors influence salaries of recently hired assistant professors, they have less effect on the salaries of more senior faculty. The result is assistant professors making as much as associate professors and often as much as full professors. In our opinion, there must be some sort of plan or approach to this “salary compression” issue and the demoralizing effects it can have on dedicated faculty. We’ll begin to work on this once we get the compensation policy situation clarified.

The other big issue is the relationship between salaries of professional and administrative faculty, and clinical-track faculty and tenure-track faculty. Is there a problem with how merit raises are allocated among these different groups? Is there even a merit process other than for tenure and tenure-track faculty? We don’t know the specific answers to either of these questions. However, what we do know is that how these issues are handled has a definite influence on the internal rapport among these employment categories.

For more information on these issues, contact Feeney at (612) 625-9731 or feene001@tc.umn.edu.