Ohio University’s Board of Trustees walked out of Walter Hall on Friday afternoon with a new chairman and a commitment to increasing faculty salaries to compete with those at top-compensating state universities.
Salaries
The board reviewed discussions from its committee meetings in order to pass several resolutions, including one to increase salaries for all OU faculty by $6.1 million in the next three years.
“We’ve gone through the plan in great depth, and we support all aspects of the plan,” said Trustee David Wolfort, chair of the board’s academics committee. “We support that in the academics committee as we support all the hard work that’s gone into it.”
The plan asks the university to use its stable streams of revenue — tuition and state funds — to increase faculty compensation rates for all faculty, including Group 2 and regional campus faculty by 2.19 percent.
By the 2015-16 academic year, OU faculty will see the following approximate increases in total salary:
$3.9 million for Athens campus tenure-track faculty
$540,798 for regional campus tenure-track faculty
$739,631 for Athens campus Group 2, or teaching faculty
$939,405 for regional campus Group 2 faculty
The numbers presented by the faculty compensation task force are currently speculations, and they could be modified with changes in inflation or university revenue, as long as all faculty salaries reach the third rank among universities in Ohio.
“It’s another piece of the puzzle coming together with such things as the Capital Plan and the Completion Plan,” said Trustee Cary Cooper.
The board also discussed next
year’s budget, which might include tuition increases, and will vote on it at its June board meeting.
Tuition
The next meeting will take place at OU’s Eastern Campus after Spring Semester ends, but OU President Roderick McDavis said he plans on announcing a decision on tuition before the 2014 commencement.
“We do (this budget approval) in June, not because the students are not here, but because we want to give the campus enough time to have input into whatever decision the campus is going to make,” McDavis said. “We believe it was better to be transparent, it was better to allow for more discussion, than to be less transparent and have less discussion before we propose to the board.”
The board discussed which programs the university would invest in if a tuition increase is approved, but even the tuition scenario that would leave OU the most money — increasing it by 1.5 percent — would leave nearly $14.2 million of those desired program improvements unfunded, according to the March Board of Trustees agenda.
A 1.5 percent tuition increase would mean undergraduate in-state students enrolled at OU Athens campus would pay about $155 more, bringing tuition to $10,536 for the 2014-15 academic year.
“Most of (the funding proposals) that I’ve seen so far are meritorious, so we will have to work with the deans as we work our way through the budget to try to address that,” said Stephen Golding, vice president for Finance and Administration.
If these potential programs aren’t funded by OU’s stable streams of revenue, they might be included in other years’ budgets, or not at all, said Executive Vice President and Provost Pam Benoit.
“If there’s a life and safety issue that’s now more important, then that might bump it down farther (on budget priorities),” Benoit said. “It’s hard to say what might be on that list of priorities given what else might be on that list in the following year.”
OU administrators will talk with Student Senate and Faculty Senate and will hold open forums with students to discuss next year’s tuition.
The board’s voting session in June will be streamed on the board’s website, said Trustee Chairwoman Sandra Anderson.
The board also passed an impromptu resolution to inspect the underground tunnels by Baker University Center and Richland Avenue after an “urgent” situation that required closing Mulberry Street, said Trustee Janetta King.
“It would probably be a good thing to do regular inspections so these kinds of resolutions don’t come up,” King said.
Trustee David Brightbill was elected Chairman and Trustee David Wolfort as vice chair of the 2014-15 Board of Trustees. The board also approved a study that might potentially change vehicular traffic on Park Place.
— Dina Berliner, Seth Archer and Maria DeVito contributed to this report.
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