Dear Colleagues,
As you no doubt are aware, WSU will be implementing a salary increase program for faculty, administrative professional staff, and graduate students, to be effective January 1, 2014. Details on the WSU program are available on the Budget Office website.
Basically, this salary increase program includes an across-the-board increase of 4% for all faculty, administrative professional staff, and graduate students (regardless of funding source), and provides an additional merit “pool” of 1% of the total salary pool for an additional increase for eligible tenured, tenure-track, and clinical faculty, not to exceed the top 1/3 of faculty based upon meritorious performance since the last salary increase program.
In addition to these funds, we are very pleased to announce that the Pullman-based leadership of CEA has elected to implement a supplemental salary program to further recognize, reward and retain meritorious faculty, through an additional 1% pool, or approximately $150,000, provided from a reallocation of the CEA’s Pullman permanent funding level.
The college academic leadership (Dean, Associate Deans, Department Chairs, and School Directors) has agreed upon the following approach for both the centrally provided 1% merit pool and the additional CEA 1% pool:
- Distribution of the WSU 1% merit pool will go to no more than the top 1/3 faculty of the College, based upon overall performance.
- Distribution of the CEA Pullman 1% pool will be based upon performance as indicated in part by annual review rankings over the last 5 years, and may also include market equity factors, retention issues, and overall strategic contributions to the units and the CEA.
- In Pullman, CEA administrators will not participate in either the 1% central merit pool or the CEA additional 1% pool.
- For faculty located in Tri-Cities or Vancouver, identification of faculty for potential merit increases will be conducted at the campus level, with the top one-third identified and forwarded to the chancellor on the urban campus.
You should know that the funding for the 4+1% increase being provided centrally has been made available, not by the state legislature, but through a WSU internal reallocation of funding. This is the same with the CEA 1% pool – it is being funded through a CEA internal reallocation of funding of our permanent state funding. We are not using the new engineering expansion funds to cover this additional 1% merit pool.
The 4% increase includes all faculty, AP staff and graduate students that were on appointment as of September 15, 2013, regardless of the source of funding. WSU is funding the 4% increase centrally for all faculty, AP staff and graduate students that are currently funded on permanent state funds. For those of you who are supported on sources of funding other than permanent state dollars, your 4% increase will be funded by the source of funding that supports your salary.
Finally, while this amount will not make up for the years of stagnant salaries, it nevertheless represents a significant effort on the part of the WSU administration to begin to address some of our salary issues, and for this effort we can be proud and grateful.
Sincerely,
Candis Claiborn, Professor and Dean