I recently received feedback on one of my posts from a reader who posed the question, “How does the College of Communication receive a $30 million grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation, yet still struggle to pay a visiting journalism professor a reasonable annual salary?” I was intrigued by the inquiry, so I decided to look into it.
First off, the Scripps Howard grant received by the School of Communication on September 12, 2006, was for $15 million, intended to support growing curriculum, technology improvements, teaching fellows and scholarships. As I've mentioned, this type of grant falls under a budget separate from faculty salaries and other operational costs. However, President McDavis and his administrators have repeatedly reported their intentions to provide employees with a three percent raise on average, while also spending $1.2 million to fund the first year of a five-year plan to increase faculty compensation. I personally think this displays some progress, yet some faculty members believe that the three percent raise merely suggests a cost-of-living increase, and that the implementation of higher healthcare premiums will offset the raise.
In a "Reader's Forum" in Monday's Athens News, Kenneth Brown, a professor of chemistry who serves on Faculty Senate, made this point, noting that "OU is literally putting money in faculty members' right pockets, while taking it out of their left pockets."
But Bill Decatur, Vice President for Finance and Administration, said in an Ohio University news release that the university is raising healthcare costs only to avoid bigger cuts elsewhere in the budget. "This helps us protect jobs and our core academic mission while still providing our employees with a very competitive benefits program," he said. Faculty Senate will continue to hash out the details with administration before the final budget plan is due at the end of June.
Hope this clears up some of the confusion about different spending procedures and how they relate to different types of Ohio University budgets.
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Brittany, you're partly right about the clarification, but you leave out an important part of the equation. The $15 million endowment does, in fact, include funding for the Scripps Howard Visiting Professional, but the endowment wasn't given early enough last year to earn sufficient interest to pay one year of salary. Also, the university's foundation is only providing 4% return on the investment, which wouldn't provide enough $$ for the usual salary for that position.
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