Raids have UI feeling brain drain
BOISE – The University of Idaho is losing some of its biggest-name professors to other schools that are willing to pay them much more, UI President Tim White told legislative budget writers Tuesday.
“We are getting raided,” White told lawmakers.
Among those who have left is historian Carlos Schwantes, author of more than a dozen books including “In Mountain Shadows: A History of Idaho” and “So Incredibly Idaho: Seven Landscapes That Define the Gem State.”
Schwantes, who first joined UI in 1984, is now a professor of transportation and the West at the University of Missouri, which offered him a starting salary of $120,000 – when he was the highest-paid faculty member in his UI division at $85,550.
Other high-profile departures have included a wheat geneticist, a food science and toxicology professor and a chemist, all of whom left for much higher pay elsewhere. The chemistry professor, Jeannie McHale, got a $30,000 raise, a new lab and a $400,000 start-up package just by crossing the state line to Washington State University at Pullman.
Humberto Cerrillo II, UI student body president, said, “The faculty people we’re losing are ones who inspire a classroom, create discussion. … We’re losing that feel, we’re losing that touch to other, more competitive universities.”
When Sen. Mel Richardson, R-Idaho Falls, asked White how much it would take to “protect the faculty at the U of I,” White said about $14 million.
“It’s a lot of money,” he told the stunned lawmakers on the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, who write the state budget. That kind of money would get UI’s faculty salaries up to the median, White said. “It would give us the war chest we need to recruit and retain the best.”
Gov. Dirk Kempthorne’s recommended budget for all of Idaho’s four-year colleges and universities next year, including the UI, Boise State, Idaho State and Lewis-Clark State College, calls for a total increase of $11 million in general funds, which would boost university budgets by 4.8 percent.
The universities had requested a 23 percent increase.
On Tuesday, presidents of the UI, BSU and ISU made their budget pitches to the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, and all highlighted faculty pay among their biggest needs.
Cerrillo, a junior international studies major from Lewiston, said, “We need to be visionaries and look ahead, and find a way to appropriately fund the people who are teaching our students at the university.”
Rep. Dick Harwood, R-St. Maries, questioned whether people really are leaving the university because of pay levels. He said he read a national study over the summer that said other factors often are more important when people change jobs.
White noted that the UI has lost 10 information technology workers in the past year, five of them to WSU. Salary was their main reason for leaving, and they averaged $10,000 increases in their new jobs.
“We hear over and over again the compensation issue,” White said. “That is one of the elements, and that’s something you can help us solve.”
In the past year, the UI cut $4.75 million from its budget and eliminated 67 positions. White, who has been on the job a year and a half, said those changes were part of a process of aligning the UI’s programs with its resources and focusing on priorities. “We needed to do that,” he said.
While he thanked lawmakers for approving immediate, permanent, merit-based raises averaging 3 percent for state employees including those at universities – Gov. Dirk Kempthorne signed that bill into law Tuesday – White also said it’s not enough to bring faculty salaries up to par.
“Quite frankly, we have a gap that is large,” he said. “We’re 22 percent behind the average of those we compete with. … We have to do more than just 1 or 2 or 3 percent in order to close that gap.”