Faculty members at Loyola University will receive salary increases averaging 3.5 percent next year.

Those raises will be based on two criteria. Part of the raises will go to reward each professor’s merit and the second part will go toward correcting what university officials call “salary compression.”

Salary compression is a phenomenon that happens when a longtime employee ends up earning less than new hires. This happens because the longtime employee’s cost of living raises failed to keep up with what other universities are paying.

Since Loyola bids against other universities when it hires new professors, new professors end up getting paid at a higher “market” rate when they start. But that means that the more veteran professors, who only got annual cost of living raises, are paid at a lower rate than their younger colleagues.

The compression payments are intended to correct that imbalance. According to Ed Kvet, provost and vice president of academic affairs, this will not be a one-time increase and there will be more payments in successive years.

Faculty senate member and chairman of the philosophy department, Mark Gossiaux, agrees with the new policy.

“Well certainly, I am in favor of faculty raises — what’s different about the year coming up actually is that in addition to merit raises, there also going to be some efforts to correct compression, which has been a problem here at Loyola,” Gossiaux said. “It’s certainly a long time coming and hopefully it’ll make things better.”

According to Kvet, a similar policy was implemented at Loyola in the 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 school years.

“We had planned to begin to address the issue of compression last year but at the time the university didn’t have the funding,” Kvet said. “Now that the university has the funding it is important we address the issue of salary compression that mostly effects those faculty who have the longest tenure at Loyola.”

Kvet said there are two ways in which implementation will take place.

“Two percent will go to the dean of each college to distribute for merit, and 1.5 percent will go for faculty salary compression,” Kvet said.

David Zemmels, mass communication assistant professor, said pay concerns shouldn’t end at the day of hire.

“Well it’s important to remain competitive to begin with,” Zemmels said. “There’s lots of universities in this country and so if we want the best and the brightest at Loyola we have to pay a competitive salary for incoming faculty — we also have to be sure that faculty are here are satisfied and happy to remain here and not drawn away by higher salaries at other universities.”

Only half of Loyola’s faculty has been here for more than five years.

Lee Yao, business professor and area chairman of the accounting department, said adequate pay is an important way for a university to stay competitive.

“We are living in a market-driven society,” he said. “Salary is dominated by the market. Supply and demand drives the salary.”

There are several faculty members who were concerned that 1.5 percent may not be enough to correct the university-wide compression.

“We need to take care of the big problem, I’m looking forward to fixing the problem,” said Ralph Tucci, mathematics professor and faculty senate member.

Kvet said that this year’s salary increase will not be the only one that will take place.

“The allocation of 1.5 percent for this year is the first installment of what will be a three- or four-year process in order for us to totally address the issue,” Kvet said.

Kvet said deans generally grant the merit portion of the raise based on teaching, scholarly and creative activities and service.

Faculty will be receiving their annual contract on March 15. The contracts will detail the new policy.

“People deserve to be fairly compensated and part of the compensation is their years of experience. I hope that a senior faculty member has learned something about how to teach, how to evaluate, how to do scholarship, all the things that faculty members are expected to do. The flip side is, if there’re not doing them, then they don’t get the increase,” said Lawrence Moore, associate dean for Academic Affairs and professor of law.

Pearla Mutombo-Watumba can be reached at [email protected]