Colorado higher-education officials complain that budget cuts are driving away their key faculty, but statistics and interviews with professors who left do not establish a clear link between minimal state support and faculty flight.
John Curtis, research director for the American Association of University Professors, said universities and colleges see the turnover just as business and governmental agencies do.
“There’s a certain amount of movement all the time,” he said. “A couple of dozen cases do not indicate a big structural problem.”
Among those who have suggested there is a problem is Dr. Larry Edward Penley, president of Colorado State University, who said his school constantly scrambles to find money to keep key professors.
“If we don’t pay these faculty what they’re worth, we could lose them,” he said at a recent Denver Post editorial board meeting.
Penley is echoed by Todd Gleeson, dean of the University of Colorado’s College of Arts and Sciences, the biggest college on the Boulder campus.
Gleeson said deans at other schools have told him that CU’s “salaries are low and faculty are movable.”
This summer, CU administrators repeatedly said the University of Kansas is targeting CU faculty because CU does not pay enough, but KU officials deny they are looking at CU any more than any other school.
“It’s news to me,” said James Woelfel, director of the Humanities and Western Civilization Program at KU. “I suppose there could be a particularly strong department at some university that another department might try to pick off, but that happens everywhere.”
Since 2001, higher education has faced more than $100 million in state budget cuts, but there has not been a flood of faculty resignations.
No statewide database of professor resignations exists, and different schools track the information in different ways, if at all.
At CSU, for example, eight to nine full professors left in fiscal years 1998, 1999 and 2000 each. The number increased to 10 professors in 2001, when the budget cuts started, and 13 professors the following year. But in 2003 and last year, the number of professors leaving dropped to three and five, respectively, despite continuing cuts.
CU does not keep campuswide statistics, but information from the College of Arts and Sciences shows a similar pattern. Twenty-three professors left in fiscal year 2001, but that has since dropped to 11 through 16 a year – similar to the numbers CU saw in the late 1990s. Other big schools, such as Metropolitan State College of Denver, did not have statistics for more than one year.
Penley told the story of a University of Michigan professor who recently turned down an endowed chair at CSU and wrote in a letter that it was over his concerns about the state’s budget cuts. School officials refused to provide the professor’s name or the letter.
But several faculty who recently left Colorado colleges did not cite low pay as the primary reason for leaving Colorado.
“It was a slight pay cut to come here,” said Martin Gonzales, an assistant biology professor now at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.
Gonzales, formerly at CU-Denver, said administrators there did not fulfill repeated promises for lab equipment.
“When I showed up, my lab was being used as a hazardous waste storage site.”
CU officials said a lack of money led to Gonzales’ resignation.
“He accepted a position at an institution with more funding and better facilities,” said CU-Denver spokeswoman Danielle Zieg.
Rick Ginsberg, who recently left CSU to become dean of KU’s School of Education, said he primarily left because it was a good opportunity to move up, and the school also had a job for his wife. Ginsberg, however, was concerned about what higher education in Colorado will look like if budget cuts continue.
CU faculty council chairman Rod Muth said that if CU doesn’t keep up salaries and facilities, good professors will leave.
“Staff morale goes down the tubes,” he said.
But the AAUP consistently ranks CU as one of the highest- paying universities in the Big 12 Conference and in the top 20 percent to 40 percent of all schools nationwide.
Staff writer Arthur Kane can be reached at 303-820-1626 or akane@denverpost.com.
