Strapped UW losing English professors

For six years, she explored 19th-century British novels as an assistant professor at the University of Washington. Now Goodlad teaches "Literature in the Age of Victoria" at the University of Illinois. She was lured to the Midwest last year by higher pay, a lower cost of living and brighter financial prospects.


	Raimonda Modiano, an English professor at the UW, says she is completely fulfilled in her position, but she worries about the future of the department. "We're losing all our young blood." Dan DeLong / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

"For the first time in my life, really, I feel as if money isn't a major concern," she said.

Goodlad is one of several well-regarded English professors who have left the UW for better-watered academic pastures at such schools as the University of Michigan, Duke University, New York University and Saint Louis University.

Pulled by larger salaries and the feeling of being wanted, pushed by declining morale and recurrent budget crises, they are departing in numbers that alarm administrators and threaten the department's standing as one of the best in the nation. Ultimately, that could make it harder to attract talented teachers to the department and devalue an English degree from the UW.

Among the English department faculty, much of the concern about the departures flows from fears that scholarly achievement will erode and with it, the department's standing among U.S. colleges and universities.

For graduate students, the "brain drain" can be keenly felt.

"What happens is you apply (to the UW graduate school) thinking these people will be here, and you come and they're not here," Ph.D. candidate David Cho said.

Cho, a teaching assistant in the department, said Goodlad and Srinivas Aravamudan, a former UW professor recruited by Duke, were specialists in his field of interest, post-colonial literary theory.

The English department is not the only one at the UW struggling to hang on to gifted professors. Average faculty pay at the university lags behind the competition -- eight similar public research institutions clustered mainly in the West -- by 11.4 percent, according to figures released by administrators last week.

A 2000-01 faculty pay comparison, this one with 24 peer institutions across the country, shows the UW closer to the average. But the school is 13 percent short of placing in the top fourth of the schools, the longstanding goal set by state higher education officials. Average faculty salaries at Washington State University fell 16 percent short of its peer-group average in 2000-01, and 5 percent to 15 percent short at the state's other four-year public schools.

The UW salary gap could widen, with the university's Board of Regents voting yesterday to provide no general salary increase as part of a 2002-03 budget, revised to absorb an $18 million spending cut imposed by the Legislature. Lawmakers, wrestling with a statewide fiscal trauma, eliminated a scheduled cost-of-living salary adjustment at the UW as well.

But the regents will include $1 million in the UW budget for faculty recruitment and staff retention.

From President Richard McCormick on down, administrators and faculty at the UW point to the English department as one of the hardest-hit by the compensation crisis. The average salary of $62,706 a year runs 21 percent behind those of peers at the eight comparable universities, according to the administration's figures; only 10 of the UW's 70 departments lag more.

The English department is among the largest on campus, with 50 regular full-time faculty slots. Of the 29 faculty members hired since 1989, 13 have left the university, and the 14th will go at the end of the school year. They have been replaced largely by younger, less-experienced and less-established teachers.

The turnover is disturbing, said Shawn Wong, chairman of the English department.

"Early in my tenure as chair, we started to lose people to private universities, like Duke or NYU," Wong said. "They can outbid any public university if they really want somebody. Since the year 2000, we've started to lose people to public institutions that are our peers."

Not every professor who has left for another job based the decision strictly on salary. Yet for many of the defectors, money talks.

"Money was certainly a factor," Goodlad said of her decision to leave; her salary rose from $47,000 at the UW to $55,000 at Illinois, a 17 percent increase. With Champaign's more affordable real estate, she also was able to buy an "amazing" house for less than $200,000.

"But money also meant that a lot of other people I really valued were leaving," she said. "Particularly what you see going are the colleagues who had a lot to offer intellectually."

Money, too, influenced the departure of Aravamudan, an expert in 18th-century British literature who saw his UW salary of $47,000 come close to doubling when he accepted an offer from Duke in 2000.

"I really liked the University of Washington," he said. "I very much fell in love with Seattle as well."

When Duke made its pitch, Aravamudan said, the UW came up with "a very handsome counteroffer," if somewhat short of what Duke put on the table. But Duke's strength in his specialty appealed to him, he said, and the school's overtures made him feel valued. And the department he left, he said, is not a happy camp.

"People are badly underpaid, they feel undervalued and that translates into the sort of things like bickering and being thin-skinned," Aravamudan said. "The fact that people around me were underpaid demoralized them and demoralized me.

"Simply paying me better because I got a good outside offer wouldn't solve the problem."

The counteroffer to Aravamudan is not an isolated case. In fact, Wong said, professors have discovered that the only way to wangle a significant pay increase is to attract an outside offer to prompt a match from the UW.

"That's a very dispiriting thing to do," Goodlad said; it's exhausting and reeks of bad faith. "Eventually, you just go."

A few years ago, the UW created a system of pre-emptive offers, authorizing a department chair to sweeten a professor's pot in response to feelers from another school. But that's hardly an ideal solution, Wong said.

"It makes it difficult for faculty whose salaries have lagged behind," he said. "Some people get raises because they're more marketable or younger or doing current research that's needed by another institution."

And the resulting deals can blow the salary structure apart.

"The discrepancy from top to bottom is huge in our department," Wong said. Some full professors, the top academic rank, earn around $55,000 a year, he said; others make almost twice that.

Nonetheless, Wong said, "Morale is good in the sense that everybody knows they're all in the same pot. No matter how much money you make in this department, you are underpaid -- and if you aren't underpaid now, you will be two years from now."

The problem is particularly acute, Wong said, with younger faculty who are rising in their fields. The university can attract top-flight talent at the entry level of assistant professor, he said, "because we are competitive at that level, and this place is in Seattle; some of the 'Rainier factor' is still there."

But after a string of small or non-existent annual raises, those faculty members see their compensation fall behind pay at peer institutions -- or even that of newer UW hires.

There's little faith in the corridors of Padelford Hall, the English department's headquarters, that the Legislature will reverse course and pump more money into the university, Wong said. So the academics are looking elsewhere.

"Our department is trying to raise more private funds and taking very aggressive brainstorming sessions to try to build up the private part of our endowment to pay for more professorships," Wong said.

But a slippage in status doesn't necessarily diminish the classroom experience for students, at least not immediately.

"It's not something that I've noticed with my actual classes," senior English major Megan Chadderton of Edmonds said.

"It's not a pivotal issue," said Rick Chan, a senior English major from Seattle. "In my experience, I have had very good professors."

Yet Melissa Wensel, who advises the UW's 800 undergraduate English majors as director of academic services for the department, said the departures take their toll on "everything from the ability to offer (specific) courses to the opportunity for students to establish mentoring relationships. They get to know these exciting young faculty people and all of a sudden they're off to Duke or somewhere." (Editor's note: The spelling of Wensel's name was incorrect in the printed version of this story)

After immigrating from Romania with little more than a suitcase, Raimonda Modiano earned her doctorate at the University of California at San Diego and joined the UW English department in 1973. A scholar of 19th-century British Romantic poetry, she rose to the rank of full professor in 1986 and holds a joint appointment with the Department of Comparative Literature.

Ten years ago, Modiano was wooed by the University of Massachusetts when it sought to hire her husband, UW administrator Norm Arkans, now associate vice president for university relations. The couple decided to stay in Seattle, but the offer-counteroffer maneuverings meant a $20,000 salary boost for Modiano. She currently makes $76,536 a year.

"I'm completely fulfilled," she said last week, during a break from teaching a senior seminar on Coleridge and Wordsworth. "I am totally in love with this institution and with this department. It's a wonderful place."

But Modiano fears for the future.

"We're losing all our young blood," she said. "We have reached the worst point in the history of the English department ever. There's no question about it."

P-I reporter Gregory Roberts can be reached at 206-448-8022 or gregoryroberts@seattlepi.com

Add P-I Local headlines to