UW-Whitewater is losing quality teachers to other schools.

State, university should focus on education

Resources should be focused on keeping our best professors

By: Royal Purple Staff

Posted: 5/14/08

We grow up in a society that values the individual pursuit of happiness. For many of us in the modern world, that equates to our ability to find an increasingly better standard of living.

That standard can be based on how much money one makes and the quality of the environment in which one lives and works.

UW-Whitewater regularly loses professors to other institutions on the basis of pay. Students express disappointment when this occurs, because they feel they are losing out because their university cannot pay them enough. After all, who wouldn't leave for more money?

For example, the school is currently losing Associate Professor of Communication Pete Smudde to Illinois State University and communications lecturer John Luecke to High Point University, a private liberal arts school in North Carolina.

Associate Professor of Language and Literature Marilyn Durham, who has taught at UW-Whitewater for roughly 20 years, says there's more to it than that.

"When you come to teach here you are making a commitment to undergraduate education," she said. "It's really on a case-by-case basis, but those moving up to other universities intentions' may have changed and are now interested in more scholarly research-writing books."

Even Durham admits, however, that people will surely go where they are going to make more money.

According to a 2006 survey compiled by the American Association of University Professors, the median salary for a professor at UW-Whitewater was $71,900, for associate professors $58,200 and assistant professors $54,100.

Ray Baus, a communications professor and another 20-year veteran of UW-Whitewater, says it often does come down to money.

"Differences [in pay] are more pronounced at one level than they are at another," Baus said. "Assistant professors are not a large gap, but when you look at associate professors you see something different."

He contends that in general "the state of Wisconsin has not been kind to the UW System" and that "when you hear how other schools pay in relation to how your school pays it has affects its reputation."

With rising tuition and waning state aid, UW-Whitewater needs to focus more on what is at the core of a university-its instructors. New buildings and sophisticated technology may look good on its face, but without the best people behind it, it's all for naught.

Roughly $20 million was spent on renovating the university center in order to attract new students and provide a more modern environment. However, the student that chose to attend UW-Whitewater based on this may realize that by the time he or she is ready to take upper-level classes, the professor who instructed them has left, forcing a change in curriculum.

The university trumpets a modern, technological environment, but when graduates working in their field are recommending universities to students who are shopping around after high school, they may be suggest steering clear of UW-Whitewater; after all, they couldn't even hold onto that beloved professor.

The consistency and real improvement any organization seeks can be lost when deciding how money is best spent, and administration should shift its focus back to maintaining an effective and long-lasting faculty.