UPDATED: December 10, 2018 at 1:53 p.m.

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n December 2017, Syracuse University released a faculty salary review report showing a statistically and economically significant university-wide gender pay gap. The report showed that women faculty made as little as 77 cents to the men faculty’s dollar.

Four months later, on Equal Pay Day in April, more than 200 women faculty came together to criticize the gender pay disparities in a spread advertisement in The Daily Orange. Next to signatures of women professors from every school and college at SU, a statement outlined their collective demand that the university address long-term effects of the pay gap, among other grievances and acknowledgements.

By July 2018, some women professors at SU had received their salary letters from their school’s dean’s offices. The documents specified their salaries for the 2018-19 school year and if their salaries were raised to that of male colleagues.

In September 2018 — nine months after the initial report — during the first University Senate meeting of the fall semester, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost Michele Wheatly announced that the university had resolved the pay gap by allocating $1.8 million in funds to close it.

But faculty said the communication leading up to that point and after created a wave of confusion, as well as skepticism on whether or not pay inequities across the university had been resolved.

In an emailed statement to The D.O., Wheatly and Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs LaVonda Reed said that, after developing a recommendation for deans and providing them with a portion of the $1.8 million in funds, the deans were “tasked with reviewing them and making the appropriate adjustments.”

The autonomy in communication surrounding the salary gap, and the monetary measures taken to adjust that, has created inconsistent responses from faculty in SU’s schools and colleges — particularly at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. The Maxwell School did not use the university’s report to make salary adjustments, and instead conducted its own study and data analysis. The school had one of the largest salary discrepancies between men and women faculty, according to the university’s report released in December 2017.

Maxwell Dean David Van Slyke concluded from his office’s independent study that salary inequities were only present at the full professor level, while the university report found inequities at each level. The independent study also concluded that inequities in the Maxwell School were much smaller than the university report suggested, said Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, a professor of history in Maxwell.

After Van Slyke’s announcement last spring, the Maxwell Faculty Council created the Maxwell Faculty Council Salary Equity Subcommittee to review the independent analysis. When asked why he disregarded the report’s algorithm and used his own data to evaluate Maxwell’s pay disparities, Van Slyke said, in an emailed statement to The D.O., it was “to fully understand the landscape in the Maxwell School.” The internal study’s analysis was taken into consideration when making salary adjustments, he said.

Lasch-Quinn, who was on the subcommittee, said the group analyzed the internal study, raised concerns and presented those concerns to the faculty council at the end of the spring semester, where members of the dean’s office were present. The subcommittee recommended that the dean’s office use the university’s data provided in the December report to distribute the equity adjustment instead of the internal analysis. This was because the subcommittee felt the independent analysis had minimized the inequities and was not considering the historical impact of the pay gap, among other things, Lasch-Quinn said.

After the presentation, the council voted to accept the subcommittee’s suggestion that the dean’s office forgo its internal analysis, she added. The dean’s office continued to use its independent study and data analysis.

“Admitting that you’ve underpaid people is a great first step but wouldn’t the next step be ‘how am I going to fix that seriously?’,” Lasch-Quinn said.

According to Lasch-Quinn and the subcommittee, one of the ways to fix the inequities seriously would be to address the long-term effects of the pay gap for professors who have been at the university for an extended period of the time.

“I was operating for 28 years here with a feeling of good faith,” Lasch-Quinn said. “I love Syracuse University, I always will, but I thought things were different.”

Deborah Pellow, a professor of anthropology at Maxwell, said the communication between the Maxwell dean’s office has not been sufficient. When she’s requested presentation slides with information on the independent analysis, she’s either been told the office can’t share them or that she can view them with members of the dean’s office, Pellow said.

“At this point, I’d like to see clear process,” Pellow said. “I’d like to have our questions answered. I’d like to know what value system are we talking about when we do this.”

Pellow questioned why SU would leave the issue in the hands of the same offices that allowed the gap to form in the first place.

Taped to Pellow’s office door is the advertisement with 207 faculty signatures. Pellow said administrators at Maxwell never addressed her or anyone about the advertisement, although Chancellor Kent Syverud told her he thought it was “terrific.”

Just two floors below Pellow’s office in Eggers Hall, Audie Klotz, a Maxwell professor of political science, hangs the same spread on her office door. While she takes pride in the advertisement, she said she finds the salary gap that inspired its creation “embarrassing.”

Klotz said the timeline of the university’s plan to address the pay gap was never made clear.

For years, the annual raise letters were distributed in the days after SU’s commencement ceremony, but they have increasingly been handed out later.

Even if faculty wanted to appeal their salary update or express concerns after receiving their letter, there was no clear process for following through with that, Klotz said.

“There is no appeal process. There is no backup,” Klotz said. “You’re just supposed to go plead.”

Van Slyke said in the statement that he has “invited every female Full Professor in Maxwell to meet with me individually.”

“Of all the schools on campus, you would think the school of public policy, with public administration experts at the helm, would do better on the process in particular,” Klotz said.

In a statement to The D.O., Van Slyke said the adjustments made by his office “have eliminated the differences.”

Faculty across campus experienced similar lapses in communication and leadership, professors said. Others, though, said they thought schools handled the pay equity issue well and appropriately.

In the School of Architecture, professor Lori Brown describes SU’s efforts to close the gap as “piecemeal.” Brown said that, not only was she alarmed by the university’s unclear direction, but also concerned for each woman faculty member who endured that process unsupported.

Brown’s dissatisfaction was heightened in early September, when Wheatly said during a University Senate meeting that statistically significant pay inequities had been eliminated, she said.

“There is no way that there are no inequities left. I just do not believe it,” Brown said. 

Tula Goenka, a television, radio and film professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, received nearly a 20 percent salary increase this summer. Goenka believes Newhouse Dean Lorraine Branham is committed to closing the gap — but what Goenka called insufficient communication has been frustrating, she said.

The salary equity adjustment is mentioned nowhere in her salary letter for the 2018-19 school year. Goenka said she assumes that anything above the usual two to three percent raise came from the funds allocated from the Provost’s office.

Goenka, Pellow, Lasch-Quinn and Klotz, as well as other women professors interviewed by The D.O., all said they believe there are still pay inequities left uncorrected at SU.

“We were able to remove the statistically significant disparities at the University and unit levels,” Wheatly and Reed said in a statement to The D.O. 

It was difficult for Brown to determine where her salary stood relative to men faculty in the School of Architecture, she said. The size of the school is small — there are only six full professors in the entire school — and the faculty salary review committee was unable to provide gender comparisons in their report at the risk of revealing individual salaries.

While the salary report provided more specific trend information and data for the faculty, before that point, faculty at SU relied on Committee Z, an annual report providing information on faculty salaries. The Committee Z report was published by SU’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, a higher education advocacy group. The Z reports, which were discontinued by SU in 2014, were the only evidence for faculty to advocate for higher salaries for more than three years.

Sandra Lane, a professor of public health and anthropology in the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics, used the Committee Z reports to determine where her salary stood. Lane said her salary was more than $25,000 below the mean salary for professors in her category, despite her advocating for higher pay at least eight times since joining SU in 2005.

“We’re supposed to be kind of quiet about our salaries,” Lane said.

After the report was released in December, Lane said she reached out to her dean to address its findings. Lane said that Falk Dean Diane Lyden Murphy responded and reassured Lane that she was working on it, but could not disclose more than that.

Lane received a significant pay equity raise in her salary letter from this summer. Though she said it didn’t raise her to full equity, Lane was “very pleased” with the raise and with Murphy.

“I’ve tried to be a really good citizen and not expect more than the university can do,” she said. “I realize that my dean is trying to … take care of a whole college of people who have a variety of needs.”

Assistant professors Lynne Vincent and Penelope Pooler Eisenbies in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, one of the schools that ranked among the highest for salary discrepancies in the report, are also pleased with the actions taken by the dean’s office, they said. Vincent, an assistant professor of management, felt that the school was open and forthcoming in its communications about its efforts to resolve the pay inequities.

“It appears they made a serious effort and I appreciate that,” Vincent said. “I’ve always felt valued here.”

Pooler Eisenbies, an assistant professor of finance practice, said she believes the dean’s office has done its best to address the salary disparities and has responded positively.

Denise Heckman, an associate design professor in the School of Visual and Performing Arts, said it’s still unclear what VPA Dean Michael Tick did to address the gap.

Since receiving her salary letter from this summer, Heckman said she has reached out to Tick, her department chair and Associate Provost Reed to discuss the issue and has yet to receive a clear answer on any meeting time.

At SU’s School of Information Studies, only having one department has contributed to the openness of discussions about the pay equity issue, professor Jennifer Stromer-Galley said.

During a semi-annual faculty retreat in the spring, Stromer-Galley led a discussion on the issue and brainstormed with those present on how the iSchool could resolve the discrepancies. She said faculty have been making strides to find long-term, systemic changes, while iSchool Dean Liz Liddy has been primarily focused on case-by-case problems.

“I truly believe everyone should get paid fairly, equally, what they’re worth for the work they’re doing,” Liddy said. “(I had) full faith and trust in them and what they were doing so I had no concerns about it.”

Jill Hurst-Wahl, an associate professor of practice in the iSchool, was one of the representatives for the school on the faculty salary review committee. She said the committee, which met several times a month for about one year until the report was released, was extremely thorough in their processes. But she said all the committee could do was submit the report, issue recommendations and turn its conclusions over to the provost and then the deans to make final decisions.

Hurst-Wahl, who said she’s happy with how Liddy has handled the issue, recognizes that the deans are conflicted, being involved in a private institution in which salaries are not public information.

This inflexibility is what makes Stromer-Galley more appreciative of the fact that the university released the report in the first place. She’s still skeptical, she added, as to whether or not university administrators are taking the necessary steps to fully examine the systemic and underlying issues behind the pay inequities.

Cover illustration by Ali Harford | Managing Editor

CLARIFICATION: In a previous version of this post, the Maxwell Faculty Council Salary Equity subcommittee’s suggestion related to the dean’s office’s internal analysis was misstated. The subcommittee called on the dean to modify its analysis.