This is the first in a two-part series examining faculty pay raises at Marquette. The second article will run next Thursday.

Marquette was given an extra million dollars to allocate pay raises for the next academic year. When contract offers come out on March 1, some teachers will be seeing more money on the bottom line than others.

Contract offers should come to faculty members on Monday, according to the Director of University Communication Ben Tracy. However, an additional $1 million has been allocated for a special faculty salary pool, on top of the annual $3.3 million that is set aside for faculty pay raises.

The extra million dollars comes from a proposal Provost Madeline Wake made to the Board of Trustees in May 2003. Wake told the Board of Trustees the average salaries of Marquette faculty — assistant, associate and full-time professors — were below the 60th percentile of salaries of professors across the nation, according to numbers provided by the American Association of University Professors.

According to Director of Research for the AAUP John Curtis, the average salary in the 60th percentile for an assistant professor for the last academic year was $58,125. The average 60th percentile salary for an associate professor was $68,822 and the average 60th percentile salary for a full-time professor was $96,392.

According to the Curtis, the average salary of an assistant professor at Marquette University was $54,500. The average salary for an associate professor at Marquette was $64,600 and the average salary for a full-time professor at Marquette was $85,200.

"At the time of my presentation professors here were making below the 60th percentile of what professors across the nation were making, according to numbers provided to me by the AAUP," Wake said.

After Wake made her initial presentation, the board told Wake and Senior Vice President Greg Kliebahn to come back to the next meeting with a plan to raise professor's salaries. At a meeting held last September, the board approved a million-dollar budget bonus for faculty salary increases to be awarded on the basis of merit. The Office of the Provost then told deans of various departments to disperse the allocations to each college to 30 percent of faculty on the basis of the comparisons with national salary averages and merit, according to Wake.

The other $3.3 million general merit pool allocation will be given to deans and vice presidents for distribution as adjustments to base pay. University policy calls for salary increases to be awarded strictly on merit based on annual performance reviews. During these reviews, things like federal research grants and works published during the review period are taken into account. Because of this, some individuals can earn salary increases greater than 3 percent. The allocation of funding for merit raises does not mean employees will automatically receive raises, according to Tracy.