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Colleagues,

I write to share with you some progress we’ve made on compensation. First, I met with Chancellor Brown yesterday and she shared the following from the UNC System/President Peter Hans:

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The message below was sent out to legislators with this updated version:

“We are not asking that a specific dollar amount be appropriated for salary increases, but rather ask to be treated equally to other state employees should you address salaries.

UNC System employees have not had a salary increase in two years and have not received an increase that was equivalent to that of other state agencies in three years. UNC System faculty and staff have been working hard educating, promoting student success, and producing groundbreaking research. We have seen the results of these efforts in our steadily increasing graduation rates and nationally recognized research on treatment and prevention of COVID-19. More details are included on pages 6 and 7 of the attached document.”
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Next, the Chancellor and I discussed my plan to have Dr. Sean Mulholland (Professor of Economics) present his compensation work at the Board of Trustees (BOT) meeting in early March. To make this happen, I gave Sean my talk time. But, some really good news, the Chancellor reached out to BOT Chair Bryant Kinney about Sean’s work. Because of their commitment to this issue, a full 30 minutes of time has been allotted for Sean; he will have 15 minutes to present and 15 minutes to take questions from BOT members. This is great news & I thank Provost Richard Starnes, Chancellor Brown, and Chair Kinney for their commitment to advancing this issue!

The other good news is that I’ll have my talk time back. So, Sean will present the quantitative reality, and I will present the qualitative reality based on your comments. I am so pleased to let you know that I received 113 comments from DHs to Adjuncts; this, resulting in 53, single-spaced, pages of comments. I just completed inputting the data into an excel spreadsheet. What I plan to do for my BOT talk, is to simply read anonymous, telling, comments to the BOT. Doing this will bring to life Sean’s numbers; it will tell the real story, of real faculty difficulties faced because of the 13-year absence of a cost-of-living (COL) adjustment (this equates to our freshman being 5-years-old the last time we had a meaningful adjustment from the State of N.C.). There’s something fundamentally wrong with that.

I will do whatever I have to as Chair to make progress on this issue (if I have to run a bake sale, I will).

See you on zoom this afternoon from 3-5pm EST for our Open Faculty Conversation,

Kadie

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Open Faculty Conversation

https://wcu.zoom.us/j/83184700348

Meeting ID: 831 8470 0348

+16468769923,,83184700348# US (New York)

+13017158592,,83184700348# US (Washington D.C)

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