NC school teachers aren’t the only ones struggling. UNC faculty are also enduring low pay

In all of the back and forth about the state budget, public school teachers have received a lot of attention, as they should. But there has been scant coverage of the fact that University of North Carolina system faculty salaries have been flat for 12 years, even as health care costs and the cost of living have increased significantly.

While faculty have on the whole received legislative raises of 1.5% or less since 2008, costs of participating in the North Carolina State Health Plan have increased annually by more than twice that rate. In terms of cost of living, the US inflation calculator shows a whopping 20.1% increase in inflation/cost of living from 2009-2019. In other words, since faculty members have received no real cost of living adjustments during that time, UNC system faculty have actually experienced a pay cut of well over 20% during the past decade.

Attempts to raise this issue have come largely from brave UNC system faculty, like UNC-Charlotte Faculty Senate Chair Jeffrey B. Leak and Appalachian State University Criminal Justice professor Elicka Sparks. They are desperate for someone to take notice, despite the backlash that can ensue when university faculty dare to raise salary issues.

I am a UNC system faculty member in the English Department at Western Carolina University, a regional comprehensive university in the rural western part of the state, as far as can be from the centers of power in Raleigh. My family has lived in Western North Carolina since the 1700s, predominantly in Buncombe and Transylvania counties, and I am a product of and have taught in a number of UNC system schools.

I know North Carolina cultures and politics in ways that many UNC system administrators and NC legislators do not. And I’m writing out of a love for North Carolina as well as from a sense of urgency on the part of its university system. Finally, I want to acknowledge that I am writing from the position of someone who has been much better compensated than many of my colleagues, given that I held an administrative position for a few years that allowed me to renegotiate my salary. I am, therefore, writing from a position of advocacy as opposed to self-interest — although I certainly don’t deny my stake in this issue.

Last December, Nick Martin published an article in the New Republic titled “The Decade when Republicans Stole the States: How the North Carolina GOP’s Anti-Democratic Chicanery Became the National Party’s Playbook for Electoral Theft.” His article details the ways that North Carolina “managed during the latter half of the twentieth century to carve out a surprising legacy of providing its citizens top-tier social services, for instance in the form of a strong public K–12 and university system.” But things changed when North Carolina, the “once progressive beacon” of the South, was reshaped after the 2010 midterms when the GOP overtook both the NC House and Senate and then implemented unconstitutional gerrymanders that have shaped North Carolina politics ever since.

Faculty in the University of North Carolina system have been invisible victims in these political changes, caught up in the freedom of speech wars that have riled campuses in recent years, and often publicly punished, as I have been, for daring to speak out against blatantly partisan and corporate influence within the UNC system. In addition to being financially starved, we’ve also been silenced, and these two realities are very much by design.

For more than a decade, the salary stranglehold on UNC system faculty has been perpetuated by our state’s legislature and ignored by the media. Flat wages over such a long period actually constitute cuts in annual salaries. But more importantly, given the failed GOP experiment with regard to all public education in North Carolina since 2010, I hope to have made clear why faculty salaries and higher education issues in North Carolina in particular deserve and even require media and public policy scrutiny, now more than ever.

This story was originally published February 16, 2020 at 12:00 AM with the headline "NC school teachers aren’t the only ones struggling. UNC faculty are also enduring low pay."