University professors earn the highest salaries of any college in the state, according to a report released by the American Association of University Professors Monday.
According to the report, the average annual salary for a full-time employee at the University of Virginia is $109,400, which is nearly $8,000 more than Washington & Lee University, the second-ranked Virginia university in terms of average salary.
AAUP’s annual report surveys only full-time employees whose role is at least 50 percent instruction-based, and does not look specifically at whether an individual has faculty status.
Law Prof. George Cohen, chair of the Faculty Senate, said the report hid the true disparity of incomes among University teachers.
“The first thing you have to understand about the average is that it is an average,” Cohen said. “So, if you average $50,000 and $350,000 salaries, that’s a $200,000 average. It doesn’t mean that everyone is making $200,000; it means that there is a wide variance in the different schools and departments.”
Full professors at the University earn an average of $143,200, placing the University in the 80th percentile of the doctoral institutions that participated in AAUP’s survey. Conversely, instructors in general averaged $53,100, which is only in the 46th percentile.
Cohen said it is important for the University to offer high faculty salaries to remain competitive with its peer institutions — a sentiment echoed by University President Teresa Sullivan in November when she proposed a $65 million commitment to raising faculty salaries.
“You have to think about salaries in comparison with people’s opportunities elsewhere,” Cohen said. “If we are trying to get the best possible faculty members to come here and get them to stay here, we have to be competitive with the schools that we think of as our peer schools.”
Sullivan also announced last year a goal to break into the top-20 on the Association of American Universities’ list of faculty salaries, a goal approved by the Board of Visitors at its meeting in February.
“I think that people just need to understand that, if you want to have high quality, you have to be willing to pay for it,” Cohen said. “If you don’t take care of this issue, if you don’t ensure that you have the highest quality faculty, everything else [in the University] is not going to be as successful.”
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