The report says the effective salary drops must be understood within the broader political and economic context.
“Faculty compensation cannot be understood apart from politics, inflation, and institutional instability,” the report states. It notes that research funding has become more unstable under the Trump administration, which has issued executive orders that view DEI efforts as “wasteful” and “illegal.”
“Regardless of how institutions responded locally, the practical effect was to make the national policy environment more hostile to equity-oriented initiatives and more uncertain for institutions trying to maintain long-standing compliance and accountability practices,” the report states.
The report found that absolute salary levels varied starkly based on rank and institutional type. For instance, instructors at associate’s institutions with ranking systems earned an average salary of $63,155, whereas full professors at doctoral institutions earned an average salary of $184,361. Salaries at public institutions came in at $114,703 overall, whereas salaries at private-independent institutions came in at $145,148, and at $105,925 at religiously affiliated institutions.
Salary equity also remains elusive. For the most part, the report found, women earned an average of $108,678, compared with $130,064 for men. In other words, the report states, women earned salaries that were 83.6 percent of men’s salaries.
The largest gender disparity took place at the full professor level. “Women full professors earned an average of $150,245, compared with $172,101 for men, a salary-equity ratio of 87.3,” the report states. The ratios were “narrower but still unequal” for faculty of other ranks – 91.2 percent in the case of lecturers and 93.3 percent for associate professors.
The report says the overall 83.6 percent gender salary-equity ratio for all ranks combined is lower than the ratio for any individual rank “in large part because women remain underrepresented in the higher-paid segments of the full-time faculty workforce.”
The report casts faculty pay as “inseparable” from student learning conditions.
“Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions because the quality and continuity of academic work depend on the people who do it—and on the terms under which they do it,” the report states.
