It is no secret that Eastern’s faculty and administration have a lot on their hands. However, each position within each department has different responsibilities, and not only that, but there are different salaries.

Department chairs and deans, who are considered administration, have very different responsibilities from each other and from the faculty. However, each department’s duties differ slightly.

Blair Lord, the Provost and the vice president for Academic Affairs, said the department chairs’ salaries differ from the deans’ for a variety of reasons.

“Most of our department chairs have been elevated from a faculty position here at Eastern, so they all were carrying a faculty salary,” he said. “When they become chairs, they’re unlikely to take less,” he added, laughing.

When the decision is made to make a faculty member a department chair, there is a negotiation on how much to add to the salary that already exists.

“The department chairs’ salaries carry a legacy of past salary history with them,” Lord said.

This is not the case for deans. Eastern has seven full-time deans and one interim part-time dean who will become full-time in summer 2011.

The deans are, for the most part, selected in an external, national search. Eastern faculty can also apply.

There are four academic colleges: Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Education and Professional Studies, and Lumpkin Business and Applied Sciences.

There are deans for every college including: Education and Professional Studies, Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Graduate School, Library Services, Continuing Education, and Honors College, in order of most-to-least paid.

Diane H. Jackman is the dean of Educational and Professional Studies and has been at Eastern for three years and nine months. However, William C. Hine is the dean of Continuing Education, the second lowest paid dean, and has been at Eastern for 24 years.

Lord said the process for picking a dean is more “market-driven” than the process of hiring a department chair.

Part of a department chair’s job is to make sure that there are no problems within any of the faculty-student, faculty-faculty dynamics, or any combination thereof.

Mary A. Hanner, the dean of Sciences, who was already at Eastern before becoming dean, explained that the job of all deans at the university is to facilitate what happens in the department.

“(Facilitating what happens is) a broad statement for making sure everybody has the personnel they need, oversight of recruitment and hiring the faculty, we make sure that they have the equipment that they need and the budgets for teaching materials,” Hanner said.

Hanner comes in as the second-highest paid dean. She makes $130,459.80 annually.

Most of these are universal duties for deans, however, there are specific duties unique to certain departments. For example, since Hanner is the dean of Sciences, there are off-campus field sites for students majoring in the sciences to take field trips to, and part of her job is to oversee those.

John P. Stimac, the dean of the Honors College, said each dean has a different set of jobs, so it is hard to compare workloads.

“Every college has its own responsibilities, and difficulties, as well,” Stimac said.

Stimac was also already employed at Eastern when he became dean on July 1. Being the newest dean, Stimac is the lowest paid dean at $108,387.12 annually.

As dean of the honors college, Stimac does not have as many faculty members to oversee. However, he handles students from 33 majors, where deans of the academic colleges have fewer majors to oversee.

Also, some colleges can be more expensive. Hanner explained that as dean of Sciences, she has to make sure all teaching equipment is budgeted for. Things such as telescopes for astronomy, compasses for geography, etc. have to be accessible to students and teachers within the College of Sciences.

Since deans and department chairs have almost always been faculty members before becoming part of the administration, they have a reference point when changing status. There is no minimum salary for either position.

Although department chairs can return to faculty status, the same is not true for deans.

“I know that my salary, using some national data, my salary is just about at the mean of the national data,” Hanner said.

Stimac explained that he trusts his employers to pay him a fair salary. Going from a professor to department chairman and then to dean, he did almost no negotiations on salary.

“I just said, ‘Pay me what you think is fair,'” Stimac said. “For me, it’s not about the pay, it’s about the opportunity.”

Journalism chairman James Tidwell said department chairs have one foot in administration and the other foot with faculty.

“So, it tends to be a hybrid position,” he said.

Tidwell, the sixth-highest paid department chairman at $130,310.16 a year, said chairs used to feel left behind in salaries. Chairs, who cannot negotiate as part of the union, do not get raises with faculty.

That all changed when department chairs started receiving pay raises when their department chair status was renewed every three years.

“(That is) equivalent to what you would get as a full professor when you’re getting a (Professional Advancement Increase,)” Tidwell said. “The council of chairs worked on that for quite a while with the provost to try to eliminate those sort of disparities there. There are safeguards in place that should be able to make sure that chairs don’t fall behind in salaries.”

Tidwell also said that no two departments are the same, and because of the different environments, chairs will have differences in what they do.

Even though a faculty member changes status when becoming a dean, he or she is still able to teach depending on the amount of time is had to do so. Stimac, for example, taught four classes in the fall semester. However, not all deans feel that they have the time to do so because of increased responsibilities.

Although salaries for different faculty members may seem uneven at first glance, Lord said that salaries are not based on a department’s size or popularity.

“The department, the base of it, may not be the biggest department with the most majors and the most faculty and the biggest budget,” Lord said. “You can have a big department and a discipline that faculty nationwide are not hired in at the highest salaries. So, there is a sense of a market there because-I’m just picking this (major) randomly- philosophy is not going to generate the same kind of faculty salary that accounting does.”

Melissa Sturtevant can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected]