There are two principal reasons for having ranks in any personnel system: to supply incentives for sustained, high-level performance, and to clarify lines of command and control. Only the first of those is relevant to a university faculty.
Perhaps the limited number of ranks that we see at most major universities reflects the egalitarianism that we want in the academy. When nearly all full professors have the same rank for the last 20 or 25 years of their careers, we avoid even hints of inequality in power. However, we have bought that fuller expression of egalitarianism at a substantial cost in reduced incentives and morale.
With the exception of a scattering of named professorships, the personnel system in place at most universities offers no incentives for professors to improve or even maintain their level of performance. Some, possibly most, professors do improve or maintain level of performance but it is not because of any university incentive to do so.
Ranks serve as very powerful incentives to improve performance even if they do no more than confer official recognition of achievement. Look at the enormous effort people put into achieving higher ranks in bridge, chess, tennis, or judo merely for the official recognition that those ranks confer. When we preclude nearly all professors from advancing in rank during the entire last half of their careers, we preclude them from getting official recognition of their achievements. That depresses morale.
Additional grades within or ranks above full professor would provide the incentives and confer the recognition that is lacking in the current system. This would directly increase performance and morale. Furthermore, raises that would accompany achievement of the higher ranks would also go a long way toward reducing salary compression, another morale-killer at the university.
One might argue that differentials in salary increases, rather than in rank, might serve to motivate performance. And so they might, if the differentials were large enough. However, history shows us that salaries overall tend to increase very slowly, typically at less than the rate of inflation, and that differentials in the rate of increase are generally so small that they cannot and do not serve to motivate performance. In fact, for rational actors whose performance is responsive to monetary rewards, differentials in salary increases actually discourage performance diverting faculty efforts from academic to non-academic pursuits where monetary incentives are much greater.
That salary compression is common at most large universities is clear evidence that salaries tend to increase at a lower rate than inflation. Because the rate of increase is so low, it is often decreed that a large percentage of any increases are to be across-the-board (ostensibly to cover increases in cost of living). Thus, little is available to reward level of current performance or to compensate people for performance that was not rewarded in the past. No rational professor invests extra time and money to improve performance because of the expected financial return on that investment. For the average professor at Auburn, the expected financial return of working an extra 1000 hours a year on teaching and research is less than 20% of the return on working those same hours at McDonald’s.
Adding grades within or ranks above full professor with associated salary increases would supply at least some of the incentives that are now missing. These would have to be ranks that a substantial percentage of professors might expect to attain if they continued to perform at a high level, not ranks that only a handful of professors could attain. For example, there might be Professor II and Professor III grades for which full professors would become eligible after seven years of service in the next lower grade. Promotion to each grade might carry a $5,000 increase in salary.
Adding such grades or ranks would have the additional advantage of greatly reducing or eliminating salary compression. The $5,000 raises that could come at seven-year intervals would compensate for the fact that during those years other salary increases would not keep pace with inflation.
Florida, Rutgers, and North Texas are examples of universities that have ranks above or grades within full professor. There is a single rank at Florida (Distinguished Professor) and North Texas (Regents Professor) which can be attained by a 20-25% of the full professors or 10% of the whole faculty. At Rutgers, the full professor rank is divided into two grades and, within each grade, into steps. As with the others, only a limited number of professors can be promoted to the higher grade.
Auburn should give serious consideration to establishing such a system. In an environment where extraordinarily tight budgets have left the faculty increasingly despondent, this may be the only way to keep up both performance and morale.
