Faculty members want Regents President Jamie Koch to recheck his numbers.
Koch wrote an open letter to the community Feb. 5 saying the average faculty salary was $94,000.
Koch said he got his numbers from Mark Chisholm, director of Institutional Research.
In an interview with the Daily Lobo, Chisholm said the average salary for faculty - including associate, assistant and full-time professors - is $83,576.
Koch said that about 90 percent of faculty have nine-month contracts, which include 39 personal days per year, meaning they work 189 days a year.
Chisholm said that when he was asked about the number of days faculty members are contracted for, he estimated it was about 189 days.
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"The 189 just sort of came up in discussion, and it's close, but probably not a precise or an official number that shows up on anyone's contract. What shows up on people's contract is a 39-week contract," he said.
Associate professor Gary Weissman said he was disappointed with Koch's letter to the community and that many others found it insulting.
"I can guarantee you that most faculty on this campus don't make that kind of money," he said. "Most of us are sitting around waiting to find out when we get the days off and how we sign up for that, and then we also are waiting for our pay raise to get the $94,000."
At the Feb. 10 Board of Regents meeting, Koch said he used the numbers from a faculty compensation study provided by Chisholm.
Chisholm said faculty compensation consists of salary and benefits, which include social security taxes, medical insurance, retirement and tuition remission. He said the full set of benefits on average cost the University about 24 percent of a faculty member's salary.
Chisholm said he provided the numbers for the regents' meeting but not the Main Campus faculty average salary Koch used in his letter.
Koch said he wanted to restate his numbers at the regents' meeting, which Chisholm also attended, to certify the accuracy of the data.
"I just wanted to make sure that people have a clarification that the numbers I used were the accurate numbers that I received from Mark Chisholm," he said. "I just stand by the numbers that were provided to me by the University."
Koch said his letter was meant to praise the faculty and encourage working as one.
"The article had to deal with everybody working together, and I didn't mean to hurt anybody's feelings or make anybody unhappy," he said. "It's that our key faculty - our tenure and tenure-track faculty - we need to be proud of them."
Weissman said misrepresenting the numbers sends the community the wrong message. He said most faculty members work long hours that run into their spare time and that they deserve a raise.
"We wouldn't choose to do anything else and can't really complain about the long hours, but we do complain when our president of the Board of Regents infers that we don't put in that many hours and we get paid more than we get paid and that we have all of these days off," he said.
Chisholm said the numbers provided for Koch's presentation are from a study completed by universities around the country for the American Association of University Professors.
"It gives you the ability to do a peer comparison of your salary by rank, and so it's something the University has been doing pretty much the same way for about 20 years," Chisholm said.
AAUP measures faculty salary and compensation for faculty members who primarily teach, as opposed to performing administrative functions.
Chisholm said this includes assistant professors, associate professors and full professors whose primary job is to teach. It excludes people who are also vice presidents or deans, and doctors and clinicians teaching clinical science courses.
Chisholm estimated about 800 faculty are included in the study.
Provost Suzanne Ortega said in an e-mail that she is aware the average salaries of UNM faculty are below the average of peer institutions and that the University is working to improve that.
"This has been true for a very long time and is the reason why President Schmidly included developing a comprehensive faculty compensation strategy one of his regentally approved goals for the year," she said.
At the regents' meeting, Koch presented the numbers from the 2007-08 faculty compensation study, but Chisholm gave results from the 2008-09 study, which is not yet complete.
Average faculty compensation for peer institutions this year was not yet available, but last year their average was 7 percent higher than UNM's current pay.
Chisholm said these numbers are consistent with the pattern seen in previous years.
"We're not any farther behind then we have always been - about 10 percent behind our peers," he said.
Deputy Provost Richard Holder said in an e-mail that these numbers are hurting UNM in more then one way.
"In general, I can tell you that UNM faculty are paid less than their peers at similar institutions, and this does impact recruitment of new faculty and retention of present faculty," he said.
