[Back to Inside]

By Amy Geiszler-Jones

President Beggs will soon appoint a 14-member "equity oversight panel" that will look at whether WSU practices "systematic" gender, race or age discrimination.

The standing panel, comprising faculty, staff and students nominated by employee senates and student government, will review all reports dealing with equal treatment at WSU and see if WSU needs to collect more data. It will not be a grievance committee, Beggs noted.

The panel will include one faculty member from each of the six colleges, and two representatives from the unclassified and classified staff and the student body. Other members will be equal employment opportunity officer Leonard Clark, who will chair the group, and Nancy McCarthy Snyder, director of institutional research.

Similar equity committees are being formed at all six of the state’s public universities.

"The formalization of the committee is fitting what the Board of Regents asked for, but it actually started with a legislator being concerned about salaries, especially with respect to gender," said Beggs.

Earlier this year, a gender study by the American Association of University Professors prompted several news stories. The study said women professors still lag behind men in rank, salaries and numbers.

Shortly after the study’s release, Beggs asked the Office of Institutional Research to run numbers on WSU faculty salaries, based on a model he and other statisticians had developed at Southern Illinois University about 25 years ago.

Last month, the Board of Regents recommended the other Kansas universities use the same model.

Faculty pay is generally affected by three variables, the SIU group had discovered: college (which indicates how competitive a field is), rank and time in rank.

At WSU, 72.05 percent of the variance in pay last academic year was attributed to those factors. When gender, ethnicity and age were added to the mix, the percentage rose to only 72.094 percent. When he reported those numbers in a general faculty meeting in April, Beggs said the numbers showed that WSU doesn’t appear to have a systematic discrimination problem.

A report on this academic year’s salary variances has been generated but was unavailable at press time.

The salary variance study will be just one report the committee reviews. "An effort will also be made to identify meaningful comparisons for all unclassified staff," Beggs said.

Other data will be the annual EEO report and exit interviews for all employees.

Some faculty have suggested other qualitative data be collected, as well.

"I hope we can eventually get to a comfort level of being able to say we believe the differences in salary are mostly related to performance," Beggs said.

"The intent is to report to the Legislature that we are not systematically discriminating against people, and what the oversight committee let’s us do is to show we’re constantly monitoring that. And when you say that to the Legislature, you say that to the public."