After a difficult year for higher education in Wisconsin, including what many academics saw as a clear threat to tenure, the University of Wisconsin at Madison spent a total of $23.6 million on faculty retention. Twenty-nine professors rejected counteroffers and left the flagship campus during the 2016 fiscal year, while 111 who entertained outside job offers were retained.
Sarah C. Mangelsdorf, the provost, said Madison had a 77-percent retention rate over all, slightly higher than the university’s five-year average of 74 percent. But the number of faculty members who requested counteroffers jumped by about 40 percent from last year, to 144.
“Our faculty as a whole are quite loyal to the institution,” Ms. Mangelsdorf said during a conference call with reporters on Friday. “But do I think, nationally, that people thought this was a great time to raid Wisconsin? Yes.”
About $1.9 million of the money used for retention was earmarked for pay raises, while the other $21.7 million was one-time funding for costs like research support, additional undergraduate and graduate assistants, and new equipment, Ms. Mangelsdorf said. She said she wasn’t sure how the $23.6-million figure compared with what Madison has spent on faculty retention in recent years, because university officials didn’t start gathering that information in a central location until fairly recently.
Professors most often cited salary as their reason for considering job offers elsewhere. While a number of faculty members said publicly that the political climate, including budget cuts and new layoff and tenure policies, was their top reason for moving to another institution, Ms. Mangelsdorf said “that’s a very small percentage of our faculty.” It’s also difficult to gauge how much politics influenced people’s decisions, she said, because officials didn’t do exit interviews with all of the professors who left.
Officials hope this year’s jump in outside offers will prove to be an anomaly, Ms. Mangelsdorf said. “We’d like to think we made a strong statement that we’ll fight to keep our faculty.”
