The\u00a0CU Board of Regents\u00a0on Tuesday agreed that keeping employees happy and keeping them, period, are necessary for the university\u2019s continued success. After hearing from campus leaders, the regents unanimously voted to approve a 3.1 percent meritorious salary pool for faculty and exempt professionals, as well as a state mandated increase of up to 3.6 percent for classified staff.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are no longer cutting fat, we\u2019re cutting muscle and bone,\u201d said Board Chair Michael Carrigan. \u201cWe are losing our talent; we are losing the competition to bring the best generation of teachers and researchers to this university. It\u2019s a difficult decision. Because the state is not doing what it needs to be doing to invest in its flagship university system, we have to look somewhere else for the revenue to try to protect and invest in our faculty leadership and our staff leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carla Ho-a, vice chair of the University Staff Council, told the board that voting for the pool would be \u201can important signal (of) how the Board of Regents feels about our staff and our faculty and the value they bring to this university.\u201d<\/p>\n
Campus leadership stressed salary increases were necessary to retain the university\u2019s best and brightest.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy top priority as chancellor is compensation for faculty and staff,\u201d said CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip DiStefano. \u201cWe\u2019ve taken $11.5 million in cuts this year. With those kinds of cuts, we want to reward the faculty and staff who are here, who are working harder than ever before, with some sort of compensation.\u201d<\/p>\n
CU Denver Chancellor Don Elliman said if salaries are increased, employees would be more willing to implement necessary cuts. \u201cWe believe a 3.1 salary pool is important to retain the quality of faculty we have and the quality of personnel we have. These people feel like they gave at the office and didn\u2019t get much back for themselves. And they didn\u2019t. If we go back to them and say we really do value what you\u2019re doing, then we can ask them to take some more cuts than they\u2019ve already been willing to take, which is substantial.\u201d<\/p>\n
UCCS Chancellor Pam Shockley-Zalabak said the past four years have been difficult, and that top talent have received competitive offers from other institutions.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not just salary and adequately rewarding people who are doing excellent jobs for our students,\u201d she said, \u201cit\u2019s also staying competitive so we can continue this into the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lilly Marks, CU vice president for health affairs and executive vice chancellor at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus, said without adequate compensation, the loss of faculty and staff could get worse.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs our economy starts to rebound, as other institutions with better funding start poaching for talent, we are one of the great poaching grounds,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
President Bruce Benson also spoke in support of the compensation pool.<\/p>\n
\u201cFolks, you have got to think about what the cost is of replacing good people,\u201d Benson said. \u201cI think it\u2019s terribly important that we continue to work to keep the people here. If I were doing this, I would be proposing 3.6 percent instead of 3.1 percent. We are doing a heck of a job here and I couldn\u2019t be more proud of our faculty and staff.\u201d<\/p>\n
— Cathy Beuten, CU System University Relations<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The\u00a0CU Board of Regents\u00a0on Tuesday agreed that keeping employees happy and keeping them, period, are necessary for the university\u2019s continued success. After hearing from campus leaders, the regents unanimously voted to approve a 3.1 percent (More)<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all","category-personnel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1mBpJ-2G0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10292"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10307,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10292\/revisions\/10307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}