No public explanation for how shifting engineering budget from FAMU to FSU will help resolve faculty salary disparities

Early into her FAMU presidency, Elmira Mangum presented the university Board of Trustees with a budget workbook that described the problem of faculty salary disparities in the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering (COE). That document dated April 29, 2014 said that “over the years, salary increases at FSU and no corresponding increases at FAMU have contributed to the disparity.”

This problem is part of the reason why FAMU has a much smaller number of engineering professors at the college than FSU does. The workbook explained that: “When [FAMU’s] most outstanding faculty receive better offers, FSU often is unwilling to let the College lose them. For FSU faculty, FSU provides counter offers and for FAMU faculty FSU provides new faculty lines with competitive salaries to retain them. While the net effect benefits the College, from [the] FAMU perspective however, it shifts the distribution of faculty between FAMU and FSU, especially the most productive.”

The $10.9M COE appropriation that FAMU received from the legislature for 2014-2015 paid for facility operations and the salaries of 23 FAMU professors and 27 FSU professors. FSU received a separate appropriation of $5M in its general revenue (E&G) budget that paid for another 36 FSU professors.

When FAMU engineering professors have received better job offers, FSU has often hired them in order to keep them from leaving the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering. FSU has been able to do this because of its separate engineering appropriation, big general revenue budget, and larger amount of tuition dollars.    

The April 2014 workbook said the “immediate solution” to this problem was to “bring the average academic year salaries of assistant professors, associate professors and full professors of FAMU to the corresponding national/FSU averages of $85K, $98K and $125K, respectively.” That required $430,000 in new recurring funds.

FAMU sought money for this purpose during the 2015 legislative session and lawmakers agreed to increase the budget for the College of Engineering. The appropriation went from $10.4M in 2014 to $12.9M in 2015.

But now, the COE operations appropriation is no longer part of FAMU’s general revenue. The legislature shifted the funds to a new budget entity entitled “FAMU/FSU College of Engineering” in March of this year. On June 3, FSU President John Thrasher said that his university will be the new fiscal agent for the college. He later told his board on June 26 that FAMU agreed to this change. FAMU was the fiscal agent from 1987 through 2014.

The FAMU administration has not released any public statement denying Thrasher’s claim. It also has not explained how letting the $12.9M COE budget move from FAMU to FSU would help resolve the faculty salary disparities. If FAMU is no longer the fiscal agent/budget manager of the College of Engineering, it cannot ensure that the funds are used to increase the salaries of FAMU engineering professors.