Texas Association of College Teachers - LEGISLATION

Discussion on McReynolds' House Bill 3164
(Unofficial Transcript)

House Bill 3164 by McReynolds - House Committee on Higher Education - April 6, 1999

Committee Chair Irma Rangel: The chair will now lay out House Bill 3164 and recognizes Representative McReynolds to explain this wonderful bill. Oh, excuse me, Dr. McReynolds.

Bill Sponsor Representative Jim McReynolds: Thank you. We were looking about how many doctors their were on Appropriations, weren't we, Mr. Cuellar and Mr. Jones. Thank you so much for letting me appear before you, and as each of you may know, in Texas we are having a difficult time retaining and recruiting faculty in our public colleges and universities, in part because we are not paying competitive salaries in comparison with other large states. Over the last several years, presidents and faculty groups and others have come to the legislature expressing concerns about the problem and I think this bill simply gives them the tools to remedy the situation. House Bill 3164 makes the paying of competitive salaries a matter of public policy.

Madam chair, I have a committee substitute that I think Representative Farabee said he would lay out for me.

Rangel: O.K., Representative Farabee asks that we lay out the committee substitute to House Bill 3164 and it is so ordered.

McReynolds: Thank you, Madam Chair. The committee substitute to House Bill 3164 requires that general academic teaching institutions compare their salaries of tenured and tenure track faculty with institutions in their same Carnegie category from the other ten most populous states. If the Texas institutions determine that they fall below the average, they will devise a plan in conjunction with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to reallocate existing discretionary funds over the next four bienniums to bring salaries in parity with the average of the ten most populous states. And let me be clear that under the terms of this bill, regents are given complete flexibility over implementation. The bill does not establish a salary schedule or a requirement that any individual faculty member be paid a minimum or aq maximum amount and it recognizes that salary schedules, Mr. Goolsby, are disparate between different institutions. Finally, as this bill reallocates existing funds, their is no effect on GR and therefore no fiscal note and the bill simply expires in the year 2007. There are witnesses, but before we call them I would be happy to answer any questions that I could.

Rangel: Members, are there any questions? We have some witness affirmations, Representative. We have Dr. Tom Hoffman.

Dr. Thomas P. Hoffman: Good evening, Madam Chair and members of the committee. Thank you very much for the opportunity to address this group and testify on behalf of this bill. I appreciate very much Representative McReynolds presenting it to you and appreciate Representative Farabee offering the substitute.

I am Tom Hoffman. I am the State President of the Texas Association of College Teachers, and I am also a faculty member at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. My argument for improved faculty salaries is to recruit and retain the best teachers for the next generation of Texas college students. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board estimates an eight percent enrollment increase between now and the year 2005. And the reality may be even greater if your efforts to improve access and retention are successful, which I hope they will be. That may require a net increase of hundreds of new faculty members at a time when we are seeing a graying of the professorate in this state and we can expect significant numbers of retirements. In my two years as president of this association, I have traveled all over the state. I have visited more than half the senior public institutions in Texas and one observation is pervasive: we are not able to recruit the best, or ion many cases any, faculty because we are uncompetitive with our compensation packages. I wish I had current, hard statistics to offer you, but I do not.

Two years ago, our association collected a series of anecdotes from across the state regarding the difficulty in recruiting and retaining faculty members. Permit me a moment to paraphrase just a few. Quote: the salary offer was $44,000. The candidate was offered $60,000 from another institution. Which job would you take? End Quotation.

Quote: rank and file faculty members at my institution are so poor that our students, newly graduated, make more money than their professors. End quotation.

Quote: potential new hires come to our institution and they like what they see, but when we start talking money, there's no comparison, and they go somewhere else. Therefore, we've been forced to hire part-time faculty without Ph.D.s for less money. End quotation.

Quote: only one of our top three candidates qualified for the position. End quotation.

Quote: we ended up having to offer salaries that were significantly higher than the tenured senior faculty now employed making the same in our department. End quotation.

Members of this committee, I could go on and give you further examples, but I think you understand that the situation is a very serious one. Our accrediting associations and accrediting bodies require that we have qualified faculty teaching in our classrooms, and I know that you want that also. But you cannot imagine the time wasted in recruiting efforts and retaining faculty on the campuses across this state. I'm not going to say that this is time bomb with one major explosion because I see this as a weekly small detonation on campus after campus after campus across the state.

The legislation introduced by Representative McReynolds will generate the data that we all need to put our resources in the most valuable places. We appreciate your understanding and support, and I'd be happy to try to answer any questions that you may have.

Rangel: Members, are there any questions for Dr. Hoffman? Dr. Hoffman, it was good to see you again. Thank you for coming by and sharing this information. (Recognizes others in attendance supporting this bill but not wishing to testify: Dr. Charles Zucker, Chuck Hempstead, Wanda Douglas.) You are recognized to close, Representative McReynolds.

McReynolds: Thank you, Madam Chair. Members, I've taught at four of the state universities in this great state. The bill doesn't fix problems in higher education, it only addresses just one segment of probably twenty-five things we need to be looking at. But I know this: we come to session every two years, and two years upon two years upon two years we know we have a problem but sometimes we don't address that problem. I've tried to very maturely set this into motion, and that the best way to get home is to take one step at a time. This gives us eight years to implement something. It has no fiscal note. The flexibility to the universities will be that if they want to save money on electricity or if innovative things in computer technology can help them save money, then they can use those discretionary monies any way they wish to, but they have to come up with a plan as to how every two years they are taking a quarter toward moving toward the norm of the other ten most populous states. Representative Cuellar, do you have a question?

Representative Henry Cuellar: Jim, what exactly does this bill do, it's not a study, right? What happens at the end of eight years?

McReynolds, O.K., the bill goes away, but at that point we should be at parity with the other ten states. Let's look at the bill together, just look at the first part. Notice that on August the thirty-first of every year, that the governing board of every school, and they are identified as general academic teaching institutions only, and those are listed in the code, and they are going to do a study looking at tenured and tenure track faculty across ten states and in this comparison they are going to find colleges that are comparable to them, and that's what this Carnegie category is all about. Then, what this does, it comes to the Higher Education Coordinating Board, providing the governing body information generally provided to them by AAUP, the American Association of University Professors, which I belonged to for man, many years. We may find that some of the schools in the state are in parity, now, we may not. Whatever the case, we don't compare a ULLA to a Sam Houston - it has to be in this Carnegie comparison, a school of comparable size offering the same kind of education. And then what the governing board does, once it determines that at any given rank, that is instructor, associate, full professor and so forth, is less than, then what they do is adopt a program to reallocate their available resources that we give them, Mr. Cuellar, in your subcommittee and what the Appropriations Committee did this time. Now, what they will do is pick up a quarter of that deficit, that differential in that biennium. I think if we looked across the board, well, we're at the bottom of the most populous states, and it would be difficult to stand here and say this, what amount of money we're looking at, but maybe as much as four or five thousand dollars per faculty member. At least that's what LBB did until we took this bill out of discretionary funds. And that's essentially, Henry, how this works. Now granted in these ten most populous states that those salaries may go up over time, and in the second biennium you would have to meet one-half of what that's gone up to, and the next biennium if it's bumped again, and so on and so forth. But we have universities that can't attract new faculty. We have schools like engineering and business, liberal arts and humanities and so forth, but we just can't get anyone to come to the State of Texas or keep our own. We've got a problem here and I don't really know some of the problem other than really looking at it as best as I possibly can. This may not be perfect, guys, there may be a thousand things you can help add to it. I envy your positions in higher education, it's where my heart is, with you and this committee. Is this as important as helping students enter the university who couldn't otherwise have the opportunity? I don't know. But I do know that it is one of the major problems that we've got. It's a major problem and this is the best way I know to address it. I would certainly appreciate any input you have. Dr. Cuellar, you know a lot about state financing and as Vice Chair of Appropriations for Education maybe there are some thoughts that you have here that would help us deal with this bill. I think everyone here in this room, certainly Dr. Jones, knows first-handedly the problem that we have in our state universities.

Representative F. Brown: Let me offer that this is helping the student, because the better the professor, the more impact they have on the student. That helps the student and it helps the state. In the past I 've been real active with the business school at Texas A&M and I just grieve when I go out there and see quality professors that we lose not for ten thousand dollars or twenty thousand dollars, but for forty thousand dollars a year who go off to other institutions and there's nothing they can do about it because they don't have the funds available to compete. If we're going to compete with major institutions throughout the country, we have to have the funds available.

McReynolds: Thank you, Fred. Your school, where your home is, you lost 63 faculty, documented, to higher salaries in other states. Your micro engineering program, there are eleven professors, Michigan offered to hire all of them, en mass, and these are the things, guys, that we just have to think about and we have to plan for the future. We can't do this Band-Aid session-by-session, so how do we put something in place. All I know is that you've got to take the first step, and this is only one of so many things we've got to look at in higher education. How I appreciate what this committee does. We're giving a tremendous amount of attention this session to public education. We do, when we spend half of our budget on public education, and obviously to get a kid up to where he can read up to speed is a magnificent goal and a worthy dream and something we're going to pursue, I think, in this legislative session. But guys, we've got some of the finest institutions of higher education in the country. People come from foreign countries to our schools of higher education. There's a million problems in our public schools that your constituents and mine will tell us about, but we've got some good things going in higher education and I want to be real sure that we're putting something in place that will help keep that momentum going. Really, there's only two things, Fred, you've got to have literate students with a mechanism to be able to afford to be able to come to the school and you've got to have a good, quality, trained faculty. Everything else is collateral to that. Libraries are very important and those people in administration are vitally important, but the truth of the matter is that students and faculty, and there is a lot of legislation affecting students and I support every bit of it, good stuff, but we're going to have to look at this, either now or sometime, and maybe this is the will of the committee that you help me look at this real carefully and say that now is the time, I believe it is. Thank you again.

Rangel: Representative Farabee has a question.

Farabee: Thank you madam Chair. Representative McReynolds, I was wondering what that feeling was that I had I think you said that if we look at these pages with glee. I had a feeling, I didn't know what the feeling was, but glee, that's it. As we stay here until 10:00 PM tonight - glee, that's the word.

McReynolds: Guys, it's called good government, you get to participate in good government. And an ordinary pup like us to be able to do this, what a wonderful process we've got going on in this room.

Rangel: Any more questions, members? Dr. McReynolds, it is very clear that you have a great passion for higher education, and you do have a wonderful, sincere concern for our faculty, but I like the way you said students and faculty, because you're giving priority to students, because without students we wouldn't need faculty. I like the priority you give the students, because the students are the ones providing jobs for our faculty. And you know they really should be paid much more than what they are receiving, but we should look to the resources that we are going to provide so we can pay them what they all deserve, and I might as well say it because I've said it for 22 years, in my opinion we should resort to the state income tax. Unfortunately, it's locked into the Constitution, but you know, we're going to have to look to something other than property taxes in order to pay our teachers, our faculty, everyone what they deserve. Inflation seems to be going up, salaries are not going up, and it's making it difficult. We also want to express our concern for the staff at our universities.

McReynolds: Absolutely, very valuable people to our higher education process.

Rangel: And we're very concerned. I certainly hope that we will be able to look to another resource of income that we can provide our universities with what they all deserve. I think it was in about '86 that we cut something like about 16 or 18 percent, and I don't know that we have restored that cut back into our universities. I want to commend you for your interest and your concern, and hopefully we'll be able to obtain another resource other than ? Thank you for your passion. You will be noted as an honorary member of our committee. The chair at this time will withdraw the committee substitute to House Bill 3164. If there is no objection, then so ordered, and House Bill 3164 will be left pending, and if there are no objections, then it so ordered. Thank you.