In your article on alleged age discrimination against two senior faculty members in the School of Journalism, one of the complaining professors is quoted as saying “there was a clear decision made to give bigger raises to younger faculty with no merit.”
I am dismayed at the fact that a single professor arrogates the right and competence to determine that his colleagues have no merit. My understanding is that peer evaluations and the evaluation from the chair or director result in recommendations for merit-based salary raises.
This simply means that merit is neither determined ad libitum by an individual faculty member, nor solely based on peer evaluation ratings.
The article further states that “... both Washburn and Bernt have received the highest possible ratings on annual peer evaluations for each of the last six years — a distinction matched only by Cheng.”
This is not true since I received the highest possible ratings for each of the last six years, as well, which makes the allegation that “faculty with no merit” received bigger raises even more ludicrous.
Last year’s merit raise process had the obvious problem that the administration limited raises to a certain percent of the faculty (varying haphazardly by college). This mandated cap on who was eligible for raises implied that only a small pool of faculty would receive raises.
This policy has been criticized in Faculty Senate and in our local media because it would exclude those colleagues from merit raises who were meritorious but just below the threshold of eligibility.
If there were some discrimination in the process, it had to do with this arbitrary exclusion, but not with age discrimination.
Bernhard Debatin is a journalism professor and director of tutorial studies in journalism.
