UPDATED: Sept. 6, 2018 at 9:56 a.m.

Syracuse University has eliminated the faculty gender pay gap, Vice Chancellor and Provost Michele Wheatly said Wednesday during a University Senate meeting.

SU invested $1.8 million to make salary adjustments for more than 200 women faculty, Wheatly said in Maxwell Auditorium. The announcement comes almost eight months after the university released a report that found women faculty at SU generally earn less than men.

The report concluded that those pay gaps were university-wide and statistically and economically significant.

“I can assure you that all incidences of statistical significance in pay disparity have been eliminated,” Wheatly said to the faculty Senate body. “We continue to be surveillant, as I mentioned, because of in- and out-migration of faculty. We will continue to keep our eyes on this, and we will rerun the algorithm for this coming fiscal year.”

She added that deans and administrators all worked to fix the faculty salary gap. At the end of Wheatly’s speech, a group of senators gave a two-minute presentation expressing their dissatisfaction with the university’s work and what they called a lack of transparency.

Dana Cloud, a professor of communication and rhetorical studies, said pay between faculty is still unequal. She said part of the reason for that is because the deans of each school and college didn’t properly allocate funds.

In response, Diane Lyden Murphy, dean of the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics, said she has been fighting for pay equality for 40 years, and was able to raise salaries for women faculty in her college. But she said she isn’t sure how other colleges decided how funds were divided.

Lori Brown, an architecture professor, said she thinks that there should be a yearly review of pay equality.

Other business

Provost Faculty Fellow Kira Reed and Assistant Provost Amanda Nicholson gave a presentation on the redesigned first-year experience for the fall 2019 semester, which the Senate will vote on later this academic year.

They also spoke about the short-term program in place this year, which requires all new students to read comedian Trevor Noah’s “Born a Crime.” Noah will speak at SU during the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration in January.

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Professor Janice Dowell also urged the university to publicly announce that it had divested from companies involved in the private prison industry. For more than a year she has pursued a public statement from SU and the Board of Trustees committing to never invest in companies involved with private prisons.

Syverud, in response to Dowell, said that the Board of Trustees will not commit publicly to divesting from companies with possible connections to private prisons. He referenced an email he sent to Dowell, in which he said, “Given our robust socially-responsible investing policy, the (Investment and Endowment Committee of the board) will not make public declarations about any individual prospective investment, including  — but not limited to — private prisons.”

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this article, Kira Reed was misnamed. The Daily Orange regrets this error. 

Published on September 5, 2018 at 10:15 pm

Contact Catherine: [email protected] | @ccleffert