The combination of the pandemic and lower enrollment is hitting the school pretty hard.
Inside Higher Ed reports:
Cutting Faculty Salaries by Executive OrderIn the COVID-19–induced chaos of spring 2020, the University of Missouri system quietly added a section to its rules and regulations that allows for individual tenured faculty salaries to be cut by up to 25 percent. This could be for productivity, enrollment or other reasons.The rule change went largely unnoticed for a year, until news broke last summer that the School of Medicine at the university’s flagship campus at Columbia, or Mizzou, planned to slash multiple professors’ salaries by 10 to 25 percent following productivity reviews.According to information from Mizzou, fewer than 10 professors in three programs—medicine, veterinary medicine and agriculture—have been affected to date. But the system expects that more professors will see pay cuts as additional academic units adopt criteria for evaluating professors under the new policy.Alarmed by this policy shift, both in substance and how it was adopted, system professors have been fighting it for months.Mun Choi, system president since 2017 and also Mizzou’s chancellor since 2020, recently told professors that he’s not backing down, however.“I will not be making changes to the executive order,” Choi said in a memo to Kathleen Trauth, chair of the Faculty Council and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Mizzou. “Individuals who work for the university, whether faculty or staff, must fulfill important responsibilities that contribute to the mission of the university.”
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