University of Arizona unit leaders had broad discretion in deciding how to divvy up pay raises that faculty and staff will receive in the first week of October, Chief Financial Officer John Arnold told faculty senators.
Some responded with disappointment that it isn’t simply an across-the-board raise for all.
“We implemented a salary increase program. We established a pot of dollars for staff and a pot of dollars for faculty,” CFO John Arnold explained Monday, Sept. 8, at the first Faculty Senate meeting of the new academic year. “Those salary increases will take effect the first week of October. We gave broad discretion to unit leaders on how to allocate those dollars.”
Once the salary increases were determined in each unit, unit leaders were asked to submit the finalized distributions. Arnold said he hadn’t seen all the distributions yet, as some units were still finalizing their decisions.
“As we work through fiscal ’27 budget, I know it’s a priority for (UA) President (Suresh) Garimella to continue to work on salaries, so we’ll look at that again for next year,” Arnold said.
UA officials announced in late February that they would increase the university’s minimum wage from $15 to $16.50, and offer raises for “most employees,” starting in October.
They said the raises would be given from a pool equaling 2.75% of eligible staff salaries and 2.25% of eligible faculty salaries in each college and division.
Additionally, they said senior officials who make more than $250,000 annually would be exempt from the raises.
At the Faculty Senate meeting, Arnold explained that central administration established certain rules with unit leaders for the salary increases, saying there had to be a merit component to raises, and they did not allow for across-the-board increases. However, most of the unit heads kept a portion of the raises across the board and then gave a merit-based raise on top of that, he said.
The College of Agriculture, Life and Veterinary Sciences, for instance, sent out a notice saying it will give across-the-board raises of 1% for faculty and 1.25% for staff, and merit-based raises of 1.25% for faculty and 1.50% for staff.
The College of Nursing, on the other hand, is only giving out salary increases based on performance evaluations conducted during the 2025 annual review cycle. Eligible faculty will get a 2.5% or 2.25% raise, depending on their rating in that review.
As for UA’s Arizona Institute for Resilience, all staff and faculty are receiving across-the-board raises of 1.375% and 1.125%, and the remaining 1.375% salary pool for staff and 1.125% salary pool for faculty will be applied as merit increases at the discretion of AIR leadership.
While acknowledging the salary increases were positive news since many people at the UA hadn’t gotten one in years, Secretary of the Faculty Katie Zeiders said despite that, and despite this year’s erasure of the university’s budget deficit, there are faculty in each college still dealing with frozen funds and not being able to spend internal money.
“So, it has come at a cost and continues to be,” Zeiders told Arnold, to which he nodded in acknowledgement.
Garimella, who started at the UA about a year ago, pledged to end the university’s budget deficit, originally estimated at $240 million in 2023, in the fiscal year that ended July 1, and he and Arnold succeeded in doing so. The UA’s former financial crisis, revealed by then-UA President Robert C. Robbins in November 2023, eventually resulted in budget cuts and 328 layoffs, including the elimination of 13 vice president posts, according to previous reports.
While dealing with the financial challenges, Arnold has said Garimella directed that raises be provided starting Oct. 1 as an “overdue investment” in the UA’s workforce.
At the meeting, Zeiders said two issues had come up in the process of carrying out the salary increase program this year.
One was that this time, faculty promoted in the last year were exempted from receiving raises, she said, asking why that decision was made. To this, Arnold said central administration allocated one pot of money for the salary increases and another pot for promotions. Consequently, anyone who received a raise through a promotion was left out of the salary increase program.
The University of Arizona
The second issue Zeiders addressed was that decisions about the raises were made over the summer, and that put department heads and deans in a difficult position, giving them very little time to finalize the distributions.
“Some of the (salary increase distribution) plans were accepted as late as mid-August, and then they had two weeks to determine who got a merit increase and that’s a lot of pressure on directors, deans to have a fair process and a transparent process,” said Zeiders. “So, part of my question is, how are we going to do this different next year? ... What did you identify as the challenges and the missteps, and how can we make this rollout a bit more smooth for our administrators and then the transparency around it?”
In response, Arnold started out by acknowledging that there was quite a bit of confusion around the salary increases and what faculty and staff can expect to get. This led to some back-and-forth between his office and Provost Patricia Prelock’s office, he said, also adding there were delays due to conflicting guidance that went out from his office, the provost’s office and human resources.
“One thing I’ve learned since I’ve been here is you can never communicate enough, there’s no such thing as overcommunication,” Arnold said. “I thought we had explained adequately (but) we had not, and so, if and when we do this again, we will make sure we have better written guidelines that go out over and over.”
UA Chair of the Faculty Leila Hudson said the communication about the salary increases was “about as clear as mud.” She said she didn’t know anyone who knew what kind of a raise they will be getting in October, and the only certain thing was that newly promoted faculty like herself won’t be getting a raise.
“But the methodologies used by particular colleges, the amount of raise that any particular faculty member may receive, I think is largely unknown to anyone at this point,” Hudson told the Arizona Daily Star.
“I can also say that when I first heard about the salary increase program back in spring, of course I was pleased and excited because I, like so many, misunderstood and thought when it was first announced that everyone would be getting a well-deserved and long overdue pay increase of a little bit over 2%,” she continued.
“… As time went on, we learned that no, this was the amount of total payroll that would be dedicated to future pay increases, and that the methodologies would be decided by individual college deans without much transparency. And, there was a good chance that some people might not receive anything; most people would receive much less than 2%.”
Jeff Michler, a UA associate professor of agriculture-resource economics, echoed Hudson’s comments by saying he knew many people who were expecting a 2.75% or 2.25% increase to their salary.
“The administration did not do a good job of communicating the nuance that only some, but not all eligible faculty and staff would get the announced 2.75 or 2.25% increase,” he told the Star Friday.
At the meeting, faculty senator Ted Downing and research professor of social development, raised a question to Arnold of how central administration justifies the “outrageously large salaries” of top-level administrators when university-wide faculty and staff were getting about a 1% cost-of-living raise.
“Budgets show priorities,” said Downing, quoting Arnold from a previous Faculty Senate meeting in the spring. “What is the priority that explains these huge, huge salaries?”
To this, Arnold didn’t say much besides stating that generally the salaries are set on the basis of a number of factors, including market and performance. Downing responded by saying there was a market for faculty, and it wasn’t 1%.
Later, when asked if any UA employees with salaries over $250,000 had received raises without promotions, UA spokesperson Mitch Zak said they were not eligible for an increase through the salary increase program, but didn’t say if there were any raises given outside of it.
“Compensation adjustments for employees at that level prior to the SIP (Salary Increase Program) reflect their individual professional qualifications, performance, and job responsibilities, benchmarked to market rates,” Zak said.
Hudson said, based on the little information she has about the total pools of faculty and staff raises available for allotment, she’s quite sure that the amount to be distributed is nowhere near what people need to make up for the inflation and cost-of-living changes over the last year.
“And, this is part of a long trend of not keeping up with the cost-of-living and inflation, and being exempt from the kind of cost-of-living mechanisms that other state employees are afforded,” Hudson said.
“And then I would go on to say that, in fact, we don’t have a full overview of the salary increase program,” she continued. “With the raises due to roll out with the first October paycheck, we don’t know who’s getting a raise. We don’t know the methodologies designed by the different colleges and approved by the provost’s office, to decide who gets what kind of small or merit-based, or perhaps larger merit-based raises in the colleges. We simply don’t know.”
Michler added that nearly all faculty and staff members he’s spoken with think a 1% across-the-board raise is “woefully insufficient” given their additional workload due to the UA’s financial crisis, which was revealed in fall 2023, and the debt issue created by Robbins and former CFO Lisa Rulney. One percent is well below the rate of inflation since the COVID-19 pandemic, he added.
“Many employees wonder why the current administration chose to prioritize reducing the budget deficit to zero in just 20 months instead of prioritizing providing just compensation to the university’s employees,” Michler said.
“The current administration could just as easily have decided to reduce the budget deficit over a three-to-four-year period, and provided funds freed up by the slightly longer repayment period so as to provide meaningful salary increases to those who educate and serve our students,” he said.
“What good is being debt free on your house if, in the meantime, you’ve let the foundation crumble and the roof collapse?”
