Rutgers-Camden professors say they are paid less than their main campus counterparts, a pattern perpetuated by the school

Daniel Shain had worked at Rutgers-Camden for more than 20 years and chaired the biology department.

But his pay, he says, was about $22,000 less than his peers on Rutgers’ New Brunswick and Newark campuses with similar years of experience and accomplishments. Even some Camden campus faculty 10 years his junior earn more, he said.

He asked for an adjustment in 2020 through a university system developed a few years ago, and negotiated with the union to process complaints, but was denied. After he appealed that decision, a committee established to review such matters supported his case, he said, and sent it to the executive vice president for academic affairs, Prabhas Moghe, who passed it on to Rutgers-Camden Chancellor Antonio D. Tillis for reconsideration.

» READ MORE: Rutgers professors say they were shortchanged in salary equity adjustments, especially those who work in Camden

Tillis, who started at Rutgers-Camden in July 2021, denied the request again, Shain said. In fact, faculty union officials say, Tillis denied all 16 faculty cases that came back to his desk — a number Rutgers-Camden administration disputed in a statement but did not clarify how many were approved.

Requests to speak to Tillis were answered through spokespeople.

It’s part of a pattern, faculty there said, of the Rutgers system continuing to unfairly pay professors on the Camden campus as compared to their counterparts on the flagship campus in New Brunswick and in Newark. The union said Camden faculty were shortchanged in the first round of salary adjustments in 2021. The union had been pushing for changes since New Jersey’s pay equity law went into effect in 2018, and five female professors across Rutgers’ three campuses filed a lawsuit over unequal pay in 2020.

Despite adjustments to the system, problems persist, say faculty union officials.

“It’s disappointing and it just shows a lack of leadership,” said Shain, 58, who said he earned about $138,000 when he filed his initial appeal in 2020, while his peers earned about $160,000.

The crux of the problem: Faculty and the administration disagree on who qualifies as a professor’s peers or “comparators.”

“For pretty much everybody at Camden, they switched comparators to people we weren’t comparable with, who were making a lower salary,” Shain said.

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Rutgers-Camden in a statement said about two-thirds of faculty who requested a salary equity evaluation were awarded adjustments. (Alan Maass, a spokesman for Rutgers AAUP-AFT, argued that some of the adjustments were “insultingly low.”)

The school acknowledged that the process is complicated and said the administration, unions and staff “are learning our way through the early implementation.” The process, the school said, “considers each faculty member’s unique contributions in teaching, service, research, and other applicable criteria relative to peers within the same faculty rank and discipline, such as the breadth of academic responsibilities and accomplishments, distinction in the field, and market.”

It also includes an independent committee made up of faculty and faculty administrators who evaluate the requests under the appeal process, and two faculty experts who evaluate the program, the school said.

Jonathan Holloway, president of Rutgers, said that the three campuses are designated differently when it comes to research, which affects compensation, and that makes comparisons more challenging. New Brunswick’s Carnegie classification is Research 1, meaning that research activity is very high, while Newark and Camden are Research II campuses. Harvard, MIT and Stanford are among other Research I schools.

“The research expectations in Camden are different than they are in New Brunswick, because of the way the campus is organized,” he said. “That is not a criticism. It’s just a fact.”

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Ellen Malenas Ledoux, an associate professor in the English and communications department, said when she filed her claim in 2020, she was being paid 34% or $30,000 less than her peers in New Brunswick and Newark. Her dean, Howard Marchitello, called her case “one of the most egregious salary inequities in all the cases he has reviewed to date,” she said.

She was granted an adjustment of $781, she said. The university replaced her comparators with two colleagues on the Camden campus who also have lower salaries, and one of those professors got an increase of $10,000, she said. She appealed and used other associate professors at Camden who were making more than her, but was denied again, she said.

Ledoux, 48, who has been at Rutgers-Camden since 2007, earned $89,723 when she filed her appeal. With increases won in the recent faculty contract negotiations, her salary is now $99,000.

“I feel completely devalued by my university, and I feel outraged,” she said. “It’s total injustice.”

The salary equity process has affected how faculty feel about the university, she said, and that’s not good for education.

“Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions,” she said. “When you underpay faculty and there is low morale, that isn’t going to bode well.”

» READ MORE: Rutgers-Camden arts and sciences dean says he was removed from his post

Marchitello, former dean of arts and sciences at Rutgers-Camden, said while it was a good idea to establish a salary equity system, it was flawed from the start in concept and execution.

“There have been many casualties of this process since its deployment — a fact that is palpable across the campus, particularly in morale and what strikes me as something like widespread worry, if not despair,” he said.

Tillis removed Marchitello from his dean’s post two years ago, and faculty leaders speculated at the time it may have been in part due to comments he made that month about the Camden campus being chronically underfunded and how that played into pay equity decisions for faculty.

Shain, the biology department chair, said his salary has since risen to $158,000 due to increases won in the faculty contract; his peers also got increases, which means he continues to lag, he said.

He recently filed a union grievance, asserting that Tillis denied his request as retaliation against him for publicly backing a no-confidence vote against Tillis in 2021. Faculty took the vote after Tillis removed Marchitello.

“I called for his resignation in front of everyone,” Shain said. “I thought it showed lack of leadership and judgment to fire a dean midsemester who was very popular and doing his job amid a pandemic.”

Shain noted in his appeal that the committee sided with him and said his original comparator group was accurate based on his grant acquisitions, peer-reviewed publications and his service over the last decade as department chair.

Tillis, however, said Shain’s publication record was not as robust as the peers he chose, which Tillis based on Marchitello’s evaluation, Shain said. But, Shain asserted, Marchitello actually said the exact opposite: that his publication record was on par or stronger.

At first Shain thought the chancellor had just made a mistake, so he wrote him a letter and sent it twice.

The chancellor, he said, never responded.