Opinion ID: 4574284
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: FAMU’s Salary Changes

Text: Because the changes to FAMU faculty salaries since Smith I mentioned above are relevant to this appeal, we pause to explain them in greater detail. The changes fell into one of five categories. First, as referenced above, the FAMU law school made a one-time salary adjustment in 2016 which brought all tenured full professors up to at least $140,000 and all tenured associate professors to at least $120,000. But the adjustment was not widespread: it affected only a dozen of FAMU’s roughly 36 faculty members. Further, the adjustment applied with equal force to both males and females. According to one of the deans in charge of making the salary adjustment, changes were based exclusively on “rank, tenure status,” and “length of time”—not “qualitative factors” such as “reputation, . . . teaching effectiveness, or any other type of subjective criteria that might go into hiring somebody.” Second, FAMU gave a university-wide 1% cost-of-living raise to all professors. Third, all FAMU law school professors who did not receive a 4 USCA11 Case: 19-12560 Date Filed: 10/08/2020 Page: 5 of 18 promotion or other pay increase between January 1 and June 16, 2016 received a 1% lump-sum bonus. Fourth, associate professors who were promoted to full professor before 2017 received a standard salary increase of 9 percent.4 Fifth, routine changes to professor salaries reflected the addition or removal of administrative duties or a shift between a 9-month and 12-month schedule. Pursuant to FAMU’s salary changes, Smith received a one-time salary adjustment from $115,278.63 to $125,000, putting her salary above the $120,000 mark for associate professors; a 1% cost-of-living raise; and, upon her subsequent promotion to full professor, a 9% pay increase.5 She did not, however, receive a 1% lump sum bonus, as she had received a pay increase during the one-time adjustment. And she was not affected by routine administrative or shift changes. Smith’s annual salary by the end of 2016 was $136,250. Regarding the one-time salary adjustment in 2016, two more things are noteworthy. First, there was an earlier draft of this proposal. On August 22, 2016, before the salary adjustments were finalized, the interim dean emailed FAMU officials with a draft of proposed salary adjustments in which Smith’s salary was recommended to be increased to $138,000. This figure was very close to the actual 4 Under a later union contract, the full-professor salary-promotion increase was set at 15 percent for those promoted in 2017 or after. 5 Smith was promoted to full professor effective August 8, 2016. 5 USCA11 Case: 19-12560 Date Filed: 10/08/2020 Page: 6 of 18 salary of the highest paid male associate professor, Jeffrey Brown, who at that time was paid $138,330 and was not subject to the one-time salary adjustment. An associate dean of the law school who was closely involved in crafting that recommendation testified in his deposition that he (and other law school administrators with whom he had collaborated) had at first proposed the $138,000 figure in part because he was attempting at that time to bring all tenured associate professor salaries “a little closer” to Brown’s salary. FAMU ultimately decided against raising all tenured associate professor salaries closer to Brown and instead chose to consider his salary as an “outlier.” Accordingly, the 2016 one-time adjustment to Smith’s salary as a tenured associate professor was instead set at $125,000, which was $5,000 greater than all other tenured associate professors other than Brown. The associate dean testified that Smith received $5,000 more than the other tenured associate professors in part because she had been tenured for a greater length of time, and because of “other factors.” The second noteworthy aspect of the 2016 one-time salary adjustment is FAMU’s stated purpose in making it. One of the deans tasked with crafting the adjustment testified that correcting “gender disparity” simply “wasn’t the project.” In other words, he explained, “[he] didn’t begin from the proposition that there was gender disparity.” Rather, the adjustment was intended to address “[c]ompensation inequities,” the “most obvious” of which was “salary inversion,” that is, “when 6 USCA11 Case: 19-12560 Date Filed: 10/08/2020 Page: 7 of 18 faculty of lower rank and tenure status earn more than faculty with higher rank and tenure status.” Salary inversion at the law school “resulted from the State’s inability to provide regular cost of living raises to present or current faculty, combined with new faculty hiring under the economic conditions prevailing on the date of new hiring.” And although “[t]here are high end ‘outliers’ in each category” of rank and tenure status, the one-time salary adjustment “does not attempt to make the level of compensation paid to outliers the norm.” Along these lines, the one-time salary adjustment “does not adopt a prohibition against inversion,” but rather, “[i]t merely implements a restart” for those salaries that had been affected by inversion in the past. That is to say, “[s]alary inversion may reoccur.”