By Brandan Rogowski
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
When Jenny Atwater left her job as a television news reporter 15 years ago and joined Towson University’s Mass Communication & Communication Studies Department — first as an adjunct, then as a lecturer — she wasn’t sure what her future was going to hold.
“I’m not sure I knew it was going to be the rest of my life but it’s been worth it for me,” Atwater said. “I wanted to teach, I love my students and I also wanted to be home with my kids. So to me, I’m willing to put up with the really low salary because it gives you both of those things.”
Lecturers — full-time faculty members who teach without the prospect of tenure — make an average of $54,543 at Towson, according to an analysis of Maryland public employee data. That’s compared to a fully tenured TU professor who earns an average of $96,673.
“The frustrating thing for lecturers is there is no way to advance,” Atwater said. “I became a lecturer 12 years ago and I’m still just a lecturer. They have ways that adjuncts can advance but they’ve never given any thought to having lecturers advance and then get pay increases that way.”
Atwater said it’s time for lecturers to be compensated at higher levels.
“I just think Towson really needs to look at the lecturer position because we’re thought of as temporary, filling-the-gap kind of professors or teachers, and I mean I’ve been here 12 years as a lecturer. I don’t think that’s temporary,” Atwater said. “Towson really needs to revisit our treatment and our pay and our advancement.”
Lecturers at many institutions are the lowest-paid full-time faculty members. Towson, like many other institutions, pays tenure-track faculty at higher rates, with chances for salary advancement as they go from assistant to perhaps associate and full professors.
Rank isn’t the only area in which the pay gap exists. Male educators at Towson make on average $7,363.49 more than female educators, and there are many potential reasons to explain that disparity — including the higher share of male faculty members who are tenured.
“There’s probably about 50 variables that you have to look at to try and tease out the equality of people’s salaries so it’s really, really complex,” said Dr. Debbie Seeberger, assistant vice president for diversity and inclusion at Towson. “On the surface when you look just broadly, it might appear one way but you really have to do an analysis of all those other factors to understand it.”
The only title in which women make more than men is at assistant professor, the first step to becoming a tenured professor. In this role, women earn $72,925.93 compared to $70,951.61 for men.
Seeberger suggested that this shows the changing times at Towson in that there are more incoming female professors.
When it comes to academic degree, women with a master’s degree make about $6,000 more than men with the same level of education, though that’s a sample size of only 59 females and 15 males. At the terminal degree level, men make approximately $7,000 more than women.
Atwater knows that going back to school for her Ph.D. might give her a salary boost, but doing that isn’t in her plans.
“For me, my interest is the practice of journalism more than the study of journalism,” Atwater said. “If I were to do anything it would be to leave teaching and to go back to reporting or something else.”
Atwater said some of the gender wage gap could be reduced by allowing lecturers to advance.
The wage gap also exists in many academic fields. Not surprisingly, faculty in business and high-tech fields (business administration, e-business, accounting, computer science) are among the highest paid, while those in communications and education are among the lowest paid.
This trend is nationwide, as the opportunity cost for faculty in fields like business, computer science and health fields is high — meaning that they could earn significant salaries on the non-academic job market.
“It’s very difficult to get nursing professors because they can make so much money out in the field,” Seeberger said. “I understand faculty members in education would like to make as much as faculty members in marketing but it’s kind of out of our hands because it’s what the drive is for it out there nationally.”
