THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, January 15, 1996 TAG: 9601130016
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 52 lines
Noting that what Virginia pays its schoolteachers has dropped well below the national average, we made the case the other day that if the state wants better teachers it should reward teachers better.
Ditto for those who teach the schoolteachers.
In six years of 1990s state budgets higher education has taken perhaps the heaviest hit. For the commonwealth's colleges and universities, it's ever harder to recruit and retain top professors.
As faculty pay has lagged, faculty exodus has escalated. At least 40 departing Virginia Tech professors over the past two years have cited concern over salary levels or the level of the state's commitment to its colleges, which is much the same thing. At Old Dominion University 25 faculty members have moved on to higher-paying jobs on other campuses during the past 18 months.
The colleges are alarmed about not only what they say is unusually high faculty turnover but also, as a College of William and Mary official put it, the number of ``first choices'' who don't choose W&M.
Higher-education funding is scarcely a burning public issue. But last summer the Virginia Business Higher Education Council, made up of some of the state's most prominent corporate figures, launched a Virginia First initiative to add $400 million in new money to the 1996-98 budget, which is before the current General Assembly.
Gov. George F. Allen has offered some fresh dollars. And in his address Wednesday night he recommended what he called ``significant merit-based salary increases for faculty'' aimed at keeping Virginia schools competitive nationally. But what Allen proposes is not nearly enough in our view - and in the view of John T. Hazel Jr., council chairman, the initiative's chief spokesman and a Republican.
These pleas from and for academe are persuasive. Professor Daniel J. Larson of the University of Virginia aptly noted: ``We are very lucky in Virginia to have an incredibly fine set of institutions of higher education. I just think we're at a point where we need to invest a little more . . . to preserve them.''
Like other states and Washington itself, Virginia has a full plate of serious problems: poverty, crime, pollution, clogged roads, school dropouts, etc. But the state's network of colleges and universities - which took a quarter-century to build - is a precious asset, not a problem. Let's not make it one. by CNB