When numbers and feelings don't mix

Last week when I spent Spring Break with the grandkids, my grandson kept opening up a music box that played "Feelings," a song that hasn't gotten any less sappy since it debuted in 1974. Every time I heard those tinkly opening notes, I wanted to grab the box, snap it shut, and toss it out the window--but I didn't, because I'm not that kind of grandma. I have years of experience in biting my tongue and I'm not going to forget those skills now.

This week, though, I have felt an awful lot like that music box: every time I open my mouth, I want to talk about feelings. Everyone's talking about numbers and money and percentages and interest rates, and all I want to say is it feels like a pay cut!

It's not a pay cut. It's not a pay raise either, but that's no surprise--we haven't had raises in a number of years I'm too depressed to add up. What we're experiencing is a reduction in a small but significant stipend teaching faculty receive from earnings on an endowment fund directed toward recognizing the value of teaching. To explain more clearly: some years ago, a bunch of people donated money to a fund to benefit teaching faculty, but the annual amount we'll receive from it has been reduced from a small but significant amount to an even smaller but still significant amount. So, yes: it's not a pay cut but it feels like a pay cut, particularly on top of all the other cuts we've been experiencing for the past couple of years.

But there's more. The reason the stipend needs to be cut is--and believe me, I have feelings about this--that we've evidently been overpaid for the past five years. I've seen the numbers and they are convincing, so intellectually I can agree that it was not wise to habitually pay out more in stipends than that specific fund could produce in earnings, but you could poll every single faculty member on this campus and ask whether they've felt overpaid for the past five years--or, really, ever--and not a single one would say yes. Everyone feels overworked and undervalued, but the numbers suggest that we have actually been overpaid from a fund designed to reward the value of teaching, and now we will have to endure a correction to bring that reward back in sync with what the endowment is producing, so, according to the numbers, there's really nothing to see here. We have been overvalued and now we will be rewarded more in line with what the numbers say we're worth, sorry as that valuation might be. End of story.

But it still feels like a pay cut, and I still feel like spilling out a sappy story every time I open my mouth, but I fear that someone might just snap me shut and toss me out the window, so I'll just sit over here and bite my tongue.