Ohio State’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors has complaints about the current faculty salary appeals process and ideas for a new one.”My guess is there are a lot of people who feel they’re not getting just pay, but for one reason or another, they don’t use the appeals process,” said Gerald Winer, professor of psychology and vice president of OSU’s chapter of the association.Under the current system, faculty members who are unhappy with their pay can appeal to their department chair, then to the dean of the college and then to the provost. The provost has a Faculty Salary Appeals Advisory Committee, made up of faculty members, that reviews the appeal if it gets as far as the provost.”At any stage, an administrator could decide (the appeal) was without merit and terminate it,” said Gordon Aubrecht, professor of physics and an association board member.Nancy Rudd, the vice provost for academic policy and personnel, and a committee of faculty members will review the salary appeals process spring quarter.”Any revisions would simply be for the purpose of improving it,” Rudd said.The association thinks that several changes should be made to the process, because overall, it has too much administrative involvement, Aubrecht said.”It was a flawed system to begin with,” he said.The first step for faculty members who decide to appeal their salaries is to talk to their department chair. The department chair is the person who decides the salaries of faculty members.”That’s the cause of the injustice in the first place,” Winer said.Another problem the association has with the process is that if appeals are granted and raises are given, money still needs to be found to give the raises, Aubrecht said.”The association would like to see a system set up where a certain amount of money would be set aside in academic affairs,” he said.Departments could fit raises into their budgets easier if the raises came from this pot of money for the first year, he said.The university has three salary pools: across-the-board, merit increase and equity increase.”What I would like to see is that some money in the equity pool be put into a central fund to be distributed to faculty that win these appeal cases, assuming any do,” Aubrecht said.Rudd said it would be premature for her to comment on the strengths and weaknesses of the process as the committee has not yet had the chance to work on the review.