Letter: Letter missed point of flagship
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Kevin Kelly’s Oct. 22 letter characterized LSU faculty as overpaid and underworked, using the physics and astronomy department as a specific example.
Unfortunately, Kelly very much missed the point of a flagship university, where much of the teaching goes on outside the lecture hall.
Much of the most valuable student training goes on in seminars, one-on-one meetings in faculty offices, in research labs and in the field.
Yes, our classroom teaching is important. But students in our physics laboratories receive state-of-the-art training growing crystal structures with applications to new electronics and future energy sources. They work in clinics at Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, and graduate with jobs as medical physicists across Louisiana.
Our undergraduates are writing software to analyze data from NASA spacecraft. They work on nuclear physics experiments at national laboratories in the United States and internationally, and perform computer simulations with our faculty at places such as Los Alamos National Laboratory.
LSU physics research is supported with almost $7 million annually of grant funding. Federal funding provides essential financial support for students, creates jobs and helps build the local economy, purchases equipment on which students are trained and helps develop the technical work force that our local industry needs. Obtaining these grants is highly competitive and requires the expertise of a nationally competitive faculty.
We know that we want our student athletes to compete on a national level. We owe all our students the same commitment to excellence and high quality in academics as well. And that means that we need to pay our faculty market rates.
A recent survey of salaries at peer institutions found that LSU faculty are paid $7,941 less for a nine-month academic year than faculty at a sampling of peer institutions. So yes, physics faculty are paid more than most Louisiana workers, but they are still paid less than at institutions in other states with which we compete.
As far as teaching workloads, surveys show that one lecture class per semester is the norm nationally for faculty who also work with their students on research, perform service to the community, provide expertise to local industry and state government, and do all the other things that faculty at a state’s flagship institution do.
The work of LSU faculty and students is an essential driver to training a high-quality technical work force and building Louisiana’s future economy, and the flagship institution’s faculty (across campus, not just in physics and astronomy) need to be just as good and just as competitive nationally as our athletic coaches.
Kelly’s criticism focusing narrowly on salary levels and hours of classroom teaching missed the point about the other things that go on at a nationally competitive university and its importance for Louisiana.
Michael Cherry, professor and chairman
department of physics and astronomy, LSU
Baton Rouge
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