Ohio University officials are planning to put more than $6 million into faculty raises over the next five years, but a projected $11 million budget deficit could stand in the way.

OU’s tentative plans to raise faculty salaries — identified in the Vision Ohio document as a top university concern — include an average of $1.26 million of reserved Vision Ohio money over the next five years, the Faculty Compensation Task Force estimated.

The task force, formed and chaired by OU Provost Kathy Krendl, determined that a $6.3 million investment over the next five years would meet Vision Ohio’s goal of compensating faculty members at a nationally competitive level.

OU currently ranks ninth out of 11 among its 10 peer universities in average faculty compensation, which was $91,300 in 2006, according to the task force study. All faculty ranks– professor, associate professor and assistant professor– receive about $8,000 less than peers on average.

John Day, associate provost for academic budgeting, said the $6.3 million originally slated for the five-year faculty raise could instead go to repairing the deficit or increasing an already planned 3.2 percent raise for all university employees next year.

Not moving OU higher in the ranks of faculty compensation could hurt faculty recruiting, said Shawn Ostermann, a faculty representative of the task force and OU’s interim chief information officer.

“The fight now is to keep that money reserved for the Vision Ohio goals and not the general budget concerns,” Ostermann said. “We’re running the risk of not recruiting top faculty or losing them.”

Faculty Senate President Phyllis Bernt agreed that raising faculty pay is an important priority, a movement that also had unanimous support at the Feb. 16 Board of Trustees meeting in Chillicothe.

“We’re losing faculty members,” she said. “Departments aren’t getting their first choices.”

Krendl said the budget planning council she co-chairs has included the planned 3.2 percent employee pay raise in all variations of its planning budgets, but it still must go through an approval process.

“We assumed (the 3.2 percent raise) as an automatic, but of course it is still an assumption at this point,” Krendl said. “Increased faculty salaries will improve the retention, the transfers and the quality of all aspects of the university. I think it’s important that even in times of fiscal constraint, the most important investment is in our faculty.”