The UW System has significantly reduced the online availability of salary data for faculty members.
Since December, the salaries of individual professors are no longer accessible through the Internet, though data will be provided upon request.
UW System spokesperson David Giroux said the step was taken to reduce the ""regular outflow of talented researchers in the university.""
Citing the retention of professors as ""becoming a much bigger problem with every passing year,"" Giroux maintained that the easy access of individual salary information made UW professors an easy target for other institutions.
Until December, the UW System was the only state government agency to provide individual salaries online in such an accessible manner. This had been done to save on printing and distribution costs incurred in providing booklets, according to Giroux.
Currently, total departmental salary can be found online.
Since individual salaries are public information, the information is still accessible to the public, though it requires more effort to find.
According to the Wisconsin State Journal, salary-related information may be obtained through a UW System computer, the main library of any System institution, by contacting any System institution's human resource department or by purchasing a copy of the annual Redbook CD.
Giroux stated the UW System continually loses academic talent to other institutions. Besides accessible information of individual salaries, he cited other universities' better equipment, facilities, benefits and pay as factors in luring away valuable professors.
Yet another factor that may explain the System's retention problems is its lack of domestic partner benefits.
Unlike other Big Ten universities, UW-Madison does not provide domestic partner benefits, which may deter academic talent from working for the UW System.
Several high-ranking faculty members have left the university, citing its lack of domestic partner benefits as one of their reasons, including former Dean of Students Luoluo Hong and engineering professor Rob Carpick.
Giroux said the university has a ""reputation for recruiting good, young talents, training them as assistants very well and paying them very little,"" and emphasized the importance of taking steps to rectify retention problems.
