By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Education Writer

Faculty raises at the University of Hawai'i are in the works for 500 to 600 people or more as part of requirements in the contract signed last year calling for $1.5 million a year devoted to merit, equity and retention raises.

At the Manoa campus alone, requests for 363 raises are being processed and sent to the president's office. Several hundred others are coming from the community colleges and other four-year campuses.

The raises will average $10,000-$15,000.

"A lot of these salary adjustments have been made on the basis of good research," said Edward Laws, interim vice chancellor for research and graduate studies.

While the raises are part of the negotiated contract signed after a faculty strike, they must be approved by UH President Evan Dobelle. But far from wanting to keep raises to a minimum, Dobelle wants to give them to even more faculty.

Dobelle, interim Manoa Chancellor Deane Neubauer and Laws want to add what Laws calls a reward system for people who do a good job, "not just in research but in teaching." Laws expects the reward system to take effect next school year.

Under Kenneth Mortimer, Dobelle's predecessor, there were only a handful of merit raises each year, said Laws, even though merit raises were allowable and possible under the former contract.

"In the past they went into a black hole when they got to Bachman Hall and nothing ever happened," said Laws. "Now they're being acted upon."

Laws quoted Mortimer as saying at a meeting, "If I give a raise to a physicist at Manoa, and a cook from the community colleges comes in and says, 'I'm the best cook in the world,' how do I decide which one to give the raise to?"

Laws recalls thinking then that "if you're running this university, you ought to be able to decide who deserves a raise and who doesn't." But Mortimer "seemed unable to do that and the result was almost nobody got a raise."

"The tragedy of the Mortimer attitude is it doesn't take a lot of money to get this done. It's not breaking the bank. It's the attitude," Laws said. "And I think there's a lot more esprit de corps on the part of the faculty now because they're realizing if they do a good job they will be rewarded."

Dobelle wants to see salaries raised throughout the university system to bring the compensation of faculty closer to levels at Mainland institutions, with the goal of retaining top people.

"The president has made it clear he regards this as an important issue and he's going to do his best to reward people appropriately," said Laws. "He realizes there are a lot of very good people here who could be making more money at other institutions, and if we expect to keep them we have to reward them."