January 20, 1976

Department chairmen protested the January 14th vote by the board of trustees freezing salaries and wages for all college employees for the 1976-77 academic year. Twenty-eight out of 29 department chairmen signed a letter to President Simpson, the administration and the trustees which asserted that the vote breached The Governance. The Faculty Compensation Committee (FCC) also reacted to the vote, drafting a letter to the faculty in which they declared the board made “its decision unilaterally without regard to the FCC’s position.”

At a faculty meeting on January 28, President Simpson defended the action, saying, “The Dean [Dean of Faculty Barbara Wells] and I reject the suggestion that The Governance was violated in either the letter or the spirit by the procedure through which the compensation decision was reached.” The faculty endorsed the department heads’ January 20th statement, and biology professor Patricia Johnson observed that she “had never seen the faculty so united on an issue.”

The issue was resolved on April 16, when the trustee Committee on Budget recommended a five percent increase in faculty wages for the coming academic year. The Miscellany News