The University’s Senate Executive Committee reviewed a report regarding the state of faculty compensation at its meeting Monday, aiming to move forward with issues addressed in the report.

The ad hoc compensation review committee, formed in January 2014 to review the overall quality and competitiveness of the campus’ compensation package, delivered its findings and recommendations to the SEC in a final report in late May.

Jeff Brown, chair of the ad hoc committee, said the committee concluded that on average across the entire campus, the University is about 3 percent below its peers in terms of employee compensation.

Average salaries in some units, however, are more than 10 percent below the average salaries of their peers, according to the report.

“Our overall recommendation regarding compensation is that we seek over the next couple of years to close that gap, which would essentially mean roughly a 3 percent increase on top of increases that other schools will be having,” Brown said.

He said this could be done by extending targeted programs, particularly outliers on the lower side.

The report also encourages the creation of supplemental retirement plans to combat the effects of Senate Bill 1 on faculty pension plans. Even if implementation of the bill is delayed or overturned, the report reads, contributions from faculty in the tier II system and self-managed plan will continue to lag behind peer institutions.

The committee only analyzed the compensation of full-time tenure track faculty due to a lack of data from peer institutions. On other campuses, Brown said, these positions go by very different names and titles and this problem was not something the committee would have been able to address in the time that it met.

SEC Chair Roy Campbell suggested that the committee draft a plan for next year to work on implementing the work of the ad hoc committee.

Chancellor Phyllis Wise updated the committee on plans to open a College of Medicine on the Urbana campus. Ideally, she said, the new college should be built around the strengths of the College of Engineering, granting greater access to healthcare at lower cost for more people. This relies on new devices, new materials, new robotics, new imaging, big data — “areas that Engineering really concentrates on.”

She added that it is very important for the Engineering-driven College of Medicine, which would be relatively small, on the Urbana campus to complement the Chicago campus’ College of Medicine so that it does not compete with them in any way.

In line with this idea of complementation, Tripp-Umbach, the consulting firm the University commissioned for an initial feasibility study, reported that the college on the Urbana campus should be private rather than public so that it would not depend on state funds. This would prevent competition with Chicago for state funding, allowing the college to be built on the University’s ability to raise funds through donors, corporations and foundations that would want to invest in this type of college.

“It puts the onus on us to be raising money because we also don’t want to take our pie and divide it into more pieces,” Wise said.

Wise said there are many more steps before the plans are concrete. Plans for the college will be presented to the Urbana-Champaign Senate in the fall, but the college still needs a governance structure, curriculum and financial base before it can be passed by the Board of Trustees and the Illinois Board of Higher Education.

Tyler can be reached at [email protected] or @tylerallyndavis.