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A bonus for work already paid for?
At the March 12 meeting of the Faculty of Commerce and Administration Council, the Faculty administration presented a document for approval which proposed that faculty members be paid a "publication bonus" of $500 for each refereed journal article published in any one calendar year; joint authorship will earn $700. This proposal is, in my view, preposterous.
Members of the professoriate receive a regular salary for community service, teaching and research, which includes the publication of refereed articles. A bonus for each refereed article published is a bonus for work for which we are already compensated. For excellent performance (and this bonus is not for excellent research performance, it is for any refereed article published), we have a merit system, a system of salary adjustments and a system of reduced teaching loads. Furthermore, a bonus policy should be University-wide, since it is a change in our working conditions.
I urge the rest of the Concordia community to vigorously oppose this outrageous and wasteful use of University funds. I estimate that this policy will cost the Faculty approximately $20,000 per year. Is this what we really would like to do with the monies earned from the fees of our foreign students, who now pay the "full freight" for their education? I suggest that the University would be better served if we establish a scholarship fund for our students with these monies, especially since we have so little of this kind of funding available.
-Christopher A. Ross,
Dpartment of Marketing
