Math professor Rich McLaughlin has spent years convincing people to come teach at UNC-Chapel Hill for less pay.
For decades, Carolina has been able to count on faculty accepting a smaller paycheck compared to other so-called “public Ivies,” because of the perception of a more affordable cost and quality of living. A Yale University admissions officer coined the term in 1985 when he produced a short list of state schools that provide an Ivy League-quality education for a cheaper price.
[Read more: Q&A: UNC-Chapel Hill professor talks salary inequities, university’s gender and race pay gap]
McLaughlin’s been at UNC-Chapel Hill since 1998 and spent over a decade recruiting professors as chair of the math department until 2023. He said growing gaps in UNC-Chapel Hill’s salary pay are becoming too large for prospective faculty to ignore.
“I started to feel it toward the second half of my chairmanship, where (professors) were getting a lot more money and offers from other places than we were able to pay here,” he said. “We were really successful, they were still coming and accepting the jobs, but (now) that’s not happening. The top people that we want to get are not always accepting and the reasons I’m hearing is because of this lack of salary.”
“We have seen very few raise pools in the past 15 years at UNC, whereas at the peer schools they had a steady constant raise structure,” McLaughlin continued. “And that’s where we got behind.”
State legislators are signaling plans to include a 3% raise for university faculty once they pass a long-awaited budget. But data shows UNC-Chapel Hill’s salary gap is much larger than that.
‘Schools can start coming after your stars’
Last summer, McLaughlin, physics professor Laura Mersini-Houghton, and data science professor David Adalsteinsson spent three months collecting and processing salary data for thousands of faculty members at and outside of UNC-Chapel Hill.
This included every faculty member in UNC-Chapel Hill’s College of Arts and Sciences’ art, English, history, math, physics, and political science departments. The professors then compared that data to departmental counterparts at several of UNC’s peer institutions – from the University of California Berkeley and University of Michigan to Georgia Tech and the University of Texas Austin.
They found that UNC-Chapel Hill’s average faculty salary across those six departments was about $132,000. The average at peer institutions was over $181,000 – a 27.3% difference.
“When we have a gap like this, other schools can start coming after your stars,” McLaughlin said. “Then you lose all of that investment that went into building – building a program, building faculty, startup money that went into hiring them – all lost if they leave.”
The team also separated the departmental data by faculty rank and found that UNC-Chapel Hill was last or second-to-last in assistant, associate, and full professor pay. The direst difference, McLaughlin said, was salaries for full professors without a distinguished title. UNC-Chapel Hill was 35.1% below its peers.
Additionally, he said some institutions have been getting creative with benefits to offer professors on top of their salaries.
The University of California System, for example, gives some faculty members low-interest mortgage loans or housing stipends to adjust for higher costs of living. UNC-Chapel Hill provides retention salary boosts for professors who threaten to leave for another university. But even then, you can’t give retentions to everyone.
“If our Chancellor’s goal is to be top number one public – that’s a great goal – but this certainly is a challenge,” McLaughlin said. “You can’t be a top university with salaries that are lagging all the peers this much. And because UNC is so successful, it’s also a problem for the state of North Carolina. You don’t want to see this absolute gold mine we built here disappear or even start to slide away a little bit.”
McLaughlin said it was actually Chancellor Lee Roberts who first inspired him to pursue his research into faculty salaries.
‘We are starting to lose people’
Back in February 2025, Roberts had just given a faculty council presentation comparing UNC-Chapel Hill’s tuition, graduation rates, research spending, and several other metrics to the university’s peer institutions. McLaughlin noticed none of the slides mentioned salaries and called the omission out.
The university posts data using salary figures from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The most recent report from 2024-2025 also shows UNC-Chapel Hill falling behind several of its peers in faculty pay.
But Roberts told McLaughlin the university’s “top-level” data masks a lot of variations, and asked professors at the faculty council meeting to share any departmental salary data they have.
“(There’s) clearly plenty of folks who are underpaid relative to the peer group,” Roberts said at that meeting. “Something we’ve talked to the System Office and General Assembly about, and we’ll continue to do so.”
By the end of the summer of 2025, McLaughlin sent his team’s findings to Roberts and other administrators. The group later met with interim provost Jim Dean. Two months ago, McLaughlin reiterated the problem to the university’s new permanent provost Magnus Egerstedt at another faculty council meeting.
Egerstedt said then that he didn’t “have an immediate check” that he could write, but that he was starting to “dig into” salary structures at the university.
WUNC requested to speak with the provost, but he and other UNC-Chapel Hill administrators were not made available by the time of publication. Instead, university spokesman Kevin Best sent a statement saying Carolina faculty are among the university’s most valued assets.
“Retaining faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill is essential for upholding the highest standards in academic programs, sustaining research excellence, and supporting student achievement,” Best said in the statement. “We deeply appreciate the dedication and contributions of our faculty and understand that academic freedom and parity in pay are central to their satisfaction and retention.”
Best also said the university welcomes any discussion of those concerns. UNC-Chapel Hill’s faculty council recently launched a committee to do just that.
‘(We’re) being taken for granted’
In December, the faculty voted to create an inaugural faculty salary committee. Misha Becker, a linguistics professor, is one of the members. She said the group will likely look into differences in how the university pays fixed-term and tenured-track faculty, to internal salary inequities like racial and gender-based gaps.
“If you look at the mean salary across the university for men, for women; for white faculty, for faculty of color,” Becker said. “What you see is that men’s salaries are quite a bit higher than women’s salaries. White (faculty member) salaries are quite a bit higher than the salaries of faculty of color.”
The committee will include a mix of departmental and professional faculty, as well as senior university administrators in faculty affairs and human resources. Its first meeting will be in the fall, where the committee plans to finalize which aspects of faculty pay it plans to investigate.
The deep dive into the faculty salary issues comes as UNC-Chapel Hill has had a tighter budget the last two years, amid uncertain state funding and sweeping federal cuts to university research grants. Currently, Roberts is aiming to eliminate more than $85 million from the university through administrative staff reductions, lowering financial aid for out of state students, and by encouraging some faculty to leave the university through a retirement incentive program.
“Each of these decisions comes with true costs,” Roberts said in a statement first announcing the cuts. “Yet, we believe that this measured approach will enable us to continue to pursue our goal of becoming the best public university in the country.”
Meanwhile, Becker said she hopes the new faculty salary committee will put more constant pressure on administrators to address salary inequities.
“We care deeply about the university and at a certain point, it feels like it’s being taken for granted that we will just do what we do because we do it out of love,” Becker said. “I do love my job and I feel lucky to do what I do, but the reality is just that we also need to be compensated fairly. It’s hard to look at your peers (who) are doing equally good work, but they’re being compensated so much higher.”