From Stephen Schensul: RE: From Bill Mohler: Don't base big decisions on iffy statistics.

Dear Dr. Mohler,

I want to respond to your memo entitled “Don’t base big decisions on iffy statistics.”

Your memo begins with the admonition to not compare one’s individual salary with the AAMC tables. This point of view is not widely shared. The AAMC tables are regularly used to argue for promotional and equity raises in medical schools throughout the country and in our medical school as well.

You base this admonition on the view that you cannot compare an individual to a mean. This flies in the face of standard convention in which individual data from a distribution are routinely compared to means, medians, modes, or any other measure of central tendency. The ability to compare single numbers from a sample (or a population) distribution is implicit in science, business, and all manner of applied statistics (e.g., this statement, “as an Idaho truck driver, I make the same [or less or more] salary as the mean [or median, or mode] of all truck drivers in Idaho,” is both logical and informative).

Your view that tenure and promotion is granted earlier in an individual’s career at UCHC than in other medical schools is not substantiated by any data that I know of. Nonetheless, the AAMC tables provide percentiles (25, 50, 75) corresponding to the time spent at each promotional level.

The UCHC AAUP Faculty Association’s memo explicitly did not refer to “mean salaries” but rather compared the “mean salary increase” between Storrs and Health Center faculty. While I concur that salaries are almost always “positively skewed” (not “one-tailed” since all distributions are “two-tailed”), the Faculty Association memo did note that the mean raise at UCHC was 2.23% and that the mean raise at UC Storrs was 4.99%. There is nothing “iffy” about the statement that UCHC faculty have received less than half the percentage raise as the unionized faculty at UConn, Storrs from the years 2004-2008..

I support the election of a union for Health Center faculty based on a wide variety of issues and concerns. We have a faculty that is committed to the goals of high-quality research, education and clinical service and I see a faculty union with a strong voice providing a significant contribution to those goals. I see nothing untoward about unionization also seeking to address compensation issues at a time when our faculty have been denied salary increases for the last two fiscal years.

Stephen L. Schensul, PhD, Professor

Community Medicine & Health Care