America’s university faculty have experienced the first real-terms drop in their average pay packet since the 70s, according to the American Association of University Professors.

The association’s annual salary survey puts the overall average salary increase for full-time faculty at 1.2%, which it says shows colleges and universities “continue to undervalue” their staff. Once adjusted for inflation, this amounts to a 1.5% decrease, says the AAUP.

“As the economy weakened at the end of 2008 and into 2009, college and university presidents, business officers, admissions deans, financial aid directors, faculty, staff, students, and parents wondered whether higher education would find a refuge from the worst of the storm, as it had in prior recessions,” says a new report from the association. “Eighteen months later we have some of the data needed to answer this question, and the answer is a resounding ‘no!’”

Around a third of the 1,200-odd institutions responding to the survey said their overall average salary levels decreased this year. The AAUP also says there are “troubling signs” for the retirement prospects of its members, with the rate of retirement contributions being reduced by 14% of responding institutions and curtailed entirely by some.

“No one becomes a professor because they expect to get rich,” Saranna Thornton, chair of the AAUP’s Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession, told the Chronicle of HE. “But I don’t think professors are any different than anybody else in that they don’t want to see their purchasing power go down. There’s nothing immoral about wanting to make a little more money than you did last year.”

Not everyone is sympathetic though. In the comments of Insider Higher Education’s coverage of this story is this:

In an economy like this, where many people are losing jobs, can you really complain about any increase? And, would you want the increase to come on the backs of those who were let go to make it happen? Yes, buying power may have decreased a little, but let’s have some perspective….

Jane Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability, takes a similar (if less confrontational) line.

“It’s a necessary thing,” she told the NY Times. “It reflects the real level of fiscal stringency in higher education and probably understates the magnitude of resource reductions for faculty, since one of the ways institutions have been saving money, where possible, has been to replace full-time tenured faculty, who are paid the most, with part-timers who earn much less.”

(Insider Higher Ed also has a nice breakdown of the some of the data, including which institutions pay best.)

Table: Percentage increases in nominal and real salaries (source: AAUP)