Letter: Frank Heppner: Don't blame URI professors for rising costs and tuition

When I came to the University of Rhode Island in 1969 as an assistant professor, the average salary for new professors was about $11,000, and the average house price in Wickford, where many young URI faculty lived, was around $35,000, or about 3.2 times their annual income.

In 2019, the starting salary for an assistant professor at URI is $60,000. The Zillow estimate for the cost of the average house in Wickford today is $358,000, or 6.0 times a new prof’s annual income. In terms of inflation, URI professors are economically way behind where they were 50 years ago.

In 1969, there were 27 full-time tenure-track faculty members in my old academic department. Today, there are 17.

So whatever is driving up the cost of operating URI, it isn’t faculty salaries.

Frank Heppner, Wakefield

The writer is an emeritus honors professor of biological sciences at URI.