The Wisconsin Department of Justice is reviewing allegations and conferring with UW System regarding a lawsuit filed July 31 against the UW System Board of Regents and UW-Platteville Chancellor David Markee.

Bill Cosh, press secretary for the Department of Justice, said the department is serving as the counsel for UW System. UW-P Vice Chancellor and Provost Carol Sue Butts said that the university is no longer commenting on the lawsuit because it is in litigation.

The lawsuit questions the process that the UW-P administration used to distribute its $219,300 share of a $10 million fund created as part of the 2007-09 Wisconsin budget. The fund is supposed to be used to recruit new faculty and to encourage current faculty and teaching academic staff to stay. Three departments and a school received 59.5 percent of the UW-P allocation: Chemistry and Engineering Physics; Civil and Environmental Engineering; Social Sciences; and the School of Agriculture.

The plaintiffs, Ray Spoto, a professor of foreign language at UW-P, and The Association of University of Wisconsin Professionals, allege that the UW-P administration illegally bypassed faculty governance in distributing the funds.

According to the guidelines supplied by UW System, the funds are to be used only for salary dollars but cannot be distributed in an “across-the-board fashion” or to address widespread salary compression.

“The amount of money available for salary, maybe increases by 3 percent a year,” Duane Ford, dean of the College of Business, Industry, Life Science and Agriculture, said. “We’d all like to see a better salary situation for our faculty and staff that are here and have been here for a number of years.”

Funds can be used to match outside offers to faculty and academic staff and to “support proactive market-based salary increases when those disparities can be documented.” Individual awards must be a minimum of $1,000.

UW-Madison received $5.2 million of the $10 million fund; the other $4.8 million was divided among the other 12 four-year universities in the System.

“It’s throwing crumbs at the faculty,” Spoto said. “It’s a maneuver to devalue the teaching mission of UW System by shifting $5.2 million away from the faculty who teach at the four-year institutions to the Madison faculty.

“If you cheat the faculty, you cheat the students too.”

Mark Zidon, former director for the School of Agriculture, said he discussed the use of the recruitment and retention fund with Ford.

Ford approached Zidon with people he had in mind and asked for feedback.

“Personally, I have no qualms about how [the money] was given out,” Zidon said. “It was made in the best judgment of those who made the decision. I didn’t see any foul play.”

“This is a very useful program,” Charles Cornett, chair of the Department of Chemistry and Engineering Physics, said. “It is very beneficial in recruiting and retaining faculty in areas of high demand.” He said competition comes from industrial fields in addition to other academic institutions and he attempted to use the fund for both of its purposes.

Cornett said he was not aware of all the distributions within the department, even though salaries are a matter of public record.

“There needs to be more transparency and more dissemination of information on how the funds are distributed and to who they are distributed,” Cornett said.