The Committee Z report was an important public record of SU faculty salary that broke down faculty salary by college, gender in each college and percent change. And its two-year absence so far has done the university community a disservice.

The local American Association of University Professors chapter, which distributes the report, was denied in its request for the data for the 2013-14 school year. And SU failed to provide data again in 2014-15. At the time, Chancellor Kent Syverud was just settling into SU and the national antitrust lawsuit against law schools releasing faculty data made benching the Committee Z report justifiable. But now that two years have passed without any action, the reasons for the lack of cooperation on SU’s behalf are running out.

The current standing of Committee Z update is essentially unknown. Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs Lavonda Reed is set to head a subcommittee and will work with other University Senate members to review and possibly share faculty salary numbers. Still, there is no timeline or concrete plan for the committee to determine whether and how gathered data will be distributed.

And apart from inaction marking a theme across the past few years, reasons for declining AAUP’s requests remain unclear.

For a university that claims transparency as one of its goals, withholding faculty salaries seems counterproductive and dishonest since failing to produce a report hurts the community. SU’s faculty salary information is now outdated, making it difficult to gauge exactly how SU compares to peer institutions when crucial data is missing from the analysis.

Looking inward, now it’s also harder to examine professor salaries at SU across colleges. And because Committee Z no longer exists, the only thing that is easier is jumping to conclusions about SU’s motivations for withholding salaries. So while SU strives to be “One University,” the lack of a college-by-college breakdown from Committee Z will likely only drive schools apart with speculation.

When SU had initially agreed to move forward with releasing the data for the 2014-2015 school year, the consensus was that reinstating Committee Z indicated openness from Syverud and that the university taking positive steps If SU wants to hold itself to the standard of peer institutions and true to its own values, the university will need to bring back Committee Z.