The University of Washington lost a class-action lawsuit last week as a state court ordered the Seattle-based public university to retroactively award meritorious faculty 2 percent salary hikes withheld in 2003.

According to Washington spokesperson Norman Arkans, the university added a policy to its faculty handbook about six years ago to increase the salary of commendable faculty by 2 percent each year.

With dwindling state support however, the university decided to maintain the status quo on faculty salaries in 2003, reasoning it did not make sense to increase faculty salaries and cut support to other aspects of the university.

"The administration's view of the policy was that it was dependent on having funding come to us from the state Legislature for faculty salary increases," Arkans said.

Judge Mary Yu of the King County Superior Court disagreed however, and in her decision last week said no language in the faculty handbook qualifies the increases as dependent on funding.

"[T]he court concludes that the plain language creates a mandatory duty that requires the university to provide meritorious faculty an annual merit increase of at least 2 percent," Yu said. "The court cannot find any language that makes the merit salary increase contingent on funding."

Arkans said the authors of the handbook believe it was "perfectly clear" that the 2 percent increase was contingent on receiving funding from the Legislature.

"Without the influx of new money or in the event of decreased state support, a reevaluation of this Faculty Salary Policy may prove necessary," the handbook reads.

Yu's decision, which will reportedly cost the university more than $12 million, cited the word "reevaluation" as reason why the school could not abruptly bypass a salary increase.

"There's a provision in one of those … documents that says the president may reevaluate the policy in the future but it doesn't say the president may ignore the policy in the future," Stephen Strong, attorney for the Washington faculty members, said.

The next step in the legal process, Strong said, is for the court to determine who will be paid by the university and how much, as he said the failure to increase salary nearly three years ago now equates to more than a 2 percent hike.

"It's not just for one year, it's not a bonus that's the issue — it's a pay raise," Strong said. "People were making less money ever since that occurred, which was three years [ago]."

Arkans said he personally believes the language in the handbook could have more clearly expressed the university's intent. The idea, he said, was Washington could refrain from making the increase in a given year as long as it did not give another adjunct of the university increased funding.

"We have a long-standing commitment to competitive faculty salaries, and by competitive I mean with our peers like Wisconsin, like Michigan, like UCLA, like Berkeley," Arkans said.

In 2003 though, Arkans said the state actually cut the budget and so the university made the decision not to further put itself in a hole by increasing faculty salaries, but instead to "say these are tough economic times … and hope that the following year is better."

The University of Washington has not yet decided whether to appeal the decision.