As Rutgers University's spring semester gets under way today, negotiators for the university and faculty union will try for the second time in one week to hammer out a contract for professors and teaching assistants.

After initially offering no pay raises, the university has made numerous concessions to the union, including a 12 percent pay increase for teaching assistants over the next two years.

Assistant and associate professors would get across-the-board raises of 3 percent and 1.3 percent, respectively, over the next two years, under the university's most recent offer. They would become eligible also for merit raises of 3 percent and 3.94 percent, respectively, over two years.

Senior professors would become eligible for merit raises of 5.25 percent over the second and third year of the contract.

"We have heard and responded to a number of the union's concerns, and we expect that the union will do the same for the university," deputy university counsel John Wolf said. "This offer balances the difficult financial reality currently facing Rutgers with the university's goal of retaining and attracting high-quality faculty and graduate students."

Wolf noted that teaching assistants who already receive health benefits equal to those of faculty would receive a full remission of fees, starting with the new semester.

"This is a very fair and competitive offer," he said.

Acknowledging that some concessions have been made, leaders of the faculty union said the university's stand remains unacceptable.

"We're determined to have a four-year contract," said professor Robert Boikess, the lead negotiator for the Rutgers Council of the Association of American University Professors.

The university has yet to offer raises in the current year to teaching assistant or faculty, Boikess said, adding that this year's teaching and graduate assistants "need some kind of salary increase."

"Nothing could be starker" than the gap between Rutgers' comparatively modest salaries for teaching assistants and the pay for university administrators, Boikess said, alluding to the $625,000 annual pay package Rutgers President Richard L. McCormick could receive if he stays for four more years.

The administration's stance in the negotiations appears to be hastening the end of the honeymoon McCormick enjoyed with much of the faculty during his first year at Rutgers.

"I have come to the conclusion that, notwithstanding our great hopes upon his arrival, President McCormick's administration is taking a more unfair, more unenlightened, more confrontational approach to its employees than any other public university or college in New Jersey -- or any other administration in the history of collective bargaining at Rutgers over the last 40 years," union President Rudy Bell said.

Those sentiments are expected to appear in a full-page ad the union plans to purchase in the Daily Targum later this week, Bell said.

The faculty union also has called for a boycott of Friday's meeting of the University Senate, which could potentially deprive the institution's chief advisory body of the quorum it needs to conduct business.

"The top priority of the university must be the retention of the high-quality faculty it has," Bell said. "The current offer (for faculty) doesn't even meet the increase in inflation. Any offer that doesn't protect against inflation is in fact a cut in real pay, it's that simple."