November 05, 2009, 11:00 AM ET
The Millionaires' Club
According to a recent Chronicle article, 23 private university presidents took home more than $1-million last year, up from nine the previous year. Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, NY, came in at no. 1, with a total annual compensation package of nearly $1.6-million.
Among the other top earners were:
• Steadman Upham, U. of Tulsa: $1,485,275
• Cornelius M. Kerwin, American U.: $1,419,339
• David J. Sargent, Suffolk U.: $1,496,593
• Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia U.: $1,380,035
Meanwhile, over at 11D, Laura McKenna is quick to point out the...
Read MoreSeptember 29, 2009, 12:00 PM ET
An Interesting Proposal
Are you sick of your tax dollars going to institutions that value big-time athletics over their educational missions? So is Benjamin E. Rosenberg, a New York lawyer who argues in a recent op-ed in The Christian Science Monitor that the U.S. government should withhold federal funds from universities that pay athletics coaches more than professors. The purpose of a university education, he writes, is to ...
gain professional skills and to cultivate a love for learning–tools that will ultimately help carry us through life. In a world that has become increasingly dependent on technology, information, and clear communication, American universities cannot afford to falter on this.
And yet, schools are paying outrageous compensation to the coaches of their football...Read More
September 21, 2009, 09:00 AM ET
Professors and Picket Signs
On the day before classes were set to begin for the current
semester at Oakland University, near Detroit, months of negotiating
had yet to yield a new contract for faculty members. So the campus
chapter of the American Association of University Professors did
what it has typically done when negotiations go down to the wire:
The members voted on whether to strike.
The result, overwhelmingly in favor, gave the union's bargaining
team needed leverage during negotiations. But the seven-day strike
that followed was anything but typical for a faculty union, for
which work stoppages of any length are uncommon.
The strike, which forced Oakland to cancel classes, ended in a
tentative agreement. Even so, local union officials and
higher-education labor experts say boycotting the classroom is a
last resort. Students' education, after all, hangs in the
balance.
August 24, 2009, 04:00 PM ET
Strategizing on Salary and Rank
The comments in response to my last entry about the beginning of our search season raise good questions that deserve some thought and a thorough response.
One commenter suggests that the best way to make everyone happy is to offer a very high salary and then adjust everyone else's salary to match.
Philosophically, this is an excellent point, and I always try hard to offer the best salary I can to selected candidates because I know that doing so will help us attract and retain the best people we can. I also take careful account of the salaries of faculty members who are already here to ensure fairness to them and to avoid inducing serious distortions in our salary structure.
Practically speaking, however, there are real limits to how much adjusting one can do, particularly at a small institution like...
Read MoreAugust 18, 2009, 08:00 AM ET
Ball State U. Will Pay Its President an Extra $220K
The president of Ball State University, Jo Ann Gora, will forgo
an extended leave of absence that was promised to her in favor of
an additional $220,000 in pay,
The Star Press reports.
As the newspaper tells it:
When she was hired in 2004, Gora's employment contract provided her a six-month leave of absence if she was still serving as president five years later, which is August of this year.
In the fall of 2007, however, the university's board of trustees amended the contract to give Gora the option of receiving additional compensation in lieu of taking six months of paid leave of absence.
Under the amended contract, Gora, whose 2008 salary was $356,400, is entitled to "additional compensation equal to 50 percent...Read More
August 18, 2009, 07:00 AM ET
Ex-Chancellor of N.C. State U. Gets a Pay Cut
The University of North Carolina system's governing board voted Friday to slash the salary of James L. Oblinger, the former chancellor of North Carolina State University who stepped down in June over his involvement in the hiring of Mary P. Easley, wife Michael F. Easley, the former North Carolina governor, the Raleigh News & Observer reports:
Oblinger [...] had been earning his full administrative salary: $420,000 annually, or $35,000 a month. Under an agreement forged with UNC system President Erskine Bowles when he resigned, he was to be paid at that rate for six months before returning to the faculty at a lower wage.
The UNC system's Board of Governors voted Friday to scale his pay back immediately....Read More
August 07, 2009, 04:13 PM ET
Hiring and Firing Bytes
Neal Smatresk, executive vice president and provost at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, has been picked to lead the university, the Las Vegas Sun reports.
The Wheeling Jesuit University Board of Trustees has dismissed the Rev. Julio Giulietti, president of the institution since 2007, the Wheeling News-Register reports.
The University System of Maryland plans to slash 175 jobs -- 151 of which are currently vacant -- and freeze hiring as part of an effort to carve $37.8-million from its 2010 budget, the Baltimore
Read MoreAugust 05, 2009, 01:00 PM ET
Expectations Mean a Lot
Via The Juggle comes word of new research showing that many women hamper themselves at work by underestimating their job performance and their standing with supervisors and colleagues. In contrast, men tend to slightly overestimate how their supervisors would rate them, according to the study, which will be presented at the Academy of Management's annual meeting this month.
The Juggle's Sue Shellenbarger, in The Wall Street Journal, notes that "over all, averaging all the ratings, the gap between prediction and reality was three times greater for women than for men." Not surprisingly, the gap was most pronounced for women 50 and over, whose estimates averaged 11 percent...
Read MoreAugust 05, 2009, 11:00 AM ET
A Lose-Lose Situation
Furloughs at the University of California may be a "foregone conclusion," but faculty members would be wise to carefully consider how the steps are taken, warns Ari Kelman, an associate professor of history on the Davis campus, in a post at The Edge of the American West. Given the choice between taking furloughs on "calendared days of instruction" or on "calendared intersession days when no formal instruction is scheduled," he says he would pick the former, lest a dangerous precedent be set:
My sense was and is that if the state Legislature chooses to impose what amounts to a highly regressive tax (in the form of huge cuts in funding that necessitate furloughs) on a tiny subset of California’s population (most state employees), because it...Read More
July 27, 2009, 09:00 PM ET
Top Administrators at U. Hawaii to Take Pay Cuts
The president of the University of Hawaii, David McClain, and the soon-to-be system president, M.R.C. Greenwood, are planning to take a 10-percent pay cut in order to help offset $155-million in budget cuts over the next two years, the Honolulu Advertiser reports. Under the proposal, which President McClain will present to the Board of Regents on August 27, another 210 administrators throughout the 10-campus UH system would also take home 6 to 9 percent less, depending on their most recent performance evaluations, he told the newspaper. The announcement comes in the midst of discussions between the governor, the university, the state Department of Education, and several unions over proposed pay cuts and furloughs, the Advertiser notes. McClain, who is trimming his own salary by 10...
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