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April 28, 2008, 04:22 PM ET
Administrative Flight at U. of Wisconsin?
According to an article in the Wisconsin State Journal, professors aren’t the only ones departing the University of Wisconsin for greener pastures; chancellors, apparently, are saying sayonara at an alarming rate, too. The reporter, Deborah Ziff, writes that:
In the last year, more than a third of the University of Wisconsin’s chancellors announced they were vacating the head office. …
Heads of five of 13 UW System ‘s four-year universities are leaving, or have already left — Whitewater, Madison, River Falls, Parkside, and Green Bay.
The reason, of course, is money. Ziff notes that despite the Board of Regents’ recent efforts to raise UW chancellors’ salaries to bring them in line with those of their peers, compensation and benefits packages for UW chancellors are still low. She points out, for example, that:
The salary of UW-Madison chancellor John Wiley, who announced he was retiring last year, is $327,417, the lowest in its peer group. The highest is University of Texas at Austin at $552,500.
Meanwhile the median salary of the other UW school presidents, except UW-Milwaukee, is about $13,000 below the median of its peer group.
Ziff quotes the system’s president, Kevin P. Reilly, as saying there’s no denying that money is major factor: “For the chancellors of UW-Green Bay and UW-River Falls, ‘the compensation packages were a significant part of the decision of those folks, although not the full story.’”
He and others worry that lower salaries will hurt the university’s ability to recruit top leadership talent. Jimmy Peltier, faculty chair of Whitewater’s chancellor-search committee, told Ziff that while he is happy with the pool of candidates to replace Martha Saunders — who departed last year at a chance to help her alma mater, the University of Southern Mississippi, rebound from the damage done by Hurricane Katrina (not to mention a big raise, from $190,525 to $345,500) — he worries that some candidates may be turned off by Wisconsin’s lower salaries: ‘“One of our disadvantages we have as a state is we don’t offer salaries other states offer,” Peltier said. “And that’s a challenge.”
Categories: Administrative-hiring
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