Things are looking up … for California State University administrators. Despite a budget crisis and plans to limit student enrollment, the Board of Trustees of the California State University system and Chancellor Charles Reed, are handing out big raises to top CSU administrators, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. According to the newspaper:
Chancellor Charles Reed approved salary increases of up to 19 percent for nine vice presidents at four of CSU’s 23 campuses earlier this year, and approved 11 new appointments of vice presidents at nine campuses at salaries of as high as $225,000.
A committee of the Board of Trustees reviewed those pay raises on Tuesday, endorsed a separate 10 percent salary raise for an interim vice chancellor who is receiving a permanent appointment and approved Reed’s hiring of a vice chancellor for development for $240,000 a year – a job that had been vacant for about 5 1/2 years.
The biggest raise went to Ronnie Higgs, the interim vice president of student affairs at CSU Monterey Bay, who got a $22,500 bump in July when he assumed that title, which upped his salary to $140,004 from $117,504, the newspaper reported.
Not surprisingly, the raises aren’t sitting well with some CSU faculty and staff members. Pat Gantt, president of the CSU Employees Union, which represents about 16,000 staff members, said, “Paying managers and executives more at a time when everyone else is sacrificing is bad form. It’s like the executives at Enron taking bonuses while the company goes down … .”
According to the newspaper, some of the raises were meant to reward high performance, while others were designed to align administrators’ salaries with those of their peers on other campuses.
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