Press "Enter" to skip to content

UO Pres Mike Schill’s pay and benefits will be 9th highest in nation

Diane Dietz has the story in the RG, here:

Incoming University of Oregon President Mike Schill negotiated a sweet deal from the UO Board of Trustees.

His pay and benefits will be the ninth highest of the 220 top public universities, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education annual report released today.

Trustees, during the presidential search, said they were willing to pay more to get a go-getter with talent, skill and judgement.

Schill’s compensation at $798,400 annually — when he starts on July 1 — is roughly 50 percent higher than his predecessor Michael Gottfredson, who resigned abruptly in August.

The UO’s new president has to remain on the job for the full five years of his contract to get the total compensation, because some of it is in the form of retention bonuses.

Schill is a longtime law dean at prestigious universities — UCLA and University of Chicago — although he’s never been a university president.

By contrast, Ed Ray has been president at Oregon State University for a dozen years, and his annual compensation at $558,739 is about 30 percent lower.

Earlier this year the Board of Trustees gave large raises to AD Rob Mullens and football coach Mark Helfrich and his assistants – while the UO administration is arguing the athletic department can’t afford to end the subsidies, and start making the payments for academic scholarships that would boost UO’s tuition discount rate, attract more top students, and improve our US News ranking.

Meanwhile the administration’s salary offer to the faculty amounts to a cut in real pay:

The UO faculty last received raises on July 1, 2014. Last week the admins proposed that we wait 18 months for this:

Jan 1 2016:
1% ATB
0% Merit
0% Equity

And then wait another 12 months for this:

Jan 1 2017:
0% ATB
1.5% Merit pool by unit (But up to 20% held back at Dean’s discretion.)
0% Equity

Bargaining resumes in July, after Schill takes office. The UO Trustees met in closed session on Friday to discuss the union bargaining proposals.

18 Comments

  1. dog 06/07/2015

    Schill = 1/2 a Helfrich, correct, about?

  2. Anonymous 06/07/2015

    Every recent president has gotten a honeymoon – a period of high hopes, some breathing room while they get their bearings. But as far as I’m concerned, by accepting this deal Schill has given up that perk. The bar is absurdly high, and he set it himself.

    • Kitten 06/07/2015

      Maybe he’s a guy who rises to a challenge, and it’s serve as an internal motivator.

    • just different 06/07/2015

      He seems to want to hit the ground running and he knows we’ve been around this block too many times to cut him much slack. I’m very encouraged that before even starting the job he stopped the GC search and made it his own.

  3. Cleaning up 06/07/2015

    Now that Dean/President Schill has decided to take command of the General Counsel’s office, will he be equally decisive with the director of the Counseling Center?

    UOM printed an email from her that explicitly ordered the secret collection of therapy records in the basketball case (no date stamps, no informing the student whose records were being given to her opponents (General Counsel) in the lawsuit).

    Can the 25,000 students enrolled at UO have any confidence in a Counseling Center that could do the same thing again — with their records?

  4. honest Uncle Bernie 06/07/2015

    The ONLY justification for this is the UO’s well-deserved reputation for destroying presidents, especially in recent years (but a lot of people still remember Paul Olum).

    Other than that, it just seems like another extremely tin-eared move on the part of the trustees and the new president. Do they think this will keep us in the AAU? That it will make the faculty even more cooperative and less adversarial than we already are? What do they want after the union? A real honest to goodness strike or something? What are they thinking?

    Do they want to remove Bellotti’s pension as the top beef the public has against UO?

    I mean, give the guy a decent package, middle range of our comparators (which is where we rank AT BEST) — not number 9 among public universities. I mean, I can easily rattle off backward twice that many that are clearly way better than us.

    I look forward to UO rapidly rising to number 9 in SAT/ACT scores among public universities. After we race by Kansas, Oklahoma …

    lol!!

  5. SaveUofO 06/08/2015

    With that sort of pay how in the hell does the administration not see where most of their financial woes originate? Nevermind. I forgot they’re all writing their own contracts and pay scale. Nothing is going to change around here. The folks in JH don’t give a shit about anyone else on this campus and will eat their own. The only way anything can change is to have it come from the top and we all know how all that has gone around here for years now.

    • dog 06/08/2015

      yes but look at that guys record and the development of WSU under him. WSU went through a similar undergraduate growth support
      as the UO, but WSU managed to scale their TTF (and give them raises) to support that growth. In addition, WSU’s research profile has substantially grown.

  6. Walter R. 06/08/2015

    First year on the job, no track record beyond dean? Pay him wwice what the Chancellor of UCLA gets? At a small, poor university with no medical etc? Too much money. And UO says the faculty only need a $600 raise? A slap in the face to the very people Schill will have to work with to put the university back together. Including the legislature. Terrible idea. Unless of course we come back in the fall to find that Uncle Phil’s finally given UO that $1B, with no Duck strings. Then it’s all OK, an excellent hire, and money well spent, Mr. Lillis!

  7. awesome0 06/08/2015

    I think he’s talking a good game, and I’m hopeful. That said, I hope he realizes trickle down academics doesn’t work. If they want good professors, they have to pay for it.

  8. 'dead duck' 06/08/2015

    The downside: this compensation schedule will surely lead to more increases for admins in JH, alas. All of whom are proven mediocrities, and survive only by hiring more junior admins. This pattern will not help the faculty salaries or improve the instructional and research mission of the UO. Rather I fear the opposite, but being a ‘dead’ duck does provide some measure of protection.

    The upside…maybe, just maybe the new prez will begin by cleaning house in JH, and getting some competent people. The record of such appointments over 30 years does not suggest there is much of a basis for anticipating such a housecleaning.

  9. Desperate? 06/08/2015

    Or perhaps he did his research, understands UO chews them up and spits them out, realizes that there is a level of toxicity around here that he will need to clean up, and is a helluva negotiator, knowing that there were few people really who would take the position (despite the happy talk of the Search Committee). I for one hope that he can bring calm, collegiality, and a healthy discourse to this place. And if he does that, he saves us lots of search fees for the future.

  10. Raven 06/08/2015

    The salary seems high to me, and it may not reflect brilliant negotiating skills on Schill’s part (if recollection serves correctly, Gary was the only voice on the BOT expressing any concern about the size of the compensation package when the issue came up last fall). Still, if Schill’s as good as some say he is, the high salary may be worth it in the long run.

    It should be noted that UOMatters’ effort to tie this BOT action to the salaries for Mullens/Helfrich is misleading. The BOT does not set the salary of anyone at the university other than the president. (Of course the Board could fire a president if its members didn’t like the salary decisions being made, but that’s not a likely outcome unless there are broader concerns of the sort that emerged during MG’s reign.)

    • uomatters Post author | 06/09/2015

      The raises for Mullens and Helfrich exceeded the $5m trigger and the BOT finance committee had to hold a special meeting to approve them.

  11. Rep 06/09/2015

    Raven,

    Also, if anyone took the time to read and listen to Ed Rays discussion about institutional boards, one of the concerns he had was a micro-managing board ( https://media.oregonstate.edu/media/0_f18pdhig ) . If you think that the board or specific members have no hand in setting the terms of the faculty and staff compensation then, well naive may be an appropriate term. The board has the power implicitly, and explicitly to take control of what ever it wants… and it will over time… that is unless the legislature decides to pass a law to give the legislature control: https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/06/08/wisconsin-board-adopts-tenure-rules-dont-satisfy-professors

  12. that effing Canis again 06/09/2015

    Plus he seems now to be Prex of IOU (Interim Oregon University) – as we now have 4 interim Deans and one Interim VPR – that’s a lot of interim. I, personally, have asked to be promoted to Interim Professor. I guess its time that the entire campus reflected the basic nature of Interim parking.

  13. Samantha 05/25/2017

    Shame on you for resorting to tuition increases. Students shouldn’t have to bear the costs of the university’s financial difficulties; rather, you could take a pay cut instead of adding to students’ financial burden.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *