10/4/2013: That would be Duck President Michael Gottfredson, vs. UC-Boulder Chancellor Phil DiFestano. Duck faculty, on the other hand, lost this one by 13%:
Faculty salary averages are for Fall 2012, from the Chronicle/AAUP data. President/Chancellor salary and deferred compensation from news reports. Colorado system President Bruce Benson makes $359K. In 2011 he turned down a raise from his board, redirecting the money to faculty merit raises.
outrageous and I’m not even faculty! This should be shared with the RG or Oregonian…
misleading … using total compensation from AAUP instead of salary puts UO slightly ahead of Colorado at every rank …. not sure about president though …
I think this is about right — when I figure in pension benefits at each rank, with a couple of percent to account for the fact that CU has engineering, and maybe another couple of percent for the low fraction of our medical benefits that we have to pay — it looks like UO is just about even with CU on faculty compensation. You say you need to throw in the housing subsidy at CU (necessitated by sky-high (so to speak!) housing)? Then by all means, throw in the differential cost of living as well. I’ll bet then UO comes out ahead. (In any case, I’ll take the ocean, but that’s a matter of taste.)
High housing costs are caused by
1. 300 days of sunshine a year
2. 1 hour to best skiing in the world
3. The stuff that makes Eugene a little more expensive too (fun community, hiking, natural beauty), without springfield and danebo which average Eugene prices look lower than what they really are.
Perhaps ‘total compensation’ should be renamed ‘deferred compensation.’ And when taking into account Deferred Compensation, is there any way to justify the relative pay of UO administration? Salary at 100% of comparators PLUS amazing Deferred Compensation?
Anon — In making the case about the facts re faculty compensation, I have never meant to defend out-of-line compensation for upper administrators.
Total compensation not including other benefits like housing support which effectively reduces your mortage by 20-30 percent, which increases your compensation by 10 percent.
I repeat, I interviewed with Boulder. Great school and department, and probably our close comparator (and competitor) of the AAU pools. Our two departments our close to the same ranking (they’re a little higher, but a little bigger too). Asst salaries about the same. In the same department, Boulder salaries were about 20 percent higher for associates, and 40 percent higher for the median full profs. The problem is how we pay median full profs and associates, at least for this particular department.
And why if things are so much better at Colorado, did you come to UO?
By the way, if the housing support increases your total compensation by 10% — let’s say, $10K per year — and this decreases your mortgage by 20-30%, then your mortgage must be in the range $10K/(.20) — $10K/(.30) — that’s a mortgage of $33K – $50K per year without the subsidy, or net $23K – $40K per year with the subsidy. You can get a nice house in Eugene for a hell of a lot less monthly mortgage payment — any salary differential at Colorado will be eaten up pretty quickly at those housing costs!
Because two faculty at UC Boulder were independently warning me about each other, and others were warning me about them. Also the UO was quite strong in my area of expertise with three other faculty actively working on closely related topics. So I as a place to start a career, with comparable salaries and better playmates, the UO was a clear winner as an asst prof at the time (things have a changed a little since then, but stuff is still pretty awesome here). The one reservation I had was the notable compression issues evident when looking at more senior salaries, but of course I was assured those issues were being solved:-)
As far as the housing subsidy, I rechecked stuff using a mortgage calculator tool it probably comes out closer to a 5% benefit in income based on what my mortgage is now, vs. what it would have been with the subsidy.
Remind your chair that you were assured that those issues were being worked on.
Awesome0 — sounds like you have had some second thoughts about decision, but on the whole, thought UO better. So I would not waste too much of my life looking back and complaining.
I have experience of both universities and places, Eugene and Boulder, and I will take life here.
It is good, however, for authorities here to be reminded that there are other nice places, that Eugene is not everyone’s cup of tea.
Eugene is definitely my cup of tea, and I have no regrets of coming here. I absolutely have no second thoughts, I’m sure it was the right choice and I would make it again. But at the same time, I think its important to recognize the tradeoffs that exist, and one of them in Eugene is that we don’t pay the associate and full professors that well.
This is a huge problem because then assistants doing well think of leaving, and then the retention offer to the assistants is often constrained by the salary of associates and fulls to prevent or limit inversion. This leads to negative selection. Of course we can’t retain everyone, but improving salary outlooks is important in recruiting, retention, and encouraging scholarship. To pretend all salary issues are magically solved by generous retirement benefits which are under continual attack from the state government is overly optimistic and perhaps naive in my view. Also retirement benefits do not immediately reward merit.
I want the associates and fulls to be paid well, both to encourage better faculty to come here, and because some day I aim to be an associate and full professor, and I would to be paid marginally more than a new assistant professor despite having years of experience and scholarship.
I think the current contract is the an important first step, and I hope that as the UO starts bonding, increasing its endowment, and building new infrastructure, that long term plans will be announced by the admin to put the UO on a great trajectory in improving its scholarship. As a public institution, the UO has a great chance to jump ahead of others given its relatively stable funding stream. I hope the leaders seize the moment and opportunity they have.
I am pretty sure — I’ll just claim that without saying why I’m confident — that the UO administration has restrained the full professor salaries in recognition of the much higher (on average) retirement benefits. I’m thinking especially, but not only, of Tier 1 people, either in PERS or ORP. Both the benefit to the faculty member and the cost to UO.
Unfortunately, it is not easy to get said full professors to realize the value of those retirement benefits, or to overlook their admittedly low salaries. This is partly due, I believe, to the poor job the administration has done with this.
If you’re getting a lackluster salary, yet getting retirement benefits that make that salary a good deal more lustrous when the dollars are added up, it’s hard to know whether you are being taken for a chump, whether you lucked into something, or are being adequately rewarded, or perhaps all three simultaneously.
In the future, as the older full professors retire and are replaced by Tier 3 people with much more ordinary salaries, it will behoove UO to improve the full professor salaries accordingly.
I would not say that all salary issues are magically solved by generous retirement benefits. See above, especially re getting the older full professors to recognize the value of their (generally) far superior retirement benefits.
You sound pretty thoughtful about these compensation issues, while being, I take it, rather new.
In the future, it is to be hoped that UO will do a much better job with faculty compensation issues, including equity, and using compensation policies to motivate and reward good people.
Dog Whines
I can’t agree with this at all. I do not believe that over the last 25 years our various admins have consistently said: “let’s not raise the salaries on those prima donna full profs because they will make out like Bandits in Tier 1”
Rather I think this is going on and this is based on actual case example in my dept (not me)
1. Person X was hired in 1991 as an Assistant prof at about 10% below market value (our dept continued
this practice until around 2000).
2. Person X got promoted to Assocaite in 1997 and got the standard $1800 promotion raise at that time
3. Person X got promoted to Prima Donna in 2003 and got another $1800 (% promo raises were instituted by CAS in 2004)
This person is still here and their salary is about 30K below average because of
a) low starting salary
b) low tenure and promotion raises.
I suspect that any Full prof that got hired here as an assistant professor prior to 1992 is in the
same situation.
Of course it wasn’t over the last 25 years, because Tier 1 PERS/ORP did not become such a great deal until after the market crash of 2000-2003 and the subsequent issuance of bonds to make up the unfunded liability, which resulted in employer rates going from their historical level of about 9-10% to the current 16.5% or so. (But in addition to the 6% pickup, which continued and which was always rightly regarded as an increment to “pay.”)
It also wasn’t the practice of UO to offer competitive salaries until — you said it — starting around 2000, the time of the “white paper” under which UO, however sporadically and in starts and fits, began to make real progress on salaries.
It was after 2003, when Tier 2 had been established and then Tier 3, and when ORP was operational, that, I claim, UO administration began thinking of the Tier 1 people as getting an extra special “pay” increment in the form of exception pension benefits, above and beyond what others were getting.
See Coltrane on this at https://uomatters.com/2013/09/bad-news-on-future-pay.html
“c. Step 3 (as early as FY 2012/13 and no later than FY 2013/2014), increases based on internal equity and merit.
The total amount of funding made available for salary increases by the College in Step 3 will be at least the amount necessary to increase the College’s average salaries to make up the remaining distance to the average salaries of the OUS 8 comparators.”
Note the use of “salaries” and the lack of mention of benefits.
Dog says
I buy the premise that raise structures for full profs from 2000- 2010 were decent with some better
attempt at dealing with compression issues. I don’t think that Tier 1 was holding that raise structure
back any.
They were not good in the 1990 – 2000 framework, especially the lack of a healthy promotion
raise.
So I stick to my original point that many full professors are grossly underpaid due to legacy
issues.
I basically think that anyone hired since 2000, is likely doing okay.
I think that everyone, including people in Johnson Hall when they are being forthright, realizes that whatever the situation regarding average, aggregate compensation is for the various ranks at UO, there are great inequities in individual cases. This bespeaks a past failure on the part of UO, and hopefully, one which they will try to rectify in the future, with or without the prodding of the union.
BTW, retirement here is the same as IOU’s.
When we retirement, I imagine we might feel kinda like this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uW728Zm6gcY
ok please be fair here and report all the info:
If you read the linked article the CU president is an oil tycoon who has no interest in the money from CU
he is one of their biggest donors! He also pays for all his own travel and never does expense reports. Sounds great, but can’t be expected from all presidents…
Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good headline
You mean, because the CU president has independent wealth, he can be expected to live on the poverty wages of $389,000? But because Gottfredson is not an oil tycoon, he desperately needs that extra $151,000 per year to keep him in groceries, instead of directing part of his $540,000 to the folks hoping for a 2% merit raise to increase their $80,000 or $60,000 per year?
What are you trying to say? Just spit it out.
“What are you trying to say? Just spit it out.”
How about this: the pay of a university president/chancellor should be based on factors related to the position, not to the holder’s personal wealth from other sources.
How about: it’s deplorable that the UO president is paid so far above the presidents of our comparators when faculty are paid so much lower than faculty at our comparators. Since CU’s faculty are well paid, one might be able to understand if CU’s president decided to take his raise. But he make a public statement in favor of merit raises for faculty, and put his money where his mouth is. Gottfredson would do well to emulate his example. The idea that Gottfredson couldn’t afford not to be paid the entire $540,000 because he doesn’t have a private fortune is laughable. The fact that he’s been directing his subordinates to restrict faculty raises is deplorable.
Of course he should not take additional money. That said, he makes so much more than is justified that I would hope a little give back here and there would not be enough to assuage faculty concerns over his ability to govern. Make the athletic department pay its own way? Not you’re talking. Care out 2 percent of the athletic budget to help move the academic side forward for once? Real progress. Can Randy Geller’s ass? Bury Tim Gleason somewhere? Don’t hide behind Rudnick when bargaining starts up again. All good.
President Gottfredson has done an excellent job keeping faculty salaries under control. Presumably the board will give him a big raise next year.
Board doesn’t care about profs. To get bonus he’ll have to expand Autzen.