Administrators gone bad

3/28/2012 Update: Link to Boston Globe story on Cotton here:

2/29/2012: Furloughs for faculty, big tuition raises for students, huge bonuses for administrators. At Howard University, from insidehighered.com. I like this quote:

Raymond D. Cotton, a Washington lawyer who specializes in presidential contracts, said the incentives Howard offered — often called “stay bonuses” – help keep top administrative talent at universities during transitions. While the value of the bonuses at Howard struck Cotton as perhaps somewhat high, Cotton recommends such stay bonuses to his own clients.

Back in 2007 George Pernsteiner wanted to give Dave Frohnmayer a raise. So he hired that same Ray Cotton and his higher ed consulting firm ML Strategies to prepare a report comparing Frohnmayer’s pay with that of his peers. The report is 11 pages long, including the cover. It’s almost entirely cribbed from data available online to any subscriber from the Chronicle.com online reports on presidential salaries. The report is here. They charged Oregon an incredible $45,572.03 for this report. The invoices are at the end of the pdf.

When I started asking questions about this Pernsteiner was so embarrassed that OUS legal counsel Ryan Hagemann spent months trying to hide the report from public view, and months more trying to hide how much they had paid for it. In the end the Oregon Department of Justice ruled they had to make both public, and then that they had to pay the DOJ another $3,000 or so to cover the DOJ’s expenses for the ruling.

Ironically, the information in the report suggests that Frohnmayer was actually overpaid, to the tune of $100,000 or so. But, of course, his buddies went ahead and gave him another $150,000 anyway. By the end he was taking in more than the Chancellor (=President) of UC-Berkeley. And 2 years later, he tried to get the UO faculty to take furloughs.