Tag Archives: Administrator salary spreadsheet

Update: Gottfredson’s compensation is ~10% above comparators

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7/27/2013 update: OUS has quietly shifted presidential pay from the UO Foundation to state funds and student tuition. Back in 2008, the OUS board approved the final year of Dave Frohnmayer’s presidential contract, with a substantial raise. Contract here. On top of $245,700 in state money and $50K for the “Knight Presidential Chair”, they agreed to let the Foundation pay him another $350K from donor funds. OUS tried to hide this, and then tried justify the raise by noting that the increase would come from donors, not taxpayers. Steve Duin of the Oregonian reported on some of their attempts. Frohnmayer’s 2008 pay:

In contrast President Gottfredson’s base pay of $540K (no chair) is all from OUS state and tuition funds (contract here):
PERS/ORP retirement, car, housing and expenses are on top of this course. Where will the UO Foundation spend the $350K they saved? The past is probably a good predictor:

5/13/2013: Gottfredson’s compensation is ~10% above comparators:

We all know UO faculty salaries are bad. Check here to see how far you are behind your peers. But the UO salary news isn’t grim for everyone. The Chronicle just reported salaries for 212 presidents and chancellors at public research universities, for 2011. The median total compensation (includes deferred) is $400,000. President Gottfredson’s contract is here. His starting pay was $440K, plus $100K deferred, plus ORP at about $63K, plus $14.4K for a car, plus use of McMorran house or Treetops, worth say $36K – below market, but he’s gotta use it for entertaining too. So, including ORP his total comp is about $653K. Leaving out the house and car, it’s $603K.

Average compensation at our AAU comparators is $612K. If you leave out IU and Michigan, where the presidents run entire systems, the average is $553K. Of course many of these other presidents have years of presidential experience.

Update: Administrative raise documents

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3/20/2013 update. Seems like a good time to repost this classic on raises for UO administrators and the efforts JH has made to keep the process secret. You can read the WSJ on UO’s administrative bloat and listen to Bean and Frohnmayer bloviate about UO’s lean administration here.

4/3/2012: More than four months after his initial public records request, Nathan Tublitz has finally been able to obtain documents showing how the most recent raises for a few top UO administrators were determined. The file is here. It includes Jim Bartko, Jim Bean, Frances Dyke, Don Harris, Wendy Larson, Jamie Moffitt, and Russ Tomlin.

Tublitz tried to get more info, but the university told him he’d have to pay them $4,328.63 to see the records. This is the price for asking too many tough questions. These documents were for the summer 2011 round of raises. The RG editorialized about this back in November, just before the Lariviere firing, noting that fully 40% of the money was going to administrators:

“Bad Politics, Good Policy: The UO invests its tuition money in (some) people”

… The documents list “special equity raises” of $3.1 million for 743 faculty members and $1.8 million for 417 administrators. The faculty raises averaged 6.98 percent; administrators’ increases averaged 7.68 percent. …

To pick a name at random, the result of this process is that UO’s provost Jim Bean is now paid $322,140 plus a BMW and sabbatical. For comparison UC-Berkeley’s provost George Breslauer is paid $306,000. Berkeley has, roughly, four times the budget and staff of UO, and provost at Berkeley is a much more difficult job – who knows, it might even involve a competitive search and performance reviews.

For a better comparison, here are (a bit dated) salaries from the Chronicle database for schools with budgets and size similar to UO. You can get the data on UO salaries here (big file).

COLA for OA’s, and SEIU response:

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7/30/2012: I’m sure there are many underpaid OA’s even after these raises. And many underpaid staff and faculty. Feel free to comment away. Back in November Greg Bolt of the RG had a story on the raises for UO faculty and administrators that led to Richard Lariviere’s firing. This was shortly before the news on Bean’s beamer and sabbatical came out. The RG Editorial was headlined: “Bad Politics, Good Policy: The UO invests its tuition money in (some) people” The short version:

… The documents list “special equity raises” of $3.1 million for 743 faculty members and $1.8 million for 417 administrators. The faculty raises averaged 6.98 percent; administrators’ increases averaged 7.68 percent. … 

 The biggest raise, of course, went to Bean. I thought the 417 was a little hard to square with the statement from Bean below that

“The majority of the affected employees have not had a salary adjustment since late 2008, nearly four years.” 

but it turns out UO now has 1271 OAs. (Versus only 691 TT faculty). On the other hand the FAQ says 900 will get raises. I’d ask Jim for more clarification, but when Nathan Tublitz asked for details on the 2011 raises Randy Geller tried to charge him $10,000 or so, and then Berdahl shit all over him with the new restrictions on public records access. What he did finally get out of the PRO is here.

I like the way Bean’s FAQ blames the faculty unionization for the fact faculty will get no raises. Yes, our Provost really thinks we are stupid enough to believe his stupidity. Bean’s statement today:


Colleagues: 

I am pleased to announce that Interim President Berdahl has authorized a cost-of-living salary adjustment (“COLA”) for most Officers of Administration (“OAs”), effective July 1, 2012.  Affected employees will see the impact of the adjustment in their late August paychecks.  This will be an across-the-board adjustment of 3.5% for all OAs except; President, Provost, Vice Presidents, Vice Provosts, Deans, tenure related faculty in administrative roles, General Counsel, Athletic Director, athletic coaches with negotiated multi-year contracts , and most F-contract employees.  To be eligible, OAs must have been hired into their current position before January 1st, 2012. 

The majority of the affected employees have not had a salary adjustment since late 2008, nearly four years.  We feel that it is crucial that we take care of this employee group whose commitment to effective and efficient operations of this great institution has helped bring us through this difficult economic period. 

The SEIU contract negotiated by OUS for the seven Oregon Institutions provides COLAs and step increases for our classified staff over the next two years.  We anticipate addressing faculty salary issues in our upcoming negotiations with the newly formed union.A FAQ page with more details is posted at http://hr.uoregon.edu/oa/oa-announcement-7-30-2012.  If you have questions, please direct them to [email protected]. 

Regards, Jim

SEIU local President Gary Malone’s response is, basically, that Bean needs to work on his math:

Dear Provost Bean, 

I would like to clear up a few misconceptions pointed out in your letter rationalizing 3.5% COLA’s for our Officers of Administration Staff. When you say that the 2011-2013 SEIU/OUS CBA “provides COLAs and step increases for our classified staff over the next two years. “ That is somewhat of a misnomer. 

The 2011-2013 SEIU/OUS CBA initially awards Furlough Days for the biennium which equates to a 4.7% pay-cut for all employees. Also, when the CBA was ratified in October of 2011; It rolled back all employees step-increases that were given after June 30 2011. In the 2009-2011 CBA, all steps were frozen and Furlough Days were imposed on Classified Staff Only! The Chancellor initially froze all Merit Increases in October 2008 for all Classified Staff; Right after Faculty and Administration were given substantial pay increases. 

Let’s take a closer look at where Classified Employees are:
1) Merit Increases Frozen 10-2008
2) Furlough Days 2009-2011; 4.7% pay cut
3) Furlough Days 2011-2013; 4.7% pay cut
4) Salary roll back 11-2012, to pre-July 1 , 2012 levels
5) Dec 2012, First Step Increase since 2008; 4.7% increase…But wait…you still have the Furlough Days. Equals no pay increase
6) 1.5% COLA, January 2012. However, the cost of living has gone up 12 to 15 percent since our last adjustment.
7) July 1, 2012, Some people finally get a Step Increase. Many do not.
8) January 1 2013…..Every Classified employee who has been here since 2008 will have received 1 Step Increase +4.7%, and two COLA’s +2.75% , and Furlough Days -4.7% over 5 years….AND Merit Increases are still frozen, or discouraged.
While I appreciate the UO Administration for giving credit to OUS and SEIU for the OA’s good fortunes; The bottom line is that most Classified Employees have only seen to date a modest 1.75% COLA and a -4.7% Furlough Day pay cut for a net of…are you ready for this … Minus 3% over 5 years. Our wages have gone down, not up. Then if you factor in say 12% inflation over the same period and we really are about 15% under paid. 

Respectfully, Gary D. Malone
SEIU/OPEU Local 085 President

Pernsteiner gives Ed Ray raise for good behavior

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6/15/2012: Bill Graves has the story. Looks like $587,705 plus benefits. Quite high for a school like Oregon State. Gottfredson’s deal is on the rich side too. The high pay for OUS presidents is a holdover from Pernsteiner’s $45,000 consulting deal with Ray Cotton, used to justify a large raise for Frohnmayer. And of course when the presidents are paid a lot, it’s easier to justify more money for the chancellor – maybe even a raise for his maid?

Retention raise for Robin Holmes

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5/18/2012: VPSA Robin Holmes was one of three finalists for the VPSA job at Virginia Tech. She withdrew before the campus visits, apparently in return for a raise from $193,128 to $233,000 as of May 1, 2012. If rumor is correct she also got all expense paid trips to the Rose Bowl for self and family. Not that I’m jealous. Pretty nice retention raise, considering she didn’t have an offer in hand and didn’t even have to do a flyout. There’s more on the special treatment UO’s central administrators get for raises here, thanks to a public records request from Nathan Tublitz. And thanks to an anonymous reader for this tip. Given Berdahl’s new public records fees we’re either going to need to get more info on JH’s backroom deals this way or take a serious hit to the scotch budget. So please help UO Matters keep things flowing freely.

UO invests its tuition money in (some) people

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11/3/2011: “Bad Politics, Good Policy: The UO invests its tuition money in (some) people”

RG editorial on the summer UO raises. Love that subhead. So, it’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the policy. And why should the RG go out on the limb for a UO administration that has been spending millions on administrative bloat, and then uses retention to justify raises for *retiring* administrators?

As a state institution, the University of Oregon blundered when it granted $5 million in pay raises to administrators and faculty earlier this year. As an increasingly independent institution exposed to the bracing winds of the free market, the UO made a smart move by investing tuition dollars in the people who have attracted record enrollments to the university.
The conflict between the UO’s traditional role as a box on the state government’s organization chart and its emerging status as a self-reliant and self-guiding institution is revealed in the details of the raises, contained in documents released to The Register-Guard in response to a public records request. The documents list “special equity raises” of $3.1 million for 743 faculty members and $1.8 million for 417 administrators. The faculty raises averaged 6.98 percent; administrators’ increases averaged 7.68 percent. …

Administrators gone wild

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11/2/2011: Greg Bolt’s story 2 weeks ago in the RG gave the short version of the last 10 years of UO spending priorities: 26% more students, 9% more faculty, 36% more administrators.

Today Bolt has a detailed story about the recent UO raises. The short version? The money for the raises comes from all the new students the faculty are teaching. But nearly 40% of the $5 million in raises went to administrators. Apparently the next story will deal with the DPS budget, also now bloated with another million or so in new tuition money.

Today’s story includes lists of those faculty and administrators getting the largest raises. Fun reading. (And probably not completely accurate – though the table labels are now corrected.). A surprisingly large amount of the money went to a select group of administrators – or maybe not so surprising, given that those administrators make the rules:

In the documents, the UO listed special equity raises for 743 active faculty members and 417 administrators. Faculty received almost $3.1 million in total raises compared to almost $1.8 million for administrators.

Jim Bean is at the top. Dude just couldn’t keep his hand out of the cookie jar. Think how much easier this would have been if Lariviere could have said “Our top administrator believed this was so important for the faculty and the future of UO that he did not take an increase for himself.” Bolt discusses Lariviere’s report to Pernsteiner:

In that report, Lariviere said UO faculty pay was about 23 percent below the average for peer universities despite a decade-long effort to raise them. Following the equity raises, faculty pay was only about 3 percent below average, the report said.

But the average faculty raise was 7%. Explain that math again, Russ Tomlin? Then there’s this:

The report made a similar case for administrative raises, saying the UO was losing some of its best managers to other schools. But it did not say how far behind average administrator pay was before the raises nor how much of the gap was erased after them.

They don’t say that because the UO administrators were already at or above their comparators. Case in point, our new $270,000 a year CFO Jamie Moffit. The Chronicle database reports the median salary for CFO’s at doctoral institutions (for 2008-09) was $191,981. We top that by $78,000 for someone without a day of experience in the job?

UO is, of course, still a member of the prestigious AAU, but we have no Med school or engineering, and our budget is about 25% of most other public AAU’s. Go down the list of UO administrators and compare them to the Doctoral column from the Chronicle database:

$270,000 salary for CFO Jamie Moffitt

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10/11/2011: That’s the word from Greg Bolt’s RG article today. Seems more than a bit high for an internal hire with no direct experience in the job. Plus we’ll have to keep paying Dyke to job shadow for 6 months. The Chronicle database reports the median salary for CFO’s at doctoral institutions (for 2008-09) was $191,000. UO is, of course, a member of the prestigious AAU, but we have no Med school or engineering, and our budget is about 25% of most other public AAU’s.

Working in higher education really pays off …

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9/28/2011: … so long as your job doesn’t involve anything academic, like say teaching, or research. Here’s a dump of payments from OUS, in descending order, from Oregon Gov Docs. I just grabbed the first page – didn’t have the heart to see how far down you need to go before you get past the jocks to an actual professor. Or just a Dean, for that matter. One of the commenters at Bojack.org did, and reports that after a few pages you do finally find an academic of sorts – UO’s Emeritus President, Dave Frohnmayer. Of course.

UO raises in news

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9/16/2011: Bill Graves of the Oregonian on the UO raises:

The report explains the UO jumped at the chance earlier this year to raise salaries and protect quality at a time when state support keeps shrinking. The university was careful to avoid merit or across-the-board pay increases, said Russ Tomlin,  senior vice provost for academic affairs.

“We were expressly permitted to do promotion and retention and equity increases,” he said. “We focused most of our energy on equity increases, and that is where we were aggressive and where the concerns arose.”

The university, for example, raised the salary for a tenured mathematics professor from $77,000 to $84,000.

In a letter to Pernsteiner accompanying the report, Lariviere writes, “It is imperative, in order to retain the quality faculty and staff that makes this place special, that we continue to take all necessary and allowable actions to make progress on faculty and staff salaries.”

Hey – why no link to the report in the story? The RG has one here. I’m biased, but it is pretty convincing, except when they get to the raises for top level administrators. Frances Dyke announced her retirement and *then* was given an “equity raise” to $223,118. What does that have to do with retention – giving a raise to someone you want to leave, and who is leaving, thank god.

The letter references a diversity person leaving for more pay. In fact, 3 have left recently. VP for diversity Martinez was forced out. Neither of the other two were top administrators – far from it. One was recently given a raise to $39,400. The other was paid $51,750 and did not get a raise this round. These are strange examples to trot out when explaining why we gave raises to administrators making more than $200,000, with no outside offers – and frankly, little prospect of getting them at this point in their careers.

But Pernsteiner, having recently received a *retroactive* raise himself and on very thin ice with the Governor is not going to push this any farther.

Faculty Salaries

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9/7/2011: Seems like a good time to repost the data on UO faculty salaries produced by Sarah Douglas and Marie Vitulli for UO’s AAU chapter:

Full professor salary was at 81% of peers, associates at 86%, assistants at 94%. My guess is that with the June 2011 raises full professors are now at 86%, associates at 90%, assistants at 93%. With benefits? Who knows.

Faculty raises were a priority for Lariviere from day 1, when the June 2009 story came out that UO professor salaries were the lowest in the AAU – below Missouri by some 10%.

UO Administrators? Last time I looked, in 2009, they were typically paid 100% of the median for 4 year public research schools. The Chronicle has not updated it’s data on this since 2008-09.

Big raises at UO – for insider administrators

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4/28/2011:  You can make quite a bit of money in academia, as long as your job does not involve teaching students or doing research.

We wrote last year about UO General Counsel Randy Geller’s big raise: As GC, Melinda Grier had been paid $184,710 – this was after 12 years in the job. Randy Geller was hired as an insider, at $200,000 a year to start.

The latest administrative raise tops that, by far. Retiring Alumni Director Dan Rodriguez was paid $100,989.  The new director, Tim Clevenger, will get $170,000.

But the big payoff is getting a job with the UO Foundation. The Oregon Attorney General’s office has given us their most recent filings. They are for the fiscal year ending in June, 2009. Why so old? Because our foundation runs out the IRS extensions, to delay having to reveal how much they are paying their executives. The numbers for 2008-2009 are here:

Karen Kreft was a former CEO who left under mysterious circumstances – looks they paid her a year’s severance. And Jay Namyet, the interim CEO, got over $300,000 in total compensation. The new CEO is Paul Weinhold. Any bets on what he is earning? They have to release that by May 15, and we will post it.

So what do these people do to earn this sort of money? They hire consultants to do the work:

Lariviere’s compensation 40th out of 185 public university presidents

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4/4/2011: Counting benefits, retirement. 2009-2010 data, obtained by the Chronicle of Higher Ed via what I am sure was many, many public records/FOIA requests and published last week:

The four-year institutions shown here comprise (public) universities with total fall enrollments of at least 10,000 that are classified by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as either Research Universities or Doctoral/Research Universities. We also show those institutions’ affiliated systems.

Faculty raises:

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6/8/2010: This is rumor but we hear President Lariviere is still going to push to raise faculty pay. For full prof’s this is the lowest in the AAU by 10% and is currently at 84% of our “peer institutions.” Most of the raises will go to the full’s as a group, they are the most underpaid.

In the comments, “Wild and Crazy Duck” thinks this is the wrong time to push for raises. I disagree. The counterargument is that drastic steps are needed to ensure UO’s survival as a top research school, that this should be a top state priority, and that the benefits to the students are worth the extra tuition. I think Lariviere can and will make that case to the public. He’s already got a bunch of newspaper editorial boards to sign on, including the Oregonian and the RG. And I bet that he got the OUS Board to agree to something like this before he accepted the job.

So which fulls will get the raises? Lariviere has ditched Russ Tomlin’s plan, which was to give the most money to those making the least relative to their peers, with a small merit bump. The new plan is an across the board increase (still targeted mostly at fulls) in proportion to current salary with the amounts determined by how far the department is behind its comparators. The main difference is that Tomlin’s plan would have given most of the money to those making less than the dept. average, the new plan will give most to those making more.

No word yet on OA’s and senior administrators but we can assume the latter are spending a lot of time on figuring out how to get their own raises. In the past UO has used “stipends” to funnel more money to the senior administrators, then folded the stipends into salary later, when no one is looking. For example, Provost Bean got a $12,000 stipend (folded into his salary last year), Diversity VP Martinez gets a $23,306 stipend on top of his regular pay and his off the books OSLC money. These stipends are supposed to go to faculty who take on extra administrative assignments. Too bad!

* Note to reader: These stipends are not for expense reimbursements: they are regular taxable income, just from a different pot.

UO salaries, and Frohnmayer makes top 5 most overpaid list

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1/26/2010: Curious about who is getting UO’s cash? Salary info is now online, at http://ir.uoregon.edu/alpha. Scroll down, or just click here for the fall 2009 quarter. (Big pdf). This is the “Salary Book” that is also in the reserve room.

Top 10? Obviously these numbers leave out a lot: Millions for Kelly, ?? for Bean, and at least $300,000 for Lariviere. Why the hell is John Moseley still on the payroll?

Kelly, Charles E 450,000 Head Football Coach
Dunlap, Michael G 400,000 Assoc Head Men’s Basketball C
Bellotti, R M 350,000 Dir Intercollegiate Athletics
Bean, James C 306,800 Senior VP and Provost
Bullis, Michael D 257,140 Dean
Moseley, John T 248,941 Special Asst to the Provost
Frohnmayer, Dave 245,700 President Emeritus
Lariviere, Richard W 245,700 President
Paris, Margaret L 232,904 Dean
Kaplan, Paul 230,951  University Physician

Today Dave Frohnmayer was singled out by a Wall Street investors report as one of the top 5 most overpaid university presidents, adjusting for endowment, enrollment, and staff numbers: 

David B. Frohnmayer:  President of University of Oregon made $636,445 last year.  That represented 0.13% of the $497 (million) endowment.  He was paid $31 per student and $382 per staff member, both above average.

Lariviere would also be substantially overpaid by these criteria, not clear if he’d make the top 5 though.