… the president of the University of Washington. Let’s drop in on him again!
… [The] University of Washington Regents, a public body appointed to govern a public university, [recently] signed President Mark Emmert to a five-year contract which included sweeteners, including a six-month paid sabbatical (worth $450,000). His new contract will require the Regents to pay him a $1-2 million lump sum should he be fired. When economic downturn hit last year, Emmert refused to take a voluntary pay cut, as his counterpart at Washington State University did, even though Emmert was the second-highest-paid public university president in the country. (Although we UW alums take pride in our alma mater, we should recognize that it ranks only in the middle of major public universities, well behind those in Austin, Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Madison, Minneapolis, Charlottesville, Los Angeles, and Chapel Hill, among others).
Emmert presently receives $900,000-plus in compensation from the UW plus another $340,000 as a director on the boards of Weyerhaeuser and Expeditors International. When he sought the directorships, he told the Regents they would give him a greater understanding of business (while, of course, taking time necessarily from his duties at the UW). The new package also provides Emmert with a paid driver while on university business and a fresh $2 million in term life insurance.
Summing up the new contract: It provides Emmert a base salary of $620,000, deferred compensation of $250,000, a car allowance of $12,000, a retirement match of $24,500, and free use of the 12,000-square-foot president’s residence. This at a time when the UW budget was being cut $73 million this fiscal year, eliminating 700 jobs, and when tuition for students was being raised 14 percent both this year and next.
How could this happen? It happened for the same reason that Wall Street types, with acquiescence of their boards and public officials, saw no reason to make any personal sacrifice at a time when others are sacrificing greatly. The UW Board of Regents, as most others at public universities, is not made up of scholars and altruists. It consists mainly of governor-appointed businessmen, lawyers, and other high-income types who themselves live insulated from the daily travails of ordinary state taxpayers. They gave Emmert big money in the same way they hired and gave big money to former President Richard McCormick, former athletic director Barbara Hedges, and former football coach Rick Neuheisel, all of whom proved duds or later embarrassments to the university. They paid doubly for Neuheisel, first for his contract and then to settle his wrongful termination suit.
When Emmert got his last pay raise, I asked a long-serving Regent about it, who said Emmert had indicated he might leave for private business if not given the added compensation. When I wrote deploring the increase, I got e-mails from Louisiana State University faculty members. When Emmert was chancellor there, they said, he continually threatened to leave for business if not given raises…
A prince of a guy.
September 15th, 2009 at 10:31AM
"When he sought the directorships, he told the Regents they would give him a greater understanding of business"…I’m a Weyerhaeuser bondholder…I would have liked to believe that WY directors *already* had a pretty good understanding of business.
September 15th, 2009 at 10:51AM
Everything is on the table?
http://www.mynorthwest.com/?nid=11&sid=140916
March 4, 2009
Faced with massive cuts, faculty at the University of Washington had some suggestions for University President Mark Emmert at a meeting Tuesday night.
"We could take half of your salary and save ten jobs. There’s no reason that that should not be done," faculty member Steve Lee.
Emmert says his $800,000 salary, and just about everything else, is on the table.
The university faces cuts of 15 to 20 percent. The school may lay off hundreds of faculty and staff, as well as greatly reduce the number of students.
September 16th, 2009 at 11:30AM
I’m pasting this comment onto the thread for Roy Poses at Health Care Renewal. (My blog’s software didn’t like it for some reason.)
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This seems to be another demonstration of the unholy alliance between high-level corporate executives, especially from the finance sector, and university managers. The “heads I win, tails, I get bailed out” (courtesy Froma Harrop:
http://www.projo.com/opinion/columnists/content/CL_harrop16_09-16-09_0FFNJ2L_v15.3f88fbb.html) ethos of the finance sector seems to have infiltrated the leadership of academia.
We have posted about university boards that seem more like clubs for masters of the universe here:
http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2008/12/what-linked-parallel-declines-of.html
http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2009/04/hedge-fund-u.html
http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2009/04/hedge-fund-u-version-2.html
Woe is us.
September 17th, 2009 at 6:33PM
[...] On the University Diaries blog, Prof Margaret Soltan picked up on an article on the privileges now given to university leaders, using the example of the President of the University of Washington (which includes a medical school, academic medical center, etc). At a time when the university budget was being cut, President Mark Emmert refused to take a voluntary cut in his greater than $900,000 total annual compensation. This included a $12,000 car allowance and free use of the university mansion. [...]