University Times

In defending the salary raises and bonuses that they awarded to Pitt executives this year, trustees said they overruled advice from Chancellor Mark Nordenberg, who reportedly argued that such large increases could be “misconstrued and damage important campus relationships.”

At its Feb. 25 meeting, Faculty Assembly urged trustees to pay better attention to Nordenberg the next time they’re considering Pitt officers’ compensation.

By a 16-2 vote with 2 abstentions, Assembly members approved the following resolution: “Faculty Assembly recommends that the University of Pittsburgh’s Board of Trustees give greater heed in the future to the chancellor’s concern, as reported in the media, about the very large compensation increases and bonuses to himself and other top University officers in a time of severe campus budgetary problems which necessitated a 14 percent increase in tuition for students and a mere 3.5 percent raise in the faculty and staff compensation pool.”

Dental medicine professor John Baker, who proposed the resolution, said he didn’t begrudge Pitt officers their 5.4-13.9 percent salary raises and $50,000-$75,000 annual bonuses for remaining at the University. Nordenberg and other Pitt officers have been doing a good job, he said. But Baker decried what he called the “shocking double standard with regard to how faculty here are compensated versus how top executives are compensated.”

Trustees’ public statements justifying the Pitt officers’ raises and bonuses were “at best, misleading,” Baker said.

Board of Trustees chairperson William S. Dietrich II said the compensation increases were needed to retain Nordenberg and his administrative team while closing “an embarrassing gap” between officers’ pay here and that of officers at 15 peer universities surveyed by a consulting firm that Pitt hired. Dietrich would not identify the peer universities, saying they provided confidential data on condition of anonymity, but he said they were principally public Association of American Universities (AAU) schools within a 500-mile radius of Pittsburgh.

Some of the 15 peers were private institutions, Dietrich said — despite the fact that Pitt’s administration has been arguing for years that faculty salaries here should be compared only with those at the other public AAU schools, Baker pointed out.

Among 32 public AAU institutions during 2001-02, the most recent fiscal year for which numbers are available, the Pittsburgh campus ranked 20th in average salary of full professors (down from 7th among 30 public AAU schools during FY 1994-95, the year before Nordenberg became chancellor), 21st for associate professors’ salaries (down from 7th in FY 1994-95) and 19th for assistant professors’ pay (down from 12th in FY 1994-95).

Among the 32 public AAU schools that belong to the Association of Research Libraries, the average pay for Pitt librarians ranked 30th. During FY 1994-95, the average salary among Pitt librarians ranked 26th among 29 public AAU/ARL schools.

In contrast, Nordenberg’s total compensation (including his $390,000 salary) makes him the 7th best-paid chief executive among CEOs at 131 U.S. public research universities surveyed by The Chronicle of Higher Education for 2002-03. Based on what he was earning two years ago, Nordenberg’s compensation would have ranked 21st in the Chronicle’s survey for 2002-03.

Several Faculty Assembly members questioned the validity of comparing average salaries without taking into account academic disciplines, cost of living differences among cities, and Pitt department chairs’ freedom to award higher-than-average raises to meritorious faculty.

But when it came to a vote, most Assembly members approved Baker’s resolution in the hope that it would send a message to Pitt trustees: Do something to improve faculty salaries.

“I actually don’t think that the chancellor’s salary, or even the principle upon which the chancellor’s salary is set, is a major matter to us,” said Lewis Jacobson of biological sciences. “I think the crux of the matter is that faculty salaries at this institution have not been getting enough attention.”

English professor Phil Wion said he supported the resolution because it would tell trustees “that they need to take into much more serious consideration the whole institution and not have tunnel vision, just looking at how certain administrators’ salaries compare with those of certain other, well-paid people elsewhere in academia. That’s too narrow a vision in these times — or, I would argue, in any times.”

—Bruce Steele