The board representing UC faculty is the latest to join in a long line of critics of UC President Robert C. Dynes over the college system’s pay policies, especially a new policy that gives Dynes the power to boost the salaries of top university executives.
The plan, finalized by the UC Board of Regents in January, put top-tier university officials in broad salary ranges, and allows Dynes to adjust their pay without prior approval. Previously, the regents’ approval was required to grant salaries of more than $168,000.
The UC Academic Council, the top committee of the university’s faculty representative group, labeled the plan “flawed” in a resolution announced on Feb. 23, and called for the regents and Dynes to seek more consultation with academic councilmembers before moving forward.
“[We have] not been presented with evidence that increases in executive compensation … beyond those received by all other employees should be the highest priority use for limited resources,” Stan Glantz, chair of the academic senate’s subcommittee on planning and budget, stated in the resolution.
The council was particularly concerned with the way executives would be grouped in the pay plan. Regents put 284 executives into pay scales based on an independent study conducted last year, which compared UC salaries to public and private institutions as well as private industry. The scope of the study was too narrow to be used in categorizing executive pay, according to the council’s resolution.
“The methodology should have also included, among UC’s comparison groups, certain nonacademic job categories; e.g, the managers of other public agencies in California state and federal government,” the resolution stated.
UC Regent Judith Hopkinson and UC Board of Regents Chairman Gerald L. Parsky touted the study in testimony before state senators last month, and emphasized the report’s findings, which concluded that compensation for UC administrators was about 15 percent below the market. In response, the regents approved a plan, labeled RE-61, to bring all employee salaries within market levels in a decade.
Senators, however, were miffed by a series of newspaper articles that exposed a trend of giving undisclosed compensation to executives and other employees, including $248,000 granted to Chancellor Marye Anne Fox in lieu of a sabbatical earned at her previous job. The study, they said, did not include those forms of compensation, and therefore couldn’t be trusted to determine executive salaries.
In its resolution, the council echoed the senators’ sentiments.
“UCOP [should] convey to the Senate the full table of salaries affected by RE-61, including … deferred compensation, special allowances and any other forms of compensation not available to all other university employees,” the resolution stated.
At a regents meeting in January, Hopkinson promised an “overhaul” of the university’s pay practices. But faculty leaders should be a large part of that renovation, according to Raymond Russell, the chair of the senate’s subcommittee on faculty welfare.
“If compensation offered to senior managers encourages a public perception that UC employees are overpaid,” Russell said in UCFW’s recommendations to the council, “that seriously undermines the university’s ability to obtain the state funding needed to fulfill the regents’ pledge to bring the salaries of UC employees up to market levels within the next 10 years.”
