UA business dean to make $375,000
Jones to be highest-paid outside athletics
The new dean of the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville will be the university’s highest-paid employee outside of the athletic department.
With a $375,000 starting annual salary, Eli Jones will make nearly $80,000 more than UA Chancellor G. David Gearhart and about $92,000 more than the campus’s next-highestpaid dean.
“I’m one who earns whatever I’m paid,” Jones said Wednesday from his office at Louisiana State University, where he serves as dean of the E.J. Ourso College of Business.
“I will certainly earn it,” he said. “I work pretty hard.”
Gearhart said Jones’ salary “doesn’t bother me in the least.”
“This person is going to be dynamite,” Gearhart said. “We believe that [the salary] is an investment that will bear fruit for the college and university down the road,” he said. “This is a person who is highly touted, has a corporate background.
“We have to pay to be competitive.”
Gearhart said Jones’ salary is commensurate with what large universities are
paying their deans.
Last fall, the University of Kentucky, for example, hired David Blackwell as dean of its Gatton College of Business and Economics. He started March 1 with an annual salary of $385,000.
“I think it’s really a market issue,” Gearhart said. “Finding a really top flight business dean is a tough, tough order these days. That’s just a name of the game.”
Jones will receive $305,000 from the publicly funded portion of UA’S budget, known as its Education and General Fund, said John Diamond, the university’s chief spokesman. That fund is made up of state funding, tuition and certain student fees.
The remaining $70,000 will come from endowment funds, Diamond said. Along with his dean appointment, Jones will hold UA’S Sam M. Walton Leadership Chair in Business, an endowed teaching position.
Jones replaces Dan Worrell, who will return to teaching and research in the college’s department of management. Worrell’s starting salary when he came to UA from Southern Illinois University in 2005 was $250,000.
Worrell now makes $332,463, more than any of the 11 deans at the state’s oldest and largest public university.
At $282,590, Ashok Saxena, leader of the College of Engineering, is No. 2 among UA’S deans in compensation.
Jones’ current salary at LSU is $299,999, said spokesman Ernie Ballard.
“It is common for business professors to be paid more than other disciplines,” Jones said. “Business professors in general are paid handsomely.”
Nationally, the average salary of a dean of business at a doctoral-degree-granting university is $290,700, according to the 2012 Administrative Compensation Survey conducted by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources in Knoxville, Tenn.
That’s more than any traditional dean at a doctoral-degree-granting institution. The next highest-paid dean on average is in engineering, $254,015.
The Southern Regional Education Board, based in Athens, Ga., estimated the 2011 average salary for business school deans nationwide, at all institutions, was $202,343.
Jones’ UA salary will place him in the top tier of business deans’ salaries at the Southeastern Conference’s 13 public schools, according to a survey of the institutions.
Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., the conference’s only private school, would not divulge the salary of its dean. Alabama’s Auburn University did not respond to repeated requests for information.
UA officials tout Walton College as the state’s “premier college of business” and one of the best in the nation. U.S. News & World Report’s “2011 Best Colleges” guide ranked Walton College in a tie for 27th place among the nation’s public undergraduate schools of business.
Jones’ salary should be compared with business deans at other highly ranked public business schools, not just the SEC, Diamond said.
UA has a nationally and internationally prominent business college and must compete with similar programs for leaders and faculty, Diamond said.
Jones, 50, also holds an endowed faculty position at LSU, the E.J. Ourso Distinguished Professor of Business. He’s served in both roles at the Baton Rouge campus since 2008.
He said the opportunity to hold the Walton Leadership chair “absolutely” was a factor in his decision to come to UA.
The chair was created by a $50 million gift made in 1998 by the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation, one of two charities connected to the family of Wal-mart Stores Inc. founder Sam Walton, who died in 1992.
Before LSU, Jones held several top positions in the C.T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston, including associate dean for executive education programs from 2007-08.
Jones holds three degrees from Texas A&M University: a doctorate in marketing, master’s in business administration and bachelor’s in journalism.
With an expertise in marketing, Jones has written or cowritten four books and nearly 50 academic papers.
Jones combines an academic background with corporate experience.
He spent eight years working his way up the ladder as an account executive or sales manager for Quaker Oats and Frito-lay — both branded subsidiaries of Pepsico Inc., and Nabisco Foods, a branded subsidiary of Kraft Foods Inc.
At his last private-sector job — zone sales manager for Frito-lay in Houston from 1992-93 — Jones supervised 144 sales employees and 12 district managers, and oversaw $44 million in annual sales, according to his resume.
Jones enrolled in the doctoral program at Texas A&M in 1993 and completed his doctorate in four years, he said.
“A business dean ... these are folks who can relate to the business community and then bridge the gap with their academic colleagues,” Jones said, adding that he holds a “unique blend of theory and practice.”
Jones said he didn’t seek the Walton College dean’s job when it was advertised last year. The Ua-based search committee called him and other potential applicants, he said.
The more he researched the college, the more “engaged” he became in seeking the position.
“What I found in the process is it really is a good fit,” he said.