UT pays millions to top execs
Trustees express concerns about practice
Former University of Tennessee Chancellor Jimmy Cheek will earn $340,650 annually as a professor, which is 75 percent of his chancellor’s salary and nearly double that of the next highest-paid faculty member in the department.
Cheek’s contract does not stipulate a point in time when his salary would revert to department standards. In other words, the arrangement is for an unlimited time period.
UT President Joe DiPietro, who currently earns an annual salary of $465,618, has a similar deal for when he leaves his administrative position. He’s contracted to earn 75 percent of his final base salary as president should he move to a 12month faculty position in the College of Veterinary Medicine. His contract also specifies no time limit. That could change after the News Sentinel published a story online Friday morning and DiPietro, later that morning, suggested to the board of trustees that his contract be amended to a four-year cap.
Retreat salaries, allowing higher education administrators to move to faculty positions, are common, especially for university leaders with an academic background, according to the American Council on Education.
These arrangements at UT currently add up to nearly $1.5 million in pay at the Knoxville campus for former administrators including Cheek and five others. That’s about $450,000 more than UT pays in total to the highest-earning faculty members in each of those administrator’s respective departments.
A Washington, D.C., lawyer who specializes in higher education and administrator contracts said that while paying retreat salaries is typical, it is highly unusual to set them at 75 percent of an administrative salary for an unlimited period of time.
Cheek’s appointment as a tenured fac-
ulty member in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies will be for nine months a year, as opposed to the 12 months he worked as chancellor.
He won’t accrue annual leave or sick leave as an administrator would, but he will be paid while on academic leave for the remainder of the spring semester before returning in the fall to teach a course load that hasn’t been determined yet.
In addition to retaining 75 percent of his chancellor’s salary for an indefinite period, Cheek will get four tickets to a Neyland Stadium skybox, four tickets to men’s basketball games; four tickets to women’s basketball games, and a parking permit for football and basketball games. He’ll also hold an adjunct faculty appointment in the UT Institute of Agriculture, and like other faculty members across the system, he’ll be expected to engage in community service.
Raymond D. Cotton, a partner at Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough in Washington, D.C., said Cheek’s $340,650 salary as a faculty member would be at the “highest end of the scale” of what a chancellor or president would earn upon returning to a faculty position.
“It’s 75 percent of it, but he’s only working 75 percent of the year,” Cotton said. “If you annualize it, he’s getting the same amount he gets now, which is unusual ... basically he’s getting his chancellor’s salary.”
Cotton said there’s a range of what administrators get paid if they move back to the faculty, and that typically if they earn a percentage of their administrative salary, it would only be for a set period of time.
As of October, the highest salary in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at UT was $180,000 — a figure that is nearly half of what Cheek will earn.
“For a state like Tennessee, where it’s not considered a rich state and its salaries are not the highest in the nation, for a state university to pay this amount of money is quite unusual in my experience,” Cotton said.
In addition, former UT system President Jan Simek also moved to a faculty position in 2011 under a contract that paid him a salary of $300,000 annually, or 75 percent of the $400,000 he earned as president.
He currently earns $340,956 as a professor and department head of the Department of Anthropology, about double the highest faculty salary in the department, which is $171,359.
Simek teaches one undergraduate course, heads a graduate committee mentoring doctoral students, and supervises one graduate independent study.
“Am I paid more than some of my colleagues here? Yes, I am. That’s a fact and that’s the result of the fact that I went and did that administration (job). I stepped out of my career in order to take on those jobs,” said Simek, who also served as an interim chancellor in Knoxville. He added that he does not get paid an additional stipend for serving as department head and that many of his colleagues in the department are younger. While his post is for nine months, Simek said he and other faculty members often do research year-round.
“I’m not saying it couldn’t be done a better way, but that’s for the (UT board of trustees) to decide. I’m not going to begrudge them however they decide it,” Simek said.
Cotton said some administrators who become professors should simply be paid as faculty members are paid.
“You can move that individual up to the highestpaid faculty person in the department,” Cotton said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. But taking a percentage of the (administrative salary) can create problems within the department among other faculty members, who will point out what I just said, which is, ‘The person is not an administrator anymore. Why are they getting a percentage of an administrator’s salary?’”
The Knoxville campus also uses a similar formula to that of the UT system in figuring out retreat salaries for senior administrators, generally offering them 75 percent of their former salaries for an unlimited time for nine-month appointments.
Karen Simsen, director of media and internal relations for the Office of Communications and Marketing at UT Knoxville, said, “It’s important to note that teaching load alone does not paint the clearest picture of a faculty member’s responsibility.”
Board expresses concerns
The UT board of trustees has raised concerns about how retreat salaries are negotiated, though there are no plans right now to institute a policy or change the board bylaws, according to Gina Stafford, assistant vice president and director of communications for the University of Tennessee.
However, the contracts » Susan Martin earns $250,860 compared to the $334,480 she earned as an administrator. » Carolyn Hodges earns $149,223 compared to the $194,964 she earned as an administrator. for new UT-Knoxville Chancellor Beverly Davenport, who replaced Cheek, and UT Institute of Agriculture Chancellor Tim Cross have a fouryear limit on earning 75 percent of their administrative salaries.
After that, their salaries would be adjusted to the average base salary of full-time professors in the department.
The average salary for a full-time professor at UT-Knoxville across all departments is $136,000.
Davenport currently earns a base annual salary of $585,000 while Cross earns $333,000.
The issue is something that’s likely to come up in the next few months at the campus level, as Davenport stands to appoint five administrators in her cabinet and would likely negotiate the terms of retreat salaries at the time of the appointments.
Stafford said in an email that last year the board of trustees’ Executive and Compensation Committee “expressed concern” about the practice of setting the base salary for administrators who move to faculty positions at 75 percent for an unlimited period of time and recommended the practice be discontinued with new hires.
Minutes from an August 2016 board meeting also state that the committee “discussed not making this a standard practice.”
David Smith, director of communications for Gov. Bill Haslam, who is also the chair of the UT board of trustees, said in an email that the committee had concerns about “whether the practice was fiscally responsible” but did not elaborate when asked what prompted the concern.
Raja Jubran, vice chair of the board of trustees, as of Friday morning declined to comment to the News Sentinel when questioned, and deferred to » Sally McMillan earns $151,367 compared to the $197,866 she earned as an administrator. » Doug Blaze earns $217,525 compared to the $261,080 he earned as an administrator. Stafford when asked about the board’s specific concerns.
Stafford did not respond when asked whether it has been a longstanding practice for former administrators to retain 75 percent of their administrative salaries. There are no board policies that speak to retreat salaries.
Davenport and UT system President DiPietro also did not respond to requests for comment before as of Friday. Cheek also did not respond to requests for comment.
DiPietro, at Friday’s board of trustees meeting, asked trustees to amend his contract to a four-year limit on a retreat salary that would bring it in line with the contracts for Davenport and Cross.
After the four years, he would revert to the average salary for faculty in his department.
At the meeting, Jubran said, “What Joe is doing is the right thing from his perspective, not the fair thing. The fair think is to go by the contract. What I would tell Joe is we duly appreciate because it sets the tone and we appreciate that.”
The terms of Cheek’s retreat salary were negotiated at the time he was appointed chancellor in 2008.
He announced in June that he would be stepping down from the job after an eight-year period in which he made strides toward institutional improvement and becoming a Top 25 public research university but also faced high-profile controversies about sexual assault, athletics and diversity issues.
The contract for Keith Carver, the new chancellor of the University of Tennessee Martin, does not include any provisions for a potential move to a faculty position. Carver, who comes from an administrative background rather than academic, follows Tom Rakes, who moved to a position as a professor of education in 2015 in the midst of accreditation problems for the university. As an instructor he was contracted to earn $185,520 for a nine-month appointment, or 75 percent of the $247,360 he earned as chancellor, for an unlimited period of time.
Value of move to faculty
About 20 percent of university presidents and chancellors will move or return to faculty positions at the end of their posts, according to Terry Hartle, senior vice president for the American Council on Education Division of Government and Public Affairs.
“University presidents are mostly externally focused, so they’re people who have spent a lot of time off campus and have a much better sense than might otherwise be possible of what funders want, what employers want, what students and families are looking for,” Hartle said. “At the end of the day it’s going to be very positive for the university.”
John Zomchick, interim provost and senior vice chancellor for the University of Tennessee Knoxville, echoed those words in speaking about the contributions Cheek will bring to UT’s faculty.
As provost, Zomchick oversees the terms of retreat salaries for other high-ranking administrators at the campus level, and said without retreat salaries it can be hard to attract candidates from around the nation to fill top jobs at UT.
“(Cheek) has been an extraordinary leader for us and I know he will continue to be an advocate for the university and continue
At the University of Florida, where Cheek worked for 34 years before coming to UT, National Media Strategist Steve Orlando said the way administrators are moved to faculty positions is handled on a caseby-case basis.
The contract for current University of Florida President W. Kent Fuchs, who serves in a role similar to Cheek’s, states that should he move to the faculty at the end of his term as president, he would be paid at the same level as the highest-paid full-time professor in the College of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering — currently $181,000.
That is similar to the provisions laid out in the contracts for the presidents of the University of Alabama and Louisiana State University, both of whom also serve in roles similar to Cheek’s, and whose contracts say they would be paid at the rate of the highest-paid professor in the department.
At the University of Kentucky, there are no provisions in the contract for current President Eli Capilouto, a tenured faculty member in the college of public health, that speak to a return to the faculty, according to Jay Blanton, executive director of PR & Marketing. Capilouto’s predecessor, Lee Todd, moved to a tenured faculty position in 2011 with a contract stipulating that he be paid at the level of the highestpaid professors in the engineering department — $162,000, the Lexington Herald Leader wrote at the time.
Some universities, like Alabama and Auburn University, have campus-level policies stipulating that administrators who move to faculty positions will have their administrative supplements phased out or suspended after they become faculty members.
Currently, there are 1,531 faculty members, including 796 tenured and 321 on the tenure track at the Knoxville campus.