‘Unusual’ clause a boon for ex-presidents on faculty
When Katsouleas steps down in June, UConn will be paying two former leaders $339,000 each as professors, with the potential for future raises
When UConn President Thomas Katsouleas steps down in June, two years into his five-year contract, he’ll be making at least $339,000 as a professor — the same amount as the highest-paid faculty member outside of UConn Health, just like his predecessor Susan Herbst.
But, due to contract clauses two experts describe as highly unusual, the former presidents will continue to get raises each year to match the salary of the highest-paid faculty member at that time.
“Let’s say the current highest-paid faculty member makes $300,000 a year. Then next year, [UConn] hires a superstar, [and] in order to get that superstar, they have to pay them $400,000 a year,” said James Finkelstein, a professor emeritus of public policy in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University in Virginia, who has studied university president contracts for more than a decade.
“This means [the former president] will get a $100,000 raise,” he said. “That’s a very unusual clause.”
“I’ve never seen that, in all the contracts we’ve seen,” Finkelstein added.
Research Professor Judith Wilde — another expert on university president contracts who works with Finkelstein — agreed, exclaiming, “Wow!” as they reviewed Katsouleas’
contract Friday morning.
Most often, university presidents who step down to serve as faculty agree to be paid a percentage of their former salary, Finkelstein explained, typically 75%. If the contract bases salary in relation to other professors, the school may do so in several ways, including matching the highest-paid faculty member outside of medical or law schools like UConn.
“But I’ve never seen a clause that recalculates this to index it every year that he remains on the faculty, based upon the highest-paid faculty that year,” he said. “This means the president is going to get a raise that could be substantial, that is unrelated to performance.”
According to his contract, Katsouleas received an annual base salary of $525,000 with a 3% annual raise. He was also entitled to an annual performance-based incentive of $50,000, unless the board of trustees determined that he “failed substantially” to achieve the goals and objectives for the year without good cause.
Katsouleas would also receive an additional $75,000 at the end of each contract year he completed as president. The contract years — except for the first — ran from July 1-June 30, and he is expected to step down June 30 this year.
Because Katsouleas, 63, resigned before completing five years as university president, the contract states he will not receive the same sabbatical benefit as Herbst, who is now a professor of political science at UConn’s Stamford campus. During her yearlong sabbatical, she received $711,072 — equal to her salary in her final year as president.
But like his predecessor, Katsouleas plans to stay on as a professor. He will join the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a courtesy appointment in the physics department. Just as Herbst does, he will make as much as the highest-paid faculty member each year, excluding those at UConn Health.
Currently, that amount totals $339,000, the base salary of business school Professor Yiming Qian, the university said. Qian receives an additional $35,000 through her stipend as holder of the Toscano Family Endowed Chair in Finance, but neither president will receive that money.
Mary Ellen Junda, president of the UConn chapter of the American Association of University Professors said trustees are “not nearly as generous with the faculty as they are with the compensation packages for the President.”
“UConn-AAUP members endured six wage freezes in the last 12 years, and we had to fight to protect our contractual raises for 2021,” she said in an email. “Our members are discouraged and frustrated with the administration’s approach to ongoing negotiations with the union. For example, the BoT has proposed salary increases for the next three years of 0% 0% and 2%, completely ignoring the teaching, research, and clinical contributions faculty made to the university and to the state during the pandemic. With administrative turnover happening more frequently, there is a tendency for administrators’ salaries to keep getting higher while faculty salaries remain stagnant. This compensation divide needs to be addressed before the next President is hired.”
Sen. Kevin Witkos, a Canton Republican and UConn graduate who serves as ranking member of the higher education committee, said Thursday he will speak with UConn officials about changing future contracts for the university president.
“I would hope the board and the governor remove the provision that allows them to become a full-time, tenured professor,” Witkos said. “It is a public university, and the governor really is the chairman of the board.”
Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, a New Haven Democrat, said of the high pay and tenured positions: “That may be the nature of the going rate for college presidents.”
Particularly when someone is entering an institution where they have not worked before, and they do not know well the attitude of the board of trustees, “these kinds of parachutes are built into the contract ... in order to get them to take the job in the first place,” he said.
However, regarding the clause that allows former presidents to receive substantial raises to continuously match the salary of the highest paid faculty member each year not based on performance, Looney added: “I certainly think it merits looking at.”
When it comes to hiring its next president, Looney encouraged UConn to consider Yale’s method of hiring from within the university, instead of searching outside.
“That way you get somebody who is already familiar with the university, with the governmental and political situation in Connecticut,” he said.
On a national scale, a significant number of newer university presidents have stepped down because of the pandemic, Finkelstein said.
“They faced enormous stresses that no university president has ever faced before, not just with the issues related to the pandemic ... but the financial stresses,” he said. “These presidents have just been in crisis mode day in and day out, and a lot of them burned out prematurely. They come in with a big plan, big ambitions . ... Then all of a sudden those things wash away, and they’re in survival mode.”
In the short term, it may be more difficult to find people who want the job, said Wilde. She noted several school searches she’s followed lately are reporting far fewer applicants than in previous years. However, that may change “as universities find that they may be able to open more broadly this fall,” she added.