Payout for Whittaker is called ‘one-sided’
Compensation researchers saw several problems with proposal
A proposed settlement agreement under which UCF President Dale Whittaker would walk away with $600,000 appears to be overly generous and affords few safeguards for the university, said researchers who study compensation for college presidents.
If trustees approve, Whittaker would leave the University of Central Florida immediately with a payment valued at more than a year of his annual salary and no obligation to his former employer.
“This is a very one-sided agreement that heavily favors the individual and an individual who only served for seven months in his position,” said James Finkelstein, professor emeritus at George Mason University.
The settlement — a flat cash payout — would be the ninth-largest severance or settlement payment made to a chief executive of a public university or university system since 2011, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education analysis of presidential compensation.
Trustees accepted Whittaker’s resignation from UCF on Feb. 21 amid controversy over construction spending and investigations by the Florida House and the Board of Governors, which oversees the state university system. They were initially scheduled to vote on the settlement Thursday, but the vote has been postponed until an undetermined date.
Should the UCF board sign the agreement, Finkelstein said, it is “not exercising its fiduciary responsibility on the behalf of the citizens of Florida.”
Whittaker, who became the university’s president in July, declined to comment about the matter. Trustees have said little.
“Nothing has been decided,” Trustee Joseph Conte wrote in an email to the Orlando Sentinel. “The board is waiting for the House committee report to be released before taking up the agreement.”
The committee’s report, which is expected to detail its investigation into how the university spent or planned to spend $85 million in
operating funds on construction, may be released as soon as late next week, said Fred Piccolo, spokesman for the House Speaker Jose Oliva.
The issue first came to light last summer, after the state auditor general’s office flagged $38 million that was budgeted for construction of Trevor Colbourn Hall, an academic building that opened in August.
Whittaker has testified that he didn’t know the university was misusing state money. But several of his former colleagues contend that Whittaker, who was the provost at UCF during much of the planning process for Trevor Colbourn Hall, knew more than he let on. Four employees are facing termination for their role in the scandal.
Finkelstein and Judith Wilde, chief operating officer of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason, reviewed Whittaker’s contract and settlement agreement at the Orlando Sentinel’s request. They’ve studied compensation for university leaders, including a review of 115 contracts of presidents at public universities around the country.
The two researchers said they saw a number of problems, including that the agreement is more generous to Whittaker than his contract, which says if the president resigns, he could return to the tenured faculty and receive 85 percent of his annual base salary of $506,000.
An earlier version of the settlement agreement, valued at about $400,000, called for Whittaker to go on sabbatical for nine months while receiving 85 percent of his salary in biweekly payments.
Also under that proposal, performance pay that trustees had stripped from him would have been restored, and it called for him to research public policy issues related to student access and higher education at public institutions and write a report on his findings.
It’s unclear why the latest version of the deal is so much more favorable to Whittaker.
Another issue with the new proposal raised by Finkelstein is that the former president wouldn’t be compelled to help the university with ongoing inquiries into the misspent money. Rather, Whittaker walks away with a “bulging wallet,” and the university pays his legal fees if any employees facing termination who served while he was president decide to sue him.
“I’m not a lawyer, but my advice [to Whittaker] would be to sign this fast before the board comes to their senses,” Finkelstein said.
Few university presidents have received sweeter deals during the past eight years, according to the Chronicle.
Ohio State University handed out the largest payment in 2013 to Gordon Gee, who retired after joking about “those damn Catholics” at Notre Dame and poking fun at the academic quality of other schools. Gee left the university with $1.5 million.
Whittaker’s payment would be far above that of James Ammons, who left Florida A&M University in 2012 in the wake of the death of student Robert Champion during a marching band hazing ritual. Ammons received $341,250, according to the Chronicle.