Last Friday, Western’s President Amit Chakma barely scraped through a non-confidence vote following his decision to take pay in lieu of administrative leave when he started his second term, a move which pushed his pay to $967,000 last year. The story has resonated widely across academia, so it seems worth a couple days of blogs to unpack some of the issues
With specific respect to pay, the real issue seems to be what to do with this “leave year” that all Presidents have apparently negotiated. It would appear to be common practice for presidents to have five-year terms, supplemented by a sixth year of “leave” during which time the President stays on the payroll at his or her former salary. What seems to get people tied in knots is not so much the base salary (that causes grumbling, but not non-confidence votes), but rather the way the “leave year” gets used.
It’s worth looking at a couple of other Presidential pay packages that didn’t raise eyebrows in order to understand why Chakma’s actions were perceived as so horrible. Absolutely nobody seems to have ever made a fuss about Presidents who take their leave year and return to the professoriate. Academics apparently feel that as long as a President appears to be doing duty as an academic, the fact that he or she is making between two and three times normal professorial pay is an acceptable perk of being a President. Also, people don’t seem to mind if a President defers the leave year if a second term is earned. Arvind Gupta’s contract at UBC is quite clear on this: if re-appointed, he gets to take the leave year at the end of his second term (also clear: he won’t get to earn a second year of leave if he is re-appointed. One and done).
Chakma’s former boss at Waterloo, David Johnston, cashed-out at least one year of leave, in full, when he became Governor General in September 2010 – the Sunshine List records him as having received slightly more than $1 million that year. Nobody raised an eyebrow then, so it’s probably fair to say that either Johnston gets a pass because he looks like everyone’s cuddliest granddad, or nobody think it’s a problem to cash out that leave year if you suddenly leave the university (or both).
Another way leave years have been used is to be folded into later pay packages. At least one President (Sara Diamond at OCAD University) had her leave year salary divided into five, and spread over her second term. Again, this has not been subject to any criticism, so far as I know – in which case, we can deduce that people don’t actually have a problem with converting leave years to salary, as long as they don’t do it all at once.
The issue, then, is a pretty specific one: total compensation is not a problem, leave years are not a problem, and converting leave years into cash is not a problem, provided you don’t cash the leave all at once as a sitting President. And honestly, that’s not a test most should find too difficult to meet.
Basically, it comes down to the nature of the leave year. If both sides view it as equivalent to a sabbatical, or as severance, it’s OK. If it is viewed just as a way to increase compensation over the course of a contract (i.e. spreading $2.2 million over six years instead of five) then you’re probably heading out onto thin ice.
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I suspect the pure optics of the dollar figure matters, at least to some extent. Colleen Hanycz, the principal of Brescia University College at Western, took a double-dip salary last year, but then returned for a second term (well, sort of – she is leaving after just one year, headed to a President job at a US university). But in her case, her double dip topped out in the $450k range, so it went relatively unnoticed outside her own university. Notably it didn’t put her at the top of Ontario’s sunshine list the way Chakma’s did. It just blended in with the hospital administrators and, well, Chakma’s base salary.
I think that Johnston got away with it for two reasons: he was leaving for greener pastures such that it would have served little purpose for anyone to pursue it. But also, I suspect Johnston was a stronger leader. Chakma on the other hand has been virtually invisible on campus during his tenure, preferring to be the outward face of Western and leaving both day to day decisions and strategic planning to his Provost and VPs. So it truly was hard to see what he did to earn the salary he commands.
It is incorrect to state that eyebrows haven’t been raised about presidential (or vice-presidential) pay packages at other universities. I work at the University of Waterloo, and I (and others) raised the issue internally in various forums when certain payouts became evident in 2009 and 2010. But you’re right to suggest that there seems to have been a general acceptance of the practice. Luckily, in the Western case the stars somehow aligned to cause the media (most notably the London Free Press) to investigate and report on the matter. Probably it was the arrogant and shameless flagrancy of the double-dipping. One might conclude that the indignation is part of a general trend of disgust with the inequity of pay throughout both public and private institutions in the industrialized democracies.
What I find equally (if not more) maddening, however, is the other form of double-dipping: pay that presidents and vice-presidents receive when, of their own free will, they break their existing contracts to take up positions elsewhere. It may be justifiable and even smart to reward years of administrative service with paid leave, but there is no ethical justification to sign a contract with someone that allows that person to say “adios!” and take an extra year or two salary while working elsewhere. This is a luxury afforded no other employee at the university. Boards of Governors that defend this practice are essentially showing an absolute lack of respect for the staff and faculty who carry out the work of their institutions. These boards also add insult to injury when they endorse budgets that cannot find money to support the universities’ primary educational mission.
There’s a wider context here with respect to this particular institution. Western’s budgetary model is a mess as senior admin preach austerity and devolve responsibility upon individual faculties (while clawing back a percentage), and effectively make Faculties compete against each other. It’s shades of neoliberalism, really. On top of that, the President and many senior admin seem to leave in some different parallel dimension, and are either completely oblivious to what is happening in departments, or are just outright dismissive. Topping it all off, the idea of shared collegial governance is largely a joke as admin have steadily apportioned to themselves ever more power. Meanwhile, we have grad students making use of food banks and a heavy layer of precarious contract academics as class sizes at Western increase, hiring stays relatively frozen, and morale is in the crapper. So, after 5+ years, the President makes his big mea culpa promising to “listen” after all these years.
And then there is the BoG that struck some kind of secret sub-committee to sign off on the president contract in the first place, with some of them stating that they didn’t even know about the double dip since they didn’t want to micro-manage the contract. So, apparently carefully reviewing what is probably the most significant contract before offering it is micro-managing. Ahem. A lot of signs are pointing to some upper management bloopers.
I would say there are a lot of grumblings about admin leave, mainly because it has outlived its original purpose and is now simply yet another perk enjoyed by administrators (in addition to the sky-high salaries, better pensions, better health benefits, etc.).
Back in the day, administrators would accept a modest stipend for having to babysit the faculty, hold the position for 5 years, and then be given leave for a year to get up-to-speed on teaching and research before rejoining the faculty ranks. Today, how many administrators voluntarily return to the ranks of the faculty? Administration becomes a career path for those in their 40s (and even in their 30s sometimes) and most — if not all — have little interest in teaching or researching again. I’ve seen new positions created and existing ones filled with unqualified people just so that senior admin can keep their buddies around long enough to collect 2-3 years of admin leave before promptly retiring immediately after and collecting their big pensions. You can bet if they were required to rejoin their home departments, they would behave much differently while in their admin roles.