Despite making across-the-board pay cuts in 2009 and freezing salaries in 2010, the University of Hawaii at Hilo is spending 61 percent more on executive pay than it did five years ago.
University system salary data provided to the state Legislature at the beginning of the current session reveals that between November 2006 and November 2011, the Hilo campus added seven new administrator positions and increased its total budget for executive pay from $1,975,368 to $3,189,648. That marks an increase of 61.5 percent.
University of Hawaii executives across the state were asked to take pay cuts of between 6 and 9 percent in September 2009 in an effort to trim from the annual budget. Senior executives, including vice presidents, chancellors, vice chancellors, athletic directors and deans, were asked to take pay cuts ranging from 7 to 9 percent.
Among them, former UH-Hilo Chancellor Rose Tseng, who had received a nearly $40,000 raise the previous year, saw her salary dip back down to $283,920 from $305,280.
Executive pay remained frozen through the following year, but by the end of 2011 salaries begun to climb again. UH-Hilo’s chancellor position, now held by Donald Straney, currently pays $291,192.
By comparison, the national median salary for chief executive officers of single institutions or campuses within systems is $255,849, according to the 2011-12 Administrative Compensation Survey by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. The entire University of Hawaii system participated in the survey, along with 1,240 colleges and universities nationwide. The survey’s data reflects salaries reported as of October 2011.
While Straney is the highest-ranking executive on the UH-Hilo campus, he does not earn the biggest salary. That title is held by John Pezzuto, dean of the College of Pharmacy.
Pezzuto currently earns $324,504 a year. Before the statewide cuts, he earned as much as $341,568 during the 2008-09 academic year. That is more than the median salary of $228,799 earned by pharmacy deans across the country in 2011-12, according to the Administrative Compensation Survey.
The College of Pharmacy — the only pharmacy school throughout the Pacific islands to be approved by the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education — opened its doors to its first class in August 2007. The launch of the relatively new department accounts for a large amount of the new executive salary burden, with its dean, associate dean for academic affairs and associate dean for research accounting for a total of $659,064, or 21 percent, of UH-Hilo’s executive payroll.
In a Friday afternoon phone interview, Straney said UH-Hilo executives have worked hard to continue offering the same level of education to their students, in addition to expanding their offerings, despite the state’s budget cuts. Bringing the campus’ new College of Pharmacy and College of Business and Economics on line have necessitated the addition of new executives to the payroll, he said.
The overall increase in executive pay over the last five years, he said, “is because of things we simply didn’t have back then. I don’t think it’s a case where every administrator is adding a No. 2.”
Straney added that while the university has worked to deal with flagging funding, “during that same period of time our enrollment grew 20 to 25 percent, and I’ll bet the staff grew that much as well.”
While the school has had to cut the number of sections offered for some classes to meet budgetary constraints, administrators have showed a lot of “cleverness and hard work” in preventing the loss of any courses, he said.
“We’ve been able to keep meeting student needs within the budget constraints, and it’s taken faculty and administrative willingness to do that. … The good news is that the increases (in enrollment) have been relatively modest recently. But we’re getting to the point where it’s now going to be difficult,” he said.
As for future additions to UH-Hilo’s executive team, Straney said that the school is preparing to announce a hire in a health and wellness position at the executive level. A posting on UH-Hilo’s website describes an opening for a program director for Student Health & Wellness Services.
“That was due to concerns we have about drug use and unhealthy behavior among the students that is growing, and we want to be able to address those programs in an effective and helpful way. It’s directly related to the needs of the students,” he said.
The position would be shared with Hawaii Community College, Straney added.
“It’s a two-fer,” he explained. “And frankly, we hope we can find more situations going forward where our two campuses can share their resources where it makes sense, where it helps both our programs at the same time.”
