The Cal State University unveiled, last Thursday, an executive salary comparison list, meant to put “downward pressure” on its presidents’ salaries, but the 23-campus system is still facing criticism on how it pays its executives.
Executive compensation at the CSU became a hot bed issue last July, after the university system approved a $400,000 salary for San Diego State University President Elliot Hirshman — a salary that will pay the SDSU executive $100,000 more than his predecessor.
“This is a list that justified raises that were already in place,” said Brian Ferguson, a California Faculty Association spokesman. “[It is] creating a means to justify the ends.”
Ferguson highlighted the fact that the CSU did not use a neutral third party to create the list, but the 23-campus system insists that this type of third party will be found in feedback from the state’s legislative analyst office and department of finance.
CSU spokesman Erik Fallis said the university is still waiting on this feedback and has yet to make compensation policy decisions based on the new comparison list.
“We were asked to come up with this,” Fallis said. “[This list is] putting information out there.”
The comparison list, which was released at an Oct. 13 special committee meeting on presidential salaries, categorizes the CSU’s 23 campuses into four groups focusing on research endowment and enrollment, among other things.
Cal State Long Beach, which is considered a B-group “high enrollment and mid-range research” university, is compared to other “high enrollment and mid-range research” universities, like Kent State in Ohio, George Mason in Virginia and Wayne State in Michigan.
CSULB’s comparison group averaged a presidential base pay of $391,000 and the CSU universities being compared within that group averaged a presidential base pay of $309,500.
CSULB President F. King Alexander has a base pay salary of $320,000.
The CSU also used university budget totals, percentage of Pell Grant recipients and six-year graduation rates to create the comparison groups.
SDSU was the only CSU to be compared among A-group “high enrollment and high research” universities like Temple in Pennsylvania.
This comparison group averaged a presidential base pay salary of $458,360.
This new list, according to Fallis, is meant to replace an older list released by the California Post Secondary Education Commission, which compared all 23 CSU campuses without categorization and inflated comparator presidential base pay by including private universities.
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