By John Hrabe

Every good protest has a catchy rallying cry. A simple memorable phrase that summarizes the movement’s agenda. The Vietnam War: “Hey-hey! Ho-ho! LBJ has got to go!” The Women’s Rights Movement: “What do we want? Equal Rights! When do we want it? Now!”

Over the past year, students, faculty and staff have organized protests and rallies at California State University campuses, as the country’s largest higher education system copes with annual tuition increases and budget cuts.  The California Faculty Association announced on Tuesday that, after all the protests, it finally had reached a tentative contract agreement with trustees. And the rallying cry is clear:

“What do we want?” 

* “Salary for 12-month department chairs on sabbatical shall be based on a 12-month — not academic year — salary schedule.”

* “The age of dependents eligible for fee waiver will increase from ‘up to 23 years of age’ to ‘up to 25 years of age.’”

That’s not a parody, but two exact quotes from the faculty association’s fact sheet on the deal that could end the faculty’s holdout. Have they really been holding out for revised sabbatical pay schedules and an increased age for dependent tuition waivers?

The faculty association’s fact sheet confirms how badly they were beaten by trustees. In fact, faculty members only played defense. The first 19 bullet points contain some variation of the phrases: “stopped management’s attempt to,” “defeated CSU administration’s legislative effort to,” and “beat back a chancellor proposal to.” Another CFA victory brought Cal State “up to date with state law to prohibit discrimination against faculty.”

The deal only goes into effect “upon ratification by CFA members and the CSU Board of Trustees.” CFA members can and should veto the agreement. They’re the only group with any leverage over trustees and could use their contract negotiations to change the corruption at Cal State.

Cal State Administrators Immune from Austerity Measures

Cal State Trustees have been arrogant. Top administrators continue to be dismissive of student and faculty concerns. And CSU presidents have been entirely immune from any budget cuts.  Since 2008, student fees have nearly doubled.  Faculty members have matched student sacrifices by foregoing pay raises and taking furlough days. Over that same time, there’s been no end to Cal State’s administrative excess. Don’t forget that these figures are just the president’s base pay.

* Elliot Hirshman, the president of San Diego State University, has received an annual salary bump of $154,500. He made $267,000 per year at the University of Maryland, but now makes $421,500 at San Diego.

* San Jose State University’s Mohammad Qayoumi takes home 38 percent more per year now that he moved over from the Cal State East Bay campus. He earned $237,072 per year at East Bay and earns $328,200 at San Jose.

* Dianne F. Harrison, the new president of Cal State Northridge, has increased her salary from $270,315 to $324,500 per year, a 20 percent raise over her previous base salary at the Monterey Bay campus.

* Mildred Garcia, Fullerton’s new president, also scored a 10 percent pay raise by changing campuses. She now earns $324,500 annually, a 10 percent raise over her previous post.

* Leroy Morishita, the new president at CSU East Bay, receives $303,660 per year, a 10 percent increase from his salary as the interim campus president.

* Leslie Wong, the new president of San Francisco State University, earns $123,000 more than he did at Northern Michigan University. His salary increased from $201,995 to $325,000 per year.

Enough Money for Pay Raises for Top Managers

Cal State presidents have shared the wealth with their top managers.  According to an analysis of payroll data, Cal State presidents awarded 486 pay raises to top managers from 2008-10. Cal State Chancellor Charles Reed handed out another 80 pay raises to his chosen bureaucratic elite.  Those figures excluded promotions for staff that have internally changed positions.

“On an annualized basis, these discretionary raises added $6.5 million to the cost to run the CSU system,” the study’s authors concluded. You’d expect the California Faculty Association to highlight such inequitable measures in their negotiations, especially given that they authored the report.

Cal State has repeatedly defended the pay raises as necessary to retain and recruit the best talent. “We need to be able to recruit and retain the best and the brightest individuals,” said Mike Uhlenkamp spokesman for the Cal State chancellor’s office. Apparently, that logic only applies to presidents and not faculty members.

“Fair Agreement in Hard Times”

“It’s a fair agreement in the context of hard times,” said Lillian Taiz, the president of the California Faculty Association. “We are disappointed we were not able to get a raise, but that wasn’t in the cards. It was a tough pill to swallow, I won’t kid you.” Taiz is right. Given the current budget situation, it’s completely unreasonable for faculty to secure higher pay or increased benefits. However, Cal State faculty could have achieved something worth more than money: respect.

Faculty Association Should Demand Faculty Salaries Be Tied to Administrators’

The California Faculty Association should reject the current contract and demand just one additional contract provision: All salaries, including administrators, campus presidents and top managers, shall be linked to the faculty’s pay and benefits. To keep trustees honest, the policy should be applied to all pay, including bonuses paid out by nonprofit auxiliary foundations.

With just this one demand, CFA members could fix Cal State’s attitude problem. No more presidential pay raises. Faculty members could force a new policy of shared sacrifice and tie administrators’ success to their own.  Everyone at Cal State would be on the same page and face the system’s upcoming challenges together.

Faculty members don’t teach for the money. They do it because they love teaching. But, more and more, faculty are finding it hard to teach for a university system that creates one set of rules for administrators and another for faculty members. It’s especially disrespectful given that faculty are the only ones in the classroom.

Shared Sacrifice! Equal Austerity! Not bad slogans for the next Cal State protest.

By DAVE ROBERTS

In California’s highly partisan political world, there are few issues on which most agree. But a rare unity was achieved last July when the California State University Board of Trustees awarded the new president of San Diego State University a $400,000 salary ($100,000 more than his predecessor) in the same meeting that they raised tuition by 12 percent. It was denounced from left to right.

The board’s tone deafness, by sticking it to poor students while gilding a fat cat, was a “let them eat cake” moment worthy of Marie Antoinette. Students had already been feeling dissed. The $294 per semester increase to $4,884 a year for undergraduates came on top of a previous 10 percent hike and a tripling of tuition in the past decade, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The CSU board caught flack for giving SDSU’s Elliot Hirshman $350,000 from the taxpayers along with another $50,000 from the SDSU Foundation and free housing in a $1.1 million home. But that compensation is not much of an outlier among CSU presidents, who are all safely ensconced in the 1 percent of top earners.

San Luis Obispo President Jeffrey Armstrong receives $380,000, plus free housing. San Jose’s Mohammad Qayoumi gets $353,200 plus housing. Los Angeles’ James Rosser manages on just $325,000, but gets $60,000 to help with housing. All of the presidents receive more than $300,000 in combined salary and housing benefits. But they are paupers compared to CSU Chancellor Charles Reed, who enjoys $451,500 plus, of course, free housing.

In response to the outcry, the CSU board did what boards do: pawn off the controversy on a committee with a grand sounding name. The Special Committee on Presidential Selection and Compensation met periodically in the second half of 2011 and came up with a proposal in January, which was again met with criticism.

Democratic Opposition

While Republican opposition to exorbitant government employee compensation is a given, more refreshing were the man-bites-dog attacks from Democratic state senators like San Francisco’s Leland Yee and Torrance’s Ted Lieu.

“CSU trustees should not be spending limited state resources granting $100,000 raises for executive positions,” Lieu said in a press release. “We must limit salaries to a reasonable level that is consistent with California’s and CSU’s fiscal conditions.”

Yee weighed in a week later, “The exorbitant executive pay practices of the CSU Trustees and UC Regents are appalling and reinforces the perception that they are completely out of touch. UC and CSU are public institutions designed to serve California’s students and not to be a cash cow for executives.”

Particularly noteworthy was Lieu’s scathing 10-page letter on Jan. 17 to the CSU committee. Lieu in essence charged that the executive pay proposal, which compared CSU president salaries with similar universities around the country, was an exercise in deliberate fraud designed to line the pockets of presidents while fooling the public.

“The … problem here is not just that the proposed policy compares apples to oranges,” wrote Lieu. “The problem is more insidious. Data was manipulated and relevant criteria excluded through a unilateral process designed to improperly raise executive salary levels.”

Lieu, citing findings by the Legislative Analyst’s Office, makes the following charges:

The comparison data focuses on base pay without taking into account the substantial noncash benefits offered by CSU to its presidents, such as an expensive housing allowance, a car allowance, generous health benefits and a stipend.

CSU selected a narrow list of comparison institutions through a unilateral process without collaboration with traditional stakeholders.

The data and comparison criteria handpicked by CSU are designed to improperly skew the average salaries higher. For example, research funding should not have been used as a comparison factor because CSU’s primary function does not include research. And CSU colleges were compared with schools with wealthy endowments like the University of Oklahoma, which has an endowment seven times the size of San Diego State.

“A valid set of comparison institutions would show that, in fact, CSU presidents are being compensated at or above the average of their comparable peers,” concluded Lieu in italics.

Justification

Chancellor Reed, in his report to the committee, justified the pay comparison this way, “Even in difficult economic times, the CSU must compete on a national level for highly qualified candidates to serve as presidents of its institutions. The pool of candidates with the appropriate level of executive leadership experience is limited and the competition for the best candidates is intense.”

Reed acknowledged that the previous system of comparing CSU with 20 other colleges around the country “was never a satisfactory comparison” because it included private institutions with very different standards and ability to compensate executives. So he proposed replacing that with five tiers of colleges based on location, enrollment, budget, percentage of students receiving Pell Grants, six-year graduation rates and research funding.

He included a limit of a 10 percent increase of taxpayer funds paid to a successor president. But that looks more impressive than it is. In Hirshman’s case, it only would have trimmed $20,000 off of his $400,000 salary, because 10 percent of his predecessor’s salary totaled $30,000 – instead of the $50,000 increase he received in taxpayer funds. The salary percentage from foundation sources remains without a limit.

Budgetary Realities

Lieu cited the committee’s goal “to attract, motivate, and retain the most highly qualified individuals.” Lieu responded, “That cannot be correct, because it would authorize multi-million dollar compensation packages in order to get the most highly qualified individuals. Rather, the policy should be for the CSU to attract, motivate, and retain the most highly qualified individuals as constrained by CSU’s and California’s budgetary realities.” (Italics his.)

Lieu testified at a committee meeting against the compensation proposal. He was heartened when several days later the board changed the comparison formula to make it a salary guide rather than the determining factor, and that they included a 10 percent cap on salary increases and inserted consideration of fiscal conditions into their policy.

“These three changes are significant reforms that will help rationalize CSU executive compensation decisions,” said Lieu in a statement. “I commend the Board of Trustees for moving in the right direction.”

Yee was also pleased with the changes to the pay policy, but argued that they don’t go far enough. “Those making hundreds of thousands of dollars should not receive double digit pay increases during bad budget times or when students are forced to foot the bill,” he said.

Yee and Lieu teamed up to introduce several bills cracking down on executive pay excess:

SB X1 27 prohibits pay raises for top CSU executives when the state’s general fund contribution to CSU is less than or equal to the prior year.

SB 959 requires that pay raises be voted on in open public meetings. It also specifies that presidents cannot be awarded compensation in excess of 150 percent of that provided to the chief justice of the California Supreme Court. Tani Cantil-Sakauye, the current chief justice, earns $228,856, so campus presidents would be limited to a maximum of $343,269. The bill also requires trustees to first consider executive applicants from within the CSU system and secondarily from among California residents before considering candidates from outside the state.

SB 967 prohibits CSU executive pay raises within two years of a student fee hike, and limits salary increases to no more than 5 percent above the previous executive in that position.

None of the bills has yet reached the committee level. But it appears likely the over-reach by the CSU board last year will result in reforms this year to rein in the executive excess.

“Time and time again, rather than protecting the needs of students and California families, the regents and trustees line the pockets of their top executives,” said Yee. “While these public administrators are making more than the president of the United States, many Californians are struggling. We deserve better.”