University of Kentucky

The Legislative Research Committee did some studyin‘ of Kentucky’s university presidents and how much they get paid.

Pay increases for university presidents ranged from 5 percent to 34 percent between 2006 and 2010, according to a new report from the Legislative Research Commission. For faculty, the average pay raise was 7.7 percent statewide during the same period, according to the Southern Regional Education Board.

….Meanwhile, public universities and community colleges have lost $105 million in state funding since 2006, bringing cuts to education programs and higher tuition for students. Higher education faces another possible cut, $62 million, over the next two years.

For the University of Kentucky, between 2006 and 2010 the Presidential Salary increased 6.3% to $304,000. Pretty modest, right?

Except that in 2011 when UK hired Eli Capilouto as their new president, they gave him a baseline $500,000 salary. You factor that in and, as the Herald reports, you’ve got a 74% salary increase.

On Sunday, the Herald put out what might as well have been a special Eli Capilouto Issue. The Half-A-Million-Dollar Man sat down with Jerry Tipton, Linda Blackford and Tom Eblen for three separate articles.

Tipton covered the one-and-dones, and Capilouto’s ‘students first’ strategy (someone’s gotta pay that salary), as well as some political Rupp talk:

Q: Why have you spoken in opposition of Mayor Jim Gray’s proposed Arts, Arena and Entertainment District, going so far as to say you’d view any funding for that project as money taken away from your hopes to upgrade UK classroom buildings and dormitories?

A: “Mayor Gray has an exciting vision for our city. I think he made us all realize design matters. … I have the same goals of having newer facilities on campus, renovated classrooms (and) residence halls that lend themselves to modern living and learning. We both share a challenge and we speak about it frequently, and that is how to pay for the new arena.

Q: How much conflict is there between your vision for UK and Gray’s vision for Lexington?

A: “I hope all of our dreams come true.”

Eblen covered Capilouto’s ‘students first’ strategy, his feelings on UK’s history of shirking students off into surrounding neighborhoods, the plan to privatize student housing, and some Rupp stuff, too:

He raised eyebrows by saying he would not request state money to renovate Rupp Arena, as Mayor Jim Gray had urged, because it might compete with academic ­building requests.

In an interview last week, Capilouto praised as ­visionary Gray’s plans for Rupp and the ­surrounding Arena, Arts and ­Entertainment District ­downtown. He just thinks academic projects must come first. UK’s academic and ­housing infrastructure isn’t competitive with peer ­institutions. That makes it hard to attract and retain top faculty and students, and it limits what they can achieve.

“I want to be able to grow what we do here so that we can better support what I want to see flourish in downtown ­Lexington,” he said. “They go hand in hand.”

Blackford’s is far and away the best, a wide-ranging profile covering all corners of Big Prez’s life on campus:

He gets paid $500,000, and it’s clear he understands that if he has to spend a lot more time lobbying, tweeting, making videos and asking people for money than he ever has before, then so be it.

“I get a lot from walking around,” he said earlier in the day, in between taping a “hot seat” segment for basketball Coach John Calipari’s TV show and lunching with a donor. “Building relationships is my job, and it really energizes me to talk to all these people.”

….When you’re a university president, people always want something from you: time, attention, funding. When they don’t want something from you, chances are they’re a legislator or a rich donor and you want something from them, mainly money. The race for private dollars has accelerated at a furious pace just as state funding has declined precipitously. Capilouto estimates that fund-raising — the long slow dance with potential donors to build the relationship that goes on long before they give anyone a check — takes about 20 percent to 30 percent of his time. During this legislative session, he’s spent about one day a week in Frankfort, arguing for more and more flexible state funding.

Keep reading…

It’s unclear why Capilouto is pushing himself so hard (or why the Herald put all three articles together in one weekend) but perhaps the Half A Million Dollar Man is simply trying to take advantage of the March Madness attention to UK (basketball) to get some interest in UK (students first!).

***UPDATE***

As Danny points out in the comments, NoC has more on the Presidential/University salary scale from a great article from last year:

The first thing you should know is that UK’s Top 20 bonanza, paid for by students and their families, taxpayers and athletic supporters, and janitorial staff and adjunct armies, represents a fairly large redistribution of wealth, a quiet ho-hum moving of public money into private individual coffers. There have been a number of ways this has been done, but the exploitation of scale—moving from local and regional to national and global scales to deflect blame or increase importance and value—has been a much-used, yet little-discussed ripoff tactic.

The Herald-Leader editorial this morning looks at student housing, in a way. Inspired by a New York Times article from last week, they call for a big vision while putting aside questions of whether the privatization plan makes real sense.

The NYT article talks of the incremental building up of Madison, WI and its university gateway:

Pieces of the seven-block stretch from Regent Street to Lake Mendota were installed episodically over the decades, including the Memorial student union (built in 1928) along the lakeshore that has long been one of this capital city’s favorite warm-weather gathering spots; a public square one block off the lake; and a collection of campus buildings dating to the 1950s and ’60s.

In the last decade, university architects and administrators, working with Madison’s planners, have been more purposeful. Prompted by trends in urban design that emphasize closer ties between retail stores and cultural institutions, open space, recreation and stronger neighborhoods, the university and the city developed a more definitive construction plan. When it is finished, the 2.45 million-square-foot project is expected to have cost nearly $500 million.

The Herald editorial:

Yes, yes, UK must stay fixated on getting and policing just the right contract terms if it boldly goes where no university has gone before by outsourcing all its student housing to a for-profit company.

But let’s not lose sight of the overarching purpose for launching this ambitious plan to swiftly improve and increase on-campus student housing: Advancing scholarship by enhancing the quality of students’ experience in Lexington.

Where that kind of big-picture thinking could lead is illustrated by what the University of Wisconsin and the city of Madison have accomplished.

So long as we’re thinking big… what would happen if the University of Kentucky could somehow pull together the resources to bring the brightest minds they can find to a central location — let’s call it “a campus” — where really smart people old and young who study economics and business and architecture and engineering and urban design and all sorts of other pursuits can be put to work coming up with truly transformative ideas for how to remake the UK campus and pay for it.

And what if… just what if… half of those attendees actually paid to take part and the other half got paid too little to be there?

What would that meeting of the minds look like?

Or is the message from the University of Kentucky that the school is incapable of attracting such talent?