Despite faculty pay dispute, Cal Poly president gets raise
SLO Tribune 1/26/07
Baker — the longest serving and highest paid of the Cal State presidents — will make $298,372 this year after the CSU Board of Trustees on Tuesday approved a 4 percent pay increase for the CSU presidents, CSU Chancellor Charles Reed and his top executives.
The raises are retroactive to July 1.
Local faculty union leaders are questioning the raise’s timing while contract talks are stalled after 18 months of bargaining.
Meanwhile, students are facing a fee increase of about 10 percent next year, according to Claudia Keith, a CSU spokeswoman.
CSU trustees will take up the issue of fees in March. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed putting in extra money to "buy out" fee increases last year. This year, there is no such offer.
Baker’s office referred questions to Larry Kelley, Cal Poly’s vice president for administration and finance. Kelley defended the raises.
He noted that a recent study showed that CSU executives’ compensation is 42 percent less on average than university leaders of peer colleges, which are compared based on enrollments, fees and other factors.
Baker received a 13.7 percent raise in November 2005, bringing his annual salary to $286,896 before this latest raise.
"We’d like to maintain the best faculty and staff we can in the CSU system," Kelley said.
He added that he hopes to see the negotiations resolved with raises for the faculty, but he wouldn’t say how much is appropriate for the pay increase.
Earlier this month, the California Faculty Association organized an informational picket to protest a compensation offer they believe is inadequate.
The CSU has offered faculty an increase of nearly 25 percent over four years, but the union says only about 15 percent of that money is guaranteed. The rest would depend on contingencies, including money that’s not certain in the state budget.
"I guess it’s something that (the executives) deserve, but it’s incredibly poor timing," Richard Saenz, Cal Poly’s president of the union local and chairman of the physics department. "They can’t come to an agreement with the faculty, and they had a huge raise last year."
Glen Thorncroft, a Cal Poly associate professor in the mechanical engineering department and union local vice president, said the CSU offer "barely beats inflation, does not make up for years with no salary increases, and does not even begin to close the salary gap with other institutions."
Research has shown that CSU faculty members lag by about 18 percent behind peers in comparable colleges, according to Saenz.
The next phase in the faculty negotiations process is a "fact-finding mission" in which an agreement is sought through research by union and CSU representatives, as well as a third-party representative agreed on by both sides, according to Saenz.
That could end the deadlock by March, but the union members are prepared to strike, he said.
"We’ll prepare to strike and hope it never happens," Saenz said.