‘Salary adjustments’ average more than $17,400 per employee
USC came under sharp criticism last year when it was reported that the university had doled out more than $2.7 million in bonuses to 146 of its top earners. But the university handed them out again this year — in fact, it gave out more.
According to data obtained by The Daily Gamecock, 237 faculty and administration members with salaries above $100,000 per year got bonuses averaging more than $17,400 this year. That’s about $1,000 less per bonus than the 2010 average, but to 91 more people.
All told, the bonuses, or, as USC calls them, “salary adjustments,” totaled more than $4.1 million.
The bonuses come in four categories, according to Chris Byrd, the vice president for human resources, and are temporary and intended to be moved around when necessary.
The majority, 148, are “administrative supplements” — additional compensation for faculty members who have taken on more administrative duties, Byrd said. He used the example of a professor serving as a department chair or endowed chair. Provost Michael Amiridis, for instance, has received a regular $50,000 bonus each year on top of a dean’s salary for serving as provost.
Of the bonuses, 57 went to those who temporarily assumed additional or higher-level responsibilities. For instance, Charles Bierbauer, the dean of the College of Mass Communications and Information Studies, received a $25,000 increase in 2010 to head USC’s communications for nearly a year before the university created a new, $230,000 position — vice president of communications — and hired Luanne Lawrence.
Research supplements were responsible for 31 of the bonuses. These supplements are additional pay funded through grant money, such as the $53,000 earned by Mitzi Nagarkatti, the head of the USC School of Medicine, for her research in a number of fields of cancer immunology and immunotherapy, biodefense, immunopharmacology, immunotoxicology and complementary and alternative medicine.
Only one bonus came as a result of “special assignment pay” — a $21,000 reassignment of former Admissions Director Scott Verzyl to the position of associate vice president of enrollment management.
Several received multiple bonuses for serving in additional administrative roles. Nagarkatti, for example, earned two bonuses for heading the medicine school and working on a research grant. Together, the two bonuses total $83,816.
USC President Harris Pastides’ annual $270,000 bonus doesn’t include a $125,000 bonus recommended by the board of trustees and an additional $250,000 retention bonus he’s promised if he stays at the university for five more years.
USC spokesman Wes Hickman emphasized that many of the bonuses come from private funds — either research-endowed chairs or the educational foundation, which is comprised of the interest USC’s endowment generates. Pastides’ $270,000 yearly bonus comes from the endowment fund, Hickman said, not tuition.
Byrd said he and USC’s administration don’t normally review the university’s bonuses when they consider cutbacks in areas like tuition, since the budgets are largely handled at the departmental level.
But he said maintaining a degree of equality among faculty pay is important; he pointed to the 1.5 percent bonuses given to faculty paid less than $100,000, which came out of the university budget, not extra money from the state, like this year’s 3-percent, across-the-board bonus.
“We’re absolutely concerned about issues of equality,” he said. “That’s something that you want to take care to address when those issues come up.”
More than 60 percent of senior administrators and academic leaders are paid below market rate, Byrd said. The university is in the bottom half in the nation for full professors’ and assistant professors’ pay, and in the 28th percentile for instructors’, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
“Employee pay is a strategic issue for the university,” he said. “We want to make sure we’re careful as we make those decisions and make them in light of the market for talent as well as our available resources.”
News Editor Thad Moore contributed reporting.