Trustees give president raise, retention bonus last year
President Harris Pastides said he isn’t making plans to leave USC, and university trustees aren’t eager to see him go.
The board of trustees voted last year to give him a $125,000 raise, which was followed by a pay increase from the state, bringing his salary to $681,200 — up from $535,000. The board also approved a $250,000 retention bonus that he’ll get if he stays at USC through 2017.
Pastides, 59, said he doesn’t plan to leave as long as he has the energy to stay on the job.
But when he’s ready to slow down, he said he’d like to return to public health, either as a professor at USC or as a private foundation researcher.
“That’s where I was trained, and that’s something I don’t use all the time, working maybe on curing an important disease worldwide or expanding health care to more people,” Pastides said.
Pastides came to USC as the dean of the Arnold School of Public Health in 1998 after nearly 20 years in the University of Massachusetts’s epidemiology department.
He became USC’s vice president for research and health sciences in 2003 before succeeding then-President Andrew Sorensen as the first internal pick for USC’s presidency in more than 50 years.
And while Pastides has sketched out some of his next steps, he said he isn’t sure what he’ll do after leaving the office — or when.
“I’ve not written that chapter or that script yet,” Pastides said.