Little ire over outgoing U of I leaders’ salaries

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CHAMPAIGN – The president of the University of Illinois and chancellor of its flagship campus have both resigned after months of pressure over special treatment granted to well-connected student applicants, but neither man is leaving the state payroll.

When he leaves behind the red-brick president’s mansion on the Urbana-Champaign campus in December, B. Joseph White will step into a tenured faculty job and says he expects to work on a fundraising campaign, earning three times the $101,000 that the average professor at the campus is paid.

Chancellor Richard Herman, the man the Illinois Admissions Review Commission called the key decision maker in admitting underqualified students with connections, will keep his $400,000 salary through June, then take a pay cut to $244,000 and become a math professor. He’ll spend his first year on a paid sabbatical.

The pay, the jobs and, in Herman’s case, the year off are allowed under the contracts the men signed when they became top university administrators years ago.

Such deals, much like the generally more lucrative payouts that corporate executives routinely receive when leaving jobs, are common in academia.

And among state lawmakers, the review commission – the panel created to examine the admissions uproar – or even the mostly lesser-paid faculty, there seems to be little outrage over White’s or Herman’s relatively soft landings.

“I don’t get a sense that people want to exact another pound of flesh beyond having to step down and leave these positions, which is a pretty difficult fate to accept,” said Nick Burbules, a professor and member of the Faculty Senate, which in September called for White and Herman to be replaced.

But a government watchdog group says the two deserve harsher treatment.

“The new [university] board of trustees should challenge the contracts and either force White and Herman to find employment elsewhere, or at least renegotiate the terms so discredited academics can’t earn more than professors who’ve maintained the ethical and moral standards one should expect at the state’s flagship institution of higher learning,” Andy Shaw, executive director of the Chicago-based Better Government Association, wrote in an e-mail.

Neither White nor Herman responded to requests for comment by The Associated Press.

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