Few Attack Pay Hike For WSU President

Now that he is getting an 8 percent salary increase and a boost in his other benefits, Washington State University President Sam Smith is pulling down a cool quarter-million dollars a year.

His employees not only make far less, but in percentage terms, they also are receiving far smaller raises.

So why are so few people complaining?

Call it the University of Washington syndrome.

After WSU’s cross-state rival spent a year looking for a new president, then quit and eventually hired a new leader at $195,000 a year, Smith’s state-funded salary of $134,675 is looking like a bargain.

“Certainly the supply of top-notch presidents at universities is very, very thin,” Phyllis Campbell, president of the board of regents, said Monday.

“Sam is someone that we feel very good about and is top-caliber for leading the university through these times,” she said. “Therefore, let’s pay as close to the median as we can to retain someone of his stature.”

Campbell and her fellow regents on Friday boosted Smith’s pay $10,000 while increasing his privately funded retirement fund from $35,000 to $50,000 a year. He also receives $70,000 in privately raised foundation money for luncheons, banquets, football tickets and other discretionary expenses aimed at enhancing the school’s image and raising more money.

The total comes to $254,675 and doesn’t include the use of his College Hill mansion, domestic help and a Mercury Cougar automobile.

The 8 percent salary increase raised the anger level among only a few staffers, particularly as WSU is demoting four library workers and raising staff wages an average of 4 percent, said Leslie Liddle-Stamper, president of Local 1066 of the Washington Federation of State Employees.

“The reasons the regents give for giving him a 10 percent raise are pretty weak,” she said. “We have a president of the United States that only gets $250,000, and I think he oversees a hell of a bigger budget than Sam does.”

Liddle-Stamper was referring to the regents’ reliance on a College and University Personnel Association analysis of doctoral institutions with budgets comparable to WSU’s.

The study put the median salary for the president of a single university at $182,100, with Smith falling below the 20th percentile mark of $150,525.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s more general survey of executive salaries puts the average at $155,000 a year.

In yet another comparison with 20 of WSU’s 22 “peer institutions,” presidents of single institutions had a median of $172,000 in taxpayer funded pay. In that study, Smith came close to the 25th percentile salary of $135,324.

That means about 75 percent of the presidents at WSU’s peers are making more than Smith, while 25 percent make less.

In that sense, Smith is in good company with his faculty, who are also at the 25th percentile of the average pay for their peers.

Like Smith, WSU faculty have not received a raise for more than two years.

Yet they will only see on the average a 4 percent raise next month.

Then they will have to wait another year for a raise.

Still, Faculty Senate Chair Doug Baker said he is “not sensing a lot of hostility” about Smith’s increase.

“Everybody’s underpaid,” he said.

“Even though Sam makes two or three times what everyone does, relative to his peers, he’s probably underpaid too.”

, DataTimes