At UA, It?s Nolan 12, Professors -9.2

Full professors at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville were paid 9.2 percent less than the national average for doctoral-granting public universities last year, but the UA has the 12th-highest paid college basketball coach in the country, thanks primarily to outside income from apparel endorsements.

The average pay for a full professor at the UA was $76,300 for the 2000-2001 school year, according to data complied by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Nationally, the average was $84,007.

(Click here for the list of the state’s highest paid public employees.)

And the UA pays its professors more than any other college in the state. Arkansas State University in Jonesboro was second last year with an average salary of $63,400.

Full professors earned the most during 2000-2001 at Rockefeller University in New York (an average of $138,100), followed by Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Chicago and Yale.

The UA paid associate professors an average of $57,100 — 5.7 percent less than the average of $60,571 at other comparable universities. Assistant professors at the UA made $50,400 per year on average, just a half a percent less than the national average of $50,635.

(Before getting too teary-eyed, keep in mind that Arkansas is one of the poorest states in the nation with a per capita income of $22,257. That’s 25 percent below the national average of $29,676.)

Nolan Tops List

Pay for the UA’s academic positions looks anemic when compared with the income of Nolan Richardson, head basketball coach of the Arkansas Razorbacks.

Richardson will receive $1,030,000 from the UA and other sources this year, making him the 12th-highest paid college basketball coach in the United States, according to USA Today.

Richardson makes about half as much money as the University of Louisville’s Rick Pitino, who will receive $2.2 million as the nation’s highest-paid college basketball coach.

As far as the state budget goes, however, Richardson receives only $133,015, a smidgen less than the $134,892 Doyle Z. Williams, dean of the UA’s Walton College of Business, will get from the state this year. (Williams’ total pay, however, is $201,840.)

The rest of Richardson’s pay is classified as “outside income” and comes primarily from apparel endorsements and television appearances. Since the vast majority of Richardson’s income is from companies such as Nike instead of the state kitty, few Arkansans see any reason to complain.

“If you polled the faculty right now, you’d probably get ‘I’m not happy about that’ from a lot of them depending on how you asked the question,” said John King, a UA professor of social work who was chairman of the faculty senate last year. “But that’s the way the world has developed at universities. You can only earn up to a certain amount according to your rank. We understood that when we came here.”

King is referring to line-item maximum salaries set by state law for faculty members at the UA.

King said some of the UA faculty (probably less than 10 percent) makes outside money by writing books and through other means, but no professor has outside income that compares with Richardson’s and no central office tracks outside income of faculty.

Richardson’s outside income includes $300,000 for athletic shoe endorsements, $200,000 for apparel endorsements, $245,000 for television appearances and commercials, $85,000 for speaking engagements and $35,000 for sports camps.

The next two slots in our list of the area’s highest-paid state employees are also held by the UA’s athletic department.

Head football Coach Houston Nutt will earn $869,644 this year, which includes $540,000 in outside income. Athletic Director Frank Broyles will earn $260,000, which includes $107,000 in outside income.

The first non-athletic department employee on the list is John White, chancellor of the UA’s Fayetteville campus, at No. 4 with an annual salary of $235,750. But White serves on several corporate boards and apparently brings in at least $150,000 per year through stock options from those companies. That amount, however, isn’t reflected in our list of highest-paid state employees since it does not come through the UA.

White is on the boards for Eastman Chemical Co., Motorola Inc., Russell Corp., Logility Inc., J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. of Lowell and the National Science Foundation, to which he received a presidential appointment.

It’s an apples-and-oranges comparison, but White’s counterpart Richard L. Rubenstein at the University of Bridgeport, a private college, earned $832,492 last year as the highest-paid private college president in the country.

According to a Nov. 9 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the average salary of a private-college president was $207,130 last year, up 11.2 percent from $186,255 the year before.

During the same period, the average faculty salary at private and public colleges increased only 3.7 percent from $56,282 to $58,352.

Faculty members may grouse about pay raises for administrators, but others say college presidents are now similar to CEO’s of complicated conglomerates and should be paid accordingly. By comparison, Lee Scott, president and CEO of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., earned $8.9 million last year in total compensation. But Scott is head of the world’s largest retailer, which happens to be headquartered 30 miles north of UA in Bentonville.

Another professor said it’s not the season for grumbling about salaries. In this time of economic downturn and a state budget shortfall of $142 million, most are thankful to have jobs at all.

Athletics vs. Academics

If academics seem like a stepchild at the UA, it’s not a new role. The UA has a strong tradition in football, winning a share of the national championship in 1964, and has participated in six NCAA basketball Final Fours, including winning the 1994 national title.

Academically, it’s a different story. The UA is a land-grant institution. Such colleges were established to educate the young people of the state, and traditionally those graduates stayed in the state to work.

But things have changed. The UA now is trying to compete on a national level. With the help of donors, and particularly the Walton family of Bentonville (who gave $50 million in 1998 to what is now the UA’s Walton College of Business), the UA’s academic reputation is improving, slowly.

The Walton College jumped from No. 48 to No. 36 this year in U.S. News & World Report’s annual ranking of business schools, reportedly helped by the $50 million Walton infusion. The Walton College was named in the Top 50 by U.S. News for the first time last year.

But as Arkansas’ only research institution, the UA is severely underfunded, as is the state in general.

According to the Chronicle, a total of $112 million will be spent this year by all Arkansas colleges on research and development. That’s 80 percent below the average of $550 million for each of the 50 states.