A study concluding that Ohio University administrators make 3.8 percent more than the national median contained data that were mislabeled when it was distributed to faculty earlier this week.
OU's chapter of the American Association of University Professors combined surveys by its parent chapter and the College and University Professional and Association for Human Resources and distributed it to faculty earlier this week.
While the study shows that administrative salaries are higher than national medians, the study that was distributed to faculty mislabeled those medians taken from the CUPA study as averages.
Medians and averages are only the same on a normally distributed bell curve, and thus could be misleading to compare if both sets of data were not normally distributed. The distribution of both surveys could not be obtained before publication.
Joseph Bernt, secretary of the OU chapter of AAUP and journalism chair for graduate studies, redistributed a corrected survey late yesterday.
I don't want to go head-to-head with whether the study is a good study or a bad study
said Sally Linder, senior director of media relations. But I think if you look at it I think you'll see that it has some flaws in that way.
The study concluded that top administrators at OU have annual salaries that are 42.5 percent higher than the average of the national median salary for administrators at all institutions. OU
Faculty salaries, analyzed against national faculty salaries from the AAUP's portion of the study, average 4.3 percent less than the national average.
CUPA's placement of OU in the doctoral institution category, though, affects the comparisons between OU administrators and those polled nationally.
OU President Roderick McDavis, for example, makes $294,665 a year, about $86,000 more than the median salary for chief executive of any institution, but he makes more than $30,000 less than chief executives at doctoral institutions.
However, the top 31 OU administrators make 3.8 percent more money on average than administrators at doctoral institutions, according to the study, and faculty salaries, on average, are about 14.2 percent lower than those at doctoral institutions.
Ohio University administrators are at about the average level in a national comparison with doctoral institutions Linder said. The administration feels that's an appropriate level for them.
Linder said there were many reasons that some administrative salaries are above the national average, including experience, education, supply and demand for the individual position, geographic location and special skills.
According to a recent e-mail sent to faculty, top Ohio University administrators have long defended their skyrocketing salaries by blaming the dynamics of a competitive national market. The results of the survey were presented in an attempt to disprove that claim.
The OU AAUP sent an e-mail to faculty in January informing them of a disparity between salary increases for administrators and faculty. According to the e-mail, salaries for 36 top administrators had increased an average 16.9 percent from 2004-2005 to 2006-2007. The average salary dropped for faculty was -8.5 percent for instructors and 4.4 percent for professors.
Bernt said that administrators responded to this by saying that they needed to keep up with the market.
Bernt said administrators do not like that the AAUP is making the study results known because of their embarrassing nature.
They should be embarrassed
Bernt said. The university has been underpaying faculty for years
and it has come to a crisis.
McDavis and 27 other administrators agreed to a salary freeze for next year on Monday.
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Anne Elliott
