President Ruth Simmons received $575,859 in total compensation in fiscal year 2004, but she was not the University's highest-paid employee. Rather, a vice president topped the list of Brown's seven highest-paid employees, who collectively received more than $3.5 million that year.
Cynthia Frost, vice president and chief investment officer, received $781,023 for the year ending June 30, 2004, according to a tax form filed by the University in May. Frost, who came to the University from a similar position at Duke in 2000, works with the Corpora-tion's investment committee to manage the University's endowment and operating funds.
The $575,859 received by Simmons in salary, benefits and deferred compensation makes her second on the list. Rounding out the top seven are two chairs of clinical departments at the medical school, another investment official, the provost and the dean of medicine and biological sciences - who has since retired. Each of the five received roughly $400,000 to $500,000 for fiscal 2004.
As a nonprofit organization, the University is required to detail its finances, including the salaries of key officers and the five highest-paid employees, on a Form 990 filed annually with the IRS. Any filing institution is required to make its Form 990 available for public inspection.
A committee of the Brown Corpora-tion, made up of the chancellor, vice chancellor, secretary and treasurer, reviews and sets compensation for the University's senior officers each spring, according to Mark Nickel, director of the Brown News Service. The committee sets the compensation of five of the top seven, excepting Professor of Medical Science Edward Wing and Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior Martin Keller, whose compensation levels were determined by a process within the Division of Biology and Medicine.
The Corporation committee looks at several surveys of compensation levels at other nonprofits when it sets salaries and other benefits, Nickel said.
"The point of the data is to get useful information for setting compensation for people in an academic setting," Nickel said.
For at least one of the University's highest paid employees - Simmons - Brown is not the only source of annual compensation. Simmons was paid a total of $214,000 in 2004 for serving on the boards of directors of Pfizer, Texas Instruments and Goldman Sachs, according to the companies' Web sites. In addition, she received 4,326 "stock equivalent units" from Pfizer, which she can exercise once she retires from its board of directors. If she had retired and exercised the units Friday, they would have been worth $96,297.
Simmons also received a 15,000-share stock option grant from TI, which is worth nothing today, but the long term value of which depends on TI's stock price. From Goldman Sachs, in addition to a retainer, she received 3,000 "fully vested restricted stock units." Goldman Sachs was unable to provide an assessment of the value of these units for The Herald, but the company's stock closed at $130.96 Friday.
The question of pay for college presidents has been a perennial source of controversy in academia.
"It's something that has gotten fairly heavily - and heatedly at times - debated in the last decade or more," said Stephen Nelson, a former research associate in Brown's education department who studies college presidents.
Nelson, currently an associate professor at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, said that a president of a fairly well known university might make 10 times the salary of an entry-level faculty member, "let alone a groundskeeper, a custodian or someone else."
"And then people can say, 'Is this really equitable?' as an institution attempts to spread its limited resources," he said. "I think some people perceive, at least, that the gap is getting larger."
Nelson added that the "gulf in the corporate cluster has gotten larger, faster than it has gotten in the academy." College presidents "are working enormously long hours with enormously large responsibilities that, in my mind, are not only equivalent to, but probably go well beyond the Fortune 500 CEOs," he said.
Roger Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, has called college presidents overpaid.
"The AAUP worries that too many college and university presidents lose touch with their faculty roots, the mission of the school, and connection with the common good when they accept exorbitant salaries," he wrote in an e-mail to The Herald.
Bowen proposed that presidents receive "some multiple of the median compensation paid to faculty at the institution, but generally no more than four times greater."
According to the AAUP's faculty compensation survey for the 2004-05 academic year, the average salary for full-time instructional faculty at Brown was $99,013. For a full professor at Brown, the average was $123,090 and for an assistant professor the average was $69,725.
Sheila Blumstein, professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences, remembers a time when administrators' salaries were not what they are today. In 1987, when University officials asked Blumstein to be dean of the college, their original offer was less than she was receiving as a faculty member.
"I said, 'wait a second, I shouldn't be losing money,' " she said.
Though Blumstein ultimately received a raise when she became dean, "the difference that was paid to me was not something that would knock your socks off."
Blumstein, who served as interim president from 2000 to 2001, said she remembers Howard Swearer, president from 1977 to 1988, "actually found it a badge of honor that some of the medical faculty were paid more than he was."
"The president was always paid more than the faculty, but the gap wasn't as large as it appears to be these days," she said. "I think that's the price of doing business, as it were."
Nelson said that because presidents' compensation levels are public, "it becomes a keep up with the Joneses kind of thing" between schools.
He said one college president he interviewed for an upcoming book thinks that "some of these competitions could well literally get out of whack."
