Top Penn officers see big salary increses

Penn President Judith Rodin's total compensation increased by nearly 14 percent to over $500,000. They may not make the multi-million dollar salaries of Fortune 500 chief executive officers, but based on compensation information in the University's federal tax filings, Penn administrators are hardly hurting in the wallet. University President Judith Rodin earned $498,536 in base pay for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1997, the last year for which records are publicly available. She also earned $16,342 in benefits and had an expense account of more than $19,500. Rodin's combined salary and compensation package of $514,878 represented a 13.7 percent increase over the $453,029 she earned in the 1995-96 fiscal year, when she was the third highest-earning private college president in the country. Her package that year was also tops in the Ivy League. She earned $375,980 in 1994-95, her first year in office. But Rodin is far from the highest-paid employee of the University. That honor belongs to Health System CEO and Medical School Dean William Kelley, who raked in more than $1.1 million in salary and benefits in 1997. Several professors in the Medical School also earned upwards of $700,000. "I am grateful to the Trustees for the confidence they have in me," Rodin said, stressing that her salary is "competitive" for a teaching and research university of Penn's size, complexity and "academic stature." Following Rodin as the second highest-paid employee outside the Health System is Executive Vice President John Fry, who earned $326,219 in salary and compensation last year, 22.4 percent above the $266,505 he made for the 1996 fiscal year. Fry said he did not believe his salary had increased that much. "For the pure salary stuff, I don't think it's that high," he said. "I wish it was." Former Provost Stanley Chodorow made a $224,019 base salary during his final year as Penn's top academic official. His combined salary and compensation package of $242,181, however, represented only a 1.6 percent increase over the previous year. Chodorow resigned as provost last November in the midst of his unsuccessful bid to become the next president of the University of Texas at Austin. He left the University earlier this month to assume the helm of the California Virtual University, a distance-education consortium of nearly 300 California colleges. Several Penn vice presidents and financial officers also earned packages of more than $150,000 last year. The list was topped by Vice President for Development Virginia Clark, who made $191,017 in salary and $16,296 in benefits. Administrators defended the six-figure packages -- which are set by the University Board of Trustees' Compensation Committee -- as a necessary way of getting the best people to head University offices. "There's tremendous competition for the most talented [officers]," Rodin said. "These [packages] are all market-driven." University spokesperson Ken Wildes said the salaries are "in line with those at other schools" and are a key component in attracting officials to Penn and in warding off headhunters from other institutions. "The economic benefit has to be there to get the kind of person you're trying to attract," he said. "You're not going to get someone to Penn with less money." Wildes, who himself was hired away from a vice-presidential position at Northwestern University, added that the top schools across the country are "all after the best people." "We attract the best students and the best faculty," he said. "Why shouldn't we attract the best university administrators?" On the other side of the University, Health System officials make substantially more money than their counterparts from College Hall. Kelley leads the pack with a base 1997 salary of $1,128,957, plus benefits and an expense account. Wildes said that Kelley's salary is competitive with those made by CEOs of other large integrated health care systems, including Johns Hopkins University, the Mayo Clinic and Massachusetts General Hospital. And though several Medical School professors make hundreds of thousands of dollars more than Rodin and Fry, Health System spokesperson Rebecca Harmon stressed that most of their compensation comes from their clinical practices, not their teaching salaries. Urology Professor Alan Wein heads the list of Penn's highest-paid physicians with an $893,000 package, followed by Surgery Professors Thomas Spray and William Potsic, Neurosurgery Professor Paul Marcotte and Dermatology Professor Leonard Dzubow. Though all five earned salaries in the high six figures, none earned more than $59,000 from their Medical School teaching duties. "What you are looking at is somebody who saves lives," Harmon said. "Their patients are very grateful. Who can put a price on that?"

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