A new report has indicated that Northwestern President Henry Bienen received twice as much total compensation for the 2006-07 school year as the year before, an increase that university officials attributed to Bienen’s lengthy tenure and a preplanned bonus.
Bienen received $1,742,560 for the 2006-07 school year, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education report, making him the third highest-paid president of a private university. President Bienen ranked behind David J. Sargent of Suffolk University and E. Gordon Gee of Vanderbilt University.
Bienen received $814,572 for the 2005-06 school year, according to the report. For the 2004-05 year, he received $774,004.
Bienen’s salary was $1,342,595 of his total compensation and $590,929 of that compensation had been deferred from his previous ten years in office. “My salary is not twice as high,” Bienen said in an e-mail, referencing the inclusion of his previously deferred payments. “My salary is a fraction of the sums they list.”
Almost all of his benefits package for this year will be deferred to a later date, and with President Bienen scheduled to retire Aug. 31, 2009, it may be subject to forfeiture.
Vice President of University Relations Al Cubbage attributed the large increase in compensation to President Bienen’s long tenure. Early in Bienen’s presidency, the compensations committee decided that certain benefits from past years would be paid in 2006, Cubbage said. The rise in President Bienen’s salary is a result of these predetermined benefits, which he had earned and accumulated over his first 11 years in office.
According to Cubbage, a better metric of President Bienen’s salary would be to compare it to that of other longstanding presidents of research universities. The highest paid president of a major research university in 2006-07 was Chancellor E. Gordon Gee of Vanderbilt, with a total compensation of $2,065,143. Gee retired in 2007 after a seven-year term.
The practice of deferring payments serves as incentive for presidents to remain at the university, explained Cubbage. The compensation committee of the Board of Trustees sets salaries every year for university officials, based on both job performance and salaries at comparable universities.
“You get a raise if you do a good job,” Cubbage said. “President Bienen has done a remarkable job for Northwestern. This university has been transformed in many ways during his leadership.”