University of Wisconsin officials thought they had three final candidates for the vacant provost position, but these are difficult economic times.

One of the candidates, Kumble Subbaswamy of Indiana University, recently withdrew his candidacy after accepting the same provost position at the University of Kentucky, a decision that will net him anywhere between $23,000 and $67,000 more in his starting salary.

Perhaps Chancellor John Wiley would not have selected Subbaswamy as his new provost — the second-highest administrative position at UW — or, perhaps, Subbaswamy is the latest in a line of top administrators to leave Wisconsin for greener pastures.

"Most of our people are paid much less than at our peer institutions," UW Interim Provost Virginia Sapiro said, noting salaries here are often as much as 20 percent lower. "It's a terrible issue for us."

Halfway through last semester, the UW System announced four final candidates to become the first chancellor to lead both UW Colleges and UW-Extension.

David Wilson of Auburn University got the job, but not before one of his competitors — Utah State University's Jack Payne — withdrew in favor of a lower-ranking yet higher-paying position at Iowa State University.

Wilson's starting salary will be $178,000. Across the border at Iowa State, Payne will collect $210,000 in his first year.

"My current salary at Auburn is $198,000 a year with a possibility of a 5 percent increase this year," Wilson said, pointing out the economic sacrifice he made in coming to Wisconsin. "This [pay cut] certainly would have been a major issue were I not so attracted to the work."

The Board of Regents, which sets salaries for systemwide administrative positions, should consider itself lucky to land Wilson, according to Regent Roger Axtell.

"We're told by the major national recruiting firms that Wisconsin has a reputation for being a low payer and that this is hurting us," Axtell said. "They say we're trading on our reputation. But our reputation is wearing thin because people know we don't pay market rates."

Losing out on Subbaswamy and Payne are just two examples in a continuing trend which oftentimes affects current rather than prospective employees.

According to Axtell, chancellors at UW-Milwaukee, UW-Stevens Point, UW-Whitewater and UW Colleges have all left Wisconsin in the past few years for positions at other schools paying anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 more.

"I personally consider this the top priority problem in the whole system," Axtell said. "It's a sad situation."

Why Wisconsin?

According to former UW System President Katharine Lyall, the university's uncompetitive compensation crisis is part of a bigger movement toward the privatization of public education nationwide.

Drawing on her experience at the helm of the UW System — one of the largest public higher-education systems in the nation — Lyall recently co-authored a book titled "The True Genius of America at Risk: Are We Losing Our Public Universities to de Facto Privatization?"

"Our main thesis is that we're drifting into this privatization without any public policy dialogue or real discussion about the implications for the state or for … individuals in the university," Lyall said in an interview with The Badger Herald. "The problem of noncompetitive salaries is just one manifestation of this."

But why are salaries in Wisconsin lower than in Alabama, Kentucky and Iowa — states with economies at least comparable to Wisconsin’s?

"It's our Legislature who thinks that they can keep cutting our budget and cutting our budget," Axtell offered. "In the last three biennium, we have been cut a total of $390 million."

As Lyall sees it, the state of Wisconsin is in "no-man's land" right now and is being regulated and micromanaged by the Legislature as though it were 100 percent state funded, while in fact it is only 18 percent state funded.

"Wisconsin has not yet really awoken to the fact that it has to compete in a national market and, really, in a global market for Madison," Lyall said.

According to Lyall, a number of states that have traditionally lagged Wisconsin in higher education — particularly in the South — have now awoken to the fact that their economic future depends on their investing in public universities.

"It's somewhat surprising and a little bit humbling to see states like Kentucky and Georgia … outbid Wisconsin for leadership," Lyall said. "That's going to lead those universities to surpass ours, and that's a real danger."

And unless Wisconsin sees a nonpartisan public dialogue about the future of the university system, she predicted, that is where it is heading.

In another biennium or two, the public could be supporting less than 10 percent of UW-Madison. If it reaches that point, Lyall said, "it's effectively privatized."

"There will be less opportunity for people to go to Madison, there will be reduced opportunity to get research contracts and support from the outside and we'll just begin to fade away," she said. "The worst scenario [is] 15 to 20 years from now, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Mississippi have switched places."

Is the Legislature at fault?

Although state funding of the UW System has continued to fall in recent years, the Legislature is facing deficits of its own and finds has few resources to spare.

"We had a $1.6 billion deficit in the last budget and a $3.2 billion deficit the budget before," Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison, said. "I'm hopeful that the next budget when we don't have a deficit one of the main people who will benefit from that will be the UW System."

While Pocan regrets the Legislature not being able to better fund UW, Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, said he has little interest in rewarding the state's premier public higher-education system for what he sees as poor behavior.

"The UW apparently wants us to shovel money at a problem, and what they need to do is start downsizing their administrators and start taking a look internally rather than blaming the Legislature for all of its woes," Suder said. "We'd be remiss in our duties if we simply gave the UW more money for bad mismanagement."

Upon hearing of Axtell's assessment of uncompetitive administrative salaries as the "top priority problem," Suder criticized UW's ability to prioritize.

"This is another example of the UW's priorities being completely out of touch with the public," he said. "The UW thinks that their executive salaries are more important than accessibility and affordability for Wisconsin students, and that's just a sad commentary on where UW's true priorities lie."

One UW System official, speaking on condition of anonymity, attributed the unwillingness of some legislators to pay administrators "market value" to the comparatively paltry salary made by those in the Legislature.

And, according to Suder, there is little sympathy for these comparatively well-off administrators anywhere in the state.

"I don't know of many people in the Legislature or in the real world that consider executive salaries to be too low," he said. "Nobody in my district is making the type of lavish salaries these UW executives are pulling in — and they certainly aren't given guaranteed backup jobs, either."

Pocan criticized some of his colleagues in the Legislature — particularly Republicans — for taking any "foible" or controversy in the university and trying to "blow it up into something huge."

While Pocan stopped short of saying uncompetitive salaries is the most pressing issue facing the system, he agreed with UW officials in that it should be a priority.

"This state has always been — quite frankly — stingy about paying its higher level administrators," Sapiro remarked. "There has always been a view that people in the public sector shouldn't be paid so much. Well, that's not how the market works."

Do administrative salaries matter?

In spite of the bleak outlook some UW officials have cast on this current state of affairs, UW-Madison in particular still is commonly ranked among the top public universities in the country.

Just this month, Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine ranked UW-Madison the 15th-best value in American public higher education. UW-La Crosse and UW-Eau Claire both cracked the top 100 list as well, at 36 and 69, respectively.

But according to Sapiro, Kiplinger's methodology failed to take into account the quality of faculty or administrators.

"The value is [measured in] tuition, financial-aid cost and all of that," Sapiro said. "The pay faculty and administrators receive and the quality of the faculty is not in their methodology."

Despite the deficient salaries, sought-after candidates like Wilson do leave behind money to come to Wisconsin and 30-year veterans like Sapiro do stay.

"Faculty don't work somewhere just for the pay," Sapiro acknowledged. "What keeps people here is it's a great university, we have a great community and it's a wonderful place to live."

And Suder went as far as to say that hiking administrative salaries would actually be counterproductive to the university's mission.

"Paying administrators more creates less opportunities for students," he said. "I don't think you're sacrificing quality when nobody in the state is going to blink an eye if we lose a few administrators at the UW System."

But, according to Sapiro, such a philosophy is dropping morale on the Madison campus as it finds itself "constantly … under attack" from other universities trying to cherry-pick valuable employees.

And from Lyall's perspective, the next budget is immensely important and will determine where UW is going in the long run.

"Former Gov. Lee Sherman Dreyfus used to say Wisconsin is known for only two things outside this state — the Packers and the University of Wisconsin," Lyall recalled. "If we lose the UW, the future of this state is going to be really a lot grimmer [and] a lot bleaker than it needs to be."