The nearly $294,000 salary proposed for outgoing University of Hawaii President M.R.C. Greenwood to join the medical school would make her the highest-paid professor among the school’s 200 full-time faculty.
Greenwood, 70, announced in May that she was retiring Aug. 31 to spend more time with family and address health issues. She said at the time that after taking a one-year unpaid leave, she would probably return to a tenured faculty position at the John A. Burns School of Medicine.
Greenwood — an internationally recognized expert in nutrition, obesity and diabetes — was named president of the 10-campus system in August 2009 with a $475,000 salary. Her contract, after an extension in 2011, was set to expire July 31, 2015.
The university’s Board of Regents is scheduled to take up her proposed faculty salary at a meeting Thursday. The agenda lists a $24,470 monthly salary, which amounts to $293,640 annually. It would be effective following a leave without pay for "personal reasons" from Sept. 1 to Aug. 31, 2014.
If approved, her annual salary would be about $90,000 higher than the average medical school professor — and more than double what the average UH-Manoa professor earns.
Professors at the medical school earn a median salary of $202,019, according to a University of Hawaii Professional Assembly salary database.
Greenwood did not request the salary amount, the Board of Regents said in a statement Friday.
"Her academic credentials are equal, if not more distinguished, than those of the highest paid faculty members and the proposed salary is the average of the top five salaries at the medical school," the statement said. "The ceiling for JABSOM salaries comparable to her experience ranking is $317,496."
The board also indicated it’s possible Greenwood could be paid a monthly salary because she has "expressed her desire to work in Hawaii six months of the year, and elsewhere for six months." She would only be paid for the months she actually serves on staff at JABSOM, the board said, "if that set of circumstances transpires."
Greenwood, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment.
The highest-paid professor at the medical school earns $292,188. (That’s the same salary amount approved for former UH-Manoa Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw, who stepped down from her post last summer and took a tenured faculty position at the medical school.)
Nationally on average, a professor of health professions makes $98,415, according to the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources.
Greenwood’s salary is likely to "annoy" other instructors, said David Duffy, president of the union that represents about 4,000 UH faculty.
"When you have an English professor making $50,000 or $60,000 and trying to make ends meet, they can complain about overpaid administrators, but this is a faculty member," said Duffy, a botany professor at UH-Manoa. "It’s just not clear why we would pay her more than we pay any other medical school faculty. And it’s not clear how that salary is going to help the rest of the faculty. It’ll probably annoy a lot of the faculty."
Bonnyjean Manini, a faculty specialist in student affairs at Manoa, said that granting tenure to high-paid executives raises concerns about pay equity.
"My personal opinion is that executives are being paid on a much higher pay scale. So when they decide to stay on using the benefit of tenure offered in their hiring contracts, it really has an impact on other salaries," said Manini, former chairwoman of the UH-Manoa Faculty Senate. "Had they simply applied for a faculty position, their pay would be much different."
Greenwood’s announced retirement came nearly a year after UH became embroiled in the so-called "Wonder blunder" from a botched Stevie Wonder concert that shook public confidence in the university’s leadership and spurred questions about UH’s operations and accountability.
The Wonder debacle began a year ago this month when then-athletic director Jim Donovan announced the benefit concert would not happen because the pop star and his representative had not authorized the event. It ended up costing the school more than $200,000 in an alleged scam.
The university is paying a consulting firm $224,000 to study how the school can avoid being scammed again and ways to improve financial and management oversight.
The study will require about 2,000 hours of work, which UH says it doesn’t have the internal capacity to handle.
Larry Rodriguez, who chairs the task force leading the effort, told the Board of Regents audit committee Thursday that regents haven’t been proactive enough and need better training.
Meanwhile, regents are searching for both an interim and permanent replacement for Greenwood.
The board is expected to name an interim appointment at next week’s meeting. The search group has said it would focus on candidates already in the university system.
A separate search committee in charge of finding a permanent leader says it wants candidates with strong Hawaii ties. That search is estimated to take six to 10 months.
Although Greenwood called her departure from the president’s post a retirement, she is not yet vested in the state Employees’ Retirement System. In general, a public employee hired in 2009 would need to work five years and be at least 62 years old before drawing pension benefits.
