fbpx
Breaking Campus News. Launching Media Careers.
UC-Berkeley pays ex-chancellor $434,000 to do nothing for a year

Looks like ‘a reward for negligence, incompetence and petty corruption’

Nicholas Dirks had a rough chancellorship at the University of California-Berkeley.

For the next year, he’ll have an easy ride and a fat golden parachute.

The former chancellor is getting paid $434,000 to do nothing for an entire year, and will return to teaching on campus in the 2018-2019 academic year, when he’ll earn nearly $200,000 less to be a full-time professor, The Daily Californian reports.

The do-nothing payment is 80 percent of his salary as an administrator, and a university spokesperson said Dirks was actually underpaid relative to his peers at Association of American Universities members.

MOREBerkeley protesters crash Chancellor Dirks’ office with disco, cake

The money will incentivize him to “retool and do research in preparation for a return to the faculty as a professor,” the spokesperson said, but faculty aren’t buying it:

UC Berkeley Faculty Association Chair Michael Buroway and campus molecular and cell biology professor Michael Eisen criticized the university for paying Dirks a percentage of the salary he was paid as chancellor instead of the pay he will earn as a professor. …

Buroway, who is also a campus sociology professor, added that campus faculty members with four years of full time employment would be eligible for only 44 percent of their salary during a sabbatical. …

“No doubt this is all laid out in (Dirks’) contract as Chancellor, but it does appear to be a reward for negligence, incompetence and petty corruption,” Buroway said in an email. “It is an appalling commentary on the distribution of benefits at a time of supposed fiscal crisis and when many students can barely scrape together a living.”

Read the Daily article.

MORE: Chancellor Dirks has ‘escape hatch’ built to avoid repeated sit-ins

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter

IMAGE: UC-Berkeley

Please join the conversation about our stories on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, MeWe, Rumble, Gab, Minds and Gettr.