The State Journal recently received an open records request response revealing annual base salaries for 453 full-time Kentucky State University employees.

Some employees may have left or been hired by the university since this list was generated, and some salaries may have changed.

The salaries do not take into account fringe benefits, stipends, or any payments beyond the employee’s base salary.

Acting President Clara Ross Stamps is the highest-paid employee at the school, making just over $229,000. The highest-paid professor at over $154,000 is Kirk Pomper, Director of Land Grant Programs and Dean of the College of Agriculture, Community and the Sciences. Head Football Coach Charlie Jackson makes the most of any non-academic staffer at $163,000.

As of July 30, KSU paid 681 people, including full- and part-time employees. Of the 453 full-time employees on payroll as of Aug. 5, 115 were marked as professors.

The average annual base salary for a full-time employee is $58,570. For those full-time employees marked as professors on the records provided by KSU, the average salary is $75,213. The median household income for Franklin County, per the latest U.S. Census data, is $56,274.

Employees of KSU made roughly $29.77 million annually as of July 30. The school’s operating budget for this fiscal year is just under $50 million.

Judith Wilde, professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, and James Finkelstein who is professor emeritus at the same school, specialize in researching university presidents’ contracts and pay-related issues in higher education.

After reviewing KSU’s salaries for all employees, they said that there was a stark gap between administrator pay and professor pay — but that the same gap existed in most universities.

“This is part of a national trend,” Finkelstein said.

Finkelstein added that the trend noticed by those who follow higher education is the stagnancy of faculty salaries while salaries for administrators continue to grow. Each year, they said, the gap grows larger.

He and Wilde said that KSU’s gap between professors and administrators wasn’t as stark as it is at some other universities.
“There is a discrepancy, but not necessarily worse than anywhere else,” Finkelstein said. “… It’s more or less what you might expect — not too, terribly bad. There wasn’t quite the number of assistant deans, associate VPs and all those people with exaggerated titles as you might see elsewhere. So the discrepancy here isn’t as great as what we see in some major research universities.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s data corroborates this. KSU’s salaries were the lowest of any other public school in Kentucky with data available for the 2018-2019 academic year at $64,597. The University of Kentucky was paying professors, on average, almost twice as much.

Former president Brown contract

Former KSU president M. Christopher Brown II, had a base salary of $270,000, but bonuses and other incentives brought that number higher than $400,000.

A Herald-Leader analysis of Brown’s pay concluded that he made roughly $425,000.

The State Journal obtained Brown’s contract as well as all variations and addendums to the contract.

The Lexington newspaper found that Brown was granted a $43,200 bonus after receiving a glowing performance review from a consultant with the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.

In addition to a number of performance and retention incentives, as well as cost of living increases, the board voted in 2019 to allow Brown to live outside of the presidential mansion. The board also awarded him a monthly housing allowance of $4,030, or $48,360 annually.

Wilde and Finkelstein characterized Brown’s overall contract as “fairly lucrative” for a school the size of KSU, but noted that his housing allowance was unusually large. In their analysis of several major university presidential contracts, they said about one third of those contracts included housing allowances. The  allowances in the study ranged from $19,000 to $70,000 annually.
“And none of those institutions are as small as KSU,” Wilde added.

In the wake of his positive performance review, Brown was granted a contract extension on June 3 that gave him another four years as the school’s top administrator.

Brown resigned from his post amid questions about the school’s finances, some of which were forwarded by members of the board of regents to the governor’s office, on July 20