The state’s flagship university system is home to the highest-paid public employees in Massachusetts, with one noted critic saying it’s time for colleges to trim the ranks of costly administrators.
That wish didn’t happen last year.
The UMass system had 4,447 employees who earned $100,000 and up, records show.
That includes three million-dollar earners plus three who pulled down $800,000 or more; seven who made at least $600,000; nine at $500,000-plus; 25 at $400,000 and beyond; and 102 who topped $300,000.
The UMass football coach and other assorted presidents and provosts quickly followed.
The three UMass system big winners who pulled down more than $1 million in 2022 included two medical school leaders and the new UMass Amherst basketball coach.
The million-dollar hires include:
- Dr. Michael Collins, paid $1.28 million as the chancellor of the UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester. He’s also a professor.
- Dr. Terence Flotte, who earned $1.13 million as executive deputy chancellor, provost and dean at the medical school.
- Head men’s basketball coach Francisco Martin. The team is off to a strong 9-4 start.
A UMass spokesman did not respond with a comment — including questions about a UMass nurse who pulled down $205,535 in OT last year boosting her take-home pay to $348,045, as the Herald reported.
Civil liberties litigator Harvey Silverglate, long a critic of the college system, said the problem is bigger than OT for nurses.
He told the Herald the “massive increase in college administrators” has sent tuition skyrocketing and free speech plummeting.
“When you have an army of basically useless administrators needing something to do … independent liberty is sacrificed,” he said. “They are wrecking what college should be. We need independent thinking.”
Silverglate is running for the Harvard Board of Overseers to try and turn the college back, and hopefully others will follow, to what higher education should be about, he added.
“We don’t need students to parrot the college line, we need independent thinking,” he said, and less “Orwellian thought control.”
UMass, according to a recent announcement, ranks 28th among all U.S. public universities and is the top public university in New England.
Two University of Massachusetts programs – Life Sciences at No. 78 and Computer Science at No. 85 – both ranked in the top 100 worldwide, according to a fall survey.
The University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School is also home to a Nobel Prize winner Professor Craig C. Mello — who is not listed on the payroll and, according to past reports, is paid by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
