The University of Maryland spent nearly $1 billion on base salaries for fall 2022 employees, according to data obtained by The Diamondback.
Among the most notable salaries is former men’s basketball coach Mark Turgeon, who resigned on Dec. 3, 2021, and received $1.25 million in base salary — the highest pay rate in that period. University President Darryll Pines received the second highest pay with a salary of $840,000, followed by athletic director Damon Evans.
Salary data includes base salaries, and is not a measure of total compensation. Base salaries are often buttressed by bonuses and non-monetary compensation, particularly for administrators, coaches and others who are among the university’s best-paid employees.
Here are four takeaways from this university’s salaries data.
- University salary data is complicated and can lack information.
This university’s data groups Pines and Evans with nearly 3,600 exempt, regular employees – who range from administrators and deans to IT specialists and department coordinators. This group makes up one-third of the university’s workforce.
Meanwhile, coaches such as Brenda Frese and Mike Locksley are considered non-tenured faculty members, the same designation given to some research scientists, librarians and lecturers. While non-tenured faculty typically work on contracts that have to be renewed, tenured faculty are guaranteed employment until they resign, retire or are terminated.
The lack of complete information on bonus compensation obscures the totality of wage inequities that aren’t revealed in the publicly available reports, said Todd Holden, president of the Local 1072 chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a union that represents more than 3,400 university workers.
Frese, for example, signed a new contract in April 2022 that, according to The Baltimore Sun, will pay her a total of $1.7 million per year, $1.1 million more than her base salary. Around the time Frese’s deal was announced, Locksley also agreed to a contract extension in which he became eligible for up to $1.5 million in performance incentives on top of his base salary, according to The Washington Post.
“Darryll Pines makes more money before lunchtime on a Monday than a lot of our housekeepers make in two weeks,” Holden said.
- Non-tenured faculty outnumbered their tenured colleagues more than 2-to-1
Non-tenured faculty members, who work on contracts and receive lower pay than their tenured colleagues, accounted for 32 percent of university employees in 2022.
By comparison, just 13 percent of employees were tenured faculty members with indefinite academic appointments. An additional three percent served in tenure track positions, in which faculty become eligible for tenure after six years.
Karin Rosemblatt, a history professor who serves as vice president of this university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said the numbers reflect nationwide trends in academia that have accelerated in recent years.
“More and more people are having jobs that are more poorly paid and have a lot more instability because they have short-term contracts,” she said. “This also gives administrators extraordinary power because people who are on these short-term contracts are going to be much less likely to speak up about issues that they see.”
One college that is emblematic of this university’s high proportion of non-tenured faculty is the journalism college, where out of 95 total employees, just 14 achieved tenure or were on a tenure track. Forty percent of the journalism college’s faculty were lecturers classified as non-tenured, non-regular, meaning their contracts lasted up to six months. The median salary for this group was about $8,500.
Journalism college dean Lucy Dalglish said the college’s lecturers are typically working journalists who teach one class a year. This gives students the opportunity to learn from people in the field who have connections.
“There are some journalism schools that do teach almost all theory, very little skills, but the journalism schools that are producing really good journalism in conjunction with professional partners, they’re going to have a lot of adjuncts,” Dalglish said.
- Business school faculty salaries far outpaced the rest of this university
Across all subgroups, faculty at the business school earned more than their peers at other colleges at the university — in some cases, substantially so.
The median salary for a tenured faculty position at the business school was just less than $268,000, which was about $127,000 higher than the median salary across all colleges.
The median salary for business school faculty on the tenure track was $216,515, while the median for non-tenured faculty on continuing contracts was $165,313. Both figures were more than double the university median at those positions.
In a statement, the business school said it offers high salaries because its faculty members have lucrative job options outside of academia.
“We have extraordinary professors with global reputations … In order to attract excellent scholars and teachers, the school offers salaries that are competitive with other business schools,” the statement read.
- Contingent employees made up a small but meaningful portion of the workforce
Contingent workers, who are privately contracted by the university, accounted for only three percent of employees in fall 2022. Still, they represented an important segment of this university’s workforce, according to Holden.
Contingent workers privately contract with the university for up to 12 months at a time. Their rights are not protected by a union, they are unable to make contributions toward a retirement or pension plan and they do not receive the same health benefits as regular employees, according to Holden.
“Our union has been fighting for a while at this point to end contingent and contractual employment on campus because we don’t think that there should be a class of workers who don’t have any security,” he said.
Of note, the data provided to The Diamondback only included contingent II employees whose contracts run for six to 12 months. Contingent I employees, who are on contracts of six months or fewer, were not represented.
CORRECTION: A previous version of one of this story’s graphics misstated employees categorized as “exempt regular” are the most represented type of employee across all colleges. Non-tenured continuing contract faculty are the most represented employee type. This story’s graphic has been updated.
Victoria Stavish and Devon Milley contributed data analysis to this report.
