By: Marty Raminoff
Two high raking administrators at the City University of New York received impressive raises, despite the decline in enrollment at the schools.
As reported by the NY Post, the public university system’s Board of Trustees approved a raise last month for CUNY’s chief operating officer and the senior vice counsel. Hector Batista, the COO had his salary jump 27 percent– from $330,000 to $420,000. Batista, formerly a non-profit executive who has been with CUNY since 2019, also gets perks including a car– and is driven around by various university peace officers, as per a source for the Post. Derek Davis, the senior vice counsel and general counsel who joined CUNY in 2019 from Harvard Law School, saw his salary increase by 30 percent, from $300,000 to $390,000.
The board also approved double-digit salary raises for other administrators– including 15% hikes for vice chancellors Doriane Gloria and Maria Junco Galletti. The four honchos’ raises act retroactively to Dec. 31, 2021, as per university documents cited by the Post.
The salary hikes come as CUNY’s enrollment has dropped, from 271,000 two years earlier to 243,000 in the fall of 2021. In April, the state budget approved by Gov. Kathy Hochul allotted an extra $1.2 billion to CUNY over the previous year. The university said the extra cash would go towards hiring more faculty, tuition assistance and other programs.
Not everyone was happy to hear about the executive’s pay hikes. One CUNY employee griped that “enrollment is down across the university and they’re lining their pockets.” The Post also previously reported that the school system is having trouble hiring enough security officers, because theycan’t offer them decent pay. “They’d rather take care of themselves than worry about the safety of students and staff,” an insider told the Post.
In August, the Post reported that CUNY’s public safety department only employs some 900 officers and security assistants — down from roughly 1,500 before the COVID-19 pandemic, representing a 40% drop. Insiders expressed concern that the University system’s campuses are in a dangerously “vulnerable position”, amid New York City’s ensuing crime surge.
Others complained that the teachers should be the ones getting pay hikes, not the honchos. “If the CUNY Board of Trustees believes management deserves raises this big, then surely our underpaid full-time faculty and staff, and our adjunct faculty who often struggle to afford even basic living expenses in NYC, deserve a substantial raise in the next contract,” said Penny Lewis, secretary of the Professional Staff Congress, the faculty union.
A CUNY spokesman responded, telling the Post that the university’s “executive compensation plan is periodically reviewed to make sure our senior staff’s earnings are on par with other public higher education institutions locally and nationally.”
“We are in a challenging job market and CUNY recognizes that it must remain competitive in order to recruit and retain talented leaders particularly as we work to boost pandemic-related enrollment drops and get New Yorkers the help they need to return to college,” the spokesman said.
