Key UC Employees Are Best-Paid State Workers : Finances: Top officials and physicians rank highest on list. But the university says its pay is not competitive.

SACRAMENTO —  The best paid jobs in state government are at the University of California, particularly those held by the school’s premier physicians, several of whom had annual incomes above $500,000 last year.

The university president, the chancellors at the nine university campuses, hundreds of physicians and other professors, and scores of top administrators are included on a list of university faculty and staff who were paid more than $100,000 in 1994.

In all, 2,502 individuals made the list--twice the number in all the rest of state government.

Leading the list is a pediatric heart surgeon at UC San Francisco who says he spends “a very intense 80 hours a week” tending severely ill infants. Further down the list is a mathematical genius at UC San Diego, a UCLA constitutional law scholar and the head football and basketball coaches at both UCLA and UC Berkeley.

University officials stress that high salaries at UC are generally reserved for some of the nation’s leading educators, that the university’s standout medical schools employ top doctors and that overall pay scales are in line with--and in some cases below--those at schools of equal caliber.

In fact, the university’s Board of Regents has been raising basic salary levels to compete with other leading universities. “We can’t have a brain drain,” said the regents’ chairman, retired GOP Rep. Clair W. Burgener of Rancho Santa Fe. “If we’re not competitive, the climate and the beauty of California are not enough by themselves to attract the people we want. We have to have money there.”

For example, the American Assn. of University Professors reported that the average pay for a full professor at Berkeley was $80,100 last year, while nearby private Stanford University was paying $99,900. (The nation’s highest paid faculty was at Harvard, where full professors averaged $104,200.) A separate state study found that the average faculty salaries at UC lag 10% behind the average at a sampling of major universities, both public and private.

UC President Richard C. Atkinson, selected last fall, has called for closing that 10% gap to bring UC salaries up to the average of the study’s comparison group. Atkinson, who is vacationing in Florida, declined to be interviewed last week. However, at his first news conference as president, he declared, “A high priority of my administration is to regain the equity in faculty salaries. This is absolutely critical. We have a real problem.”

Atkinson is paid $243,500 a year to run the university system that includes nine campuses, five medical centers and three national laboratories. The presidents of some universities far less renowned earn more.

Retirement Uproar

Compensation for top UC administrators was a hot issue a few years ago, after an uproar over then-President David Gardner’s $2.4-million retirement package. At a time when the regents were raising student fees, Gardner and other UC executives were getting sizable perks that were largely hidden from public view, including substantial housing allowances, mortgage subsidies and deferred income payments.

In a highly critical 1992 study, retired Legislative Analyst A. Alan Post concluded that the university was treating its top administrators too much like corporate executives, and the regents phased out many of the perks.

But Post agreed that UC executives should be well paid and suggested that it is quite reasonable for the UC president to earn more than the governor, whose state income is $114,286 a year.

“The president of the university has a much more demanding job,” Post said. “I’ve known a lot of governors and they’re no geniuses.”

The list of top UC earners, obtained under the Public Records Act, was not available when The Times reported in November how much others in the rest of state government earned in 1994. But the differences are striking.

On the state controller’s list of state employees aside from UC, not one exceeded a gross income of $200,000. In the university system, 246 individuals made more than that last year.

Of course, six-figure salaries are still the exception among the university’s 154,000 full- and part-time employees, most of whom earn much less than a campus executive or a full professor. The average full-time pay was about $43,500 last year.

The UC list, prepared for The Times by Atkinson’s office based on 1994 gross incomes reported to the Internal Revenue Service, is dominated by doctors, whose faculty salaries are supplemented by income from clinical practices.

Indeed, the very highest gross incomes last year were paid to a select group of cardiac surgeons and transplant specialists, radiologists and orthopedists--clinicians with international reputations.

These individuals say that they are being paid for highly demanding jobs that required long years of training. While they acknowledge that they are well compensated, they say they could earn a good deal more in private practice.

“I put in probably 80 hours a week and that’s a very intense 80 hours, most of the time in the operating room, sometimes as much as 12 to 14 hours at a stretch,” said Dr. Frank L. Hanley, a UC San Francisco cardiac surgeon who specializes in the care of severely ill infants and who many times takes on cases rejected by physicians at other centers.

Hanley was the most highly compensated state employee last year, according to the university’s list, with a gross income of $568,437. His professor’s salary was just $55,611 last year. The rest of his gross income came from the university out of patient fees for the more than 500 surgeries that he performed in 1994.

Typically, the university provides doctors with offices and staff, collects fees and distributes a portion of the money to the doctors in return for medical services.

“We deal with small babies with very severe heart problems who come to us from all over the country, all over the world, when other centers have given up on them,” Hanley said.

Second on the list with an income of $566,483 is another cardiac surgeon, Dr. Stuart W. Jamieson, who directs the heart and lung transplant program at UC San Diego.

Jamieson said he could earn four to five times that at a private institution. “I enjoy contributing to a future generation of surgeons, I enjoy teaching,” he said. “Obviously, there is more to life than money and this is a trade-off for me.”

Orthopedic surgeon Joseph M. Lane, third on the list, said he was one of about 30 faculty members on the UCLA campus who has reached the top ranks of the university salary scale, which brought him $104,400 last year as a professor plus $2,813 as chairman of his department. He earned an additional $430,621 from patient fees under the medical school’s clinical compensation program.

Lane said he took a 20% pay cut when he came from Cornell University in New York two years ago for the chance to work at “one of the three great research institutes in the world.” His group conducts research in regenerating human bones--”bones to order,” he calls the process.

“I have 80 to 100 hours of work each week at the hospital,” he said. “I’m not sure an English professor works that much.”

Lane and other university officials point out that there are as many as 100 medical school faculty members at various campuses whose medical practice income is not reported on the university payroll system. Those individuals have been allowed to maintain a separate private practice at the university, but newer faculty members such as Lane are not.

Another 500 faculty and staff were paid royalties and licensing fees from patents by the university last year, income that was reported separately to the IRS and not included as gross income in the university’s statistics.

If patent income had been included, Dr. Marcus A. Horwitz, a UCLA expert in infectious diseases and the inventor of a potentially lifesaving tuberculosis vaccine, would have been one of several patent holders at the very top of the list. His total university income was $736,226 last year, including $530,194 in payment for his promising discovery.

The university has received about $4 million for the vaccine. Tuberculosis, which has been making a resurgence in the United States, is estimated to cause almost 3 million deaths a year worldwide.

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The university figures also underestimate the amount paid last year to retiring UCLA football coach Terry Donahue and to Jim Harrick, coach of the Bruins basketball team, the reigning national champion. The base university salary for each coach was $108,000 last year.

However, both men work under university contracts that include generous salary supplements paid from a variety of non-taxpayer sources--including talent fees for radio and TV appearances, corporate sponsorship fees and revenues from summer sports camps.

The added income would have placed them among the 20 best-paid university employees. Harrick’s total pay was $421,318, Donahue’s $370,368.

Two administrators in the top 20 are UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young, who made $423,946 last year, and the university’s treasurer, Herbert M. Gordon, who made $404,784.

Young’s income included a $162,920 payout from a special deferred compensation program that was discontinued in the furor that followed the public disclosure of ex-President Gardner’s retirement income.

Last year, the university treasurer had accumulated $166,382 from the same program.

Both were among the 126 university employees who made more than the university president last year.

In fact, even without the one-time payment of deferred income, treasurer Gordon earns more than the current president. Gordon’s base salary is $246,700 compared to Atkinson’s $243,500.

Why does the treasurer earn more than the president?

“As UC treasurer, Herb Gordon manages an investment portfolio worth more than $31 billion,” replied university spokesman Terry Colvin. “His salary is low compared to that of investment managers of his caliber in both private industry as well as in public and private education.” The job can’t be compared to Atkinson’s, he said.

Not one woman--whether professor or administrator--was paid enough to break into the ranks of the 20 highest university incomes last year.

The only woman in the top 50 was Dr. Nancy L. Ascher, a surgeon who heads the liver and kidney transplant service at UC San Francisco. Ascher’s total income, including revenue from patient fees, was $316,505.

Generally speaking, non-medical faculty members were not as well paid as their physician colleagues. But there were some exceptions.

Mathematics professor Michael H. Freedman was the highest paid university faculty member outside of the health sciences last year, with a gross income of $182,798. Much honored for his proof of the “Poincare conjecture,” Freedman was a winner of a MacArthur “genius” award in 1984.

He said that 1994 was an unusual year for him. In addition to his base salary of about $126,000, he received several grants and awards--including a one-time $10,000 settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by faculty denied merit increases in 1991 during the state’s budget crisis.

Acknowledging that he has been relatively well paid, Freedman worries that the university will have trouble attracting talented faculty in the future. “It’s definitely the case that five years of declining budgets have caused some erosion in UC’s competitiveness,” he said.

Unusual Pay

UCLA English professor Eric Sundquist has written and lectured extensively on the impact of race on American literature. Last year, his gross income was $170,561. Again, the circumstances were somewhat unusual. As chairman of his department, he works an 11-month year instead of the usual nine months. In 1994, he also received an additional month’s salary carried over from the year before. And he conducted a summer seminar for the National Endowment for the Humanities. “It was a very odd year,” he said.

UCLA constitutional scholar Kenneth L. Karst was the best paid law professor on the university’s income list for 1994 with gross wages of $148,845.

“I’m the most senior person on the law faculty who didn’t take an early retirement,” Karst said. The university lured more than a thousand highly paid professors into retirement with special incentives--one of the actions it took to pare down its budget.

Karst worries that salaries are not high enough to keep attracting top attorneys. “We are recruiting against the law firms, and it’s no exaggeration to say that people who are senior partners in major law firms are earning four or five times as much as the top salary at a UC law school,” he said.

Along with physicians and lawyers, among the best paid workers on UC campuses are medical perfusionists. Not medical doctors, they are the skilled technicians who operate the heart-lung machines used in open-heart surgery.

Seven medical perfusionists made more than $100,000 last year, according to the university’s statistics.

The highest paid was the chief perfusionist at UCLA Medical Center, Christine Cushen, who made $195,505 last year. She learned her craft in Houston, under pioneering heart surgeon Denton Cooley.

Her $33-an-hour base pay tells only part of the story. University records show that she puts in extraordinarily long hours--allowing her to collect substantial amounts in overtime and premium pay.

“My day begins with the phone ringing at five o’clock in the morning,” she said. Like the surgeons who perform the operations, she works as much as 70 hours a week, she said. And when she isn’t working, she often is on call, waiting to assemble a team for a transplant on extremely short notice.

Of her pay, she said: “I’m not embarrassed at all by it. I work hard for it, and I take pride in what I do.”

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The Top 20

Top administrators, physicians, and professors with the UC system are among the best paid state government employees in California. Last year, 2,502 employees had university incomes in excess of $100,000 as reported to the Internal Revenue Service. Here is a list of the 20 highest paid university employees for 1994:

NAME/CAMPUS: Frank L. Hanley, UC San Francisco

JOB: Pediatric Heart Surgeon

GROSS INCOME: $568,437

COMMENT: Includes $512,826 in medical income from patient fees

****

NAME/CAMPUS: Stuart W. Jamieson, UC San Diego

JOB: Heart Surgeon

GROSS INCOME: $566,483

COMMENT: Includes $461,698 in medical income from patient fees

****

NAME/CAMPUS: Joseph M. Lane, UCLA

JOB: Chairman, Orthopedic Surgery

GROSS INCOME: $537,835

COMMENT: Includes $430,621 in medical income from patient fees

****

NAME/CAMPUS: David Bradford, UC San Francisco

JOB: Chairman, Orthopedic Surgery

GROSS INCOME: $482,040

COMMENT: Includes $377,718 in medical income from patient fees

****

NAME/CAMPUS: Abdool Rahim Moossa, UC San Diego

JOB: Chairman, Surgery

GROSS INCOME: $464,524

COMMENT: Includes $349,646 in medical income from patient fees

****

NAME/CAMPUS: Stuart I. Brown, UC San Diego

JOB: Chairman, Ophthalmology

GROSS INCOME: $447,517

COMMENT: Includes $338,121 in medical income from patient fees

****

NAME/CAMPUS: Robert N. Weinreb, UC San Diego

JOB: Vice chairman, Ophthalmology

GROSS INCOME: $426,146

COMMENT: Includes $359,968 in medical income from patient fees

****

NAME/CAMPUS: Charles E. Young, UCLA

JOB: Chancellor

GROSS INCOME: $423,946

COMMENT: Includes $168,920 payout of deferred income & $50,573 from house & auto allowances

****

NAME/CAMPUS: Steven R. Garfin, UC San Diego

JOB: Orthopedic Surgeon

GROSS INCOME: $412,552

COMMENT: Includes $378,380 in medical income from patient fees

****

NAME/CAMPUS: Herbert M. Gordon, UC System

JOB: Treasurer

GROSS INCOME: $404,784

COMMENT: Includes $166,382 payout of deferred compensation

****

NAME/CAMPUS: Neil F. Jones, UCLA

JOB: Orthopedic Surgeon

GROSS INCOME: $383,086

COMMENT: Includes $324,389 in medical income from patient fees

****

NAME/CAMPUS: Emil A. Tanagho, UC San Francisco

JOB: Urologist

GROSS INCOME: $382,647

COMMENT: Includes $236,318 in medical income from patient fees & $36,475 from grants

****

NAME/CAMPUS: Guy J. F. Juillard, UCLA

JOB: Vice chairman, Radiation oncology

GROSS INCOME: $380,031

COMMENT: Includes $297,501 in medical income from patient fees

****

NAME/CAMPUS: Richard J. Steckel, UCLA

JOB: Chairman, Radiology

GROSS INCOME: $373,204

COMMENT: Includes $278,856 in medical income from patient fees

****

NAME/CAMPUS: Ronald L. Arenson, UC San Francisco

JOB: Chairman, Radiology

GROSS INCOME: $368,901

COMMENT: Includes $264,375 in medical income from patient fees

****

NAME/CAMPUS: Fernando Vinuela, UCLA

JOB: Radiation

GROSS INCOME: $366,785

COMMENT: Includes $268,755 in medical income from patient fees

****

NAME/CAMPUS: Bartly J. Mondino, UCLA

JOB: Director, Eye Institute

GROSS INCOME: $366,751

COMMENT: Includes $228,590 in medical income from patient fees & $44,000 in grants

****

NAME/CAMPUS: John F. Alksne, UC San Diego

JOB: Dean, Medical School

GROSS INCOME: $366,468

COMMENT: Includes $186,554 in medical income from patient fees

****

NAME/CAMPUS: Haile T. Debas, UC San Francisco

JOB: Dean, Medical School

GROSS INCOME: $366,250

COMMENT: Includes $138,665 in medical income from patient fees

****

NAME/CAMPUS: Robert G. Parker, UCLA

JOB: Radiation Oncologist

GROSS INCOME: $355,157

COMMENT: Includes $242,109 in medical income from patient fees & $8,655 in grants

Source: University of California, office of the president, and individual campuses.

Note: Income figures do not include royalties on patents and may exclude other income from outside sources.