The Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee retained the honor of being the highest paid public college president in the U.S. last year, as a survey by The Chronicle of Higher Education showed the median compensation of presidents they looked at growing 3 percent over the previous year's results.
Gee's compensation package totaled $1,992,221 with a base pay of $814,156, according to the report. Although he had been the lone public college president surveyed to earn over $1 million in the 2009-10, he was joined in the 2010-11 year by The Texas A&M University System Chancellor Michael D. McKinney and Pennsylvania State University at University Park President Graham B. Spanier.
High presidential compensation can be a hard pill to swallow for faculty at universities where compensation for professors has remained stagnant amid budget cuts, as a New York Times story points out.
Gee's compensation last year turned out to be 12.3 percent more than the average compensation for a full professor at OSU. Across the board, public school presidents earned about 3.1 times as much as their schools' professors.