Iowa Board of Regents evaluating presidential performance in closed session

IOWA CITY — The Board of Regents, meeting Tuesday at the University of Iowa, evaluated behind closed doors the performance of its three university presidents and executive director over the last year — a process that on many occasions has led to higher pay and more deferred compensation.

Last summer, for example, after UI President Barbara Wilson’s first year on the job, the board awarded both her and Iowa State University President Wendy Wintersteen an 8.3 percent pay raise — bringing both their annual salaries from $600,000 to $650,000.

Adding to the deferred compensation deal the board gave Wilson when she began as UI president in July 2021 — paying out $2 million in 2026 as long as she remained the university’s president — the board last summer announced additional deferred compensation, tacking on another $200,000 in 2026.

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On top of Wintersteen’s pay raise last summer, she, too, received a new deferred compensation plan paying $80,000 in June 2024. This summer, she will receive a $733,333 payout due under previous deferred compensation agreements.

Wintersteen, who started as ISU’s first female president in November 2017, received her first deferred compensation payout of $475,000 in 2020.

Although Wilson and Wintersteen both received pay raises after last summer’s performance evaluations, University of Northern Iowa President Mark Nook’s salary remained static at $357,110. The board last year, however, did enact a new two-year deferred compensation deal paying him $100,000 in 2024.

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That came on top of Nook’s existing deferred compensation agreement paying $100,000 annually through 2025 — although he forfeited half that in both 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-19 budget concerns, lowering his total payout to $625,000.

The board also is evaluating the performance of its executive director, Mark Braun, whose contract runs through 2024 and spells out a complex salary matrix due to a state law capping his position’s pay at $154,300. The state employee database shows Braun earned $390,336 in the 2022 budget year — the most he’s made since taking over the director role in November 2017.

All the executives being evaluated requested the regents do their performance reviews behind closed doors — although the board might during open session Wednesday “consider personnel action.”

“It may take no action at all, or it may defer action to a later date,” according to the board agenda.

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Enrollment, funding

Iowa’s public universities are among the many campuses nationally navigating an altered higher education landscape — even as most have shifted back to typical in-person instruction preferred by most traditional students.

After an enrollment slide that began in 2018 and worsened during the pandemic for Iowa’s public universities — dropping their combined student count about 14 percent from nearly 80,000 in fall 2017 to under 69,000 fall 2022 — only the UI reported a slight uptick at the start of the academic year. Those gains in the spring semester that just ended slipped away, with modest attrition from the fall — which is common. The UI reported 28,162 students this spring, down slightly from 28,194 in spring 2022.

Enrollment is meaningful, as tuition accounts for such a larger portion of the universities’ general education budgets: 63 percent for the UI, 71 percent for ISU and 40 percent for UNI. Despite stagnant enrollment, both the UI and ISU — thanks to rate hikes — saw tuition revenue increase in the current budget year to the tune of more than $20 million. But UNI reported a loss of nearly $3 million in tuition revenue this year.

Although the universities asked lawmakers to help offset their reliance on tuition with an increase of $32 million in general fund appropriations for the upcoming budget year, the Legislature approved a fraction of that — $7.1 million to be split among the three.

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com