UC Pay Levels Under Scrutiny : Education: Study finds top executives’ salaries below those at comparable schools. But critics note that 91 are making more than $100,000 in a time of severe cutbacks elsewhere in the system.

While deep budget cuts have sent student tuition soaring and hundreds of faculty members packing, the University of California’s top administrators continue to earn about what they did before the fiscal crisis hit--with 91 executives taking home in excess of $100,000 a year, a university report shows.

But the executive salaries still lag behind those at Harvard, Yale and other prestigious schools, according to a second study to be discussed at today’s UC Board of Regents meeting in San Francisco. The study says chancellors at the nine UC campuses are paid 14% less than their peers at comparable public and private institutions.

The reports have added fuel to a sometimes incendiary debate over whether UC executives are overpaid. UC regents are still smarting from the protest ignited last year when it was disclosed that they had secretly approved a $737,000 severance package for former UC President David Pierpont Gardner, even as they were raising student fees.

Critics said the latest reports show that those on the highest rungs of the UC ladder continue to prosper while they carry out deep program cuts. Andrew Shaw, executive director of the UC Students Assn., said students will be outraged that administrative salaries have stayed the same while fees have doubled since 1991--from $1,820 to $3,727.

And state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) said the level of UC salaries, combined with recent talk of boosting pay for Cal State presidents, “seems more and more to me to be going the way of the Roman Empire in California.”

“I see budgets being slashed and doors being closed on students . . . and the more privileged sectors helping themselves to more and more of the reward,” said Hayden, who added that many UC administrators make more than the $114,000 earned by Gov. Pete Wilson.

“They model themselves after Harvard, Stanford, IBM and GM,” said Hayden. “And the irony is they’re not even buying competence with these inflated salaries. We’ve seen a whole series of embarrassing stumbles.”

University officials, however, say they indeed have been pinched by the budget crunch. Their pay has been temporarily reduced by an average of 2.6%, yet they are working at least 60-hour weeks trying to keep a financially besieged institution together, said Celeste Rose, assistant vice president for university relations.

“We are the people who have to lay off good employees,” said Rose, who makes a base salary of $109,800 a year. “ . . . We’re being asked simultaneously to deal with the day-to-day responsibilities of running the place, to cut back, to do more, to be visionary about the future. None of us have trod this ground before.”

Since 1991, UC has been forced to cut $342 million from a budget that is now $1.74 billion a year. Overall, 5,600 professor or staff positions have been trimmed--about 4.3% of the UC work force--and a few programs have been closed on campuses.

The new salary survey shows that 58 UC executives in central administration or at the nine campuses make $125,000 or more. The highest paid is President Jack Peltason, at $280,000. Another 33 administrators get between $100,000 and $125,000. The figures in the report do not factor in the temporary pay cut, which expires in June.

A comparison with a previous salary list issued by UC in late 1990 shows that the majority of the administrative paychecks have stayed the same or increased during the fiscal hold-down. Some new hires had slightly lower salaries than their predecessors, however.

A university spokesman said there have been no raises, and what appear to be increases are actually new salary figures showing deferred compensation, previously undisclosed, for many of the employees. The issue of deferred compensation was at the heart of the Gardner scandal. In December, the regents discontinued the practice and ordered the annual surveys showing how much administrators make.

Meanwhile, the regents are also scheduled to receive an annual report showing how UC’s executive pay compares with that of similar universities. The study, conducted by the Towers Perrin consulting group, says that chancellor salaries averaged $188,767 last year--14.3% less than their counterparts at Harvard, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Yale, the University of Michigan and 20 other prestigious public and private universities.

Chancellors whose annual pay was found to be lagging the most were Raymond Orbach at Riverside and Karl Pister at Santa Cruz, both of whose $165,000 salaries would have to be increased 31% to bring them in line with the other schools. The chancellor who would need the least is Charles E. Young at UCLA, whose $204,900 salary was only 5% behind that of his counterparts.

UC officials say they will not ask for raises for the chancellors. Last week, Cal State’s Board of Trustees adopted a resolution aimed at increasing the pay for their presidents after a similar market survey showed that their top campus administrators were being paid nearly 21% less than their counterparts at 16 universities.