UC Plans 21% Raises for Medical Center Chiefs : Education: Proposed increase over two years comes as regents seek to boost student fees. Spokesman says higher salaries are needed to keep five teaching hospitals competitive.

While they consider another round of student fee increases, UC officials are also advancing plans to give raises of 21% over the next two years to some of the system’s highest-paid executives at the five campus teaching hospitals, documents released Friday show.

Now, the directors of medical centers at UCLA, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC San Diego and UC San Francisco earn $150,650 to more than $200,000 a year, salaries that put them in the elite ranks of university administrators. The highest paid is UCLA’s director, Dr. Raymond G. Schultze, whose base salary is $212,000--minus 3.5% for a temporary salary reduction prompted by budget cuts.

But UC officials say these amounts--along with salaries paid to the hospitals’ other top executives--still lag behind executive pay at comparable teaching hospitals around the country. And in what is becoming a familiar refrain among California college officials, they said the increases are necessary to attract and retain qualified administrators.

“You’re looking at a competitive marketplace and you’re looking at individuals who are in particular demand,” UC spokesman Mike Alva said. However, he acknowledged that no hospital director has left in recent memory.

Alva declined to say which hospital executives are up for the raises. The names and amounts will be revealed after the regents vote on the matter in closed sessions during their meeting in San Francisco next week--at which they will also consider imposing a $650 student fee increase.

Word of the pay raises took student leaders and at least one university critic, Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), by surprise. They criticized university officials for keeping the request for raises under wraps until Friday, when university hospital officials began contacting legislative offices to ask for support.

Andrew Shaw, executive director for the UC Students Assn., said it was completely inane for the university to be considering the raises while it cites budget problems in considering a student fee increase that will bring the average tuition to $4,377 next year, more than double what the system charged in 1989.

Shaw compared the university’s handling of the raise request to last year’s decision by regents in closed session to give a $737,000 severance package to former UC President David P. Gardner even as they were publicly raising student fees.

Hayden added: “I’m fighting hard not to come to a certain fatalism about UC’s pattern of behavior. They just don’t seem to get the message at all. . . . The pattern of behavior resembles that of an addict rather than an academic institution.”

Alva and other university officials said the potential raises should not be a shock because the regents voted in late 1992 to approve a higher salary schedule for all hospital executives. The decision came after a consultant told board members that UC medical center administrators are paid an average of 22% lower than their counterparts at 218 comparable public and private institutions.

Any extra money for the raises will come from patient fees and not from the state’s general fund or student fees, they said.