South O.C. College District Salaries Are State’s Highest

When Wendy Phillips graduated from California Western School of Law in San Diego almost a decade ago, she began looking into how much money she would earn as a new attorney and came to a quick conclusion:

She could do much better teaching, but only if she landed a job with the South Orange County Community College District, which has the highest salaries of all 71 community college districts in California.

“Our salaries are precisely the reason I didn’t go into law,” said Phillips, who has been admitted into the practice of law by the State Bar of California. But instead, she chose to teach anthropology at Irvine Valley College, which--along with Saddleback College--is run by the district.

“It’s just too lucrative,” Phillips said.

According to figures published in June by the Sacramento-based Community College Assn., the South Orange County district is truly No. 1. As one professor put it, “We’re the Nebraska Cornhuskers of community college salaries.”

Some say the high salaries are a way to attract the very best in the country to Orange County. Board member John S. Williams said such compensation is needed because of the high cost of living in Southern California. And besides, he said, the board is merely following the wishes of those who established the district nearly 30 years ago and who realized high salaries were imperative.

“I don’t see how anyone in our district can complain about salaries,” Williams said. “That began in the Gov. [Ronald] Reagan era, back around the time when the college was founded, in 1968. We wanted one of the top-paying faculties in the state, and we’ve managed to sustain that. We wanted to steal good faculty away from other districts, and by golly, we have. So it seems a little odd to me that people would be criticizing us for it.”

Kate Clark, a professor of English at Irvine Valley College, lists her salary at more than $70,000 a year, which she finds “embarrassing.” More and more, Clark said, district salaries are also a story of have-nots helping to sustain the haves.

“It’s not a healthy circumstance when you have people on the upper end making disproportionately high salaries, compared to those on the lower end, who in my view are increasingly underpaid,” she said.

For those on the high end, Phillips said, district salaries are comparable even to those at UC Irvine, which as part of the elite UC system pays the best of any Orange County college.

In Phillips’ view, professors in “the top one-quarter” of the Saddleback and Irvine Valley faculties make more than their counterparts at UCI, with many coming close to or exceeding $100,000 a year.

Descriptions vary on how many hours senior faculty would have to teach to make $100,000 a year, with Phillips saying “a large amount of overload”--the district term for overtime pay--would be needed to reach such a level.

But Bill Hewitt, director of support services at Irvine Valley, said some professors in the $100,000 range are required to be on campus only 15 to 21 hours a week.

In terms of salaries as a whole, Hewitt said the highest go to professors with 30 or more years experience, constituting, in his opinion, about a quarter of the faculty or even less.

Even so, the figures are remarkable.

During the 1996-97 school year, the average maximum salary paid to “non-PhD” professors in the South Orange County district was a generous $80,282 a year, according to the Community College Assn. The San Joaquin Community College District finished a distant second in the same category, at $67,561 a year.

By comparison, teachers in the Los Angeles Community College District in that category were paid $51,580 a year, finishing with a dismal ranking of 66th in the state.

At UCI, where salaries are calculated on a nine-month basis to conform with the academic year, the average annual pay scale breaks down this way: full professors, $84,177; associate professors, $59,547; and assistant professors, $49,547.

At Cal State Fullerton, the average annual pay scale for the nine-month term has assistant professors on the lowest end making $37,956 a year and full professors on the highest end making $82,176 a year.

But UCI and Cal State Fullerton are four-year colleges, where it stands to reason that professors would earn more money than they do at two-year community colleges, which many see as a remedial bridge between high school and the upper-class college experience.

The South Orange County district defies such assumptions in more ways than one. While it might seem to the outside observer that a No. 1 salary ranking suggests a kind of fiscal Nirvana among academia at Irvine Valley and Saddleback, Phillips said that just the opposite is true.

During her experience on Irvine Valley’s academic senate during the 1993-94 school year, Phillips learned that 89% of the $72 million coming to the district from Orange County taxpayers was going to faculty salaries.

“When any business gets 89% of its budget tied up in ‘fixed costs,’ meaning salaries and benefits, then eventually there’s going to be a problem,” she said. “Back then, we all kept saying: ‘We’ve got to get control of this.’ ”

But instead, the figure has since escalated to more than 90%, said Phillips, who contends, along with hundreds of other disgruntled faculty members and students, that money is at the root of numerous controversies now enveloping the district.

In recent weeks, the district made national news when its seven-member board of trustees approved and then--after an outcry--rescinded a controversial course on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Board President Steven J. Frogue cast the tie-breaking vote to approve the course, for which the board had allocated $5,000 to fly in four guest speakers, one of whom believes the Holocaust is exaggerated and that agents of the Israeli government killed Kennedy.

Frogue still plans to teach the course on a private basis, off campus.

On Thursday, the student governments of Irvine Valley and Saddleback called for Frogue’s resignation. Now faculty and community members say they plan to present Frogue at a board meeting tonight with papers officially informing him he is the target of a recall campaign.

Other disputes involved the interim, and then permanent, appointment of chemistry professor RaghuP. Mathuras president of Irvine Valley, and the demotion of 10 department chairs at the Irvine campus. The board voted on these matters in closed session, provoking a lawsuit from two Irvine Valley professors and prompting a Superior Court judge to censure the board for not complying with the Brown Act, which governs public meetings in California.

So how does this relate to money?

Phillips said the board is enthusiastically supported by the district’s faculty labor union, which bankrolled the past campaigns of the current board majority--Frogue, Williams, TeddiLorch and Dorothy Fortune.

In return, the board has consistently voted pay raises that account for the district’s No. 1 ranking.

“Our union is incredibly strong,” said Phillips, who makes $65,000 a year, “and they’ve consistently negotiated one of the best salary and benefit packages in the state. But it’s come through buying board members, and now they’re in each other’s pockets.”

Irvine Valley philosophy professor Roy Bauer, who makes about $50,000 a year, said the union and the board share “a quid pro quo” relationship.

“The union gives them the money to get reelected and they vote pay raises in return,” Bauer said. “In recent years, the board has cut things to the bone and now talks of more cuts to come, but have they touched faculty salaries? Of course not, and they won’t.”

While those in the top quarter are making $80,000 to $100,000 a year, those on the lower end are being paid much less, Bauer said, resulting in what he called an average salary districtwide that falls somewhere between $60,000 and $65,000 a year.

Figures released late Friday by the district support Bauer’s claim. Taking all salaries as a whole, the average for the 1996-97 school year was $60,969 at Irvine Valley and $69,097 at Saddleback. But average salaries for “academic administrators” who also teach were considerably higher: $91,966 at Irvine Valley and $91,664 at Saddleback.

High salaries among the top one-quarter of the faculty have necessitated the hiring of hundreds of part-timers, with that group now making up about half the district payroll, according to Bauer and various faculty senate members on both campuses.

“It’s the union’s strategy of rewarding those on the high end that’s led to the wave of part-timers,” Phillips said.

Union officials did not return repeated phone calls, but board member Williams counters the group’s critics by saying that the board has saved the college “huge amounts of money” by running--and voting--on a platform of fiscal conservatism.

By taking four professors from Saddleback and making them “deans” in order to replace the 10 recently deposed chairs at Irvine Valley, Williams said the board saved the district almost $1 million.

“By doing that, we put 10 chairs back in the classroom and offered 200 more sections districtwide, serving 4,000 more students,” Williams said. “No one lost a job. No one got laid off. No one suffered financially.”

Williams said the board “puts its money where its mouth is.”

But Bauer said Williams and his colleagues are guilty of “voodoo math. . . . That $1-million figure is utterly false, grotesquely exaggerated.”

Hewitt at Irvine Valley called Williams’ figures “highly misleading,” noting that he had recently seen a report by the vice chancellor of school services for the district, which placed the actual net savings of deposing the chairs at $222,000.

“A $1-million savings is simply not true,” Hewitt said.

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Pay Scales

Salary levels for instructors at Saddleback College, not requiring a doctoral degree, compare well with professors at local universities that do require a PhD or progress toward one:

*--*

Full Associate Assistant UC Irvine $84,177 $59,547 $49,547 Chapman 67,700 57,800 46,600 Cal State Fullerton 82,176 78,408 71,376 Saddleback* 80,282 77,874 67,473

*--*

* For levels corresponding to full, associate and assistant at other schools

Source: Individual schools; Researched by MICHAEL GRANBERRY / Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times