President Gutmann's salary has been steadily increasing since she became the University’s president. | Courtesy of Stuart Watson/Creative Commons
Penn President Amy Gutmann made over three times more than six of the other Ivy League presidents last year.
Gutmann’s salary, which jumped 21 percent from last year to a total of $3,426,106, is the second highest of the presidents in the Ivy League. Only Columbia president Lee C. Bollinger made more than Gutmann in the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2014, with a total of $4,641,420, according to the most recently filed tax data.
The third highest-paid president was Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust, whose salary was reported as $1,112,149. The presidents of Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton, Cornell and Brown each made less than a million dollars, and Dartmouth president Philip Hanlon’s salary of $695,568 was the lowest of the group.
Bollinger, who was also the highest-paid Ivy League president in the previous fiscal year, received a 99 percent increase in his compensation, widening the gap between his and Gutmann’s salary by nearly a million dollars. But the gap between Gutmann’s salary and the next lowest — last year, Yale’s Richard Levin, this year, Harvard’s Faust — is five times larger this fiscal year than the last one.
The salaries of Penn’s president and other administrators are determined by the Board of Trustees, with the aid of a third-party consultant. Board of Trustees Chair David Cohen explained that comparative data from peer institutions — like the salaries of other Ivy League presidents — is considered in determining compensation.
“The Compensation Committee uses a variety of data in setting compensation, including market data on salaries paid at peer institutions, particularly Ivy League and other prestigious private teaching and research universities of comparable academic stature, complexity and size,” Cohen said in an email.
Gutmann’s salary was also determined through evaluation of her performance — Cohen described the process as “an extensive annual process to set performance goals and then a detailed review of the President’s performance judged against those goals.”
Rather than promising administrators guaranteed salaries, the Board of Trustees correlates pay with performance in order to incentivize optimum achievement.
Cohen added that the large increase in Gutmann’s salary this year can be attributed to her success in the Making History campaign, in which Penn raised $4.3 billion, exceeding its donation goal of $3.5 billion.
“We have people here who are smart and competitive; people who want to succeed and are willing to be judged by the outcome of their work,” Cohen said. “That is a formula that breeds success.”
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