E. Gordon Gee, the highly paid chancellor credited with raising Vanderbilt University’s fortunes and profile, will face much tougher oversight from the institution’s governing board. The Board of Trust recently agreed to more closely monitor how much he spends on entertainment, travel, and the maintenance of the university-owned mansion where he lives, and to keep abreast of the details of his compensation package.
An article published on Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal revealed details about Mr. Gee’s spending of university money during his six-year tenure at Vanderbilt. The article also outlined the Board of Trust’s recent efforts to make one of academe’s highest-paid leaders more accountable to the board. Mr. Gee’s pay and benefits for the 2004-5 fiscal year totaled $1.17-million.
The newspaper noted that Vanderbilt had paid more than $6-million to renovate the chancellor’s residence, where the annual tab for parties and a personal chef tops $700,000. According to the article, much of that spending was never approved by the full board. After Vanderbilt’s general counsel reviewed Mr. Gee’s spending to ferret out personal expenses, Mr. Gee agreed to pay about one-third of the chef’s $50,000 salary.
In addition, the Journal said, the board chairman formally reprimanded Mr. Gee’s wife, Constance, who is an associate professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt, for having marijuana on university property. When several trustees met with Mr. Gee to ask about the marijuana allegation last year, he said his wife smoked it to relieve an inner-ear ailment, the Journal reported. The newspaper said it based its account on information from a person “familiar with the situation,” and the Gees did not comment on the incident. The university, as part of a lengthy response to the article posted on its Web site, said that it does not comment on “personnel and personal matters involving faculty and staff.”
Still, the article recognizes that Mr. Gee, 62, has raised the university’s profile and increased its coffers, as board members are quick to point out. Vanderbilt recently completed a $1.25-billion fund-raising drive two years ahead of schedule. And its endowment has grown to $3-billion since 2000 -- an increase of about $1-billion. On the academic side, the university said that, during Mr. Gee’s tenure, Vanderbilt has seen applications and its “yield,” the percentage of accepted students who enroll, increase dramatically, and it has successfully recruited top faculty from all over the world. More than $700-million worth of facilities have been completed or are underway, and the institution has started a $100-million fund that supports research centers in various disciplines.
Martha Ingram, chair of the Board of Trust, told the Journal, “I have never had qualms about whether Gordon should stay on as chancellor.”
The university, in its news release, said the Journal article “presented an incomplete picture” of Vanderbilt. Michael J. Schoenfeld, the university’s vice chancellor for public affairs, said in a telephone interview that Vanderbilt is “a university that is doing extremely well by every measure -- in academics, financially, and student reputation.” And, he said, the Journal article shows that it “is also addressing governance issues that every institution in this country is dealing with right now.”
Attention like that being paid to Mr. Gee’s compensation and expenditures is more common than ever before in higher education. Recent audits have uncovered lavish spending by top executives at institutions that include American University, Texas Southern University, and the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Such incidents are expected to draw a new level of Congressional scrutiny for universities, as lawmakers prepare to introduce legislation to rein in excessive pay for leaders of all nonprofit organizations.
Some of the issues that were going to be raised in the article, which people on campus knew was in progress, also came up at Vanderbilt’s fall faculty assembly last month, and Mr. Gee spoke frankly about them while taking questions after a speech to the gathering.
“University presidents like me have huge targets on them at this moment,” he said, according to an audio file on the university’s Web site. “The point is we have become an institution that has become highly recognized for its innovation, for its creativity, for its aggressiveness -- and we’re going to be the poster child on this.”
About his compensation, which last year landed him the No. 3 spot in The Chronicle’s annual survey of presidential pay, Mr. Gee said, “I’m grateful. For the first time in 26 years I’m paid more than my football coach,” a remark that drew a round of applause.
Mr. Gee has led five universities during those 26 years. Four of them either built a home for him or extensively renovated an existing one, according to the Journal article. A former finance chief at Brown University, which Mr. Gee left in 2000 to come to Vanderbilt, told the newspaper that the Rhode Island institution had spent $3-million to renovate the president’s house. And the $6-million total that Vanderbilt spent on renovations to Braeburn, the nearly 100-year-old house where its chancellor resides, was nearly three times the original estimate, the article said.
Mr. Gee told the newspaper that Braeburn was the site of “several hundred events” a year and that much of the money the institution has received was raised there. However, he acknowledged that he should have stayed abreast of the renovation’s final cost and notified the board.
After taking a closer look at Mr. Gee’s personal expenses, the board formed a committee to look at governance as a whole at Vanderbilt, which led to a report that said trustees should be more actively involved in plans for capital spending, and management compensation, among other areas, the Journal said. The report also resulted in the creation of a special panel that would monitor Mr. Gee’s spending and update the full board every year.
The Journal reported that the university’s budget and other spending was never approved by the full board between 2000 and 2005. Mr. Schoenfeld, in response, said the executive committee of the board, which meets much more frequently than the full 45-member board, is charged with approving such items, “and the decisions and deliberations of the executive committee carry the full weight of the board.”
Meanwhile, according to the Journal, Mr. Gee’s new employment agreement, signed in August, requires the chancellor to reduce his memberships on public-company boards from five to three, and to get prior approval for budgets in categories that include entertainment and the upkeep of Braeburn.
Background articles from The Chronicle:
