Chancellor Phyllis Wise of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has had a rough year.
Most notably she dealt with the headache of a too-hot-to-handle professor, Steven Salaita, whom the school functionally hired and then dropped when his virulent anti-Israel tweets went viral.
Now she’s the victim of a questionable clawback – her own $400,000 resignation bonus.
The UI board revoked the bonus in the wake of the school’s admission that some officials – possibly including Wise – hid their email discussions on sensitive matters like l’affaire Salaita from public records requests. Wise had tendered her resignation the day before, yet the email scandal led figures including the governor to pressure the board to rescind it.
Wise is now going through “formal dismissal proceedings” rather than a clean exit, though she’s still getting the equivalent of a golden parachute, The Daily Illini reports:
[President Timothy] Killeen reassigned Wise as an adviser to biomedical affairs, where she will continue to earn her salary of $549,068. …
[Board Chair Edward] McMillan wrote a letter to Wise stating the board will initiate formal dismissal proceedings against her and she will receive a statement detailing reasons for her proposed dismissal as chancellor.
Wise will have the option to appear in front of the board to comment on and defend the decisions she made. However, in accordance with the University statutes, the board will not be “bound by formal or technical rules of evidence, and its decision shall be final.”
The president isn’t thrilled that Wise’s contract included a retention bonus that then led to the $400,000 exit clause, saying he’d rather give performance bonuses to administrators.
The board’s vote, which looks politically driven, may come back to haunt it, according to contract negotiation lawyer Raymond Cotton. Speaking to Inside Higher Ed, he said future candidates may be wary of trusting UI (as if they aren’t already skeptical):
“As soon as Dr. Wise is gone, the board is going to be looking for a new president,” Cotton said. “What my clients tell me is that one of the key decision points is to look at how the board treated the prior president.”
Further, Cotton said that $400,000 may seem like a lot of money, but that the university was going to get “closure” for paying that sum. Instead, he said, the university may face other costs. “When presidents are fired for cause, they have nothing left to lose, so these cases end up in litigation, and that’s expensive, time-consuming and generally ends up being injurious to the reputation of the university.”
Read the Daily and Inside Higher Ed stories.
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IMAGE: Steven Salaita/Facebook
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