Gaber receives $90,000 bonus for her first year

On Sept.13, the University of Toledo Board of Trustees approved a $90,000 bonus for president Sharon Gaber, as well as a 2 percent raise.

This decision was made during Gaber’s initial review of her first year as president, according to an article by UT News. The article continued that the Board Chair Sharon Speyer said the president has made a lot of progress on achieving the University’s strategic goals, and that they look forward to continued success.

Gaber’s base salary is $450,000, so the bonus was for 20% of her salary, the maximum amount she could have received according to Meghan Cunningham, from university communications.

According to UT News, president Gaber did ask that the 2 percent raise be postponed until January, in line with her new leadership team, when the fiscal year 2017 budget was created in June.

“On behalf of all of us, I want to thank you. This is very well-deserved,” Speyer said told the president at the board of trustees meeting.

There has been some backlash to this decision, however. Many news outlets and members of the Toledo community cited the irony of the timing of the President’s bonus and raise due to its correlation with the US News and World Report college rankings. UT had fallen within the last year; in fact, UT now stands at an unpublished rank.

Local newspaper the Toledo Blade even wrote an editorial titled “Tone deaf, shameless or clueless ?” about the ranking of the school where they used the analogy “If the UT football team had its worst season in 15 years — losing more games than in 15 years — would the coach get a raise and a bonus?”

However, the University of Toledo board of trustees cited the president’s numerous accomplishments her first year as the reason for their decision.

In fact, this decision was made soon after the announcement on Sept. 6, that enrollment at UT had gone up for the first time in six years. One reason for this increase was Gaber’s execution of her five strategic goals for her first year, which outlined a plan to help increase enrollment and retention rates.

This increase added 267 more new students to campus going from 20,381 enrolled last fall to 20,648 this semester, according to the official 15-day census numbers.

Gaber has also accomplished a variety of other things during her first year. According to her 2012-16 annual report, Gaber has spent her first year traveling and meeting alumni and donors, and the numbers prove it’s working. Gaber has increased fundraising numbers to $16,750,861. This is an increase of about $400,000 since 2015.

“What that means is that if we don’t work really, really, hard every year to make sure that people recognize that this is a pretty darn good place, that you get a good education, you know really all of these things, then you know we are going to be back in that situation,” Gaber said in a previous interview. “So it is an ongoing situation that we have to make sure we are doing.”