President Tilghman's total financial compensation for the 2003-04 fiscal year was $564,619, roughly $30,000 greater than the year before but lower than the salaries of all but two Ivy League presidents, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported this week.
Tilghman's salary is performance-based, said Stephen Oxman '67, chair of the executive committee of the University Board of Trustees and chair of the compensation committee.
"The compensation committee reviews [the president's] performance and her salary annually, and among other things, looks at salaries of people in comparable positions," he said. "Beyond that, we don't really comment publicly."
"Performance has a lot of different dimensions, and we try to look at all of them as fairly as possible," Oxman added.
Vice President and Secretary Robert Durkee '69 said the administration doesn't comment on salaries, but noted the compensation often reflects the duration of a president's term.
The $30,000 increase amounts to a 5.9 percent raise, less than Tilghman's 9.5 percent raise a year earlier, but still greater than the two percent average raise for presidents of research universities nationwide. Her total compensation — including base salary, benefits and expense accounts — was greater than the nationwide average of $468,704.
In the Ivy League, Tilghman's total compensation was only higher than that of Dartmouth's James Wright and Harvard's Larry Summers.
A comparison of base salary also puts Tilghman third from the bottom, ahead of Wright and Brown's Ruth Simmons.
The University of Pennsylvania's former president, Judith Rodin, and Cornell's former president, Jeffrey Lehman, had the highest base salaries among Ivy League presidents, in part because they were in the final year of their terms. Each earned just over $630,000.
Rodin's total compensation of $934,922 was by far the highest among Ivy League presidents and fifth among private research university presidents nationwide, according to the Chronicle.
The salaries are based on the most recent tax filings.
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