Northeastern paid Richard M. Freeland $239,000 in 2011; only 23 people at the school made more, tax documents show. Freeland no longer works at Northeastern though; he stepped down from the university’s presidency in 2006, but managed to take $2.3 million with him in an exit package, the Boston Globe reported at the time. If and when President Joseph E. Aoun leaves his post, he will have $2 million paid out to him in accordance with his 2011 contract with the university.
The practice of offering lucrative retirement benefits to administrators is not unique to Northeastern. As the debate grows nationally over the cost of college tuition and increasing pay for university’s leadership, retirement pay has come under increasing scrutiny.
The issue recently exploded locally after a Boston Globe expose on the trappings of the office at Brandeis University. Jehuda Reinharz, the former longtime president of the Waltham school, was paid $4.9 million earlier this month in lump-sum retirement compensation. He also received over $800,000 for sabbatical time he never took while in office. This is all not to mention the $600,000 he earned as a part-time advisor under the title of “president emeritus” in 2011.
As Mel Brooks would say, “It’s good to be the ex-president.”
Clearly Aoun’s package does not come close to being as superfluous as Reinharz’s. In fact, Aoun’s package debatably is not excessive at all. The Board of Trustees justified the president’s retirement package as a necessary “to ensure the continued service of President Joseph Aoun,” through whose leadership Chairman Henry Nasella wrote “Northeastern has achieved levels of excellence that were unimaginable when he was appointed in 2006.”
Although it is easy to write off a well polished statement like Nasella’s, Aoun has presided over an immense rise in national and international prominence for the school, as well as an impressive jump in research funding and fundraising. This is not necessarily to say that Aoun deserves all the money he is making, but if he were not making it at Northeastern, he likely would be elsewhere.
It should of course be acknowledged that the correlation of Aoun’s tenure to the school’s recent success does not necessarily imply he is solely responsible. But students satisfied with the progress that has been made over the past eight years must also realize this likely could not come without sound leadership.
Lamenting executive pay is a popular activity at Northeastern, so this is just another variation on an old refrain. It might be worth the money in the end – a Northeastern degree is certainly more valuable than it was in 2006 – or it might just be more pork in the tuition bill. Still, students should take solace in the fact that Northeastern is able to secure a high-quality president for anything less than the total $5-plus million paid out to Brandeis’s Reinhartz.
