Editor’s Note: After this article’s publication, Board of Trustees member Charlie Scott sent a letter to the editor to The Gettysburgian, which is published here. Before that, the Communications & Marketing Office expressed disagreement with this article’s framing. In particular, issue was taken with this article’s interpretation of the salary information reported in the College’s public Form 990 tax filing. The Communications office said it “expected” a correction to be run alongside this article’s online publication. The Gettysburgian publishes corrections to address factual inaccuracies, not differing opinions regarding an article’s framing. The Gettysburgian stands by its reporting and urges readers to follow the hyperlinked sources contained throughout the article as well as Scott’s letter to the editor.
By Vincent DiFonzo, Editor-in-Chief, and Ella Prieto, Managing Editor
Recently released Gettysburg College tax filings, which shows the salaries of the College’s top administrators, revealed that President Bob Iuliano’s total compensation including benefits rose to $731,660 last year.
The Form 990 tax filing, required to be released as public record by law due to the College’s nonprofit status, was published by ProPublica and is reviewed annually by the Gettysburgian. It shows that Iuliano’s base salary increased from $511,504 in the 2021-22 fiscal year compared to $621,127 in the 2022-23 fiscal year — an increase of $109,623. The most recent Form 990 filing shows the College’s finances and executive salaries between June 1, 2022 and May 31, 2023.
The president’s salary is set by the College’s Board of Trustees and only disclosed through the annual Form 990 filing.
In her last full fiscal year at the College, former president Janet Morgan Riggs made a $471,608 base salary according to that year’s Form 990. With benefits, this came to a total of $529,162. This means the president’s total compensation has increased by 38.27% since Riggs’ last full fiscal year, June 2018 to May 2019. Iuliano began at the College on July 1, 2019.
Amid the increase, the College experienced several budget cuts to programs and departments across campus. The administration terminated The Gettysburg Review after 25 years at the school while the Civil War Institute Fellows program was stripped of its stipend to pay students and the Provost’s Office limited funding for the language department’s teaching assistants. Additionally, a College report last year found that faculty salaries fall below other averages at schools and that their salaries have lost significant purchasing power due to inflation.
The 2023 Faculty Salary Report, prepared by Director of Institutional Analysis Suhua Dong and presented to faculty in November, showed that the College pays professors an average of $12,734 less than its “like-schools,” schools of a similar size and ranking identified as comparable to Gettysburg College.
Gettysburg’s like-schools were identified as Connecticut College, Denison University, Dickinson College, Franklin and Marshall College, Lawrence University and Union College.
Associate professors were found to be paid an average of $5,017 less than their counterparts at like-institutions. Assistant professors are paid $1,977 less. The five-year average annual faculty salary increase for Gettysburg was 1.7%, compared to the 2.82% average at like-schools. The report also found that “faculty retirement benefits fall below peers” and that “healthcare costs have risen for the College and will continue to rise.” This report predates a general 2% raise given to faculty in the summer of 2024.
Iuliano’s salary is higher than that of the presidents at the like-schools Dickinson, Lawrence, Union and Connecticut, but lower than that of Franklin and Marshall and Denison, according to the most recent ProPublica data.
The Gettysburgian reached out to the College for comment on the president’s pay increase compared to that of faculty. Charlie Scott ’77, Emeriti Board of Trustees member and member of the search committee that hired Iuliano, spoke with the Gettysburgian and explained that Iuliano’s salary is well-aligned with College norms and has not significantly fluctuated since Iuliano’s hiring in 2019.
“I’m glad you wanted to talk about [the raise], because on its face, it looks pretty substantial, and certainly not in line with what the rest of the organization has had to experience,” said Scott. He explained that Iuliano initially started on a three-year contract at a $550,000 base salary with an additional $50,000 set aside each year in a deferred account that he would receive upon completion of the contract. After this, Iuliano signed a new five-contract at a $600,000 base salary with raises given in-line with other faculty and staff raises.
Scott explained that the deferred account is “one of the reasons that will make the pay fluctuate the way it looks like it has. But since then, since he started that second contract, he has received a salary increase percentage as everyone else.”
Scott said, “It’s had ups and downs that have made certain years look really strong and other years look really weak.”
A faculty member contacted the Gettysburgian to discuss Iuliano’s salary increase and faculty morale. The Gettysburgian agreed to publish their comments anonymously to protect their identity.
“The President’s 2023 salary increase sounds alarm bells about priorities, transparency and honesty,” the faculty member said. “[Iuliano] stood in front of the faculty last fall and told us he had foregone raises. It’s in the approved minutes. The figures for that year were not public yet, but now that they are, it seems that Bob was at that very moment enjoying a $110,000 raise over the previous year.”
The Gettysburgian obtained the official faculty meeting minutes report from Nov. 16, 2023 in which Iuliano was questioned by a faculty member about salary increases based on public data, in which states the following: “President Iuliano disputed those figures and said he has foregone pay raises and gave back 15% of his compensation during the pandemic.”
Scott confirmed to the Gettysburgian that Iuliano did take a voluntary $84,500 pay cut during the pandemic.
The faculty member added, “That one-year raise alone exceeds the annual average salary for Gettysburg’s full professors, our most senior faculty rank.” While Iuliano’s raise added $109,623 to his base salary, the average full professor salary was reported at $107,366. They also highlighted the closure of The Gettysburg Review and staffing issues as examples of cuts made due to financial constraints.
“In the same year the college shuttered its nationally recognized journal and fired its staff, lost respected faculty to other schools without replacing them, asked staff to take on the jobs of their former coworkers and recruited our smallest incoming class in decades,” they said. “Morale is the lowest I’ve seen in my time here.”
On faculty salaries, Chief Communications and Marketing Officer Jamie Yates pointed to previous investments in faculty raises that the College has undertaken, stating, “Over the summer, Provost Bookwala announced that by using some of the savings from the curricular efficiencies put into place last academic year, we were able to distribute $257,000 toward equity adjustments for faculty salaries. You might also be interested to know that the College invested another $225,000 toward equity adjustments in administrator salaries in the last academic year, and in the fall of 2021 and the spring of 2022, the College provided a little over $1.5 million to our support staff colleagues to address compression and ensure fair compensation.”
Iuliano has recently addressed ongoing financial constraints and lowered enrollment. At the first faculty meeting, held on Aug. 29, he recognized that there is lower enrollment seen with the class of 2028 and that there is less enrollment to colleges and universities nationwide.
“Ten or so years ago, there were far more students seeking a liberal arts education than there were spots. Today, it is precisely the opposite. Our students are applying to a dozen or so schools; they have choices,” he said.
Iuliano highlighted that the College received record applications, more than 8,300, but because less accepted students chose to enroll, he said “the underlying financial challenges actually intensified.”
510 students joined the College in the class of 2028, compared to the class of 2027’s 610 and the class of 2026’s 649.
Another faculty member who chose to remain anonymous reached out to the Gettysburgian to comment:
“The whimsical 2% raises faculty and staff have sporadically received over the last decade are striking when one looks at the exorbitant salaries and pay raises given to administrators and institute staff who are rarely on campus. The fact that the board is boastful about ensuring a competitive salary for those individuals while knowingly underpaying faculty and staff who have devoted their lives to the College — and while simultaneously cutting healthcare coverage to barebones and refusing to restore retirement contribution to pre-COVID levels — is wholly dispiriting”
This article originally appeared on pages 8 and 9 of the No. 1 October 2024 edition of The Gettysburgian’s magazine.
