Tuesday April 22, 2014 year: 134 No. 59
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thelantern the student voice of The Ohio State University
Remembering the champions
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Comic book to be set in C-Bus
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Finals week woes
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Boston Strong: OSU holds onto administrators with ‘competitive’ salaries Number of administrators at schools comparable to Ohio State US News and World A year later, Report ranking the city stands 35 CAITLIN ESSIG Managing editor for content essig.21@osu.edu For one Ohio State student, “Boston Strong” is more than a slogan. “The T-shirts and the posters and whatnot that say ‘Boston Strong’ on them, to a lot of people those are just the memorial slogan for what occurred, but for us it’s a sign of how close Boston is as a city,” said Taylor Landes, a fourth-year in international studies who is from Boston. A year ago, Landes said she knew Boston was a strong city, but after being about the length of a football field away from blasts at the finish line of the 117th Boston Marathon, she said that mindset was only strengthened. “Boston has always been a strong community. It’s a small city for being such a major city,” Landes said. “Everyone always jokes about how the sports fans are so crazy and so tight, and so it was a tight city anyways, a strong community. But especially after the bombing, if it was even possible, Boston just became even closer.” On April 15, 2013, two men set off two bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Three were killed, more than 260 were injured. A year later, nothing stopped Boston from running again Monday as 35,456 runners hit the streets Monday. Carley Tanchon, a student assistant in OSU’s neurosurgery department, was among the 23,000 runners in the Boston Marathon last year, and plans to run the race again next year. “Boston is an extremely emotional race to begin with,” Tanchon said. “When I ran it last year, I almost started crying in the first mile, just acknowledging that you’re a part of such a historic event. “The Boston Marathon has had, it just has been such a monument in the running community for decades. And you’re aware of that, you feel that when you’re on the course. I felt that the whole time I was running, and I didn’t even know what went on.”
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18
Minnesota
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OSU Florida
13 Texas A&M
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Michigan Wisconsin Michigan State
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Texas
Indiana
Central Florida
Arizona State source: reporting
28 Michigan 41 Wisconsin 49 Florida 52 OSU 52 Texas 69 Minnesota 69 Texas A&M 73 Michigan State 75 Indiana 142 Arizona State 170 Central Florida
KAYLA BYLER / Managing editor of design
LIZ YOUNG Campus editor young.1693@osu.edu It’s expected that the people leading an institution with the scope of Ohio State will be well compensated. What is less expected, though, is that those administrators on average make several times the amount an average faculty member makes, and more than their peers at comparable universities. Gene Smith formally joined the ranks of those administrators this year. Smith, OSU’s athletic director, was given the additional title of vice president and granted a four-year contract extension with a pay raise Jan. 28. His contract is now set to expire June 30, 2020, and his base salary is $940,484, up from $840,484 in 2013. He can now be considered one of the top administrators at OSU as a member of the Senior Management Council — a group of 17 people that “propose new policies or revisions to current policies … (and) determines if an issue needs to be addressed by a policy or a rule,” according to an OSU website. Smith, though, said in January it was a “formalizing” of his existing duties.
“I wanted to have an opportunity to see the vision that all of us have in the athletic department come to fruition and that takes stability. (OSU Interim President) Joe (Alutto) was kind enough to listen and forward me that opportunity,” Smith said in an interview with The Lantern Jan. 29. But the step was made both for public purposes and solidifying a grasp on Smith’s talents it seems — Alutto said in February Smith was partially promoted for his role in negotiating OSU’s private contracts with companies like Nike Inc., which has an 11-year, $46 million contract with OSU. “He’s been very active in helping us negotiate some of our infinity agreements that have brought revenues that have allowed us to support students to give additional scholarships and so what I wanted to do, and I think that the university trustees agreed, is that we want to expand that responsibility and use his talents even more than we have in the past,” he said in an interview with The Lantern Feb. 11. That’s a concept that OSU applies to a lot of its officials, Alutto said. “With this question of ‘how does a university capitalize to the greatest extent possible on the different attributes of our leaders?’ and they all have different sets of skills and you’re constantly looking to place the individual in the right position
to take for the university to take advantage of those skills,” he said. OSU football coach Urban Meyer might be another good representation of what taking advantage of skills can look like on a paycheck. Meyer is the highest-paid public employee in the state of Ohio, taking home almost $3 million total in fiscal year 2013, which Alutto said is merely a reality, as OSU competes “in different markets for different skill levels.” It is perhaps the same logic that’s been used for years in expanding the Senior Management Council and shifting the responsibilities of various administrators, as OSU and the U.S. higher education system as a whole move into an era where tuition rises, professors get cut and yet some salaries continue to grow ever more bloated. But as some argue that increase is only natural, others said they think universities are on a bad path. OSU, meanwhile, pays its administrative officials a significant amount more than some comparable universities. So how does OSU compare? The comparison Though administrative structures across U.S. universities differ, similarities still exist. There is
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OUABudget nears $2.15M for FY 2014 OSU suggests $76.9M for renovations MATTHEW LOVETT Asst. arts editor lovett.45@osu.edu
The Big Free Concert might have been free for students to attend, but the Ohio Union Activities Board had a significant budget to pay for Childish Gambino and his supporting acts. The OUAB budget was just shy of the $2.1 million mark for last year, but exceeded that in 2014. OUAB was allocated about $2.1 million for fiscal year 2013 (July 1, 2012, through June 30, 2013) while this year, the organization has a budget of $2.15 million. The organization is funded through the $37.50 student activity fee paid by each student each semester, and 53.2 percent of the total amount amassed through the fee was allotted to OUAB each year. The fee is only charged to students at Ohio State’s Columbus campus and is paid by undergraduate, graduate and professional students. According to its 2013 report to the Ohio Union Council and Council on Student Affairs, about 96 percent of OUAB’s 2013 budget — roughly $1.9 million — went toward programming or the costs associated with bringing talent to campus and putting on events. This portion also includes costs for marketing those events, said OUAB president MacGregor Obergfell in an email in March. OUAB hosted 282 events with around 89,000 total attendants for the FY 2013. The final 4 percent of the budget was allotted for operational and professional developmental expenses. Operational expenses pay for daily necessities such as office supplies. Professional development funds pay for development opportunities that Obergfell said “allow (OUAB) to expand (its) knowledge, ideas and development through experiences like attending professional conferences, such as National Association of Campus Activities in Nashville.” 2013’s fiscal year brought in acts such as “Saturday Night Live” alumnus Bill Hader and primatologist and activist Jane Goodall. This year, OUAB has used its funds to host performances from the likes of comedians Joel McHale and Adam DeVine. The 2014 budget also accounted for OUAB’s Big Free Concert April 10, which rapper Childish Gambino, whose real name is Donald Glover, headlined. The amount spent thus far in OUAB’s 2014 fiscal year, which began July 1, 2013, and will end June 30, cannot be revealed, Obergfell said. However, he said the full budget has been allocated for the remainder of the semester and for the summer. “Since we have many events currently taking place and many expenses clearing daily and waiting to be cleared, it is difficult to give an exact
FRANCIS PELLICCIARO Lantern reporter pellicciaro.1@osu.edu
SHELBY LUM / Photo editor
Childish Gambino performs on the South Oval April 10 as part of the Big Free Concert presented by OUAB. amount we have spent this year,” Obergfell said. As of the end of Fall Semester 2013, OUAB hosted about 140 events with about 55,000 attendants. Obergfell declined to provide an estimate of how much OUAB has spent so far in the FY 2014. While OUAB has nine committees specializing in planning different types of events, such as music or lectures, a set amount is not given to each committee to spend for the year. “Each committee operates within the annual full allocation, but does not receive a set amount each year. The amount of money that is eventually allocated to each event varies based on the expenses associated with each event. Thus the amount that each committee receives each year varies,” Obergfell said. OUAB does not release payment information for the artists and performers it brings to OSU because of competition with other venues in Columbus. Releasing this information, Obergfell said, would put OUAB at a “competitive disadvantage in the future.” In comparison to another programming organization in the Big Ten, the Wisconsin Union of University of Wisconsin-Madison was allocated about $705,000 for FY 2014 from the union’s operational revenue, said Gary Filipp, vice president for program administration at the Wisconsin Union. Though the Wisconsin Union’s programming budget has the opportunity to expand based
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Lantern file photo
World War Z author Max Brooks speaks to students at an OUAB event.
Ohio State seems to be taking the lion’s share of state funding to repair and maintain existing facilities, despite a newly implemented system designed to unify the funding request process. Maintenance and repair was an approximately $167 million piece of the list of recommended higher education projects totaling $404.5 million in the Ohio Higher Education Funding Commission recommendations for 2015-16. The money budgeted for maintenance and repair equals roughly the tuition cost of 16,658 in-state undergraduates at Ohio State’s Columbus campus for 2013-14 school year. The Ohio Higher Education Funding Commission is a collaborative effort of public college and university leaders established by Ohio Gov. John Kasich in 2011 to form a single budget encompassing all public colleges and universities in Ohio, as opposed to higher education institutions separately asking for state funding as was done in the past. “Those other states that I’ve talked with, they’re intrigued by this approach, absolutely intrigued,” said Kevin Boys, president of Southern State Community College, based in Hillsboro, Ohio. Boys was co-chair of the Funding Commission and said in the previous system of colleges asking for state funding, “it’s whoever has the best lobby (that) gets the biggest piece of the pie.” The most recent budget was signed by the presidents of all 37 public universities and colleges in Ohio and passed by Kasich in the capital budget for 2015-16. “I feel the funding recommendations reflect not on growth, but on the aging buildings and infrastructure of publicly funded universities in Ohio and the fact that facilities are close to crumbling before our eyes and it is now time to protect taxpayer’s investment,” said Ted Curtis, vice president for capital planning and facilities management at the University of Akron in an email. In an October 2013 memo to officials who helped form the funding recommendations, Boys and chair of the commission Roderick McDavis, Ohio University’s president, said “of particular note, the governor has repeatedly highlighted the need to concentrate state resources on maintenance and repair of current facilities, instead of building new structures.”
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