Virginia’s Highest-Paid State Employees

Charles Phlegar: Virginia’s highest paid state employee in 2017,

The Washington Business Journal has just published its database of the highest paid state employees in Virginia, and the list is dominated by people you never voted for, or in many cases people you’ve never even heard of. For the most part, the highest-paid state employees work for colleges and universities — not just any old college and university, but Virginia’s elite schools and research institutions.

Charles D. Phlegar tops the list, making $661,700.00 in 2017. Phlegar is vice president for Virginia Tech’s department of advancement, which means he runs the all-important fund-raising operations. He made more money than Virginia Tech President Timothy Sands, who raked in a salary of $527,850. (These numbers do not include non-salaried perks such as presidential residences, cars, and flunkies.)

At the University of Virginia, David S. Wilkes, dean of the school of medicine, snagged the top spot at an even $600,000. He beat out President Teresa Sullivan at $580,000. Other top earners at UVa included Jayakrishna Ambati ($590,400), a research scientist who may have discovered a cure for macular degeneration, and Irving L. Kron ($561,100), chair of the Department of Surgery who has since taken a top spot at the University of Arizona. 

Ambati and Kron illustrate the hyper-competition for top research talent. Ambati joined UVa in 2016 after directing the Kentucky Eye Institute in Lexington, Ky., while Kron departed from Charlottesville, where he had lived many years, to become Interim Executive Dean at the University of Arizona College of Medicine.

For point of reference, Governor Ralph Northam is paid a salary of $175,000 yearly. But he does get cool perks like free rent in the Governor’s Mansion and a contingent of state police guards.

A major difference between Virginia’s research universities and everyone else is that the research universities can tap endowments and other sources of funds to supplement state salaries. Thus, UVa’s Sullivan was paid $197,620 in state salary p;us $362.210 in non-state salary. Adding up the salaries for the 148 highest-compensated administrators, coaches and professors at UVa, I found that they collectively earned $39 million in state salaries supplemented by $10.8 million in non-state salaries. Contrast that to a small, liberal arts institution like (to pick one at random) Longwood University. Of the 25 highest-paid administrators and profs, only one — President W. Taylor Revely — had his $154,000 state salary supplemented by outside funds.

Among state employees, competition is the most intense for university executives who can either (1) bring in lots of outside money, and (2) win football and basketball games (which translates into bringing in outside money, just in a different way). So, someone like economics professor Kenneth Elzinga, one of the most popular lecturers and teachers in the history of UVa, makes a handsome salary of $238,000 but doesn’t make a dime in supplementary salary.