The UNC Board of Governors voted on Friday to extend a program previously reserved for the system president and university chancellors to UNC – Chapel Hill athletic director Bubba Cunningham.
As part of the next round of contract negotiations, UNC – Chapel Hill will be allowed to offer Cunningham $200,000 per year in deferred compensation into a board-approved retirement account. Cunningham will be the first administrator outside of university system presidents and chancellors from across the system institutions to be admitted to this program.
UNC – Chapel Hill Chancellor Carol Folt told the Board of Governors Friday that Cunningham was nationally recognized for several initiatives, including placing academic performance metrics in new contracts for every coach at UNC – Chapel Hill and having high academic incentives in his own contract.
“He’s viewed as probably one of the top five athletic directors in the country right now, so he’s on every short list,” Folt said. “He had been offered a job at Florida, which he declined to take because he decided to stay here.
“[The University of Florida position] was much more lucrative.”
Cunnigham turned down that Florida AD position in the fall of 2016. Cunningham had two 10 percent pay increases approved in the 2016 calendar year – one in January and the second in October, just after deciding to return to UNC.
Cunningham’s salary after the two raises is nearly $706,000 – more than $100,000 higher than Folt.
Folt made the pitch to the Board of Governors that Cunningham was important to her leadership team, but three board members ultimately voted against extending the program beyond the president and chancellors – Marty Kotis, Tom Fetzer and Thom Goolsby.
After the meeting, Kotis said that he was concerned about the precedent that this would set – although the deferred compensation will not come from state dollars and would not impact tuition.
“[UNC officials] were saying it would not impact the students or their costs,” Kotis said.
But Kotis also said he was concerned about how this move would be perceived.
“I also felt like the optics and timing were really bad right now,” Kotis said. “And that the message being sent by the first person beyond the chancellors and the president being an athletic director was not a good message to send.”
The approval comes less than a month after the conclusion of the years-long NCAA investigation into so-called paper courses at UNC. While the NCAA ultimately said it could not conclude that the university “violated NCAA academic rules” in the courses at the center of the investigation, the university has been viewed by some as escaping penalty on a technicality. The NCAA committee on infractions criticized the university in its final report, even when issuing no penalties.
Nonetheless, the issues at the center of the investigation were in place and discovered before Cunnigham took over as AD. And much of the time of the current administration at UNC – Chapel Hill has been spent putting reforms in place to ensure no similar situation arises in the future at the nation’s first public university.
For board chair Lou Bissette and system president Margaret Spellings, the approval seemed to boil down to keeping an administrator that other universities are continuously attempting to lure away.
“It acts as a retention device,” Bissette said. “If you’ve got a good administrator like Bubba Cunningham is, you want to keep him for as long as you can. And that tends to do it.”
“It’s a handcuff,” Spellings added.
“A golden handcuff,” Bissette responded.
Friday’s approval will be factored into the next round of contract negotiations for Cunningham, which the News & Observer report will include a nearly five percent pay increase.
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