UNC System President Margaret Spellings is receiving a $90,000 performance bonus from the Board of Governors.

The UNC System governing body voted to approve the performance bonus at the end of a closed session portion of Friday’s meeting. Spellings officially celebrated one year leading the system on Wednesday, March 1.

Board chair Lou Bissette said that the employment contract with Spellings required a possibility of a performance bonus, which has not been included in previous presidential contracts. Bissette said this year’s decision by the Personnel and Tenure Committee was “subjective.”

“Because we don’t have in place yet the full metrics that we will have for the next four years,” Bissette said.

Bissette added those metrics used to gauge Spellings’ performance are being crafted off of the recently approved strategic plan.

“And if you go back and you look at the access, the affordability goals, the student success goals, those are going to be designed,” Bissette said. “But it could be things like increasing the graduation rate by X percent.”

Bissette said this move reflected the direction the board has been trying to move the system toward in recent years.

“We would like to pay more for performance,” Bissette said. “Instead of having annual increases of X percent just based on longevity, we think it’s much more productive for our senior management to have incentive goals.”

While Spellings was awarded the $90,000 bonus on Friday, she will receive half of that, according to Bissette, before the end of May. The other half would be placed in a deferred account accessible if Spellings completes the length of her contract. The bonuses going forward could be as much as $125,000 and the deferred percentages could vary up to 50 percent, according to Bissette.

He added that this type of evaluation process could work its way down to the individual campus leadership positions.

The board has approved two rounds of raises for chancellors across the system since November 2015, and Bissette said the board is now comfortable with the salary ranges that have been established for campus leadership to attract the types of individuals the board would like to fill those roles.

“I think this board bit the bullet and said, ‘We want our chancellors to be properly compensated,’” Bissette said. “Because they lead our institutions and if we don’t have the best people in those jobs, we’re not going to have the best institutions in the country – which is our goal.”

Spellings’ $90,000 bonus is on top of her $775,000 base salary.

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