Top college development officers, in fact, cite money as low on their list of primary job satisfactions, according to a survey by search firm Educational Management Network/Witt Kieffer in Oak Brook, Ill. They cite quality of life, leadership and challenge as more important.

College presidents, the highest paid college executives, also are motivated by primarily public-service reasons, says Ray Cotton, vice president for higher education at ML Strategies, a consulting subsidiary of law firm Mintz Levin in Washington, D.C. Mr. Cotton, who helps colleges and new presidential hires negotiate pay packages, says presidents, like all executives, worry about having sufficient retirement funds and their employment security.

Yet “they aren’t in it for the money,” says Mr. Cotton. “There’s a strong element in public service in every president I have ever worked with.”

That’s not to say that pay for executives in academia isn’t improving. Salaries for senior college administrators, such as chief financial officers and vice presidents, increased by 5.4% in 2001, according to a survey by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources in Washington, D.C. Salaries rose by 5.3% for college executives, including presidents and executive vice presidents. During the same period, the consumer price index gained 2.6%.

Meanwhile, salaries for administrators at U.S. graduate business schools rose by 4% in 2001, to an average of $100,800 from $96,900, reports the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business in St. Louis.

Top development officers at U.S. schools earn average salaries of $98,700 annually, EMN/Witt Kieffer reports. Those at specialized research institutions make the most — an average of $182,900 annually.

In 1999-2000, 86 college presidents earned $300,000 or more, up from 74 presidents in the prior year, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education. A dozen earned $500,000 or more in 1999-2000, up from seven the year before. The highest pay package went to George C. Roche III, who received $1.2 million in 1999 after he resigned from Michigan’s Hillsdale College in the midst of scandal. This figure included $906,000 in deferred pay.

But CEOs and top executives at comparable-sized businesses in the private sector routinely earn more, often because of sizable incentive payments and stock plans. “People have learned in academia that while salaries are fair and equitable, they are fair and equitable in the higher-education community and may not have a relation to the for-profit world,” says Mr. Posner.

Moving for More Pay

Salary increases may decline or remain flat this year as demand for college administrators falls due to budget cuts, says Jay V. Berger, a principal with search firm Morris & Berger in Pasadena, Calif. States are reducing funding to public schools, while some private schools are suffering from declines in the value of their endowments. To cope with the cuts, schools are consolidating departments and jobs, filling positions without help from search firms or stretching out the hiring process, he says.

To boost their pay significantly, senior college executives usually must move to new jobs at other institutions. A bigger salary will accompany a promotion to a more senior role at a similar sized or larger institution. A lateral move to a richer or larger university also likely means a pay gain, as does a lateral move from a public to some prestigious private schools.

Development officers surveyed by EMN/Witt Kieffer say they’d require a 20% to 30% pay increase to take jobs at other schools. Some development officers at research and master’s degree institutions would need gains of between 50% and 60% to move, the survey shows. Chief development officers based in rural areas require the highest salary increases to move, possibly because 72% of them earn less than $100,000 annually, compared to 67% of chief development officers in suburban areas and 56% in urban areas.

Other college business executives have been asking for between 20% and 25% more pay to change jobs, says Gary Posner, senior vice president and director of the education search practice at EMN/Witt Kieffer.

“Typically, there’s two reasons they get it,” says Mr. Posner. “One is that the new job is a promotion, and the second is that they are moving to an institution with higher prestige, a bigger development budget and a bigger staff.”

As hiring declines overall, demand for skilled development executives who have led or been involved in a capital campaign and worked at significant institutions is “extremely tight and highly competitive,” he says.

“Development in the academic world is like sales in the for-profit world,” says Mr. Berger. “If you depend on contributed income and you lose your top person, you have no choice but to replace that person.”

College presidents also routinely bump up their pay by moving to new institutions. Some schools have private foundations that provide supplemental pay. One president who’s moving from a smaller college in Georgia to a larger one in Virginia will realize a 50% increase in her total pay package, says Mr. Cotton. The president’s pay raise is due more to the size and wealth of the new institution than to her past earnings, he says.

He advises boards to base pay packages for new presidents on those at peer institutions nationwide, not on the executive’s most recent earnings. This is what he told the board of a private university in Illinois that chose a former provost of a Maryland state university as its new president. “If they get him on the cheap and then he reads that others are being paid more, he won’t be very happy,” says Mr. Cotton. “Then he could be recruited away, so where’s the bargain?”

Changing Pay Practices

While university pay remains low in relation to private industry, compensation practices are changing in academia. College presidents’ pay packages are the most visible example of the changes. As the roles of college presidents have become larger and more complex, their earnings have increased. A decade ago, schools sought well-respected academics as their top officers. Now, they seek superior managers and fund-raisers as presidents and look to the provost to be the top academic officer.

“The kind of person a school might be looking for isn’t too different from the type of person a similar-sized organization in the private sector would be looking for,” says Mr. Cotton. “So when the board looks at the compensation package they need to be more competitive with private industry than they’ve been in the past.”

The changing makeup of college and university boards also is having an effect on pay. More trustees are business executives who are comfortable with performance-based pay and annual incentives. Once unheard of in academia, performance bonuses now are offered to presidents at about 10% to 20% of schools, says Mr. Cotton.

While still rare, bonuses are beginning to spread to other positions as well. Typically, a maximum bonus for a college executive equals only about 5% to 10% of salary, much smaller than typical bonus targets for high-level executives in private industry, says Mr. Berger. Not being able to offer a bonus is a “huge problem” when recruiting certain types of college administrators, such as IT professionals, he says.

Tricky issues surround bonuses for development executives. It’s considered unethical for their bonuses to be based on the total amount of revenue they raise, since some development executives might be tempted to seek immediate donations vs. larger “planned” gifts to be given in the future or over long time periods, says Mr. Posner. More effective goals might include increases in the percentage of alumni who give, gains in the amount of money collected from alumni annually or percentage gains in corporate foundation funds, he says. Still, most development executives surveyed by EMN/Witt Kieffer don’t receive pay incentives.

Deferred Compensation

Next in importance to college presidents after salaries are deferred compensation and employment terms, says Mr. Cotton. Deferred pay is set aside annually and awarded if they stay the length of their contracts, typically three to five years. What the school will provide if it dismisses the president, such as severance pay or deferred compensation, must be negotiated.

Housing or housing allowances, cars and memberships in private clubs also are typical compensation elements for presidents. Sometimes, negotiations get touchy concerning car choices. “One president wanted a Volvo because she thought it was the safest car on the road, and the board was mad because she didn’t want an American car,” says Mr. Cotton. “In another case, the president wanted a Cadillac, but the board thought it was too extravagant and wanted him to drive a Buick.”

When Ronald L. Applbaum, president of Kean College in New Jersey, takes the reins as president of the University of Southern Colorado in July, his pay package will be typical. It includes a $155,000 a year salary, a $7,800-a-year allowance to lease a car and a $29,000 annual housing allowance, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education. The state will contribute 11% of the value of his salary annually to his retirement and he will receive $45,000 in deferred compensation if he stays on the job for three years.

Fringe Benefits

Colleges are stepping up to the plate on a variety of creative pay elements as well. More schools are awarding hiring bonuses as a way to cover relocation and other costs, says Jean Dowdall, a vice president in Alexandria, Va., with A.T. Kearney Executive Search. “They aren’t so much salary sweeteners as they are a way of dealing with odds and ends, such as selling a home at a loss or a spouse leaving a job,” she says. “Colleges say, ‘We don’t need to see receipts, you take care of them and we’ll call it a day.’ ”

To recruit desirable executives, some schools are covering the costs of retirement and health-insurance plans during typical “wait” periods of early employment that can last up to six months, says Mr. Berger. In high-cost areas, such as California, institutions or their foundations might subsidize the cost of a new home or provide additional housing allowances for executives below the level of president. “For positions at Stanford University and other California schools last year, we negotiated some type of housing allowance,” says Mr. Berger. “That’s an area we’re seeing more flexibility on.”

Some candidates are receiving other perks, such as subsidized tuition for children or themselves, if they want to pursue additional degrees. Ms. Dowdall says she planned to approach a candidate about a position at another school until she learned that his current employer was paying his tuition to complete a prominent doctoral program. “My take on that was that I couldn’t recruit him away,” she says.

Organizations that can offer enticing perks to academic administrators should do so because it helps with retention, says Mr. Posner. “People are driven by lots of things,” he says. “Sometimes it’s money, while other times, it may be the chance to go to a specialized conference, take a sabbatical leave or take time off to work on another degree, write an article or a book. There’s a lot more individuation going on at the senior level to retain executives.”

The board’s one-page letter to “the Harvard community” sets the stage for a possible showdown between Mr. Summers and his prominent faculty critics, who are moving toward a referendum on his leadership.

The immediate source of friction between Mr. Summers and the faculty was a talk he gave at a recent conference on work-force diversification — statements that he finally made public recently — but the roots of the clash run deeper.

Hired more than three years ago to retool Harvard for the 21st century, the former Treasury secretary has found the hierarchical management style common in corporations and cabinet agencies to be a tough fit for a storied university accustomed to decision making that is decentralized and collegial. The confrontation comes as more and more universities, pressed financially on several fronts, have turned to leaders with experience outside academia to reinvigorate their institutions — and have in turn often met resistance from faculty.

The campus firestorm over Mr. Summers erupted last month when he made comments at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference here suggesting that innate gender differences could help explain why fewer women gain high-level academic careers in science and math. Prominent Harvard faculty and presidents of other elite universities spoke out publicly against his views.

But the gender remarks proved to be only the catalyst that this week ignited a broader assault on Mr. Summers’s performance since he took the helm in 2001, a period that has been marked by an unusual number of public rows with the powerful faculty, many of whom have nothing to fear from him because of lifetime tenure guarantees.

At an on-campus meeting with Harvard faculty earlier this week, senior professors flayed Mr. Summers for his management tactics and sometimes abrasive manner. Several said that the stage was set for a motion to take a faculty vote of no-confidence in Mr. Summers — something no one can remember ever occurring at the university in recent times. Mr. Summers called the meeting a “searing” experience, according to the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. Bowing to demands from faculty members, Mr. Summers released a full transcript of his comments at that Jan. 14 conference.

A vote of “no confidence” would be symbolic since, in the university’s system, the president serves at the pleasure of the board, called the Harvard Corporation. But it might be difficult for Mr. Summers to rule effectively if his faculty were not behind him.

Harvard said Mr. Summers would not be available to comment for this article.

With some professors already complaining that the governing board has not done enough to rein in the sometimes brusque former Treasury secretary, the blunt language of the transcript could wind up further inflaming the debate.

Founded in 1636, Harvard is one of the nation’s most prestigious universities, with 41 Nobel laureates among its current and former faculty and a $22.6 billion endowment that is, by far, the richest of any American university. Managing such an institution can also take its toll: Mr. Summers’s predecessor, Neil L. Rudenstine, known as a manager who agonized over details, found the Harvard presidency so taxing that he had to take time off in 1994, with Harvard acknowledging at the time that its chief was overwhelmed with the job.

When Mr. Summers came to Harvard, he was viewed as a strong figure who would speak out on national issues, reinvigorate the faculty and make undergraduate education more rigorous.

Last year, in a move supported by Mr. Summers, a Harvard committee recommended far-reaching changes in the undergraduate curriculum, which would boost the number of required science courses and encourage students to spend time abroad.

But battles with Harvard faculty broke out soon after Mr. Summers arrived. His confrontational style marked a sharp departure from that of his predecessor, Mr. Rudenstine, a soft-spoken Renaissance scholar. During Mr. Rudenstine’s tenure, Harvard’s African-American Studies department became widely regarded as a national powerhouse.

Many at Harvard are still bitter that Mr. Summers singled out one of the department’s stars, Cornel West, three years ago for a highly unusual presidential scolding of a tenured professor. Among Mr. Summers’s issues, according to Prof. West’s associates: making a hip-hop record and allegedly missing classes to help with a political campaign. At the time, a person close to Mr. Summers said he was only trying to encourage Prof. West to concentrate on scholarship and teaching. The incident inspired widespread publicity, and Prof. West ultimately left for Princeton University.

According to the transcript released, Mr. Summers cited “issues of intrinsic aptitude” to explain the scarcity of women in the higher levels of science and engineering. He also said that “it does appear that on many, many different human attributes — height, weight…overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability — there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means” or average levels of ability “there is a difference in the standard deviation and variability of a male and a female population.” Standard deviation is a statistical measurement that describes a significant degree of difference from the average, or mean.

In addition to aptitude, Mr. Summers cited as a primary factor tensions between women’s “family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity.”

Daniel S. Fisher, a Harvard professor of physics, said the new documents would not quell the tumult. He called the transcript “shocking” and added that Mr. Summers’s comments at the conference are only part of the reason for faculty discontent.

Mr. Summers also told participants at the conference that women weren’t the only group underrepresented in an important activity. “To take a set of diverse examples,” he said, “the data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking, which is an enormously high-paying profession in our society; that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and agriculture.”

According to the transcript, Mr. Summers cited no sources for these assertions and told conferees he was trying to be provocative with his comments.

In the latest of several apologies, the Harvard president said in a letter sent to faculty that he would have spoken differently if he could “turn back” the clock. “Though my…remarks were explicitly speculative, and noted that ‘I may be all wrong,’ I should have left such speculation to those more expert in the relevant fields,” he wrote.

Mr. Summers’s supporters predicted the moves will help fend off calls for his ouster. Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz says Mr. Summers “comes off much better in the statement than he has come off up to now. He should have put this out earlier.”

Harvey C. Mansfield, a Harvard professor of government, said Mr. Summers has also taken on such issues as grade inflation and the generally liberal leanings of the school’s faculty. “He is being attacked for his strengths and not for his defects,” Prof. Mansfield said. “The liberals of Harvard lost the election last November. They are taking it out on Larry Summers.”

The turmoil that has pushed the Harvard president to the brink of a possible faculty referendum on his leadership has much to do with encounters like a session between Mr. Summers and some of his professors in November of 2003.

At the time, the university was planning a massive and still-unbuilt satellite campus that would require an undetermined number of professors to move across the Charles River from Harvard proper, to neighboring Allston, Mass. Accustomed to having a say in matters such as department mergers and new programs of study, German professor Peter Burgard asked Mr. Summers whether the faculty would be voting on the Allston plan as well.

The answer was a quick “no,” according to the professor and others who were there. “I asked why not,” Mr. Burgard recalls, “and he said because it was a personnel and financial matter and not a curricular matter even though he had justified the move to Allston on curricular grounds in a 10-page letter he sent to the faculty.”

The controversy at Harvard comes at a time when governance issues have spawned friction between more and more university presidents and faculties accustomed to a greater say in operation of their institutions. Robert Sloan resigned as president of Baylor University, in Waco, Texas, last month and took the largely ceremonial post of chancellor following several no-confidence votes by faculty. Angered by a lack of input and other issues, the faculty senate at the University of Southern Mississippi, in Hattiesburg, Miss., recently asked state officials to replace Shelby Thames, the university president.

Observers say such battles reflect broader changes in higher education. State legislatures are demanding more efficient use of tax dollars at public universities, and universities, both public and private, are becoming increasingly complex operations. Facing competing demands for limited resources, many colleges are forced to raise funds nearly full time. Many are picking top executives from the ranks of government and corporations to meet these challenges.

After earning a bachelor of science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975, Mr. Summers enrolled at Harvard as a doctoral student in economics. By 1983, at the age of 28, he had become a tenured professor of economics, one of the youngest in the school’s history.

Mr. Summers, now 50 years old, has a history of ruffling feathers with provocative remarks that get him into trouble. As chief economist at the World Bank from 1991 to 1993, he signed a memo that, in jest, argued the economic merits of dumping garbage in poor countries. As deputy Treasury secretary, in 1997, he provoked controversy when he told a small group of reporters asking about Republican efforts to repeal the estate tax that: “There is no case other than selfishness.”

With then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin as his tutor, Mr. Summers practiced being more diplomatic and circumspect. Mr. Rubin, a Harvard alumnus and a current member of the Harvard Corporation, backed his protégé for the Harvard presidency. Mr. Rubin did not return a call seeking comment for this article.

Early in his tenure, Mr. Summers also stirred criticism of age discrimination on campus by vetoing the offers of tenure to two 54-year-old scholars. In a 2002 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Summers said he wanted to adjust the tenure criteria the school uses in an effort to find younger candidates whose best work lay ahead of them, rather than in the past.

For many reasons, Harvard itself is difficult to govern because it has long had a decentralized power structure, in which the deans of each school within Harvard have unusual power, says Henry Rosovksy, a former dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences. Each dean traditionally controls a share of the school’s vast endowment — or, as many at the school say, “each tub on its own bottom.”

But Mr. Rosovksy points out that Harvard’s president, in another respect, has more power than those at many other institutions because, in practice, he has final approval of faculty appointments. “There’s no question that President Summers has taken steps toward achieving” greater centralization, Mr. Rosovksy said.

That effort has led to discomfort among some in the faculty, who say that Mr. Summers has assembled the trappings of a chief executive, with a larger public-relations staff and a grand style that conflates Harvard’s success with his own.

Theda Skocpol, a Harvard professor of government and sociology, says universities function best with give and take between strong deans, input from the faculty as well as a president who isn’t afraid to set agendas and propose ideas.

But other professors maintain that Mr. Summers’s main failing was running afoul of ideas favored by the liberal elite. Mr. Summers, for example, has expressed his support for Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, which was banned from Harvard during the Vietnam era. While falling short of calling for a return, that stance has angered gay students because of the military’s prohibition of openly gay soldiers.

In a letter to the university community on behalf of the other six members of the Harvard Corporation, board member James R. Houghton said the board recognized the intensity of faculty criticisms of Mr. Summers and is taking them seriously. Mr. Houghton, who is chairman and chief executive of Corning Inc., said the Harvard president is “strongly committed” to advancing opportunities for women.

“More generally,” he added, “we know him as someone very much determined to learn from experience, to encourage discussion and debate, and to help Harvard pursue academic excellence in all of its many forms.”

Faculty members say it is unlikely that Mr. Summers will face a no-confidence vote soon, at least in part for procedural reasons. Because so many wanted to speak at this week’s meeting with Mr. Summers, it has been continued until next Tuesday.

Because a no-confidence vote was not on the agenda of the original meeting, 80% of the faculty present would have to approve consideration of such a move at next week’s session under university rules, faculty members say. If 80% of the faculty do agree to consider such a proposal next week, it could be voted up or down at that meeting by a simple majority. If not, it could be placed on the agenda of the next regularly scheduled faculty meeting, slated for March 15.

In 2004, the former senior vice president at Bank of America resigned from his employer of three decades to join Borel Private Bank and Trust in San Mateo, Calif. Borel, which is owned by Boston Private Financial Holdings Inc., has two branches: San Mateo and Palo Alto. He’s now vice president of deposit sales for Borel, which employs a total of 88 people. His job, Mr. Bordin says, is primarily developing new business. This allows him to “go out and knock on doors and talk to people, which I enjoy.”

The seeds of Mr. Bordin’s change were sown after Bank of America merged with Nations Bank a few years ago. Mr. Bordin, 56, had managed two downtown San Francisco branches for B of A, and then its A.P. Giannini branch in San Mateo. After the merger, branch managers started to lose some of the autonomy they had under previous B of A management.

Expecting this trend to continue, he began networking for a new role elsewhere. In San Mateo, he had competed against Borel for new accounts and admired its customer-oriented approach. He met Borel executives at local Rotary Club meetings and began talking with them about opportunities. When he learned Borel was creating new-business -development roles so it could ramp up its campaign to attract new customers, he applied. He started work in January, with a pay increase and a bonus opportunity based on performance.

Mr. Bordin has been asked to find new high-net-worth and small-business customers and to service their accounts personally. It’s a change he wanted. “I wanted to be in a small group where I have more latitude,” he says. “I get to talk with customers rather than doing reports. If there’s an operational issue, the person I need is 25 yards from my office. I don’t have to call Los Angeles for a decision.”

Sandy Wandelt, senior vice president and director of human resources for Sun Bancorp Inc. in Vineland, N.J., says many large-bank executives are attracted to his institution for the same reason that Mr. Bordin chose Borel. With 680 employees and 71 branches in New Jersey, the Philadelphia area and Delaware, Sun is small enough to keep a community-bank culture, he says.

“People from big banks tell me they are totally overloaded, they have lost the ability to spend time with customers and can’t get decisions on a timely basis,” says Mr. Wandelt. “Sun has a different culture. [Employees] can use their skills and talents here and be productive.”

The bank recently hired several vice presidents and regional vice presidents of commercial lending and small-business banking. All came from larger institutions. “Most of the time, they don’t leave a big organization because of the money. It’s because of the environment, lack of authority and lack of decision-making ability they have,” Mr. Wandelt explains. “Here you have the ability to make decisions autonomously.”

Sun has more openings to fill, mostly for mid-level lending executives. For positions in local branches, the bank usually seeks new hires from the area. The best way to get on the radar screen is to attend business and professional gatherings and get to know Sun’s branch-office or regional executives, who often attend such functions. They, in turn, recommend promising candidates for Mr. Wandelt to contact.