When Bernie Machen took over as president at the University of Florida in 2004, his contract paid him a base salary of $375,000 — the highest for any public university president in Florida at the time.
Two decades later, the starting salary of UF’s acting president is three times as high, far outpacing inflation.
The Florida Board of Governors in September confirmed Donald Landry as UF’s interim president with an unprecedented deal: $2 million in salary plus incentives that could add another $500,000. Even if he does not land the permanent job, he could earn severance pay of another $2 million.
UF’s presidential compensation has grown the fastest of the state’s five largest public universities, a Tampa Bay Times analysis of more than 20 years of university presidential contracts has found.
Pay for UF presidents rose nearly twice as fast as UF’s tuition. It has surpassed both average wages and professors’ salaries nationwide in roughly the same period.
The trend has accelerated since 2022 when former President Ben Sasse was approved, former University of Michigan President Santa Ono was nearly hired, and Landry and former President Kent Fuchs agreed to split duties until the next president is hired in 2026. In just over two and a half years, Sasse’s then-unprecedented starting salary of $1 million has already doubled for Landry.
In a statement provided by a spokesperson, the university said Landry’s salary is well in line with comparable universities nationally.
“Even a cursory examination of university president salaries nationwide will show that Interim President Donald Landry’s compensation is fully in alignment with our peer institutions, considering the University of Florida’s vast size and complexity and the competitiveness of the market,” the statement read.
Landry’s compensation level is near the top of his peer group, data from the school shows.
A combination of a competitive edge as Florida’s flagship university, how presidential contracts are created and a tense political climate explain UF’s soaring presidential salaries, experts told the Times.
Flagships and presidential contracts
From 2010 to 2019, presidents’ salaries at public flagship universities nationally rose 56% accounting for inflation, according to Judith Wilde, a George Mason University professor and expert on university contracts.
But in Florida, the increases exceed what she has seen elsewhere.
“The United States right now, as a whole, I think, is having some issues getting presidents hired because of the political atmosphere,” Wilde said. “And that’s magnified in Florida.”
When it hires a new president, UF’s Board of Trustees conducts a search, selects a candidate and drafts a contract. Then the candidate must be approved by the state’s Board of Governors, which oversees the state’s universities.
Presidential contracts are vast and often complex. But experts say they were not always this way.
Machen’s first contract at UF, for example, was eight pages. The proposed contract for Ono, who UF’s Board of Trustees picked before the state rejected him this summer, was twice as long.
Wilde said contracts began to change in the 2010s, when a Boston attorney named Ray Cotton decided to make presidential contracts the focus of his practice.
Cotton, who died in 2022, was influential at UF, advising the Board of Trustees in 2013 to compensate Machen “well above” the median pay among his peers in his final extension contract. He then went on to help UF scout for its next president at the end of Machen’s term.
Most of a president’s compensation doesn’t come directly from the public. Universities are allowed up to $200,000 from state-appropriated funds to help pay the heads of their institutions. The rest usually comes from a university’s foundation.
Working with multiple boards can make the job more complex and potentially less appealing, said Holden Thorp, a former chancellor of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. That can make recruiting difficult and drive up the asking price for top candidates.
“You have two groups of politically appointed people that are constantly trying to outdo each other,” Thorp said, referencing the duel between a university’s board of trustees and the state’s oversight board. “The work of trying to keep all those people in the same direction when they’re constantly trying to tell you how to do your job … that’s a full-time job on its own.”
Thorp said he believes that in Florida in particular, politics have fueled the rise in salaries.
Since Gov. Ron DeSantis was re-elected in 2022, his imprint on the state’s higher education leadership has been constant and direct.
In 2023, DeSantis appointed six new trustees at New College of Florida. In their first meeting, they fired sitting President Patricia Okker, appointing as her replacement Republican former House Speaker Richard Corcoran, a DeSantis ally.
Corcoran’s starting base salary of $699,999 — third highest among Florida’s 12 public universities — was an outlier, given the school’s small size.
Experts say salary inflation reflects a broader trend in Florida, where smaller colleges like the University of West Florida and Florida A&M have awarded new presidents larger-than-expected contracts given their enrollments.
Manny Diaz, previously the state’s education commissioner, started as UWF’s interim in June with a base salary of $643,000, more than $100,000 higher than his predecessor; he is now the school’s sole finalist for the job.
Marva Johnson, the former chairperson of the Florida Board of Education, started at Florida A&M in May making $650,000, more than $200,000 above her predecessor.
But even those salary jumps pale to what’s happened at UF. Corcoran’s 2023 salary is more than twice New College’s 2001 presidential base pay, a jump that exceeds other Florida colleges — but not UF.
As presidents come and go, salaries soar
Just months before former Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse was named UF’s president in 2022, DeSantis signed a law making public four-year universities and community colleges’ presidential searches confidential until the final stages.
This kept Sasse’s application process private, even amid concerns from some in the UF community about his lack of education experience and conservative ideologies.
Once he was chosen, his contract made Florida history.
Sasse stood to earn up to $1.35 million in his first year and nearly $1.6 million in the final year of his contract, had it been extended. His predecessor Ken Fuchs had started in 2015 with a base salary of $860,000.
Sasse announced his sudden resignation last year, citing his wife’s health as a major factor. Reports at the time pointed to a rocky relationship with Board of Trustees Chairperson Mori Hosseini, a DeSantis appointee and donor.
Thorp said that if Hosseini and the board were seen as “micromanaging” Sasse, finding a replacement to navigate that added oversight wouldn’t come cheap.
“You’d have to pay somebody a lot to deal with that,” he said.
When Fuchs agreed to return as interim president, his base salary matched Sasse’s at $1 million.
UF upped the ante again for Ono, its next candidate, who resigned as president of the University of Michigan to take the UF job. His contract specified a $1.5 million base salary for his potential role with at least an additional $1 million in potential bonuses and raises. But that contract was never signed. The Board of Governors quashed Ono’s candidacy over concerns about his views on diversity issues and protests.
Fuchs extended his interim contract until the Board of Trustees picked Landry and the Board of Governors approved his contract — the heftiest of the lot.
According to UF, Landry’s salary is based on an executive compensation analysis and recommendations from independent national financial firm Mercer, a specialist in university presidential compensation.
In a February report based on data from 2023, Mercer analysts supported UF offering a yearly total cash compensation, including salary and benefits, of nearly $2.7 million. Out of 31 peer campuses studied by Mercer, that amount was more than presidents earned at all but three schools — each of them private.
And considering the “high turnover rate” in the industry and the number of peer universities “competing for top presidential candidates” — a list that included private schools like Vanderbilt and Stanford — Mercer told the board that it would be justified in paying up to $3 million.
UF Faculty Union President Meera Sitharam said she believes the state’s flagship university is a magnet for attention, both good and bad. That helps explain why its presidential salary has grown so much, she said.
“There is a lot more political scrutiny (at UF),” she said. “If you want to use a university as a punching bag … UF is the first place people will look at or scrutinize.”
Thorp said he only expects the trend to persist as the school picks a permanent president in 2026.
“As long as the political chaos continues at the level that it’s at, and especially in Gainesville, they’re going to continue to have turnover, and they’re going to continue to pay more,” Thorp said.
Nakylah Carter is a data reporter covering education as a member of the Tampa Bay Times Education Hub in partnership with Open Campus.
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