UNM is spending more than three times as much on administrators as it was in 2002, according to the Faculty Senate.
The Senate reported that UNM spent $8.2 million on administration salaries in 2007, compared to $2.6 million five years ago.
But that information wasn't intended for public release, and the Faculty Senate is in the process of revising its analysis, said Howard Snell of the Faculty Senate Operations Committee.
The Faculty Senate is hosting a meeting to discuss the issue of administration salaries and the impact of financial decisions on research and academic programs today in Anthropology Room 163 at 4 p.m.
Helen Gonzales, vice president of human resources, said the Faculty Senate's numbers were skewed.
In a written response to the Senate dated March 3, Gonzales outlined other problems with the analysis.
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Gonzales said the positions named in the analysis were still being completed in 2002 but under different titles.
"It also compared a list of administrators in 2002 to a different list of administrators in November of 2007," she said. "The dilemma with that is the list in 2002 weren't the same types of jobs that they were comparing to today."
Gonzales said the analysis also included several administrators from UNM's Health Sciences Center.
"The problem with including HSC is that it is funded primarily from clinical revenue," she said. "Several of the administrators listed are funded in part by the University Hospital and are not part of the UNM budget. There are also several initiatives specifically aimed at increasing health care for the state of New Mexico."
Gonzales said her research found that in November of 2007, administrators' salaries totaled $4.7 million, compared to a 2002 total of $3.3 million, which amounts to a 43 percent increase over the past six years.
"What I did in my analysis is, I said, 'All right, here is the list of people we're saying today are upper administrators. Let's go back and see who we had in those jobs in 2002,'" she said. "That was my methodology. Let's use the same population and see how much it has truly grown."
Gonzales said the growth in administration salaries was about 34 percent, going from $347 million in 2002 to $465 million in 2007.
Snell said the Senate is working on interpreting Gonzales's findings, but it's no easy task.
"We are finding that the process is difficult. We are having some difficulties in differentiating between salary raises and new positions," he said. "Someone may have gotten a pay raise, but their job title and responsibilities may have changed, too."
Snell said he expects to complete the new analysis by the fall.
"Mark (Chisholm, director of Institutional Research) and I are working together on this," he said. "Both of us have a lot of other things that we are doing, and we are finding the data interpretation to be difficult and time-consuming."
Chisholm said he is confident the data will be interpreted in a timely manner.
"I want to be sure that we are fair and accurate in our analysis," he said. "This will take time, and it's going to take someone to go through and look department by department and position by position."
