Former University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins is a visiting fellow at Stanford University while being paid his UA presidential salary to be on sabbatical. He also received a $40,000 bonus this month from the Arizona Board of Regents for previous work.
The regents also awarded bonuses totaling $160,000 to their former executive director, John Arnold, who is now chief operating officer and chief financial officer at the UA.
Robbins and Arnold received $40,000 each for meeting goals set by the board in 2023-24 for the presidents of the UA, Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University, and the ABOR executive director, who together form the Enterprise Executive Committee.
Among these goals, they “focused on growing international initiatives, a source of much needed revenue for Arizona’s public universities, and supporting the Arizona Promise Program, which provides free tuition for qualified low-income Arizona students,” said Megan Gilbertson, ABOR’s assistant vice president of public affairs. The board oversees the state’s three public universities.
Robbins stepped down as UA president on Sept. 30 amid what he called a financial crisis, as the UA dealt with a projected $177 million deficit last fiscal year. The deficit led to hiring and compensation freezes and the elimination of 328 positions from the workforce paid by unrestricted funds, including 13 vice presidents and 42 full-time faculty members.
Robbins is on sabbatical from the UA until June 30, 2026, when his presidential contract and pay will end and he will become a tenured faculty member, as a cardiothoracic surgeon, at the UA’s Tucson College of Medicine.
He makes a base presidential salary of $734,407 after voluntarily taking a 10% pay cut in March. In addition to the pay cut, Robbins also asked the regents not to award him certain other bonuses he could have been eligible for, Gilbertson said this week. Suresh Garimella succeeded Robbins as UA president on Oct. 1 and is paid a base salary of $810,000.
Then-University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins, far right, with Regent Fred DuVal, middle, and CFO John Arnold, left.
‘A slap in the face from ABOR’
Reactions to the bonuses have been strong at the UA.
“It’s disheartening that the board in consultation with our new president can’t come up with a better use for 40k than to continue to pay the former president with salary supplements he does not need, for activities that he should have executed without incentives,” UA Faculty Senate Chair Leila Hudson wrote to the Arizona Daily Star.
“Forty thousand dollars may seem like pocket change to the managerial class, especially in light of the vast sums frittered away on President Robbins’ watch, but I assure you that is not a negligible sum to those whose salaries have not kept up with the cost of living, whose workload has increased without compensation, or who lost their livelihood due to the incompetence of administrators,” Hudson said.
Jeremy Bernick, president of the UA Graduate and Professional Student Council, wrote to the Star: “It’s a slap in the face from ABOR to graduate students across the state who can’t afford basic medical services, food, and heating because UA graduate employees make a base salary that is only half of 40k per school year.”
And associate professor Jeffrey Michler said in an email, “The idea that John Arnold, who has had to clean up Robbins’ mess, gets the same bonus as Robbins, flies in the face of everything we know about designing a good contract.” Michler, who is in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, has studied contract design.
“I certainly hope that going forward, ABOR pays more attention to best practices in executive pay and designs performance-based contracts that pay more when the institution is healthy and pays less when leadership makes mistakes,” Michler wrote to the Star. “There are plenty of faculty at UA, NAU, and ASU that could lend their expertise to ABOR on how to introduce better incentive schemes to executive contracts.”
Distinguished visiting fellow
Robbins’ compensation is only subject to be reduced if he is “subsequently employed in a comparable administrative position, i.e., a chief executive officer, at another institution of higher education prior to June 30, 2026.”
He is currently listed as a “distinguished visiting fellow” for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, which is not a comparable administrative position.
Stanford University and Hoover Institution didn’t respond to requests for comment or confirmation on whether Robbins’ position there is unpaid, but online searches indicate distinguished visiting fellows aren’t paid.
Two of three goals achieved
ABOR’s goals for the Enterprise Executive Committee in 2023-24 included attainment, international strategies/operations, and implementing the Arizona Promise Program.
The committee achieved the second and third goals, but failed to achieve the first goal of attainment, the regents decided.
The unmet attainment goal stated the EEC must work with university personnel including enrollment teams to “develop and launch a plan to improve Arizona resident post high school educational attainment outcomes by 10 percent over 3 years.”
The international strategies and operations goal said the EEC had to provide a comprehensive review by the presidents of university international assets, employees, programs, partnerships, research and international student recruitment, plus setting five-year goals and plans.
Robbins and Arnold achieved the goals in partnership with ASU President Michael Crow and NAU President José Cruz-Rivera, Gilbertson said.
Arnold’s compensation from ABOR also included $120,000 for achieving his 2023-24 goals.
He was in charge of developing a budget and financial options “to appropriately fund needed medical clinical rotations in Arizona” in consultation with the universities.
The second goal involved strengthening “ABOR’s relationships with a variety of Arizona’s community members including local governments, non-profit organizations, service entities and others to build trust and support for the universities and ABOR’s educational attainment and workforce initiatives.”
Arnold was ABOR executive director from May 2018 to December 2023, when he stepped in to help with the UA’s financial turnaround as interim CFO. On July 1 he fully transitioned into his role at the UA, for which he’s paid $550,000.
