Hawkins well paid despite CU budget crunch
By Joe Richey
Joe Richey | Aug 26, 2010
View or downloads Dan Hawkins’ current employment agreement (PDF, 131MB). Warning: long download time.
The economic downturn has cost Coloradans more than a pretty penny, and more pennies than in many states. It cost Colorado its public university in 2004, and nearly the entire system in 2010. It cost Colorado its electoral infrastructure. It cost Colorado its public libraries, public arts, public everything.
The University of Colorado is presumed to be publicly owned while being privately financed. In 2004, then-University of Colorado President Elizabeth Hoffman begged and was granted “enterprise status” for C.U. As a result, C.U. is no longer a public university in the same way that neighboring universities in Nebraska, Kansas or Texas are public universities.
What price? Plenty. Plenty if you were studying Environmental Ethics at C.U., where the environmental ethics track was bought by Lockheed Martin to be converted into the Environmental Management track. Plenty if you study in the humanities at C.U. Plenty if you’re a full-time instructor, working years with nothing but semester-to-semester contracts.
In the midst of the fiscal woes experienced at University of Colorado we find the employment agreement between head football coach Dan Hawkins and the Regents of the University of Colorado (download PDF of agreement from link at end of article).
While the University of Colorado faculty has sported a field of several Nobel Prize winning chemists, physicists and climate scientists, (John Hall, Carl Wieman, Tom Cech, Eric Cornell, Susan Solomon, Tingjun Zhang), the university’s highest paid employee is (you guessed it) Dan Hawkins. In fact, C.U.’s football coach is the highest paid public employee in the state of Colorado; that is, he would be if C.U. were a public entity like other state agencies.
Base pay $1.1 million
His base pay for 2010-2011 is a tad over a million dollars, $1.1 million, and $200,000 of that comes from Nike, (page 8 of Employment Agreement). Coach Hawkins would top out at $2.3 million with unlikely performance bonuses, like if the Buffalos were to win the Big 12 (quarter million to Hawk) and then a national title (another quarter million to Hawk).
Coach Hawkins has some other perks that C.U.’s brilliant professors, lecturers and instructors can only dream about: a Boulder Country Club membership, a 50K incentive for academic progress of the team, 100K for keeping the team scandal-free (page 8 of Employment Agreement).
It only seems like a lot to offer. CU Athletic Department is quick to point out how poorly Coach Hawkins is paid as compared to head coaches in Kansas and Nebraska, and that the University of Texas football coach can make up to $6 million in any given national championship year, $3 million most years. Assistant coaches at C.U. make between $100K and $200K a year. Kansas Jayhawk assistant football coaches make between $150K and $300K in salary. [source: http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/football/2009-coaches-contracts-database.htm]
Wage disparity between assistant coaches and head coach Hawkins aside, equity issues, within Colorado higher education, and other public-gone-private sectors, deserve serious auditing before cutting more services to university students and the public at large.
As our elected political leaders like to remind us: with limited resources, we need to set priorities.
Joe Richey is an independent researcher, reporter and translator who has lived in Boulder off and on since 1980.
@Evan — The CU athletic department gets between 4 and 6 percent of its budget from the university. Otherwise, the $45 million budget is met from ticket sales, merchandising, media revenue streams and donations.
In return, the CU sports teams provide tangible marketing to potential students from around the country. (That fact is often disputed by people with an axe to grind against college athletics in general…another topic, I suppose).
And the notion of a library (or any other university entity) suffering because money is instead being channeled to CU’s football program is an old and wildly inaccurate myth.
Your memory is wrong about football revenue, as well. Football revenue is more than the football program’s expenditures. In fact, the football program pays many of the bills for the other varsity sports teams CU fields. (Maybe you’re thinking of basketball — the men’s and women’s programs have operated in the red for years).
As for the state of college football coaching salaries, they hit the stratosphere several years back, and despite economic hardships the past two years, show little sign of slowing, or even flattening. It’s ridiculous and difficult to figure how it can continue.
But I’m not convinced your “share the hardship” argument holds water, Joe. If the athletic department is self-supporting, how can anyone argue that any under the AD umbrella should take a hit just because the History Department has put on a hiring freeze?
Plus, the athletic department — the most ethnically and socio-economically diverse department on campus, I would bet — really, really depends on a competitive football program. Underpay in the current state of college sports and the team will suck even worse than it does now. Revenue will fall, the AD will drown in red ink and need a bailout from the university.
Or maybe it would go under altogether. And that’s probably what you would prefer, yes?
It’s deja vu all over again. I have a T-shirt from about 1980 which reads: “Boulder Junior College. Formerly a quality institution of higher learning.” Back then they were cutting library funding to fuel football madness. Boulder’s football fans are noted for their poor sportsmanship, terrorizing Nebraska families yearly.
Xman may be right. But I seem to remember an accounting which showed that the NET proceeds of football -AFTER its enormous expenses are deducted- was negative.
Unfortunately Football brings in more money than any other department at the University of Colorado. If say one of our Nobel Prize winning Physicists were to bring in 1.4 million dollars in revenue to CU for giving a speech, (Our game next year with Ohio State will bring in 1.4 million to the school) Then I think he/she would deserve more money, but alas it isn’t so.
As sad as you might think it is, Football is by far the biggest fundraiser and PR tool for the University of Colorado, and that is why we pay our football coach so much.
Football brings TV, radio, Newspapers, fans, alumni, and prospective students (of all kinds not just athletes) to Boulder and with it comes money, donations, and future CU grads who will hopefully some day win more Nobel prizes.
Basically the investment pays off big time, and the bigger the investment, the bigger the return.
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