The City University of New York doled out fat raises to top administrators, with two honchos getting an extra $90,000 a year.
Hector Batista, the public university system’s chief operating officer, saw his salary go from $330,000 to $420,000 — a 27% increase — after the Board of Trustees approved the hikes last month.
Batista, a former non-profit executive who has been with CUNY since July 2019, also gets a car and is driven by various university peace officers, an insider said.
Derek Davis, the senior vice counsel and general counsel who came to CUNY in 2019 from Harvard Law School, got a 30% bump from $300,000 to $390,000.
The board also approved double-digit raises for other administrators, including 15% hikes for vice chancellors Doriane Gloria and Maria Junco Galletti.
The raises for the four executives were retroactive to Dec. 31, 2021, according to university documents.
The salary hikes come as CUNY’s enrollment has declined, falling to 243,000 in fall 2021 from 271,000 two years earlier.
The state budget approved by Gov. Hochul in April included an extra $1.2 billion for CUNY over the previous year, which the university said would go to hiring more faculty, tuition assistance and other programs. But The Post has reported the university’s security department can’t attract enough officers because of poor pay.
“They’d rather take care of themselves than worry about the safety of students and staff,” one insider groused of the executive raises.
Another employee noted that “enrollment is down across the university and they’re lining their pockets.”
CUNY adjuncts, who teach many of the university’s classes, have also long advocated for better pay.
“If the CUNY Board of Trustees believes management deserves raises this big, then surely our underpaid full-time faculty and staff, and our adjunct faculty who often struggle to afford even basic living expenses in NYC, deserve a substantial raise in the next contract,” said Penny Lewis, secretary of the Professional Staff Congress, the faculty union.
A CUNY spokesman said the university’s “executive compensation plan is periodically reviewed to make sure our senior staff’s earnings are on par with other public higher education institutions locally and nationally.”
“We are in a challenging job market and CUNY recognizes that it must remain competitive in order to recruit and retain talented leaders particularly as we work to boost pandemic-related enrollment drops and get New Yorkers the help they need to return to college,” the spokesman said.
