Chemical Society Draws Fire for Leader’s High Pay

TOXIC PAY: Ten academic scientists have sent a letter of protest to the American Chemical Society’s weekly newsmagazine objecting to the more than $750,000 that the group’s executive director earned in 2002.

“ACS is a professional society, not a for-profit corporation, and yet the 2002 salary of then-executive director John K. Crum was $586,360,” said the letter, which appeared in Chemical & Engineering News. The letter noted that expenses and bonuses raised Mr. Crum’s total compensation to $767,834.

The letter was signed by such scientists as Cornell University’s Roald Hoffmann, a Nobel Prize winner, and Robert G. Bergman of the University of California at Berkeley. “What they’re paying the executive director is arguably twice what university presidents are paid,” said Mr. Bergman in an interview. “Being the president of a university ... has a lot of stresses and strains with it that in my view are not present in the ACS directorship.”

In a letter of response, James D. Burke, chairman of the society’s Board of Directors, wrote that the ACS surveys the salaries offered by employers like the society, which has 159,000 members, annual revenue of $420-million, and $1-billion in assets. “We are right where we ought to be,” he wrote, to attract “the kind of people we’re trying to recruit at the executive level.”

http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 51, Issue 2, Page A19