By Sara Hebel

Joyce Hesselberth for The Chronicle

Divisions grew on many campuses in 2012-13. Administrators and faculty members clashed over the direction of their institutions. And disparities in working conditions between segments of the professoriate persisted or increased, with full-time adjuncts continuing to earn far less than their tenured counterparts, and public-college professors falling even further behind their peers at private colleges in pay.

Dozens of votes of “no confidence” in campus leaders were taken over the past year by faculty and other groups.

Among officials who encountered widespread discontent was John E. Sexton, president of New York University, whose critics complained that he had foisted his vision upon the university without engaging faculty members as true partners. Some professors questioned the educational quality of the university’s programs overseas, and many railed against its large-scale redevelopment plan, which would turn Greenwich Village, where many faculty members live, into a construction zone for nearly two decades.

The president received support from some professors and also retained the backing of the university’s Board of Trustees. But the decision of faculty members in the School of Arts & Science, and several other schools, to vote no confidence in him “is an indication,” one professor said, “of the sense of crisis that people have.”

Elsewhere, no-confidence votes preceded leaders’ departures. In December the provost at Saint Louis University, who received votes of no confidence from faculty and students, announced he would resign his leadership post and return to the faculty. The provost, Manoj Patankar, was the face of a controversial posttenure-review proposal, which was eventually shelved. The university’s president, the Rev. Lawrence Biondi, also drew no-confidence rebukes from faculty members and students. Father Biondi had maintained the support of his board but announced in May that he planned to retire.

In North Dakota, the State Board of Higher Education voted unanimously in June to buy out the contract of Hamid A. Shirvani, the chancellor, ending his turbulent tenure, which lasted just under a year. He was dogged by a rocky relationship with campus leaders, no-confidence votes, complaints to accreditors, and allegations that he had circumvented open-records laws.

Not a Steppingstone

As full-time faculty fought for more influence in governance on many campuses, adjunct instructors sought, in some cases, any say at all.

Contingent professors, both part-time and full-time, regularly attend department meetings at many institutions; some are even allowed to vote. But it is rare for contingent professors to have a full voice on universitywide faculty senates.

In 2013, many part-time instructors were also facing cuts in their work hours ahead of a federal mandate, set to take effect in 2014, that will require large employers to provide health benefits to employees who work 30 or more hours a week.

At the same time, new data on the working conditions of people who teach full time off the tenure track—who account for nearly 40 percent of the full-time academic work force—presented a bleak picture of their prospects for moving up.

Nearly 40 percent of about 7,500 full-time instructors surveyed by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, a group of higher-education and scholarly-discipline associations, said they had been teaching off the tenure track for at least a decade, according to a report released in April by the American Association of University Professors.

Eighty percent of those surveyed were 36 or older. Their annual pay—which averaged about $47,500 in 2010, the year the survey was conducted—was much better than that of part-time adjuncts. But they still earned substantially less than tenure-rank faculty members, who made an average of $84,332 in 2010.

“People are often told this is a steppingstone, when it’s not,” said Maria C. Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority, a national group that represents contingent faculty members.

Other inequities in faculty pay also continued. The gap, for example, between what public and private colleges pay their professors continued to grow. The average salary across all faculty ranks at private colleges was $99,771 in 2012-13, compared with $80,578 at public colleges, according to the AAUP. Faculty at private institutions had a pay increase of 2.4 percent from the previous academic year, compared with 1.3 percent at public colleges.

Presidents’ Pay

Meanwhile, among private-college presidents who led institutions with budgets exceeding $50-million, the median compensation was $397,860 in 2010, according to a Chronicle analysis of the most recent federal tax filings. That figure represented a 3.1-percent increase over 2009. Thirty-six private-college presidents earned more than $1-million in 2010.

At public institutions, four presidents earned more than $1-million in 2011-12, according to the latest Chronicle analysis of pay for those leaders. The median total compensation for public-college leaders rose to $441,392, an increase of 4.7 percent from 2010-11.

The top earner was Graham B. Spanier, of Pennsylvania State University at University Park, who received $2.9-million. He was fired in 2011 “without cause” after a child-sex-abuse scandal involving Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach, came to light. Mr. Spanier received most of his money in severance pay and deferred compensation, which is money he earned during his 16-year presidency that was not previously paid out. In the fall of 2012, Mr. Spanier was charged with conspiring to cover up child-abuse allegations against the coach. He has pleaded not guilty.

The first public-college president to cross the million-dollar threshold, in 2007-8, E. Gordon Gee, of Ohio State University, was the third-highest-paid public-college president in the nation in 2011-12. He received $1.9-million that academic year.

In June, Mr. Gee, who was 69, said that he would retire in less than a month, after having spent nearly half of his life as a college president. He stepped down shortly after apologizing for jokes he had made at the expense of Roman Catholics and of various universities in athletics conferences outside of the Big Ten, although Mr. Gee played down the notion that he was leaving because of his verbal gaffes.

His retirement was part of a larger generational shift across higher education. Older presidents are retiring, often after lengthy tenures. All three of California’s public-college systems, for instance, were undergoing leadership transitions in 2012-13. And the top job changed hands at several Ivy League institutions, including Dartmouth College, Princeton University, and Yale University.