Rutgers has $3M prof, but most faculty earn less than $50G

• Highest paid employees at Rutgers are doctors and athletic coaches.
• Most faculty members earn less than %2450%2C000 a year.
• Rutgers payroll is %241.58 billion.

The highest paid employee at Rutgers University is not the institution's president or even the head football coach.

That distinction belongs to Robert Heary, a surgeon at the university's teaching hospital in Newark, who earned $3.14 million -- a majority of which comes from practicing medicine, not tuition or state money.

In fact, all but seven of the 69 employees who earned more than $500,000 last year are faculty members or administrators at the university's medical schools. Three of the 17 Rutgers employees who got million-dollar paychecks are athletic coaches. University President Robert Barchi got $650,000.

The July 2013 state higher education restructuring, which led to the breakup of University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and the merger of Rutgers with Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway and New Brunswick and the New Jersey Medical School in Newark, created a bigger, more expensive bureaucracy with a payroll last year of $1.58 billion. The payroll was $876 million in 2012.

But the real story of Rutgers' massive payroll may not be at the top, but at the bottom. Half of the 24,829 workers collecting paychecks from Rutgers earned less than $50,000 last year, according to a review of salary data by MyCentralJersey.com.

Many of the lowest-paid workers at Rutgers are the faculty members teaching the state university's 65,500 students. The median gross salary last year of the more than 2,400 part-time lecturers at Rutgers was $8,727, according to the data review.

The disparity in the payroll was the focus of a campaign Wednesday afternoon by the faculty union, which fanned across the university's campuses in Camden, Newark, New Brunswick and Piscataway to raise awareness about the plight of part-time lecturers (PTLs), who teach a sizable portion of the university's courses but are paid as little as $4,800 a class each semester.

PTLs are considered contingent faculty, which also includes adjunct professors and graduate and teaching assistants. These faculty members are not always entitled to health benefits or the tenure, or job security, afforded to full-time professors.

The use of low-paid, part-time lecturers or adjuncts is common in higher education. At Rutgers, more than 37 percent of courses are taught by someone who is not a full-time faculty member. These part-time teachers often have other jobs, teaching courses at other colleges or universities.

The faculty union, the Rutgers Council of the American Association of University Professors and American Federation of Teachers (AUUP-AFT), and the university are set to negotiate terms for a new adjunct contract.

"Most students and families have no idea that the immense majority of classes are taught by academic instructors off the tenure track," said Joe Richard, a project organizer for Rutgers AAUP-AFT. Some of these PTLs teach four classes a semester and have no chance at tenure and don't have the resources for research and professional development. Imagine every three months having to apply for your job. It's outrageous."

A university spokesman did not immediately return a request seeking comment on the union's campaign Wednesday.

The salary data also shows:

•3,886 employees earned at least $100,000.

•The median salary of the more than 3,700 tenured professors, not including directors or deans, was $121,467.

•The median salary for nearly 1,100 teaching assistants was $25,924, while the median for nearly 560 graduate assistants was $45,520.

Heary, the neurosurgery professor at NJMS and director of the Spine Center and of the Neurosurgical Intensive Care Unit, earned a base salary last year of $208,000 but was paid more than $2.9 million more.

But Heary and other highly paid professionals at the Rutgers medical schools are not the typical state workers, a Rutgers official explained, because some of their compensation comes from medical insurance reimbursements for their medical work.

Professors also are responsible for millions of dollars in grants awarded to the university each year.

University officials were unable to detail by Wednesday afternoon how much of the doctors' salaries are public money versus insurance payments after MyCentralJersey.com requested a breakdown on Monday.

Top earners at Rutgers in 2014

Staff Writer Sergio Bichao: 908-243-6615; sbichao@mycentraljersey.com