How to wreck a Cleveland institution (part 10)
NewsThis is the letter that went out to professors and employees at the Cleveland Institute of Music, telling them their pay and jobs are to be cut while the boss Paul Hogle (pic) takes home a big bonus.
In yesterday’s letter to the employees, President Hogle reported on actions required to improve CIM’s budget for this new academic year.
The Board of Trustees has now approved the FY25 budget, which includes a pay reduction for the school’s top leadership,certain staff vacancy freezes, a temporary hiring cool-down, and matching faculty compensation to reduced teaching loads due to lower enrollment. Without diminishing the seriousness or personal impact, these actions affect a handful of colleagues.
Compensation and benefits were the final remaining actions required to address this year‘s operating budget. While there is much work still to be done, the Board and Staff Leadership, alongside the Business Model Taskforce, is working hard in hopes that this solution will only impact this fiscal year.
Regarding employee salaries and wages, the Board has decided that it is not possible this year to offer across-the-board raises. This means our salaries and wage rates for the new academic year remain the same as last year for faculty and staff.
Regarding benefits, after several weeks of discussion about arange of possibilities still needed to achieve budgetary goals, we have also decided to suspend this year‘s CIM contribution/match to full-time employees’ retirement funds. This suspension will be in effect as of September 1.
Freezing compensation and suspending the retirement match were not decisions that the Board and Leadership made lightlyor without regard for their impact on employees; to the contrary, we believed that these choices were the best among a series of potentially even more difficult options.
If you have questions about how this affects you, please feel free to reach out to either of us.
Tammie Belton
Vice President of People and Culture
Brian Foss
Chief Financial Officer
I am so glad that I no longer work for that messed up organization!!! Hopefully others see the writing on the wall and have escape plans, too.
“Vice President of People and Culture”
????????
Perhaps “Fearless Leader” was trademarked by the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show.
People’s commissar for culture?
Hey Tammie, remember when you emailed all the faculty this summer and promised benefits wouldn’t be cut? Hope selling out all your integrity and destroying the well being of countless students and faculty the last few years has been worth that paycheck!
The letter’s not even signed by Paul. Way to make your underlings bear the brunt of a message that should have been sent by the man at the top.
This has been Paul’s move lately. He sends his VP and Deans to make calls telling renowned faculty members they will need to work less and get paid less. When the faculty push back against it, they have to end the conversation and plan to follow up because the man in charge isn’t part of the call.
Everybody gets a pay cut, but the boss gets a bonus. It’s the American way!!
Let’s not forget the role of Scott Harrison, a failure of a Provost who has more Title IX complaints from young Asian women than he has years of experience in higher education.
How common is it for an institution in the hole to not even match retirement funds?? “Matching faculty compensation to reduced teaching loads due to lower enrollment” is also hilarious. The administration drives away students with their “leadership” then tells the faculty they are responsible for the financial consequences. Pathetic.
think there’s a small typo… should read “Paul Hogle (pig)”
that is rather unfair, to pigs who are lovely and playful. I do wish people would stop comparing monsters to animals. I get your point, but leave innocent animals out of it.
Enrollment is down? What could be the reason?
This just gets worse and worse. They speak of “lower enrollment” but several years ago the school made the deliberate decision to cut the size of the student body. (BTW, they’re now bragging that they had a record number of applications for the 24-25 school year.) Seems like the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.
It appears that both hands are busy mutually servicing those in the C-suite.
Vice president of people & culture???? c’mon …
While we can’t fix stupid, Cleveland, duct tape can muffle the noise.
Does anyone know if President Hogle’s salary was also cut since he is “top leadership”?
How can they take huge raises, blow money on a “moonshot,” jettison their best faculty, and then, with a straight face, wonder why enrollment is down…
Why, weren’t they bragging about great enrollment just a few months ago?
When will someone finally pull the plug?
(Or will we just pray with Paul and his wife? Because that always works out just fine, right…?)
Thoughts and prayers Cleveland, thoughts and prayers.
A number of illustrious musicians and teachers have held Hogle’s present position: Ernest Bloch, Victor Babin, David Cerone, Joel Smirnoff.
From Hogle’s bio at the CIM website: BS degree in music management from the University of Evansville.
Stints at various tier 2 orchestras.
NEC hired a lawyer some years ago who turned the school around.
This Hogle character has had the opposite effect on the CIM. He seems to be hell bent on following through with his goals, once audacious, and now destructive.
Recent faculty hires from Detroit Symphony? Firing renowned faculty from Cleveland Orchestra?
Hogle’s bio boasts a 338% increase in minority (black/‘Latinx’) students. What does that mean? Is Hogle an ultra right winger who is using diversity measures to demonstrate “go woke, go broke”? One must hope not. Race should not be used for marketing; the institution is crumbling at his helm and yet his bio emphasizes race issues.
The only way to Carnegie: Practice.
What is a ‘ Vice President of People and Culture’?
Perhaps they should hire a copy editor..
I don’t know anyone connected with Cleveland Institute of Music, and have no way to independently verify what is happening there, or why.
But every time I read these slippedisc reports about CIM, I think of my wife.
As a young university professor, she was hired to build a program in an area of visual design. And build it she did. The program grew and grew, was allocated additional studio space, added faculty, and over the course of decades achieved a fine reputation in the field. Some of its graduates are now professors themselves at other universities.
Then the dean and department head got the idea to change the program’s focus, i.e., to narrow it to a single specialty. She argued strenuously against this, as a result of which they began to view her as a troublemaker.
Bottom line: The administrators did everything she had advised against, and the results were exactly what she had predicted. Enrollment fell off, studio space was lost to greedier programs, and after she retired, the program’s younger faculty found themselves similarly unable to persuade administration, and quit, even though they’d been on tenure track. Almost 40 years after its founding, the program had ceased to exist.
So when I read these CIM stories, they feel familiar, and I am always reminded that it takes a long time to build something fine, but not much time at all for wrongheaded administrators to wreck it.
Postscript: As is so often typical of such executive types, the administrators who destroyed the program then moved on to other positions.
Hoping matters settle quickly so that CIM regains its statue (though it had been damaged before Paul Hogle arrived to right the ship.) Hoping the students are not further hurt.
… also did I miss that Hogle was getting a bonus? Where is that?
That information comes from the schools 2023 tax forms–they’re public, and show both Hogle and Scott Harrison receiving raises of ~$200,000 each (tripling Harrison’s previous ~$100k salary, and taking Hogle up to around ~$800k). This email does state that top administration will be taking a pay cut, and since the raises were from last year’s taxes, it’s possible that that is actually true. Although I’d be impressed if they took a cut any bigger than the raises they took last year. Seems almost like they grabbed a sack of cash while they could just so that their “pay cut” will only take them back to their usual salary.
That was likely Harrison’s first year, so if he started in September, you’d expect the next year (the first full year) to be 3x. It also makes sense as $100k doesn’t seem right, especially since those numbers usually include travel expenses and other costs.