The three members of the Regents panel hearing the matter will begin preparing their recommendation to the full 16-member board next month. The board will decide whether any or all of the Adelphi trustees should be removed. If the trustees are ousted, it will be only the third time in their 212-year history that the regents have removed trustees of private colleges. Adelphi has contended that the salary and benefits have been reasonable, and Nicholas Samios, director of Brookhaven National Laboratory and the last trustee to testify, echoed that theme. Samios said the university is in better financial shape now than when he joined the board in 1989.
Communications have to take place.
The committee's main witness yesterday was Lonnie Stevans, an associate professor of quantitative methods at Hofstra University, who was called to rebut the testimony last week by the university's compensation expert. Stevans, a faculty member at Adelphi until 1987, criticized the methodology used by consultant David Brown, who testified that the president's salary fell within a statistically reasonable level. Stevans criticized Brown for making an analysis of university presidents' salaries based on the size of the colleges' budgets, saying there was no significant correlation between those two factors. He said the comparison was invalid because average salaries were significantly higher for research universities and the number of colleges in each group was significantly different.