Ohio State faculty and staff received an e-mail Wednesday that said a newspaper has requested public records about employee salaries and that the paper is planning to publish a series about spending at OSU.
Larry Lewellen, vice president of the office of Human Resources, sent the e-mail, stating that the expected series in The Columbus Dispatch will focus on OSU’s growth in personnel and salaries. In the e-mail, he said that OSU has added more than 6,000 positions to build nationally recognized programs. OSU media relations director Jim Lynch said these jobs have been added over the last 10 years.
Lewellen cited the expansion of the Ohio State University Medical Center, the success of OSU athletics and the competition to retain and bring in new staff as the main reasons for the increases.
Admissions at the medical center have grown almost 68 percent, surgeries are up 57 percent and research funding has increased by almost 170 percent, according to the e-mail.
“It should be no surprise that we have added almost 4,800 jobs to support the increase in services offered,” Lewellen said.
He also defended increased salaries and expansion within the Department of Athletics, the largest self-supporting program in the nation. He said the program has contributed millions of dollars to OSU.
Natalie Boyne, a senior lecturer in the School of Communications, said that the preemptive e-mail puts the facts out there in an honest way.
Boyne said that the goal of the e-mail is to answer any questions that the faculty and staff might have before they arise.
“The last thing you want is when employees are making up their own theories about situations like this,” Boyne said.
Lynch said that The Dispatch has been investigating OSU’s spending for 10 months.
Alan Miller, managing editor of The Dispatch, said that requests for such information are not unusual.
“Barely a day goes by that we don’t report something about at least one facet of Ohio State – from academics to science to medicine to business to sports,” Miller said in an e-mail. He did not say whether The Dispatch was planning to publish any stories about OSU employee compensation or whether the paper is investigating spending at other universities.
Evan Winkofsky can be reached at [email protected].
