EDINBURG — Fifteen years ago University of Texas Rio Grande Valley President Guy Bailey learned a lesson: If he wanted full control over at least a portion of a university system’s assets, one way is to make good use of annual bonuses.
“The first time I was ever offered a bonus — I think I was in Kansas City at the time — I was starting to decline (the money) and my boss said, ‘Look if you want to determine how this money is spent you need to accept the bonus. It’s going to be spent someway anyway and if the money goes to you, you can do something good with it,’” Bailey recalls.
Since then, Bailey said he has not declined a single annual bonus, accepting these instead to give it back to the university has worked for at the time. That has been the case the last two years as UTRGV’s president.
A few weeks ago the UT Board of Regents approved Bailey’s $102,000 bonus, which he accepted. And this year’s bonus represented a nearly 90 percent increase from his initial year in which he received $54,000 — this on top of his $600,000 annual salary.
“If I didn’t take the money it wouldn’t go to support scholarships, I don’t know where it would go, but it wouldn’t go for that,” Bailey said.
Using these bonuses Bailey supported existing scholarship funds at UTRGV and this year he named a classroom in the school of medicine building after his mother, Emily Henryette Bailey, who recently turned 90 years old.
Bailey has donated nearly $150,000 to scholarship funds at UTRGV to help undergraduate and graduate students from any college, said Kelly Cronin, vice president for institutional advancement. But the new school of medicine scholarship will be specific to medicine students and awarded at the discretion of the dean, she added.
“He’s never taken a bonus since he arrived… He’s always put it directly into scholarships,” Cronin said. “One of them is for need-base, financially, and one of them is for merit and he just wants to help as many students as he can. It’s pretty unbelievable.”
Throughout the years Bailey said he has also endowed scholarships at UT- San Antonio, University of Missouri Kansas City and Texas Tech, which he continues to support to this day. They are all named after various members of his family, he said, but none under his name.
“A great incentive not to move, since I continue to support those scholarships, is that it gets expensive,” Bailey said jokingly.
UTRGV is currently looking for various ways to afford pay raises, including a “soft hiring freeze.” Bailey said he knew news of him accepting the bonus at this time might be frowned upon. But for him the decision was still simple, he said, because his goal is to continue growing the scholarships he has opened through the years.
His previous donations have been kept private in the past, he said. But as UTRGV experiences growing pains, keeping quiet wasn’t an option.
“It’s a real privilege for me to help students go to school,” he said. “I was a first generation student and we have a lot of first generation students, and helping those kids go to school is very important to me.”
