Steep salary of Rutgers medical school chair stirs fresh fears of Newark, New Brunswick inequities

In the realm of university finances, the eye-popping pay of football coaches often grabs all the public attention and ire.

But the lucrative compensation package Rutgers University recently offered a doctor to helm the neurosurgery departments at its two medical schools has fueled long-simmering resentments over the controversial, ongoing merger of those two campuses.

Rutgers administrators hired Dr. Robert Gross, a neurosurgeon, last year to chair the neurosurgery departments at its Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick and New Jersey Medical School in Newark, offering him $2.18 million — plus a performance-contingent bonus that could push his annual compensation over $2.5 million.

That’s more than his predecessor, Anil Nanda, pocketed. It’s more than twice what Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway or Biomedical and Health Sciences Chancellor Brian Strom make.

It’s also well over the average national pay for chairs at public medical schools, which is about $1.1 million, said Dio Tsitouras, who heads the AAUP-BHSNJ union that represents Rutgers’ medical faculty.

“Dr. Gross’ compensation is unusually high,” Tsitouras said. “I don’t cast any aspersions on Dr. Gross; I’ve never met him. My concern is what is a proper management decision if you’re keeping the interests of students and patients in mind.”

Enormous salaries for top college administrators are neither new nor unique to Rutgers.

But Gross’ appointment comes less than a year after faculty went on a weeklong strike for fairer, better wages, a labor dispute that exposed inequities between salaries paid at Rutgers’ New Brunswick campus and its campuses in Newark and Camden, which serve more Black and brown students.

It also comes seven months after the Board of Governors voted to merge Rutgers’ two medical schools, a process that will take five years to complete and which critics continue to fight.

Doctors, community leaders, and other critics objected to the merger largely over fears Rutgers administrators would divert resources from University Hospital — the underfunded, public teaching hospital in Newark where Rutgers medical students learn — to RWJBarnabas, the private health care system that runs the teaching hospital in New Brunswick.

In their July 2023 offer letter to Gross, Rutgers administrators told him he could collect a 15% annual bonus for hitting targets that would be set by the medical school deans “in partnership with RWJBH.” They also noted that one of his titles would be senior vice president for neurosurgical services at RWJBarnabas Health and directed him to recruit three to five neurosurgeons during his first two years on the job “based on the needs of RWJBH clinical practice.”

That RWJBarnabas focus fed critics’ fears that University Hospital would lose out in a merger.

“If I’m financially incentivized to make sure a certain number of cases are being done in either St. Barnabas hospital or Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in New Brunswick, but I don’t get any bonus money if something’s gotten done in University Hospital in Newark, then the financial incentives basically set this up so that University Hospital is essentially competing against those Barnabas hospitals,” Tsitouras said.

Rutgers spokeswoman Megan Florance said the university’s commitment to both hospitals “remains strong, and our relationship with these institutions will remain unchanged.”

A pledge to Newark

Although Newark’s city hospital dates back to the 1880s, many people talk about University Hospital’s history in the context of the 1967 uprising.

Part of that civil unrest stemmed from public officials’ plans to build a medical school and hospital in a Black neighborhood in Newark, driving residents from their homes. In the resulting Newark Accords, officials agreed to a smaller footprint for the new medical facilities and committed to promoting public health in the state’s largest city indefinitely.

The 519-bed hospital has become a key institution regionally as North Jersey’s only Level 1 trauma center, which means it provides comprehensive, round-the-clock care for people with the most severe injuries or illnesses. More than 100,000 people visit its emergency room annually.

That’s why University Hospital’s current struggles especially rankle, said Dr. Catherine Mazzola, a pediatric neurosurgeon who works and teaches there.

Since Rutgers took over the medical school in Newark in 2013, Mazzola said, “what we’ve noticed is that many of the resources that we had at University Hospital have been redirected to other hospitals in the Rutgers system.”

Pediatric and specialty services have been cut, and the hospital has struggled with staffing shortages, Mazzola said.

Deteriorating facility conditions prompted hospital administrators to ask the state for more funding in the 2025 state budget to fund repairs and upgrades, hospital president and CEO Ed Jimenez said through a spokeswoman.

“University Hospital is experiencing an acute need for wholesale facility improvements as the result of the age and the outdated nature of the campus infrastructure,” Jimenez said.

Gov. Phil Murphy included $40 million for University Hospital’s capital needs in the budget proposal he announced earlier this week. Treasury spokespeople didn’t have details on what that funding is for, and Jimenez didn’t know either.

“University Hospital eagerly awaits additional information on that pot of funding,” he said.

But that bump isn’t a sure thing — legislators must approve Murphy’s spending proposal, and the details could change vastly by June 30, their deadline to approve a new budget.

Besides, the hospital needs far more funding than that. It released a master plan last year identifying $1.8 billion in facility improvements needed to ensure “a safer environment of care,” Jimenez said.

University Hospital’s struggles bely the commitment the state made to the people of Newark in the 1968 accords, Mazzola said.

“The state promised the people in Newark the highest level of care,” Mazzola said. “By pulling resources out of University Hospital, this is breaking a promise. It’s letting people down on a commitment that was made.”

It’s not just faculty and union leaders sounding the alarm.

Junius Williams, a longtime Newark resident, activist, and historian, said he has watched with concern as the merger — first proposed in 2019 — advanced.

“There’s an African proverb that says when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. So we don’t want to get trampled,” Williams said. “The medical school agreement of 1968 assured the community that the hospital associated with the medical school would be engaged in the proper care for the people of Newark, so long as that hospital is fully budgeted. So we’re keeping an eye on things. We want to make sure that the hospital improves.”

Three Democratic state lawmakers who represent Essex County also voiced objections to the merger in a letter they sent to Board of Governors chair William Best in July.

“The existence of separate medical schools in Newark and New Brunswick has allowed each institution to thrive and succeed independently,” Sen. Teresa Ruiz and Assemblywomen Eliana Pintor-Marin and Shanique Speight wrote. “Merging these schools would likely result in a disproportionate allocation of resources, with increased investment in New Brunswick at the expense of Newark.”

Newark’s medical school actually has gotten slightly more state support annually than New Brunswick’s, although that gap has been narrowing since 2018, according to a January 2023 report by Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences.

But the same report shows that New Brunswick medical school has a lower student-to-teacher ratio and rakes in far more money from RWJBarnabas under an affiliation agreement, with New Brunswick and Piscataway getting $51 million in 2022, compared to just over $2 million in Newark.

And more broadly, Rutgers’ New Brunswick campus in general receives far more state funding — $260 million last year — compared to its Camden and Newark campuses, which got $40 million to split, Ruiz, Speight, and Pintor-Marin noted in their letter.

Florance, the Rutgers spokeswoman, said merging the medical schools “will create co-equal bodies under a single accreditation to be known as Rutgers School of Medicine.”

Faculty, staff, and students from both medical schools are represented on an advisory committee and task forces the schools’ leaders created to carry out the merger, Florance added.

But critics have heard that “co-equal” claim before — and they don’t believe it.

“If you’re going to share resources, you can’t ignore Newark. The people of Newark deserve to get great quality care, just like everybody else,” Mazzola said. “But in my opinion, University Hospital is being treated like the stepchild of this whole house. They’re not getting the same resources.”