Ashland University Chancellor Fred Finks will be taking a terminal sabbatical for the next academic year, his last with AU. He will receive part, but not all, of his salary.

William Crothers, AU’s interim president, said Finks will not have any responsibilities during his final year at AU.

“It’s not uncommon, it’s more common than not, that presidents get a provision for a sabbatical after a certain period of time and he hadn’t had one yet so he’s just using it for his last time here,” Crothers said.

Finks said he did not ask for the sabbatical, but it was a provision in the contract he signed when he became AU’s president in 2006.

“The same accommodation was awarded to the prior two presidents,” Finks said in an email. “This was not something I requested but was offered as it had been done with the previous presidents.”

Lisa Miller, chair of AU’s Board of Trustees, said that the sabbatical was something earned throughout Finks’s time at AU, and it is normal to be taken at the end of a high-level administrator’s career.

“In my limited experience in higher education,” Miller said, “administration takes that on the way out.”

Miller has been on AU’s Board of Trustees since 1996.

According to an article written in 2006 for “Inside Higher Ed,” “Many colleges give their chief executives a sabbatical as they leave their jobs, usually to help them make the transition back to the faculty (though occasionally to entice them out of the president’s office). Statistics compiled by the American Council on Education in 2001 show that 17 percent of all presidential contracts had provisions calling for sabbaticals.”

Finks has been the chancellor at AU since July 1, a position that had not previously existed at AU. In August, Crothers said Finks would be responsible as chancellor for working with major donors to address the debt Ashland was facing.

“One of the challenges that he has on his plate as chancellor is to talk with the major donors to help address that issue,” he said in August. “He has a strategy, every day he wakes up thinking about that. He’s going after it, he’s out talking to key leadership people to address that. I think in time the debt will come down through gifts that he’s able to raise.”

Earlier this year, AU VP of Business Stephen Storck said the university was attempting to sell $40 million worth of bonds to pay down shorter-term debt that was not able to be paid down through donations as expected.

“If we had raised more money we could have paid down some of the bank loans with the money we raised,” Storck said in February.

Miller and Finks both would not say how much money Finks raised this year.

“Over this past year, I have been working very closely with major donors of the University in preparation for the transition to for Ashland’s next leader,” said Finks.    

Finks did say that the university raised $77 million during his tenure as president, $40 million of which he claims direct responsibility. He also claims to have reduced the university’s debt by $52 million.

However, according to AU’s IRS 990 forms, Finks inherited $62.3 million in debt when he became president in July of 2006. 

In May, 2013, the last available date, the university held $74.7 million in debt.

“We do have too much debt,” Crothers said in August. “We also have some first class buildings. The experience that students are getting is pretty positive, but we do have to manage that debt.”

The faculty at AU have the opportunity to apply for sabbatical leave as well. Called study leave, there are conditions tied to their approval.

“When faculty are granted a sabbatical (we call them “study leaves”) it is with the assumption that they will engage in a project that will challenge them intellectually and bring benefit to the University,” Gordon Swain said in an email. He is a professor of mathematics and the outgoing president of faculty senate.

Finks said in an email that he would “continue my research and writing on the topic of Servant Leadership which is of great interest to me.” He also noted he is a tenured professor in leadership at the Ashland Theological Seminary. 

“There always may be good reasons for things and I wouldn’t want to judge those particular reasons as applied to particular people because, for example, faculty go on study leave all the time,” Jeff Sikkenga said. 

He is a professor of political science and the incoming faculty senate president. “So I don’t judge why that faculty member got a study leave. That’s not my place. The university makes that judgment. I respect that judgment with faculty members, as with everybody.”

“It’s important, in making those judgments, that the university be making them on the value of that activity to the good of the university, and that it talk about that in such a way as to show what that value is so that everyone is being treated according to the same principles, and that those principles are your contribution of value to the good of the university.”