Officials with the University of Missouri and its Kansas City campus said the $264,000 salary Frank Horton would get to lead UMKC’s School of Biological Sciences is on par with administrators of his caliber and necessary to further the campus’s life-sciences efforts.

Some in Columbia, however, said while Horton’s salary might not be exorbitant given his background and mission, the amount might increase public angst about UM spending.

“My first reaction to it is I hate seeing news like this when the university is so underfunded, and we’re cutting so much at the undergraduate level,” said Rob Weagley, chairman of the consumer and family economics department at the University of Missouri-Columbia and of the MU Resource Advisory Council.

“I’m losing positions in my department, so it’s difficult for me to understand those high salaries,” he said.

UMKC Chancellor Martha Gilliland announced Horton’s hiring and salary last week. His $264,000 annual salary exceeds Gilliland’s and that of UM President Manuel Pacheco.

Gilliland said Monday the campus is committed to Horton for only six months, though extending his stay has not been ruled out.

Horton has been chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and president of Oklahoma University and the University of Toledo. He was most recently interim president at Southern Illinois University.

At UMKC, Horton will have major responsibilities, Gilliland said. First, he must lead the school, help faculty develop their agendas and integrate those agendas with the life-sciences missions of UMKC, Kansas City and the rest of the state. He’ll also chair an internal task force charged with helping focus and advance UMKC’s life-sciences mission.

“We are at UMKC taking the approach with the budget cuts of really focusing our resources with the vital few areas which we are trying to achieve in connection with the city,” Gilliland said.

Horton’s appointment adds to controversy dogging the biological sciences school. Gilliland demoted the school’s longtime dean in May 2001. This year, she suspended the search for a replacement.

In May, UMKC Provost Steve Ballard told biology professors he might dissolve the school despite its stature as one of the institution’s top recipients of federal research money. The school’s professors, Ballard said, focused too much on research and failed to cooperate with others on campus.

State Rep. Chuck Graham, D-Columbia, said Horton’s presence could help the school garner grants and research money.