Embattled Brown University president Christina Paxson recently took home a staggering 74% pay raise –as President Trump blasted the school for their lack of security measures after the deadly campus shooting.
Paxson scored a salary of more than $3.1 million in 2023, a huge boost from the $1.8 million she raked in a year earlier, according to 2024 tax filings, the latest available, reviewed by The Brown Daily Herald.
A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Paxson, 65, has been at the helm of the prestigious Providence institution since 2012 — with her annual salary increasing 700% from her initial $394,000.
Paxson was the second-highest paid Ivy League leader in 2023, trailing only Columbia’s Lee Bollinger, who made $3.5 million.
She is the second highest-paid Brown employee, behind vice president and chief investment officer Jane Dietze, who made $3.2 million.
She has been under fire since the Dec. 13 school shooting, which saw two students killed, nine wounded, and suspected gunman Claudio Neves Valente, 48, waltz out of campus without a single Brown University security guard confronting him.
“We don’t know how this person got in,” she said during a news conference this week. “We don’t know when they came in. We do know that the building was unlocked that day.”
When pressed by one reporter over the lack of cameras in the school’s Barus & Holley Engineering building, Paxson refused to take responsibility for the obvious security oversight.
“We’ll look at everything that was done but I do not think a lack of cameras in that building had anything to do with what happened there,” Paxson claimed.
President Trump disagreed with that assessment and blasted Brown for being unprepared.
“Why did Brown University have so few Security Cameras? There can be no excuse for that. In the modern age, it just doesn’t get worse!!!,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Dec. 17.
The criticism came just months after the Trump administration threatened to withhold $501 million in federal funding in an effort to reign in the woke policies of the Ocean State institution.
Paxson caved to Trump on July 30, agreeing to commit $50 million over 10 years to “workforce development organizations” in Rhode Island, end programs that promote race-based outcomes, and maintain gender exclusive facilities and sports teams on campus.