Chronicle of Higher Education

Tim Foley, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, surveyed academics about the issue of astronomical pay for public-university presidents, noting that the median pay for public-university presidents in the Chronicle's most recent survey reached $436,111, while the highest-paid president, E. Gordon Gee at Ohio State University, made more than $1.5-million (Gee was the only president in the survey to top the million-dollar figure.)


Two of those surveyed - both not surprisingly from the University of California system - identified the larger issue as declining state support of public education tied to the increasing corporatization and privatization of the university, and responded with an innovative proposal to tie the pay of public-university presidents to the level of state aid received, and a call for "visionary leadership that is able to inspire ordinary Americans as well as our elected representatives to invest in our collective future."


Christopher Newfield, professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara:
Public universities should not have second- and third-class resources by comparison to their private kin. So public-university presidents should not have systematically lower salaries. Many public-university presidents manage larger and more complicated institutions than do their private counterparts. They do it with less money to go around. They have genuinely tough jobs, and that needs to be factored in.


Yet it’s hard to see the big payoffs from the big salaries. This well-paid generation of public-university presidents has presided over the largest per-student public-financing decline in modern American history. If we wanted real performance pay, we would tie presidential salaries not to private fund raising but to the current level of state support. If a president is there while state financing is cut to 1999 levels, then the presidential salary gets rewound to the same time and place.


The real question for presidential pay is this: What does it do to the presidential ability to imagine and rebuild public higher education? A president making $50,000 to $100,000 per month is insulated from the struggling world his decisions create. A president who measures success in private donations has to answer to private donors. A president who thinks a public university should look like a business may spend 10 years—true story—growing the ranks of senior staff members four times faster than the ranks of professors. A president who is dependent on industry winds up speaking in the language of advertising.


Public universities desperately need to be readied for takeoff, for something that inspires their publics, for their true role in the salvation of humanity and of the natural world. Public universities need to find presidents who care about these things far more than they care about the marking to market of executive salaries.


Ananya Roy, professor of comparative urban studies and international development at the University of California at Berkeley:
The debate about pay packages of public-university chief executives is a distraction. The more urgent question at hand is whether or not these executives are willing and able to wage the struggle necessary to maintain the American public university. That requires more than the sacrificial gestures of these executives—the self-imposed pay reductions, the payback of bonuses. It requires much more than the usual repertoire of fund raising from donors and alumni, much more than the efforts to remake universities as “lean and mean” teaching and research machines.


The struggle for the American public university requires visionary leadership that is able to inspire ordinary Americans as well as our elected representatives to invest in our collective future. It means making a convincing case as to why public universities, with their mandates of access and inclusion, remain an important pathway of socioeconomic mobility, especially in the context of growing income and wealth inequality in America. It means demonstrating how and why the knowledge produced in such universities serves the public interest. It means sparking and leading a national debate about policy priorities—after all, how much do we as a nation spend on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?


As an alumna and member of the faculty of the University of California, I do not begrudge our chief executives their salaries. But I want to see them in the trenches of Sacramento and Washington—alongside faculty members, students, and staff members—making the case for state financing. I want to see them strike alliances with other public-university systems that are facing cuts and create a nationwide movement around educational justice. I want to see them forge solidarity with California’s community colleges and schools, the gateway institutions that face a fate even more fragile than that of well-known public universities. I want to be inspired.

 

More info:

Full article here...

Areas of Focus:

Democratizing Education (Liberty Tree), Full Funding

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