Citing a study by the Institute for Policy Studies, the New York Times says the salaries of the top 25 college/university presidents average nearly $1 million a year.
“The study makes some disturbing observations about “the top 25.” Student debt is worse than at other schools. Administrative spending is twice the spending on student aid. The percentage of tenured faculty members fell dramatically, while part-time adjunct faculty increased more than twice as fast as the national average for all universities. The “worst overall offenders,” the study said, were Ohio State, Penn State, the University of Minnesota, the University of Michigan and the University of Delaware.”
This is a disturbing portrait of American higher education. Student debt soaring; tenured faculty declining. Executive compensation out of sight. Priorities?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Common on, Diane! It’s a business! Suck the $$ out of those kids and feed off of an underpaid Walmart inspired faculty.
2O2T,
“Common on”
I think you’ve been common cored too, way too much!!
Clearly more evidence of what a neo-liberal White House contributes to the economy: rob from the middle class and poor to give to the rich.
Both the president of Ohio State and University of Michigan have left their positions, and their compensation probably includes significant differed compensation.
The new president of Ohio State, Dr. Michael Drake, is reported to have an annual salary of $800,000 with $200,000 a year in additional differed compensation and $200,000 in possible bonus payments. The new president of The University of Michigan, Dr.Mark S. Schlissel, is reported to have an annual salary of $750,000 with and additional $100,000 annual retention bonus and $20,000 in annual retirement pay above the standard retirement benefits at the University of Michigan.
And that means what? Million dollar salaries are OK while students are sucked dry and placed in debt? Adjuncts populate the classrooms and luxury learning is reserved for the wealthy? Or maybe the governor’s cozy relationship with the Ohio State trustees and a crony named Kvamme and a couple million amongst friends?
You might notice that the University of Michigan president does not make a million dollar salary. The past president did get a one time $100,000 payment that pushed her salary up to that level. This is the problem with looking at a single year of compensation. The folks at the top of the list tend to be those who had an unusually well compensated year because of special circumstances.
That being said, the relatively high cost of administrators reflects the scarcity of administrative talent combined with the academic backgrounds that colleges and universities want in their administrators. There are a number of people who have experience at the head of organizations with $4.3 billion dollars of operational revenue like Ohio State, but relatively few who are also outstanding researchers and teachers. This is from the UC Irvine web site:
Prior to Chancellor Drake’s arrival at UC Irvine, he served for five years as vice president for health affairs for the University of California system, overseeing academic program policy at UC’s 15 health sciences schools, located on seven campuses. He directed the special research programs in tobacco, breast cancer, and HIV/AIDS; co-chaired the California/Mexico Health Initiative; launched the PRIME (PRogram In Medical Education) initiative to train physicians to care for underserved populations statewide; and founded the California Health Benefits Review Program.
Before that, he spent more than two decades on the faculty of the UC San Francisco School of Medicine, ultimately becoming the Steven P. Shearing Professor of Ophthalmology and senior associate dean. He has served as an administrative leader, teacher, and physician-scientist, conducting clinical research on glaucoma and maintaining an active referral practice. He has written scores of scholarly articles and chapters, and his fifth textbook was published in 2009.
An alumnus of Stanford University (A.B.) and UC San Francisco (M.D.), Chancellor Drake is a fellow of the Institute of Medicine (National Academies) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received numerous honors and awards for teaching, public service, and research, including the Burbridge Award for Public Service, the Asbury Award (clinical science), the Michael J. Hogan Award (laboratory science), the UCSF School of Medicine Clinical Teaching Award, the S.J. Kimura Teaching Award, the UCSF School of Medicine Alumnus of the Year Award, and the Gold-Headed Cane Society Speaker’s Cane.
In addition, he received the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Herbert W. Nickens Award for promoting social justice and the California Wellness Foundation’s Champion of Diversity Award. He was awarded the inaugural Binational Health Pioneer Award at the 18th International HIV/AIDS Conference. He was inducted into Stanford University’s Multicultural Hall of Fame in 2009.
As for the use of non-tenure stream faculty like me, I think that the decline in tenure stream employment has as much to do with the end of mandatory retirement as anything else. Tenure used to be something on the order of a thirty year commitment, now it is becoming a fifty year commitment.
University presidents are nothing more than glorified beggars. Their job requires less of an academic background than political. In Ohio, they are tools of the elite and more figureheads. They, like CEOs, are not a rare breed nor difficult to find. Most just need to raise cash and stay out of the way of those doing the work.
Adjuncts work hard and are underpaid. Like TFA, they are a cost saving measure. They cannot respond to student learning demands due to overloaded class rosters and high turnover. I’ve had a fair number of horrible tenured profs and watched as great professors were denied tenure and left. But adjuncts, and many are great, are in a system that now values profits over students. They do the best they can.
Teachingeconomist…although we do not often agree, i do appreciate your comments here about Chancellor Drake. With his sterling vita, and his role in supervision of a science based program which can benefit all of society, he is worth the large salary. At Irvine, the problems arise in other areas of campus activity. There were damaging battles over the hiring of Irwin Chemerinsky to lead the Law School…and he is now ensconced there…and is respected, actually, loved, by colleagues, students, and the public… including me.
I too have always been non-tenured, which is the choice we made early on to give us freedom of movement. We paid for this in many ways, both economic and in the political culture of university life. And I agree that what we chose is probably not going to be a choice for our younger colleagues…it will be cost saving mandate, and it will influence how much freedom a professor actually will have to teach as she/he sees fit.
Thank you MathVale for the kudos to adjuncts…now and then we get a plug from a truly smart student and that helps make it all worthwhile.
Then there are the football coaches, who in Division I schools often make more than the University President…
Yep, a few years ago the highest paid public employee in Massachusetts was a basketball coach at UMass. His salary was above $400,000.
Like the leaders everywhere, taking full advantage of their position to get theirs not realizing their position is to give and serve the people under you. That is true leadership. Not realized almost anywhere today. In the end their selfishness will backfire on them but so many are hurt in the process.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/05/19/the-highest-paid-public-university-presidents-2/
Yvonne…although Mark Yudoff comes off 10th in this list, he was shameless in padding his pay and severance, and many were happy to say good bye to him. Napolitano has acted more honorably…so far.
Also there are NCAA sport athletic coaches, chancellor, and board of regents who get paid far more than hundreds of university faculty and staff.
Yes, Michael and Ken…the sports teams bring in the big alumni bucks and these coaches are often the highest paid employees at their universities. That is far more shameful than the payments to the President or Chancellor in most instances.
(However, John Wooden was worth every cent paid him by UCLA. He was a gentleman and a role model for youth….unlike the Penn State coach who colluded to keep his pedophie assistant, and their Chancellor who should have gone to prison for his part in the collusion, but his university now pays their leader the highest salary in the country.)
University of California, the top tier public system in the nation, now has Janet Napolitano, former head of Homeland Security, as the President. She declined an increase at hiring, and took less voluntarily than the last President. She oversees hundreds of thousands of students, staff, and faculty. It is a huge job for which she earns about $500 K a year plus perks, which I do not see as an outrageous amount.
The Chancellors of each of the UC campuses also have a huge job with most campuses having over 50K students, staff, and faculty. However, some earn more than the UC President…and some are NOT worth it. The horror of a few years ago at the Davis campus where a peaceful student demonstration was met by their woman Chancellor with the order to pepper spray these students, was a travesty. Others of the Chancellors see their job as purely fund raising and as a stepping stone up to the next rung of feeding at the public trough. This is where the money is wasted.
In California, the Regents of the UC system are the real power brokers and include billionares such as Senator Feinstein’s husband, Blum, and they profit from their connections and decisions, plus their access to campus research labs. I find that far more egregious than other issues of salary…at least in my state.
addendum…
Considering the shallow value system regarding entertainment vs. education in our nation, with NBL and NFL players making $10 – $20 million dollars a year, what university leaders make is a drop in the bucket. Picketty makes it clear in his new book, as does Stiglitz in his book, both on Inequality, that our value systems are greatly at fault.
BIG CHANGES ARE IN THE WIND
A good part of university president’s overall compensation package is associated with their ability to look the other way as well as comply with the wishes of wealthy boosters on matters relating to the exploitation of college athletes and academic corruption in big-time (revenue-generating) National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) programs.
It’s hard to believe that it is now 11 years since I told Jim Duderstadt, president emeritus at the University of Michigan, that I would help him in his effort to clean up college sports. Jim is the author of Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President’s Perspective as we as the Foreword to the “Faculty-Driven Movement to Reform Big-Time College Sports,” the sequel to the brief “Reclaiming Academic Primacy In Higher Education.” http://drakegroupblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/splitt_sequel.pdf
Fighting against the corrupting influence of the ocean of money behind the commercialization of big-time college sports has been a long and lonely journey — similar to the current fight against the undermining of America’s public schools via commercialization of K-12 education that is driven by self-serving, enormous contributions by the Gates Foundation and other wealthy investors.
Several years have passed since the NCAA effectively countered the following congressional reform efforts aimed at increasing the transparency and accountability of its operations:
1) Senator Chuck Grassley’s request to the IRS to not only report on the NCAA as it has on nonprofit hospitals, but also increase pressure on NCAA members to further disclose their inner financial workings to see if they are using their nonprofit status to avoid paying taxes on their unrelated sports entertainment businesses;
2) Former Congressman Bill Thomas, then House Ways & Means Committee Chair, letter request to NCAA president, the late Myles Brand, containing sharply worded questions on the justification of the NCAA’s tax-exempt status, and
3) The Drake Group’s comments on the Draft of a Redesigned IRS Form 990 written at the behest of Senate Finance Committee staff.
As can be seen in Steve Berkowitz’s May 23, USA TODAY story, “Judge denies NCAA motions; Ed O’Bannon trial set for June 9,” the NCAA has failed in its sustained effort to counter the class-action antitrust lawsuit brought against it by Ed O’Bannon. The story can be accessed at http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/2014/05/23/jdge-denies-ncaa-motions-ed-obannon-trial/9500127/
Thanks to the perseverance of Sonny Vaccaro, more of the NCAA’s secretive business operations, inner-workings, and arrangements will be revealed — adding to those already exposed via the courageous testimony Ramogi Huma and Kain Colter at the regional NRLB hearing on the unionization of Northwestern athletes. See “NLRB Ruling on Northwestern Athletes: A Teaching Moment,” at ttps://collegeathleticsclips.com/news/nlrbrulingonnorthwesternathletesateachingmoment1.html
Frank G. Splitt
Former McCormick Faculty Fellow
McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL
http://thedrakegroup.org/authors/splitt
The revolution is coming! Gates and Walton will be yelling “let them eat cake” as people take them down. The salary gap is getting wider and wider!