William Bowen, former president of Princeton, in an interview:
I’m not a fan of huge salaries for presidents of academic institutions. These are hard jobs. But people don’t really do them for the money. What kind of message do you really want to convey concerning the nature of the institution and its leadership? I always thought that it was important to convey a message of we’re all in this together. If you as president earn so much more than everyone else, it’s hard to argue that we’re all in this together.
It’s an old-fashioned answer, and one that doesn’t really take into account profound changes in the American university. Under “huge salaries,” he has in mind presidents who earn more than one million dollars a year. One of Bowen’s successors at Princeton now works for for-profit DeVry, whose chief executives typically earn between twenty and one hundred million dollars a year, as do the leaders of most other for-profit universities. That’s the wave of the higher ed future, not a bunch of paupers pulling down $800,000 year and throwing money away on student scholarships and shit.
March 13th, 2011 at 4:15PM
See On The Cost of Administration at http://ptable.blogspot.com/2011/03/on-cost-of-administration-at-university.html#links., including the link to the interim IRS report on compensation of the highest paid administrators at non-profit colleges and universities.
March 14th, 2011 at 5:32PM
Sobering indeed, Michael. Thanks for posting that.
At the height of the financial crisis 2+ years ago, our own Pres. Backslapper surveyed the ranks of his top-heavy and (by this area’s standards) generously compensated court…
…and fired 4 people at the level of administrative assistant, whose combined salaries were far under $80K.
March 14th, 2011 at 7:20PM
At my apparently non-profit state run institution, they’ve decided to increase class loads in order to help with the budget shortfall. Yet the president gets a six figure bonus and a 25% pay raise.
Interesting that the bonus could actually pay for 20 full time teaching positions for one year. And they keep hiring other full time six figure administrators, because this is the wave of the future. But our salaries don’t go up (in fact, they go down, because they also raise how much we contribute to benefits).