Henry Blodget is talking about University of Southern California trustee John Martin and his… well, Blodget has already tried to supply some adjectives… personal compensation. You sense, in Blodget’s emotional but not entirely polished description of human beings who take several hundred million dollars to themselves in compensation every year a kind of verbal difficulty, an eagerness and yet an inability to capture what it means – socially, morally – for one human being to do this. Piggish is a strong precise sort of word; yet he’s matched it with an abstraction (outrageous) which does little more than amplify his initial abstraction (the condition of being unbelievable). One feels as though the phrase should substitute a more precise word for outrageous… Or maybe the phrase would be stronger if one simply dropped outrageous and ended on piggish.
Anyway. A trustee stands as a role model for students and faculty, and Martin’s cosmic greed (cosmic is good, I think… I don’t know… I’m kind of tongue-tied on this one myself) conveys the highest values of that institution of higher learning. Higher, higher, higher, until you’re pulling in, as Blodget puts it, “700 times my lowest employee.”