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Monday, November 15, 2004
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GO BIG GREEN!!
“These huge salaries feed into the ongoing corporatization of the academy," said Roger Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, who earned about $120,000 a year when he was president of the State University of New York at New Paltz during the last decade. "Universities do not exist to make money but to educate our students and citizens, a role that is central to our democratic society. We send the wrong message when we transmogrify our campus presidents into C.E.O.'s." The latest enormous increases in many university presidents’ salaries (compensation in the million dollars a year range is increasingly common) has stirred the usual indignation, the customary effort to distinguish between profit and non-profit settings, the annual warning about the destructive disparity between administrative and faculty compensation, the regular fury about big tuition increases and overpaid university leaders, etc. UD has weighed in on this scandal before [UD, 1/10/04]. She is not surprised that the rate of increase is, every year, more astoundingly high, since for a lot of university presidents no principle of personal restraint or institutional good applies. As for the disparity between the last Duke University president's salary ($528,622) and that of Duke’s basketball coach ($853,099), UD is reminded of the college president who once said: “I hope to build a university of which our football team can be proud.” |