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Thursday, August 04, 2005
we had joy we had fun we had seasons in the sun Twice a week, UD’s daughter goes to Washington Children’s Chorus practice in a church on the campus of American University. UD, while she’s waiting for her, drinks coffee and reads at the Starbucks at AU; or, if she’s feeling energetic, walks around campus. As a native Washingtonian, UD has witnessed AU grow in size and popularity. She has watched it gussy up its buildings and landscape and, like most things in Northwest DC and Montgomery County (AU is located close to Montgomery County, where UD lives) get rich. Now AU is running into one of those problems that rich universities tend to run into: overcompensation of administrators. Universities “are not in the for-profit world,” an expert on the subject reminds the Washington Post in an article about AU this morning. “If there is some unusual perk, it has to be justified.” AU’s president’s base salary for 2003-04 was $633,000. He gets a free house plus other value-added goodies. On top of this, an anonymous letter to trustees and the Post claims, “the Ladners charged the university over the past five years for their son's engagement party, presents for their children, a personal French chef, vacations in Europe, maintenance of their personal residence in Maryland ‘including garbage bags,’ and wine up to $100 a bottle for lunch and dinner.” An investigation is underway. The Engagement Party Let’s start with the engagement party. There are “things that look on the surface like they are personal, but turn out to be donor cultivation,” another expert explains to the Post. “You might have a big wedding party, but maybe 70 percent of the guests are major donors.” Consider the pathos of an engagement party for one’s beloved child, seventy percent of whose guests are business connections. Consider, more broadly, a family with absolutely no personal life. If a set of human beings, connected by blood and some sort of history, end up living a wholly institutional life, then compensation for most aspects of that sort of life doesn’t seem out of line to me. You only get one lifetime, and people who miss out on having their life deserve not only pity, but some form of compensation for their loss. If I couldn’t go to the john without taking donor cultivation calls, I’d expect compensation. The question is how much. Father Flanagan/Dennis Kozlowski The conceit in the particular case of university presidents is that, having chosen the public over the private sector, they are motivated not merely by greed and vainglory but also by duty. The university president is located somewhere between a priest and Dennis Kozlowski. He or she is expected to want good money, but is also expected to demonstrate a commitment to non-profit values. Yet our wealthy country, as the director of research for the American Association of University Professors points out to the Post, increasingly compensates its university presidents “like private sector CEOs,” and CEOesque presidents in turn “often reflect their compensation in their management of the institution.” This is a delicate way of saying that they often give themselves as stupendous a salary and as perky a set of perks as they can get away with. The AAUP’s Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession notes that “presidential salaries have risen much more rapidly than faculty salaries in the last ten years,” and “the trend apparently continues. This development is one further indication that a more corporate organizational hierarchy is emerging in colleges and universities, in potential conflict with the mission of institutions of higher education to operate for the benefit of society as a whole.” The AAUP researcher calls “the rapid growth of presidential compensation” a “morale crusher for other staff and faculty members.” The Red Corvette It’s hard for most university presidents to get away with truly truly gross and blatant greed. Ask Peter Diamondopoulous. No one tried harder than he. This rule does not hold true for the University of Florida system, however. There, a university president can do just about anything and be rewarded for it. The current president of the Florida Institute of Technology, for instance, left his last university presidency in disgrace, but got another university presidency right away. Here’s his story, in the Miami Herald:
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