Oh dear, only $436,111. I do feel so very, very sorry for them. Poor things....

Caste system- very unpleasant for those who do the work. University is now basically a criminal enterprise, an extension of the banking colony / debt industry. What does it matter what the salaries are when the universities are routinely sending young people out the door indentured to Chase Bank for fifty to a hundred thousand dollars?

I sincerely wish I could pursue intellectual work in a country with government run and government paid for higher education. The USA is rotted to the core and it will only get worse since education is just another object for the predators.

Mr. Ramsey, Ezra Pound called it "usery." By extension, that's the business you're in.

One of the reasons that higher education in this country is losing its grip on reality has been the dramatic rise in presidential salaries. It started about thirty years ago, when the Chairmen of the boards of trustees started coming out of corporate offices and began to tie their success to the salaries of those academic "CEOs" who worked for them. It was also the beginning of the "professional university president", who went from job to job, getting bigger and bigger salaries. Such is the case Gordon Gee, as it had been for the deceased Michael Hooker, who had been president of five colleges/universities before his 50th birthday. Eventually, the faculty will feel no connection to these people. Can we re-discover our values and find enough competent academics who are willing to work for a salary as president "only" two or three times greater than the full professors at an institution?

Fascinating. The New York Times is covering this survey, too, but their headline is "Pay Rises for Leaders of Colleges, Survey Says." I guess it all depends on spin.

The focus should be on competence with compensation derived there from, not on the descriptive statistics of the compensation distribution. While many facets of leadership and management are executed with competence by state university presidents, most presidents earn poor marks in managing the core enterprise; i.e., the efficient production of credits and degrees. These failures in management result in lost revenue and margin many times that of the president's compensation.

Consider the cost of one of the dozen failures common to public education: loss of market share. Every year, in every market we have analyzed, state colleges and universities turn millions of dollars of positive margin (the rest of the world calls it 'profit') over to independent and for-profits colleges, usually without so much as a protest or even real awareness that it is happening. The financial consequence of this negligence is costly for already strained state budgets.

Keep in mind that no "outsider" wants to steal the university's costly, negative margin products that educate only a few individuals. Outsiders go after and easily secure the high volume, high margin programs, leaving the state institutions with fewer revenues to defray the financial losses produced by low volume negative margin products that they must offer in accordance with their mission. Inside the industry, the ability of a state university to protect its turf (other than real turf) is a joke. "Like stealing candy from a baby" is a phrase I have heard more than once.

How do these failures in leadership and management occur? The full answer is beyond this post but key points include:

(a) State presidents do not possess the accounting and other management decision-support information that would permit them to develop and execute informed plans with respect to market share, program revenue and margins, and other basic product delivery parameters that are foundational to even the most primitive of businesses. One college president who had been a CEO in private industry said that leadership in his new job amounts to exercising a bunch of 'best guess' decisions while trying to avoid courses advocated by squeaky wheels.

(b) Presidents are unable to exercise the command and control necessary to ensure that their products are aligned with the market's needs and will therefore be successful against the competition. Faculties determine program parameters and, as presidents will tell you privately, faculty develop programs that are of interest to them; seldom do they have a good sense of the market. To compete effectively, programs must deliver the product needed in the fashion desired by the market. For-profits know this and that is one reason why they have grown from 1% to 10% market share in 15 years; and

(c) There is no requirement that state colleges and universities report enrollment, revenue and margin on a program by program basis, in the context of total market (including all competing programs). Were there such a requirement, a different picture of competence in leadership would quickly appear.

I suspect that few would argue with these claims on a logical basis but one might ask how significant are they to the budget of a state university. Here is one example from closely monitored data. A state university with total enrollments of approximately 20,000 is begging to cover $10M funding shortfall at the same time that the university let an out-of-state community college secure $5M in revenue. How did this happen? The state university was offered the opportunity first but felt it was too important and couldn't be bothered. The president turned it down because his faculty didn't want to do it. His faculty didn't want to do it because they would have had to drive 30 miles to a suburb. (The out-of-state instructors were happy to drive 60 miles and eventually set up a new physical campus under the nose of the state university.) In a similar situation, the same university ignored a $2.5M opportunity that would have grown to $4M in five years.

Yet, this state university president is a hero in his community. He is a hero because the school has an excellent football team. How would the legislature and governor feel if they knew that this president knowingly passed over millions of revenue, allowing it to slip into the hands of for-profits and other states? It is a fair guess that their view of his competence and his compensation would change.

We need to quit talking about presidential compensation in terms of distribution statistics and begin linking it to performance in the total market. Would you care if a president earned $750K if he repeatedly snatched millions of dollars of profitable business away from the for-profits? (It can be done.) To move in this direction, we will need to create the metrics that every well run business relies on. These metrics are missing from state university systems.

-------------------
Robert W Tucker
President
InterEd, Inc.
www.InterEd.com

A man had a pigeon coop behind his home. In short order, at night the hawks and owls savaged the pigeons, killed every single one of them. It is said the owls would tear the chicken wire apart to get at the pigeons.

Hire from within the ranks? Have you gone mad? A university academic office where a professor, what's left of them, witless enough to broach the threshold does not feel to be visiting the office of intimidation in league with the devil?

Our faculty and staff have not had a raise in 3 years ~ not even a cost of living increase....and all we hear about is how much the budget has been cut. But guess what? There is a brand new football stadium being built and an increase in the pay of our athletic coaches and staff.

When universities decide to focus on education and its value and stop spending on entertainment, perhaps things will improve.
The athletic coaches and some athletic staff are the highest paid employees at my university...yes, higher than the president and provost and deans.

lemontree- agree, Athletics have become a burden to university, an incest relationship with commercial sports and media. It should be noted that academic students are forced to pay fees to support athletics.

Presidential pay is merely a broader reflection of the fact that Universities are fully functioning entities in the nation's (and globe's) corporate culture. This has always been the case in the United States -- to deem otherwise ignores the fact that Harvard was founded to educate clergy but that the boards were corporate boards (already then) and the clergy were part of a culture that equated financial success in this life with being selected for life in the next.

The Civil War and the land-grant college movement accelerated this trend -- although to write that grossly simplifies what happened during the 200+ years between the founding of Harvard and the passage of the 1st and 2nd Morrill Acts.

Torstein Veblen wrote about this corporate connection at the turn of the last century in his work The Higher Learning In America: A Memorandum On the Conduct of Universities By Business Men. The corporate connection was abundantly clear to Veblen in 1918 -- in fact, he implied that what went on in American colleges and universities was actually higher training, not higher learning.

The University's role in the defense effort in World War II also accelerated the trend for universities to act as agents in a corporate sense, and this was accelerated yet again by the Cold War and the growth of what Eisenhower dubbed the military-industrial-complex. (See Giroux's work, The University in Chains.)

The energy crises of the 1970s and economic downturn of the latter part of that decade led Congress to pass the Bayh-Dole act -- legislation that redefined (and increased) the role of Universities in "practical" (commercial-fueling) research. At the same time, Regan-era financial policies began redefining the role and nature of student funding for higher education; with the net result being that higher education became more of an "individual benefit" than a public good. This view/approach has remained and been reinforced over the past 25 years -- why else has the role of for-profit loan corporations grown (with recent challenges thereto serving as an exception to the norm).

So, after more than 350 years of growing corporate connection between American higher education, and most recently a quarter century of policies that shift the emphasis of higher education from the public to private benefit, what is anyone surprised that college presidents have become CEOs? The real surprise should be that they are so poorly compensated when compared to their "pure corporate" counterparts. Are research universities any less important to our nation's well being than AIG? If you think the insurance giant is "too big to fail," try succeeding in the future without the top 50 research institutions in the United States. Yet, in comparison, these presidents make pennies on the dollar when compared to their corporate counterparts. And unlike their corporate counterparts, they are not getting billions in bailout dollars -- instead, they are managing huge cuts -- and they are not giving their "top talent" massive bonuses nor accepting them for themselves either.

Bottom line, the salaries are commensurate with their roles and clamoring over this "recent trend" ignores nearly four centuries of history. In addition, based on their actions, these folks clearly understand that they have a public role. We only wish other "corporate types" would do the same . . .

As a disclaimer, I am not a president, nor do I play one on television. I am not defending large salaries. I just get tired of the historically and culturally ignorant indignant posts that pop up every time president salaries are mentioned. If you live in a corporate culture -- and for better or worse we do -- you should not be surprised if your institutions -- both public and private -- reflect and act in that cultural context.

Writing that "academic students are forced to pay fees to support atheltics" shows true ignorance about how atheltics is funded at many higher educaiton institutions -- paritcularly what Sperber has dubbed "Big Time" college sports. It is far more complex than what you write -- indeed, far more complex than what Sperber wrote about as well.

To me, the bigger questions is how and why we in academe have allowed a corporatized sports culture to not just flourish but in many cases shape and redefine the mission of higher education institutions? And along with this, we must ask what are we going to do about it if we want the influence to be altered?

Well maybe it should be far less complex.

Graywolf, You are ignoring that business and education are too different castes. It is the goal and happiness of business to make money, hopefully by making the best product. It is not the goal of university or education to make money. Money is no trophy for the mission of education. These are two different castes with two different value systems. The error is in mixing it up and this what maligns the functioning, productivity, and mission of education. The truth of the matter is that the business profiteers need to be reigned in from being allowed to exploit both government and education and while this mixing-up is occuring, it is a burden who are of the caste of working as a civil servant or in education where they rightfully are to be. It is really a boundary issue and unethical or opportunistic interlopers are savaging and using, making dysfunctional institutions where these money schemes do not belong.

What to do about it? Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple.

The call for "that right virtuous member of the faculty" to step into the presidential rank to save the day is about as far-fetched and mythically-oriented as the belief that Barbarossa will rise again and save Germany at her hour of greatest need. Please, stop the romantic drivel.

I recently read a news release about a new president who was lauded for "being a faculty member first and an administrator second." Do you really think that the place hired that person because of his/her virtues displayed as a specialized researcher and teacher in a specialized discipline more than 15 years ago? Hardly. This is diatribe, and sadly, highly educated faculty who should know better eat it up wishfully thinking that "if only one of them" whould be in charge then they could go back to the funding structure as it was "in the good old days" or at least preserve their little patch of turf. Sadly, many tenured faculty are more or less becoming agents of status quo maintenance -- not persons who use their work and postiion to challenge the status quo.

We would no sooner benefit from an inexperienced faculty member becomeing president than we would having "the common man" become president of the United States. Sure, some of the perspectives would be refreshing, but would work really get done? Would the institution really be better off? What we need in the presidency are skilled persons who constantly strive to maintain the balance between the pressures and demands of the corporate culture (on one hand) and the public teaching and research missions of their respective institutions (on the other). Faculty may be a good source for this kind of person, but we cannot limit ourselves -- doing so shortchanges institutions, the people they serve, and the communities of which they are a part.

Don't wait for Barbarossa to rescue you. Save yourself -- and, in the process, don't subscribe to myths that limit the possibiliites of persons who can work with you to make that come to fruition . . .

You miss the point -- higher education in North America (before there was even a United States) and business were connected from the oneset. The "money-changers" built and managed the temple from the onset. Kicking them out if no more feasible nor desirable than purging your body of white blood cells. But just like white blood cells, there is a balance to how much a body can take. Too little, the body dies. Too many, the body dies. Balance is the key. And this balance is time, space, and place contextual. Complexity is the only constant.

It is reasonable that faculty from a graduate school of management would be capable to be elevated to strategic administration? Graywolf, you have nice ideas however I suspect the issue here is something outside of the realm of this article or conversation. Many things are utterly out of balance and backwards in the "iron system" as Adorno would say. War is Peace, Freedom is Bondage etc and so on. The truth of the matter is... ? Fascist power? Patriot Act? Teenagers made into lifelong sex criminals for the crime of being a teenager? Government in your business? Local police dept. with Homeland Security Paratrooper Equipment? Corporate media and corporate internet, no competition outside of oligopolies, Microsoft monopoly cash-cow MS Office applied everywhere at all times? What is really happening is that working citizens are paying huge amounts of corporate rent to Wall Street, university loans, hospital administration and insurance, bankers and military industrial who are using government monies to steal from the people. As long as people are indentured and their government is used to financially savage them, these secondary concerns will continue to fragment and perpetuate. I have to admit it is a pretty good "trick" to run education thin and force it to be dumbed down and disorganized, and then to replace with a multitude of for-profit "education" enterprises with mushy textbooks and "distance learning." Incredible how the people are being run down and run thin. But the corporate rent must be paid. Someone from outside USA described it as watching a beaten dog cowering in the corner that can no longer defend itself, as a people turned into peasants who worship their oppressors.

Let us not forget Richard Cheney is an investor in private for-profit prisons and that the USA has the most people in prison, per capita, of any country in the world. This should reveal a technique of privatizing government for the sole reason of investor gain and then creating policy for the sole result of investor gain. The pattern is using government structure for profit, not for government services or mission. Until this is remedied, the USA and any dialogue over "education" etc. will be a disorganized clown show in the service of those who continue to collect corporate rent from the people.

I would be happy to pay our presidents higher salary if they would agree to go back to the governing bodies and legislatures and actually advocate for our institutions and our faculties. It seems to me that we entered into a new era sometime in the past where, in exchange for high salaries, corporate jets, cars, drivers, maids and cooks, free housing, etc., presidents became servants of the politicians/corporatized governing bodies not advocates of faculty and students. When I look at the governing boards of public universities, it appears to me that they are people, mostly corporate types, who have been appointed because they have provided financial support for a politician of various stripes, who are all willing to do whatever is necessary to get re-elected, rather than promote the public interest. And do our presidents merely accept the situation as fait accompli or do they push back?

Public education is not a business, but the discourse of this discussion intimates that it is. Federal and state insitutions that serve the public should be subsidized, and fully funded and students, especially poor students, should not have the cost of Human Captialist theory passed on to them. Presidents should fight back and be out in front of the protest of the corporatization of higher education. But then they might lose their huge salaries, corporate jets, big houses, maids, cooks, etc. Hats off to those presidents who pass the bonuses back to students but that's merely a symptom not the cause of the disease in public higher education.

It is sad when presidents begin to look at faculty as interchangeable units of labor and create cultures H. Spencer would be proud of. Just look at University of Louisville and their last Dean of Education for a case study in corporate isomorphism gone mad.

Freedom means participation in power accordong to Cicero. Are faculty really participating in these discussion at our Universities? Are members of the public? I would venture to say not really because we have built Universities on a corporate model where free speech is restricted, employees livce in fear. Habermas would be appalled.

The salary of the college president, the college football coach, and the college professor are all arrived at in exactly the same way: The free market. Coach X is making a million dollars a year at State University because some other institution offered him $900,000. Another useful comparison between presidents' salaries and faculty salaries is the disparity between the academic and private sectors. I could make twice as much (immediately) in the private sector. That is certainly also true of the president at my university; he could probably make 5-10 times as much. Thus he is more underpaid than I. The reason I don't wring my hands over his misfortune is that he also receives compensation for serving on corporate boards and other types of external work, whereas I am limited in the amount of consulting that I may do. Where it hurts particularly are those fields in which there is no "private sector." This is why professors in engineering are paid more than those in philosophy. But then, your parents did warn you to choose your career thoughtfully.

fortysomethingprof, It took me a long time to learn the meaning of the saying from europe that "there is no free market." In the USA we are taught there is a wide open frontier, the free market, but in reality, much of the business, especially certain types of business and overall costs, are mainly affected by political activities. I suggest you ask Microsoft about this "free market."

The europeans have another saying, "In the USA you are free, free to sleep under a bridge." (i.e. no social services)

Uh huh. Faculty salaries frozen and cut, faculty and staff being "downsized," and all that's newsworthy is presidential salaries. There's no populist movement going on at the Chron!

Should public goods exist in a free market? What would our national parks look like now if we operated under these assumptions? Probably the same way our oceans and public universities are going to look soon. We have been listening to this "higher education is a private good" schlock since Reagan and now everyone merely takes it as fact. My kids are coming up on college age and in addition to my university not having a benefit for kids of faculty, perhaps I should move to Europe and let them go to University there. At least they will learn about diversity first hand.

Just imagine those parents who advised their children to choose a career in finance and banking, talk about choosing wisely.

Yeah, my pay is stagnating too. But not at $400,000. Plus, I actually have to pay my own mortgage. Sure, the market for presidents is different than for professors. But stagnating at $400k is different than stagnating at $90k. And I acknowledge that $90k is a lot, lot different than $40k.

Yes...and my pay has stagnated and much lower than $90K and I have do the real work of the university - which would be the advising of the undergraduates so they can get their education and actually get through their four-year degree. But the salary of our president seems to keep rising and he just seems to keep focusing on research and faculty and graduate programs. Well...if you don't teach and educate the undergraduates first, you won't have the faculty and the research and graduates you need to keep your institution going. He just keeps looking for those grants and research dollars and all those monies for everyone else but he just keeps freezing our salaries and can't even get us COL monies. We are so low on the totem pole now we have employees who have to apply for food stamps. Pretty sad when he doesn't even have to pay his mortgage or utilities.

maybe we should be more concerned with coaches pay and the search processes?

University president is a demanding but also highly rewarding position. However, I'm not upset that salaries are stagnating. Having just gone on my campus from a highly involved, highly competent chief executive to a replacement who does not even bother to use email, I am not in favor of encouraging people to get into the job for the money.

Any enterprise in which the chief exective is earning more than 4 or 5 times the salary of the average worker is likely to be getting into big trouble through lack of understanding of the work and issues of the ordinary person (as witness the recent meltdown in the financial industry that almost sank the economy).

Hopefully "performance-expert" and Ezra Pound know it's spelled "usury"....

Thanks. I think it's spelled "pay for your education for a long time."

Good. I'm glad it's stagnating.

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