Finally, Some Good News (Not for Publication)

Denise, I know I’ll have to re-write this. I was just having a little fun. -G

Guess what? Good news. Things are looking up … for California State University administrators, that is. Oh sure, CSU’s budget crisis is so severe that the system is planning to turn away thousands of students — c’mon, who likes students anyway? — and some campuses are cutting lecturers — without students, what do you need lecturers for? — but, despite all that, the Board of Trustees of the California State University system and Chancellor Charles Reed, are handing out big raises to top CSU administrators, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

Hooray!

As the newspaper tells it:

Chancellor Charles Reed approved salary increases of up to 19 percent for nine vice presidents at four of CSU’s 23 campuses earlier this year, and approved 11 new appointments of vice presidents at nine campuses at salaries of as high as $225,000.

A committee of the Board of Trustees reviewed those pay raises on Tuesday, endorsed a separate 10 percent salary raise for an interim vice chancellor who is receiving a permanent appointment and approved Reed’s hiring of a vice chancellor for development for $240,000 a year – a job that had been vacant for about 5 1/2 years.

The biggest raise went to Ronnie Higgs, the interim vice president of student affairs at CSU Monterey Bay, who got a $22,500 bump in July when he assumed that title, which upped his salary to $140,004 from $117,504, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter notes. (Hey guys, lunch is on Ronnie!)

It’s about time someone rewarded administrators … again.

Surprisingly, the raises aren’t sitting so well with some CSU faculty and staff members. (Sheesh. They are so not team players.) One such staffer whiner, Pat Gantt, president of the CSU Employees Union, which represents about 16,000 staff members, told the newspaper that “Paying managers and executives more at a time when everyone else is sacrificing is bad form. It’s like the executives at Enron taking bonuses while the company goes down … .”

Puh-leaze. Everyone knows administrators are so underpaid. (This president for example, only got his due after working for scraps for years.) Ask Marc Bousquet. In his piece, Asking Whether Presidents are Overpaid is the Wrong Question, he admits that many administrators deserve “20 or 30 percent more than their current salary.”

See?

Wait a minute, you say. Bousquet also notes that …

that relatively modest underpayment pales beside the perennial exploitation of adjunct faculty members. At least 70 percent of today’s faculty members serve contingently, and those who serve part-time at community colleges can teach eight or 10 courses a year for less than $20,000, without health or retirement benefits. Faculty members in such conditions can easily argue that they should earn 200 percent to 300 percent of their current salaries, suggesting an underpayment 10 times as extreme as that of most administrators…..

Well, maybe contingent faculty members don’t have a living wage, health insurance, or retirement benefits, but at least they can be happy in the knowledge that they love teaching and can sell their body organs to buy food.