Taking One for the Team

From Margaret Soltan’s University Diaries comes the news that Robert H. Bruininks, president of the University of Minnesota, has imposed a pay freeze for the university’s top administrators, himself included. Of course, both Soltan and William Gleason, a blogger at The Periodic Table, Too, are quick to point out that Bruininks’s gesture, while welcome, is a rather small one considering that he’s among the highest-paid public-university presidents in the country (according to The Chronicle’s latest executive compensation survey, he earned $733,421 in 2007-8). In fact, Gleason suggests that a pay cut would be a better show of solidarity with university workers.