Grinnell College, one of the richest liberal-arts colleges in the United States by endowment, announced this afternoon that its new president would be Raynard S. Kington, who is deputy director of the National Institutes of Health and a prominent researcher on the role of social factors in health. Dr. Kington will take office on August 1, succeeding Russell K. Osgood, who served 12 years as Grinnell’s president.
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Link to Grinnell College does not take you to the college, rather a company by the name of Grinnell.
Thanks for pointing out that error, now fixed.Andrew MytelkaNews EditorThe Chronicle
Go Grinnell! Always curious to hear what this fascinating small-but-mighty college is doing lately.
He sounds great ~ and I appreciate the nonchalant reference to his partner and children.
I am a Grinnell graduate, class of ’67. A few years ago, I stopped giving to my alma mater because I strongly disapproved of President Russell K. Osgood’s $500,000-a-year salary. I thought that that it was absurdly disproportionate for an 1,500-enrollment undergraduate institution like Grinnell. Just to put President Osgood’s salary in perspective, Dr. George Blumenthal, a world-class physicist who is chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, an undergraduate and graduate institution with more than ten times as many students as Grinnell — 17,490 in fall ’09 — was paid $310,000 last year. He has since taken an 8 percent pay cut because of California’s budget plight, knocking his pay down $24,800 to $285,200 annually. UC Santa Cruz is divided into 11 undergraduate colleges with about 1,500 students each. At UCSC’s Cowell College, where my spouse is on staff, the college’s administrative chief, or provost — who is also a tenured professor and teaches classes full-time and does research, as required by the university — is paid $90,000.Admittedly, Santa Cruz is a more appealing place to live than amid the cornfields of Iowa, which may account for the fact that its chancellor is willing to work for less than President Osgood. But I refuse to believe that serving as president of Grinnell college requires such a lifestyle sacrifice that the president’s pay must command the kind of premium that President Osgood’s has. Surely, there are plenty of talented men and women in this country who would jump at the chance to lead an institution of Grinnell’s caliber for less. It’s my hope that Dr. Kington did.So far, I have emailed the college alumni and development offices several times to enquire about President-select Kington’s salary. I have yet to receive an answer. I would like to resume giving to Grinnell — more significantly than I have in the past — but until I am advised as to whether our beloved “Harvard of the Midwest” is paying its president a salary more commensurate to its size, my checkbook is closed.