College Guide
Blog
In the latest round in the continuing struggle over financing in the California State University system, next week the board will apparently be entertaining a policy to “freeze the pay of campus presidents, but allow foundations associated with the campuses to pay for raises.” This comes after Cal State students threatened a hunger strike over continuing tuition hikes at the same time that school administrators are enjoying salary increases.
According to an article in the Los Angeles Times:
The proposal would freeze state-funded executive pay hikes through 2014, but also allow individual schools to use foundation dollars — primarily donations — to augment the salaries.
Cal State has suffered almost $1 billion in state cuts since 2008. This has caused the institution to increase class size, hike tuition, and fire faculty and staff.
In July, however, the board agreed to pay the new president of San Diego State $400,000 a year. That’s $100,000 more than Cal State paid his predecessor. According to the article:
The use of foundation funds to pay for executive salaries is not uncommon in higher education, Cal State spokeswoman Claudia Keith said.
“This is appropriate when state funds are continuing to dwindle and the Legislature continues to disinvest in education,” she said. “We still have to be competitive and hire the best people we can.”
This is an argument academic administrators continue to make, as if somehow Cal State will suffer irrevocable damage if it can’t pay presidents $400,000 a year.
The average college president, however, earns $244,553 a year. Why does San Diego State need to pay so much more? San Diego State is a pretty average school; one might think an average salary would be good enough.
If there’s all this foundation money available to support public colleges in California, why not use it to cut tuition back to affordable levels again?
Facebook
Twitter
Texas Aggie on May 05, 2012 12:27 AM:
"If there’s all this foundation money available to support public colleges in California, why not use it to cut tuition back to affordable levels again?"
That is the very first thought that went through my mind as well. Why should foundation funds be going to administrators when there are so many other much more pressing needs?
PQuincy on May 05, 2012 9:17 AM:
I have mixed feelings about the fuss over public university administrators' salaries.
Partly it's a side show, and one that anti-government radicals on the right manipulate with pleasure because it makes them sound populist. There are too many administrators at our public colleges, to be sure, and they are paid disproportionately to those -- especially the starvation-wage adjuncts and lower-middle class staff -- who actually do the work of the institution, but their salaries are still a fairly small component in costs, and the rise in tuitions over the past 10 years has little to do with administrative salaries, and a lot to do with real cutbacks in public support. The right loves to howl about individual cases (a favorite Reagan tactic, n.b.), and to howl in synchrony with the left, because it distracts attention from much larger structural issues.
Partly, it's about just how effective the corporate model of elite entitlement has become. After all, college presidents run large, complex organizations that face huge challenges. They rub shoulders with corporate executives of often simpler, smaller companies who not only earn $2m, $5m, or $10m, but also constantly point out how much they deserve such salaries, how they have earned it all, how they are entitled by their superior management skills to reap rich rewards. Even at $400K, the president of SDSU pulls in only as much as mid-level executives at mid-level companies: aren't college presidents just as 'deserving', shouldn't they be rewarded for their skills, too? Face it: most of us have drunk this kool-aid at some point, because it is seductive.
The irony and the danger is that loud complaints from the pseudo-populist Right on this issue -- (do you really think that corporate America is against executives earning mid-level salaries?) -- draw in liberal journalists and pundits: the shiny egg of "vast" presidential salaries distracts many of us from the far more dangerous trends in de-funding ALL education and public services, which are the real story.
It's a pity that college presidents (and school superintendants and principals, etc. etc.) can't restrain their own greed or realize how vulnerable they make themselves by demanding and getting big raises even as they cut teaching and raise fees. But they have been breathing the tainted Reaganite air as long as everyone, which claims to encourage 'entrepreneurial' approaches (or just outright greed): why should they be immune?
So yes: I don't see why SDSU's president needs a $100K raise from his/her predecessor. But I also think that concentrating on this issue contains a trap. It buys into the assumption that public service should be rewarded far less generously than private enterprise, which in a world that has apotheosized greed and individualism, is tantamount (at least for the corporate Right) in buying into the assumption that public service is not very important or valuable. It's win-win for the Right: not only do such controversies undermine progressive support for public education, they also reinforce the "since money=worth therefore public service is worthless" equation that the Right has been pushing so successfully since Reagan.