The One Percent at State U

A few years ago in a discussion thread at Leiter Reports I was roundly pilloried for suggesting that universities would be better off if they went back to the system where university administrators worked part time and were appointed by faculty senates.*

But consider the takeaway from this article about university executive compensation during the great recession:

“The high executive pay obviously isn’t the direct cause of higher student debt, or cuts in labor spending,” Ms. Wood said. “But if you think about it in terms of the allocation of resources, it does seem to be the tip of a very large iceberg, with universities that have top-heavy executive spending also having more adjuncts, more tuition increases and more administrative spending.”**

How many people reading this got merit, let alone cost of living, raises during the three year period from 2009-2012?

While the average executive compensation at public research universities increased 14 percent from 2009 to 2012, to an average of $544,554, compensation for the presidents of the highest-paying universities increased by a third, to $974,006, during that period.

Given what these debt loads are doing to our students' life prospects, I can't for the life of me see the moral difference between this and the bankers getting bonuses before, during, and after everyone else's 401ks and real estate holdings depreciated by trillions of dollars.

[*Read Faye on how Heidegger's main service to the Nazi state was getting this system overthrown in favor of the fuhrerrpinciple, where political hacks and connected industry folk hire the upper level university administrators.

**On why having executives unaccountable to faculty senates in university administration automatically leads to administrative bloat, see the discussion of Mesquita and Smith's The Dictator's Handbook in this earlier post by me.]