Infectious Greed
A. Ravi P. Rau (Physics & Astronomy)
Paul
Bell (Agronomy)
Obscene is the word that applies to the 70%, $205,000 increase in salary (to $490,000) to the Chancellor of LSU, along with $500,000 in annuities and investments. Already at the time of his hiring just a couple of years ago, his salary was set substantially higher than what the position had previously commanded. Just when enormous increases in business CEO compensations in the last decade (by over 200%) are being questioned for the scandal they are, academic administrators seem to be on the same route, even surpassing these grotesque numbers. Ironically, the LSU announcement coincides with Fed Chairman Greenspan's testimony before Congress on such "infectious greed".
It is a false argument to use salaries in the business world to defend these large awards to a public university's administrators. A military General, a Governor, or the U.S. President handle larger responsibilities in terms of numbers of people or budgets. Why not view a Chancellor's salary with respect to them? Indeed, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee recently castigated the Smithsonian for awarding salaries to its top administrators that are considerably larger than the $161,200 paid to U.S. Cabinet Secretaries, using apt words: "Such largesse weakens the public's belief that the organization has justified its need for taxpayer support."
Pitiful graduate student assistantships have kept LSU from being competitive for high quality students. A proposal to waive at least the tuition which would add slightly (nowhere near 70%) to the pittances they get has languished for years because the administration has not seen it as "a high priority". Regular raises to staff and faculty that would even match inflation have been unheard of for decades. Even with salary raises in recent years (when awarded, they seem to come always with caps of 6 or 8%!), LSU's salaries rank below our sister institutions in the region, leave alone at the top Harvards and Princetons, a comparison I do not make because it is untenable on so many grounds: public vs private, quality and ranking, size of endowment. However, such a comparison as an argument for grotesquely inflated salaries and raises seems to be made only with regard to football coaches and now to some of our administrators. Only in the salary of the football coach and Chancellor do we rank in the top ten in the country!
In the last 5-10 years, there has been an unhealthy de-coupling of the salaries of administrators from that of faculty, with little justification, and even less has been given. At the same time, unlike students and faculty whose performance is constantly evaluated both within and by their peers in the outside world, there is almost no evaluation of our Chancellors and Presidents, except for arbitrary perceptions and pronouncements from Boards of Supervisors, the Governor's chief aide, and such.
It is a gross distortion, if not a deliberate deception, to defend this nearly million-dollar package to a recently arrived Chancellor by pointing to the improvement in the quality of LSU's students and in their graduation rate. These reflect the increasing admission standards over the last decade that faculty and many previous administrators fought for and implemented, and to the continued dedicated efforts of staff, students, and faculty, even in the face of miserable and below-market salaries. The Provost who just left LSU worked for many years to bring about some of these improvements. If the current Chancellor is seen as holding the promise to take even greater steps, encourage and support him, both personally (albeit reasonably) and by supporting the university. Instead, giving away such gold based only on promises and expectations can only be seen as this "infectious greed" driving up administrator salaries.
Arbitrary setting of salaries from the Governor's office or the Board of Supervisors, the hiring of search firms instead of relying on faculty search committees as in the past, and the comparison of administrator salaries between campuses whether or not justified, have all contributed to this salary growth. Since such firms collect a consulting fee based on the salary of the position, it has been in their interest to drive them up. There was recent news of upper administrators in University of Louisiana campuses seeking raises by comparing with LSU's. Now, LSU sets the Chancellor's salary at almost double that of other SEC Chancellors and even of the President of Texas A&M, a school that outranks us and gives far more support to students and faculty. It is reported that our Board has already appointed a committee to study (read hike) the salary of the LSU System President. It is a mark of our values and priorities that this topic gets equal billing for our Board with the study of the public health system in our state.
There are many parallels to the business world of the nineties. CEO salaries and stock options went to absurd levels, completely disconnected to the performance of the companies themselves. Directors, themselves CEOs of other companies, indulged in an incestuous frenzy in setting these compensations, even as many laid off thousands of workers and stock prices fell to near-bankruptcy levels. These very hundreds of millions in options are now being seen as causing some of the collapses of companies and the resulting loss of confidence in the whole enterprise. Our universities seem to be headed in the same direction, with sparse support to the academic enterprise but fantasy salaries (half a million dollars for an individual salary in one of the poorer states!) to the administrators at the top. These are likely to become the focus of a general disillusionment on the part of the public, dragging down all of academia however unjustified and for no fault of the students, staff or faculty. Given the unique and important role that universities play in educating future generations and in generating new knowledge, the damage to society will be even greater than the collapse of large businesses.
Just as stock options represented a sleight of hand, with the pretense that they were not an actual cost to the companies, the pacifying argument that most of the Chancellor's package will come not from the state exchequer but private sources is suspect and dangerous. There are always hidden costs, money that may have been donated otherwise to the university now going to pay administrators. What are the implications of a major part of the Chancellor's salary coming from outside the university's budget, what if on athletic or academic matters he has to decide against the interests of these sources? Most of all, de-coupling administrators' salaries from the rest of the university budget encourages unhealthy trends: the formation of a separate class of managers rather than the traditional practice of senior faculty themselves serving in these positions for some years, less loyalty and commitment (LSU's Chancellor already flirted with another university), etc. At the same time, these same administrators who now seek business-CEO like salaries, still wish to maintain the pretense of being academics, retaining tenured professorships that they can step back into, thereby one-upping their business counterparts. "Greed" has never been better defined.
Instead of comparing only administrators' salaries with a few of the very highest in the land, I suggest the following exercise for our Boards. Compare over the last 5-10 years the ratio of our Chancellor's salary to that of the lowest graduate assistantship, the lowest custodial worker, the lowest assistant professor, and the lowest and highest paid professor. Then, based on other subjective and objective markers of performance, justify the enormous increases that have taken place in these ratios. As one example, this increase in one year of $205,000 to a salary of $490,000 (plus another $100,000 in extras) for the Chancellor parallels in the same year an increase of $521 to a salary of $13,550 for a Custodial I worker at LSU. From a factor of 22, already a large increase from just 5 years ago, the relative salary is now 44 times as large. Is this not crazy by any criterion? What miracles has the Chancellor done that even remotely justify these numbers? In state support to students, we still rank at the very bottom even in our region. Until we see substantial gains in such parameters, it is premature to be rewarding our Chancellors and Presidents, leave alone with such amounts. And, what about Tolstoy's question: "How much land does a man need?"
When such
gross distortions in decades-old practices and terms are being landed
on our universities by just a few people on the Board, should not all
faculty, and our deliberative bodies such as the Faculty Senate and University
Planning Council debate these issues, their merits, and where we are headed?
