The amount of money that colleges pay their leaders has attracted attention in the news media recently, as the salaries and benefits of a few college presidents have approached the unbelievable figure of $1-million a year. Two dozen or so presidents are each paid close to $500,000 in total compensation, and about 50 receive around $300,000.
Is there a college president in the nation who merits such lucrative compensation? How much is too much to pay? What is the job worth? And what effects do high presidential salaries have on the academy?
Context is everything. On the one hand, in our market economy the normally unquestioned assumption is that any executive should be paid whatever the market will bear. Why should a college president’s compensation be any different from that of a corporate CEO’s? After all, for as long as anyone can remember, those of us in higher education have decried the low salaries in academe as evidence of society’s disdain for intellectuals and the education profession more broadly. Perhaps change for the better does begin at the top, and the rapid growth of presidential salaries portends a similar change for everyday academics. Call it the “trickle down” possibility.
Perhaps, too, the rising compensation packages represent governing boards’ belated recognition of the heavy demands that presidents must meet regularly, like raising limitless amounts of money, managing multimillion-dollar budgets, ensuring academic quality, speaking to alumni and student groups, lobbying legislators, and so on. To be successful, today’s college president must work 12 to 15 hours every day of the week, always appear relaxed and fresh, be amiable toward members of all constituencies, speak fluently and intelligently on numerous issues, and court business and foundation donors with sincerity. The job is extraordinarily demanding, and the requirements on the president’s time are unrelenting. The position merits high pay.
On the other hand, tight state budgets at public universities and uncertain prospects for endowments at private colleges are constraining institutions’ ability to offer a wide array of courses and programs, hire sufficient numbers of full-time faculty members, support scholarships that ensure student accessibility, and maintain physical plants. At a time like this, sky-high compensation packages for college presidents can convey a message to students, faculty members, and the public that the first priority of higher-education institutions is to look after their chief executives. And high pay may reflect a presumption that presidential leadership is more important than education itself.
The analogue is business. Think Enron and Tyco, where highly paid CEO’s could afford to indulge every material desire even as the companies eliminated jobs, requiring the surviving workers to work harder and produce more without higher wages. That analogue ceases being a mere comparison if the college president is being paid a corporate-CEO-level salary and behaves with similar callous indifference toward the welfare of faculty members, students, and employees. In that event, presidents will be seen as money mongers, and the public disenchantment with the once ethically elevated academic enterprise will resemble the growing disillusionment with scandal-fostering corporate executives.
At that point, colleges would lose whatever moral high ground they may once have occupied in the public mind -- and, with that change in perception, higher education itself could lose prestige and invite public censure. Critics of higher education -- of whom there is never a shortage -- would become emboldened to apply corporate-accountability standards to colleges, and public officials would talk about setting price controls on tuition. Such moves would threaten academic freedom even as state support and private contributions were shrinking, and presidential prestige -- and, quite possibly, the institution’s reputation, as well -- would be diminished.
When the ivory tower is thus transmogrified into a corporate-like jungle, higher education’s mission to promote the search for truth and its free expression, and to contribute to the common good, would be severely compromised.
We may be approaching that situation now. The time has arrived to protect the academy from sinking more deeply into the ethically marshy corporate-like world. We should set compensation standards for college presidents. By indexing their salaries according to institutional mission, and using some multiple of average faculty salaries in each sector, we can rescue higher education from the inflated presidential-compensation packages that are now spiraling out of control.
How would it work? We could peg presidential salaries to the widely accepted classifications of colleges by mission that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has set. “Doctoral Extensive” universities, for example, would agree to compensate their presidents at a rate that falls within a certain range -- say, $250,000 to $350,000 -- and at a ratio that does not exceed something like four or five times the average faculty salary. Master’s I institutions might pay presidents $175,000 to $225,000. Private liberal-arts colleges, more heavily dependent on the fund-raising skills of the president, might agree on a range of $150,000 to $250,000. The precise figures are less important than the concept of aligning presidential compensation with an institution’s complexity, mission, and average faculty salary.
As a shaper of standards for the academy, the American Association of University Professors would welcome playing a collaborative role in pegging presidential compensation to average faculty salaries. Other major national higher-education associations, including the American Association for Higher Education, the American Council on Education, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, and the Council of Independent Colleges, among many others -- not to mention individual colleges and universities -- would need to play their part in ensuring that presidential compensation is fairly and defensibly linked with institutional mission.
Such a system would have several benefits. First, college presidents would be declaring implicitly that it is the position and the good they can do, not the money, that attracts them. Second, governing boards would be relieved of having to negotiate to meet inflated bids by other institutions competing to hire presidents from the same talent pool. Third, the public-university foundations that seek private money would be freed from having to raise funds to supplement presidential salaries. Fourth, presidents would be liberated from the psychological trap of equating the value of their work with exaggerated compensation. Finally, faculty and staff members would suffer less salary envy, often a source of low morale and resentment toward the top administrator. Colleges could then recapture the high moral ground by declaring that their leaders work for the common good, not the money.
To those who have already bought into the corporate model for colleges, the idea may appear as mere wage controls, hence un-American. But the academy has never been about the quest for wealth, nor have its salary levels been especially reflective of corporate-compensation trends.
In fact now, more than ever before, the academy should distance itself from the rapacious, hypercompetitive, corporate model if it is ever to reclaim its moral mission. Presidents, especially those who come from academic backgrounds, might then reaffirm their loyalty to the mission of higher education. Meanwhile, “nontraditional” presidential candidates could signal their willingness to embrace the academy’s values, which, again, have never been about high salaries.
In the latter regard, Florida has recently been hiring “public servants” for college presidencies at salaries much greater than those they were making as elected officials. That development is relatively new, although not without precedent. If the lure of academe for such elected officials has more to do with salary than with the ideals of education, then those politicians have unfortunately discarded the very ideals that first attracted them into public service.
The academy must re-inject that ideal of service into college presidencies. It can do so, ironically, by imitating the salary caps that the public has imposed on elected officials. In that way, aspirants for college presidencies can reaffirm their dedication to mission rather than to compensation.
The job of a college president is worth not what the market will bear, but what the mission of the institution requires. Presidents are paid too much if they seek the position for the wealth it promises rather than the opportunity it affords to promote the common good.
Roger W. Bowen is general secretary-designate, and Jane L. Buck is president, of the American Association of University Professors.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 35, Page B24