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Oh Chronicle of Higher Education, once a year we turn to you to find out what kind of crazy compensation the executives of our nations educational institutions are making (every year they make a bit more!). And this year you haven’t let us down. Of course since we don’t subscribe to the Chronicle we have to depend on those who do to let us know who is making what. Good thing then that there is a Daily News recap.
So, who makes the most in New York? That’d be Theresa Bischoff of NYU Hospital Center with a salary of $945,930, followed by NYU Prexy John Sexton whose salary last year was $897,139. But those are private Universities. What the public sector? The top earner in the public arena was CUNY’s Matthew Goldstein who made $448,800 this year. That “includes $50,000 in private dollars and a taxpayer-funded $7,500-a-month housing allowance!” (Guess he didn’t get Jake’s memo). Behind Goldstein is SUNY Albany President Kermit Hall who made a tidy $371,000 plus $36,000 in deferred compensation.
Of course these people are being paid to fundraise, not exactly a cheap activity, but those salaries are still, not shockingly, way more then we’re making... What do you think about how much these guys are making?
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Well, Sexton seems to make too much. I adjuncted briefly for the NYU School of Ed and it was surprising how much less they paid than the surrounding CUNY schools (about half as much). Yet he makes twice as much as Goldstein. It shows where their values are at.
These presidents do have an enormous amount of responsibility, but the disparity between what they make and what many on the faculty make is pretty stark. I'm sure, too, that they get housing or a low-interest mortgage or something like that, in addition.
I look at it this way:
Columbia has billions of dollars in its endowment. The President's responsibilities range from administration to academic matters, and not solely fundraising as the article so briefly touches upon.
As such, there is a broad amount that has to be covered-from getting the income (donations and grants) to controlling the expenditures (growth, expansion, salaries, facilities).
Now granted, the President doens't have his hand in every single action, but he has to hire the right management team, work with the existing management, be the lead fundraising cheerleader and all the while, ensure that the academic standards are met.
If Bollinger, for example, worked in the corporate world instead of the academic, not-for-profit world, he would be making easily over $1 million a year plus bonuses and stock options with the same type of responsibilities. If he was Forutne 500, he'd be in line for 10's to 100's of millions in overall compensation.
All in all, while I don't necessarily agree with his handling of the MELAC debacle that is a stain on Columbia's reputation, and has held me back from my measly annual donation this year, he is doing a heck of a job (and not in a "Brownie" sort of way).
What Samantha said. Plus, it's one thing for a well-endowed private university to pay this much for their officials; it's quite another for a community college system, where the students are really sacrificing more and more every year because of state budget starvation.
There was a big row a few years ago when I was an undergrad at Drexel University, in Philly, because our University President earned over $650,000 ranking him in the top 5 of all University Presidents. The issue was not so much the vast amount of wealth (which does not include free housing in the "Presidents House", a mansion in suburban Philadelphia), but rather because he is earning money that puts in the same room with the Presidents of Harvard, Penn, Stanford, and Yale.
So basically, it was a roundabout way of saying that our school is shit.
Should University Presidents be paid on the scale of CEOs rather than, say, professors? This is a tough question. I personally think all education professionals should be paid more. I also think that inspite of tax codes, all private (and most public) universities are run as if they are for-profit companies - they push donations and sponsorship like its going out of style.
What I have observed is that university students are often in very low moral. They are broke, stressed, confused, and leave the university often without a job offer. Those statistics don't show up in those thick books of colleges and The Princeton Review doesn't mention how many suicides take place each year! So when disgruntled students see their President raking in the dough for a lacklustre performance around campus, it makes for a bit of an outrage, well-deserved, or otherwise.
John Sexton's salary is about 40 times what casualized graduate teachers at NYU, who have been on strike since last Wednesday, make. The striation in hte academy between a handful of well-paid superstar profs and administrators and the contingent adjuncts and grad students who do the lion's share of all the teaching with no job security and rarely any voice on the job except where we've hafd to fight tooth and nail to build strong unions, is deeply troubling. I urge gothamist readers to support the NYU strikers, and not just because i'm one of them.