Troubling news today about the growing disconnect between the values American higher education actually practices in its allocation of salaries, and those it proclaims as it inculcates democratic values in students.
A study to be released on Monday in the Chronicle for Higher Education shows that, in this period of economic downturn when faculty salaries remain frozen or are declining and when tuition is rising, salaries for university presidents at public universities are growing rather than declining. As Joel Siegel’s ABC summary of the Chronicle report, “College Presidents Cashing In, Study Says,” notes,
The number of college and university presidents taking home eye-popping paychecks continues to climb even as more and more students have trouble paying their tuition bills. Fifty-nine presidents of public universities reeled in more than $500,000 in salary and benefits during the 2007-08 academic year, more than double the number who broke the half-million mark three years earlier, according to a survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education released on Monday (www.abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=6266263&page=1).
As Senator Charles E. Grassley of the Senate Finance Committee observes, “It’s surprising that many public universities are raising their presidents’ salaries. In these hard economic times, apparently belt-tightening is for families and students, not university presidents” (see Tamar Lewin, “Presidents’ Pay Rises Faster at Public Universities Than Private Ones, Survey Finds,” www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/education/17college.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink). Grassley concludes that the Chronicle’s study “shows that the executive suite seems insulated from budget crunches" (www.abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=6266263&page=1).
As Sigel notes, “College presidents defend their compensation packages, saying they function, in effect, as chief executives overseeing complex, multibillion-dollar enterprises and are still paid far less than CEOs in other lines of work.” The Chronicle report also indicates that presidents of private universities have, in general, always been paid more than those of public institutions. The rise in pay scale in recent years is particularly noticeable in publicly funded universities.
As Bilgrimage readers know, my concern with this issue has to do with the role institutions of higher education play in shaping the values of graduates (see, e.g., http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/10/leadership-crisis-role-of-american.html).
In many previous postings on this topic, I’ve noted that, in the American democratic experiment, taxes and donors lavishly support higher education (both public and private) because Americans assume that universities help build a democratic culture by instilling in students the values necessary to sustain such a culture.
This was a key insight of the educational and social philosophy of the pioneering African-American educator Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, whose work I have often quoted on this blog. When she founded her own college, Bethune-Cookman at Daytona Beach, Florida, Dr. Bethune explicitly built the values component everywhere into its curriculum, because she believed that colleges have a critical role to play in building a participatory democracy that brings everyone to the table.
Dr. Bethune also insisted that institutions of higher learning should model inclusive participatory democracy, since students learn what they experience and see more than what they are told. Her belief in the role of colleges as learning “collaboratories” led her to create a cross-racial and cross-cultural leadership team for her new college, as well as to sponsor public forums at which members of various communities could meet and discuss their shared concerns, collaborating as equals in solving social problems and involving students in the democratic process.
Colleges and universities play a premier role in keeping democracy alive and extending its values—in building a democracy that actually fulfills the founders’ ideals by achieving ful participattion. They cannot play that role when their own practices belie the values they proclaim.
Rising pay for those at the top of the university pay scale—while faculty salaries do not rise and tuition is increased—sends a contradictory signal regarding values to a university’s constituencies and to the public at large. It suggests that universities value the culture of corporations more than the culture of democracy.
The claim of university presidents to merit higher pay because they are CEOs should trouble anyone interested in the values American higher education has traditionally served. In order to be educational leaders, university presidents need to value education rather than profit. University boards should be rewarding educational excellence and success in teaching values, not dollar signs. University leaders who see themselves as CEOs rather than educators have departed from core values essential to the mission of higher education, if it is to fulfill its traditional function in the democratic social contract.
One of the primary reasons our nation is now on the brink of cultural collapse is the failure of its institutions of higher learning to produce leaders for a new millennium. And universities can not produce good leaders when their own leadership is shoddy—when this leadership models itself around values of the corporate boardroom and not of the academy.
The choice of university boards to reward CEO-presidents with obscenely large paychecks and perks and privileges that often extend those paychecks even more than the public realizes (particularly in private institutions, where salaries and perks are often not disclosed), is a dismal choice. I hope that in a period of concerted effort to rebuild our democratic culture, university boards will begin to pay attention to the values their institutions should be serving, and not primarily to charts showing higher profit margins.
Otherwise we’re lost.
