Today’s lesson from the Utah System of Higher Education:
The rich get richer.
The Utah Board of Higher Education is in the process of creating a system by which the presidents of the state’s eight public colleges and universities can each receive an annual bonus of up to 10% of their base salaries.
The good news is that earning these bonuses is to depend, not on a whim, but on the presidents hitting certain defined goals.
The not-so-good news is that those goals have not yet been defined and that it is not yet clear that the process of setting the benchmarks and applying them to each leader’s performance review will be sufficiently transparent to the college communities and the taxpaying public at large.
When you add these bonuses on top of base pay, benefits and extra pay for such things as also teaching a class, some college presidents stand to draw anywhere from $400,000 to nearly $1 million a year, plus, sometimes, their own on-campus mansion and other perks.
This as the Legislature has cut higher education spending, complained about too many courses that, in their view, don’t lead to high-paying jobs and targeted programs for extinction, especially those found to be excessively focused on a mission lawmakers increasingly abhor: diversity, equity and inclusion.
This is not to argue that a job as difficult as, say, sitting atop the University of Utah — which includes a medical school and a system of hospitals and clinics — isn’t worth a significant salary. It is. The market is competitive and the turnover is already uncomfortably rapid.
And those salaries in Utah are set by a more or less rational process that compares the pay packages of presidents and chancellors of like-sized and similarly missioned schools around the country and sets the salaries here right at the median of that range. Fair enough.
But if each school’s headmaster is to be significantly rewarded for meeting such goals as raising enrollments or graduation rates, it should not be forgotten that such success will depend not only on the bosses’ work. It will be to the credit of all the clerical staff and maintenance workers, full-time professors and the ever-larger number of part-time, low-paid, no-benefit adjunct instructors who increasingly carry the weight of actually teaching tuition-paying students.
College presidents who claim to deserve a bonus should be expected to demonstrate that their students have gained significantly from the administrators’ efforts. Lower tuition rates and fees, more qualified instructors, fewer barriers to graduation.
And, though more difficult to measure, the creation of a community that has become truly wiser, more literate, more humane.
The argument that attracting top talent demands top pay is hardly unique to academia. It is common in the private sector as well. But publicly traded corporations have to file public statements outlining what their highest-paid, bonus-receiving employees have done to deserve such generous rewards.
We must expect no less from our public colleges and universities.
Editorials represent the opinions of The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board, which operates independently from the newsroom.