The problem with persidental salaries
It makes the presidency too attractive
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, W. Randolf Woodson, was compensated 2.3 million dollars in 2022 to be the President of North Carolina State University. That's a lot of dough. If I wrote for The Economist, I'd call it an "eye-watering" sum. It was abnormally high. Woodson was the highest-paid president of a public university in the country. But eye-watering pay is not uncommon in US higher education, where million-dollar compensation packages are becoming the norm for the presidents of major public universities.
Executive pay is a source of disgust within higher education. Faculty, staff, and (I presume) students bemoan campus executives' wages as unjust. I don't have any moral objections to Presidents making a mint. My concern is that it makes the individual incentives to become a college president too great. The jackpot prize is that becoming a college president engenders careerist ambitions that are bad for higher education.
It's a hard job … maybe a million dollars hard.
Most of the objections to college presidents' big salaries are on fairness grounds: How is it right that the president makes a million dollars when graduate workers and adjunct faculty rely on food stamps to survive? Even some tenure-track professors can't save the downpayment to buy a home! It is unfair when graduate workers and adjunct faculty rely on food stamps to survive, and some tenure-track professors can't save the downpayment to buy a home. But the largesse of the president's salary isn't directly related to the other academic workers' pay. However, the solution to that problem likely does not lie in rolling back the president's salary. Because labor accounts for a high portion of college and universities budgets, and there are relatively few campus officials with ginormous paychecks (excluding the football and basketball coaching staff), there is no easy way to meaningfully improve compensation for hundreds or, more often, thousands of employees by soaking the few rich ones.
Set aside the practical matter that redistributing executive pay, which may be a feel-good initiative, will do little to directly improve the compensation picture for the large number of underpaid but vital workers on a college campus; being a college president, especially at a public university, is a legitimately hard job. The demands are many: Boring internal politics (the VP for finance and the CIO hate each other); the budget doesn't balance, and appropriations are flat, and you are going to catch hell when you raise tuition because there's a (real) affordability crisis; enrollment is always too low, except when it is too high, and you can't fit all the first-year students in the dorms; the graduatiation rate needs to go up, but its hard when you are also admitting two-tirds of applicants in a state that has dismantanteld K-12 education; the bond rating is down, and debt servicing just got a whole lot more expensive when you must to issue paper in order update the physical plant; managing a board populated with knuckleheads and know-nothing flat-earners, or at least slimy friends of the Governor is a nightmare; fundraising; pissed-off faculty; pissed-off students; entitled parents and donors; the US News rankings; the faculty aren't winning NSF grants, and even when they do the research operation is losing money; a mass shooting could happen at any time; the Governor might be a psychopath; the next US President could be Trump. Dealing with that halfway competently may well be worth a million bucks.
You'd love to hit the jackpot.
The problem with executive compensation in US higher education is that the individual rewards for becoming the president, the provost, or the dean, are too high relative to the next rung down that academic hierarchy. The personal reward for moving up one step in academic administration is enormous. This creates too much career ambition and leads to a sort of rancorous academic administration defined by one-upping your rival. It is easy to see how career ambition could shape academic administration.
Let's arbitrarily pick on Clemson University. The Chronicle reports that Clemnson's president James P. Clements took home $1.2 million in 2022. That is more than twice the $500,000 Clemson pays its provost. If you are the provost at Clemson, getting the boss's job would ostensibly result in a $700,000 raise. Going one step down, the dean of the College of Behavioral, Social, and Health Sciences made just under $300,000, around $200,000 less than the provost and $900,000 less than the president.
The payoff for a vertical move in academic administration can be enormous, making the possibility of rising up extremely tempting. For human beings, this sort of jackpot payoff can be, well, judgmentally corrosive. For the most part, there are no other ways to stay in academia and raise your salary close to that much after becoming a professor. The payoff for being a department chair, for example, pales in comparison. Getting and retaining a top job is too valuable for individuals. Without much evidence, I'll put it to you that it is possible career ambition leads academic administrators to sometimes act on their personal career and position rather than attending to what is best for the enterprise.
A partial walk-back.
Of course, I don't think that all college presidents are corrupt. Most are working very hard, and many are doing a very good job. Academics are, by and large, not corrupt. And I speculate that (us) academics are, on average, motivated by altruism, intrinsic values, and intellectual commitments as much or more than people in most other professions. This isn't a case of bad people with bad intent. The problem is simply incentive structure. There are several deans but only one president. Let's say you become a dean, and you feel happy with your big salary and high status, but you start to look around, and you see that the president is making three times what you are. Your job is really hard too. The president is no smarter than you. You suspect that the president doesn't work any harder than you do, either. But the president makes three times as much, and there is only one president (per institution). You and your fellow deans might start jostling to get noticed, and that can create churn and distraction.
On the other hand, if the dean made $300,000, the provost made $350,000, and the president made $400,000, the payoff for going up a rung might not seem so important, and so lots of the not-so-good motivation for climbing a rung would disappear.
Ok, enough.