The university administrator racket
By 
Remember all those stories over the past decade about how states are disinvesting in public higher education, which is why tuition is going through the roof? How are the presidents of state universities managing to personally weather the increasingly difficult financial circumstances their institutions face?
Well about that . . .
Our sample included 49 of the 50 public flagship universities (Hawaii was excluded due to both structure and number of presidents over the past decade). We used The Chronicle’s 2010 and 2019 data, entering the 2010 amounts into the Bureau of Labor and Statistics CPI inflation calculator to determine the equivalent salaries in 2019 dollars. We found that total compensation for presidents of public flagship universities increased by 56 percent, to $35.1 million from $22.5 million. In 2010, on average, a flagship university president was paid $543,000 (adjusted for inflation) in reportable income; 10 years later, the average was $715,000 — an increase that outpaced inflation by nearly 32 percent. At only eight of the 49 flagships did the president’s adjusted base salary fail to keep pace with inflation — Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wyoming. At five, the adjusted base pay increased by more than 50 percent — Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, and West Virginia.
Next to upper university administrators and football and basketball coaches, the most privileged members of the university community are of course full professors. How are they (we) doing by comparison?
We identified the average salary for a full professor at each flagship and again adjusted the 2009 salary using the CPI inflation calculator. Since 2009, full professors’ adjusted salaries at flagship universities have barely outpaced inflation, rising by an average of $646 per professor. At more than half of the flagships, faculty lost ground. In five states, the inflation-adjusted salaries of full professors declined by more than 10 percent (Iowa, Montana, New Mexico, New York, and South Dakota). In only four states were increases more than 10 percent (California, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Tennessee).
Woo hoo, twelve dollars a week! That’s like three double grande americano lattes marked with foam, or five ounces of Dorset Blue Vinney or Roquefort or Pont-l’Eveque or Port Salut or Savoyard or Saint-Paulin or Carre-de-L’Est or Boursin or Bresse Bleu or Perle de Champagne.
In all seriousness, if comp for full profs has been completely flat, that guarantees that everybody else who does or tries to do that whole teaching and research thing — associate and assistant professors, non-tenure track full time faculty, lecturers, adjuncts, and so forth — can pretty much skip the Perle de Champagne altogether.
And the funny/not funny thing is that as of ten years ago there had already been a massive run-up in university presidential compensation over the previous twenty-five years: In 1983, the average compensation for a university president in 2019 dollars was less than one-third (in constant dollars) what it was in 2010!
Imagine what it would be now if our universities weren’t in a constant financial crisis.