The Vanderbilt University administration loves it when Vandy makes the news, especially when it involves moving up in the U.S. News and World Report rankings of universities or when Forbes cites Vandy as a Best Place to Work (if you’re an administrator), or the men’s basketball team makes the March NCAA Tournament or perhaps when some faculty member scores a mega-grant. But when The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the unprecedented obscene trend in million-dollar-plus salaries among administrators at Vanderbilt (at a time when faculty salaries were frozen and some staff were furloughed in 2008), there is nary a word on the official Vanderbilt news sites or in its smiling-photo-bespangled PR rag. The report focuses particularly on the administrators who are uncharacteristically in this million-dollar club with the expected (but no less shame-worthy) group of coaches and medical school personnel. These include the Chancellor Nicholas Zeppos ($2,407,588), Vice Chancellor for University Affairs and General Counsel David Williams II ($2,999,950), Vice Chancellor for Administration and Chief Financial Officer Lauren Brisky ($2,400,935), and Provost Richard McCarty (ONLY $1,101,760). These compensation figures include base salaries as well as what PR pointwoman Beth Fortune (I can’t believe that last name) calls in the article “the strategic decision of the Board of Trust to offer additional incentives to keep the university’s management team in place.” These are apparently among the “mission critical” employees mentioned in the memo we all got in 2008-09 explaining why all salaries except for those in a select “mission critical” group were being frozen until the economy picked up. Perhaps Vanderbilt administrators should revisit its Mission Statement and then decide who is “mission critical.” From what I read from the Mission Statement, Vanderbilt really doesn’t need these administrators, or at least they are not really the ones directly responsible for fulfilling the University’s Mission as it is stated — those would be the (undervalued) faculty. The Mission Statement talks about “values,” but what can we surmise about those values from this report?
I think one of the comment posters from the original report sums it up spot on:
The trend is not pretty. It is higher education’s version of what’s happening in the society at large: the concentration of wealth in fewer hands augmented further by the capital capacity of that wealth locus to generate yet more wealth. Meanwhile faculty salaries stagnate or fall, and the compensatory benefit of tenure is accessible to fewer and fewer of them. The model will duplicate that in the private for-profit sector. Concentrated wealth at the top and a workforce without power and subject to constant reshuffling, layoffs and dismissals. Not sure how this makes sense for students either.
Precisely.
