Our respects and respect go to Mark Friedman of Arkansas Business for detailing an old scandal made new again: the disproportionate pay raises handed out to this state's college administrators even as the mere students get stuck with still another steep rise in their tuition and associated costs.
This order of priorities for what is called higher education in this state is all too familiar: Administrators come first. Students, faculty and everybody else involved in the whole venture come later. The shock of recognition when it comes to that pattern wore off some time ago as familiarity bred not so much contempt as simmering and justified resentment. How long will We the People put up with this standing outrage?
Leading the parade of university administrators in Arkansas is Joseph Steinmetz, chancellor of the University of Arkansas, who gets $536,802 a year in total compensation, which is almost 40 percent higher than G. David Gearhart pulled down when he was chancellor five years back. Just who does he think he is--a Razorback football coach?
Nor is this topsy-turvy pay scale confined to the University of Arkansas, for Robin Bowen, president of Arkansas Tech, got a total pay package adding up to $384,408 this past year. Which was also 40 percent higher than predecessor Robert Brown in 2011-12. Hyper-inflation, thy name is college administrators' pay scales in this once poor but proud state. Now the sky's no limit to the pay packages offered Arkansas' college administrators if only they will be good enough to accept all this money humbly offered by the taxpayers of this state.
Between 2012 and fiscal 2017, a period of five years, the pay increases of university administrators in this state hovered between 10 and 20 percent while inflation in general across the country came in at only 6.7 percent. So reports the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose job it is to make comparisons and record dismaying trends.
But there is some good news: The natives are growing restless, doubtless tired of being taken for suckers. "There is some backlash," notes Lawrence Wittner, a professor of history emeritus at the State University of New York, who keeps track of such discrepancies and the American people's overdue reaction to them. "There's growing concern among the general public," he says, "about the high cost of college education." A high cost that's easy enough to trace to the usual suspects: those who are paid to administer colleges rather than actually teach there.
Editorial on 08/11/2017