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The CEO culture gains hold on campus
Published on Tuesday, Nov 18, 2008
With increasing business representation on university boards, perhaps it was inevitable that university presidents would be seen as fellow chief executives, deserving of ever-higher pay and perks, the presidents themselves hardly recoiling from the idea that they, too, run large, complex organizations.
On Monday, Carol Biliczky, a Beacon Journal staff writer, reported that Luis Proenza's compensation as the president of the University of Akron now puts him in top ranks of his peers. For 2007-2008, Proenza's retirement pay of $94,405 ranked No. 3 among 184 public research universities. Overall, his compensation rose 21 percent this past year, to $528,085, placing him in the top third. He also receives a house, a car and country club memberships, not included in the compensation package. The average pay for faculty members is $68,937.
The issue is not whether the heads of large, public research universities must attend to many and demanding tasks. Rather, it is whether the model of corporate compensation belongs in a public university setting. There, it creates the real risk of backlash, not just from disgruntled faculty members, but from students and parents struggling to cope with rising costs for higher education. Yes, tuition has been frozen at Ohio's state-supported universities. That does not apply to room and board and many fees.
With a budget crunch bearing down on the governor and legislators, even holding the line on state support for higher education, long underfunded and critically necessary for economic expansion, will be difficult. Many in the legislature keep a sharp eye turned toward universities and their expenses, anxious to find waste everywhere, providing an excuse to cut. University presidents adopting the ways of corporate CEOs is definitely not the place to begin that discussion, in which the ultimate losers are students and, with them, the state's economy.
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