Looking out for the little guy

In a mirror image of corporate America, "chief executives" at Indiana University have garnered huge salary increases in recent years, while workers at lower rungs of the ladder continue to scrape by with cost-of-living increases. Currently, top administrators make as much as 30 times or more what entry-level, full-time employees make (a lot more, if you consider the package given to Coach Mike Davis). That gap looks to grow. How much should we accept?\nBefore his departure last year, former IU President Myles Brand earned well over $300,000 a year. Like many other top IU administrators, he also received a generous benefits package that included deferred compensation. To be sure, Brand was earning less than most Big Ten university presidents, so the firm hired to help in searching for the new IU president suggested that a highly qualified candidate could not be lured to IU for anything less than $600,000 -- and perhaps a good deal more. Meanwhile, the typical compensation package for top IU administrators increased substantially several years ago. While IU trustees have approved generous faculty salary increases in recent years, endeavoring to keep faculty salaries competitive, there have been no comparable increases in staff or graduate student pay.\nAt the same time, the University has sought to contain costs by limiting salary and benefit increases among both lower-end employees and graduate assistants and instructors. Beginning support staff and service maintenance staff make barely $16,000 a year, just over the poverty line for a family of three. After some 38 years of full-time service to the University, my departmental secretary, who has primary responsibility for a program area in addition to a sizable department, earns just $36,000. And graduate student employees continue to be treated as second-class citizens, even as they fill vital roles in university life. Graduate students with assistantships granting them (minimal) health insurance coverage must pay an extra $2,000 per year to have a spouse covered as well.\nThis kind of Big 10 "Keeping Up With The Joneses" can only be described as grotesque. Faculty, staff and student morale have been shaken by the news of high administrator salaries and benefits packages. As a public enterprise, the University can and must balance unregulated free market dynamics with the moral principles that undergird the public trust. It might be true that the local labor market permits IU to hire support staff at near poverty-level wages; it might also be true that national hiring trends have allowed a scarce pool of qualified administrators to command unreasonably high salaries. Yet I believe that we can and will do as good a job attracting administrators motivated to accomplish the job for less, even if that means more efforts to train leadership horizontally and promote from within. Moreover, a significant part of the salary load currently dedicated to hiring top administrators could be redirected to fund a greater number of decently paid staff positions and graduate assistantships supporting administrative functions. Such enhanced support could be used as a selling point for administrative hiring: less overall salary, but a less demanding work schedule because of ample support staff.\nThe Indiana state budget and Indiana University budget are not likely to witness significant increases in the foreseeable future, and current financial straits will severely limit faculty and staff salary increases and benefits. Principles of fairness and justice require a public university to limit excessive discrepancies in salary and benefits amongst its employees. I therefore recommend to the Trustees that all IU salaries be capped at no more than 20 times the salary of the lowest-paid full-time employee. In order to pay a "highly qualified" executive $600,000 to lead the University, we ought to be able to pay the lowest beginning employee $30,000. Anything less would be, to put it quite simply, obscene.