When Tim Downs resigned from Northern, I noted that his $261K salary is the lowest public-campus presidential salary in South Dakota. That’s still good gravy in South Dakota, but that payscale might make it hard to recruit quality candidates who can fetch much bigger paychecks nationwide.
But leave it to someone in the Republican club to suggest Downs’s salary and everyone else’s in higher education is much to high:
Representative Randy Gross said the Northern vacancy provides an opportunity for the regents to make “a bold statement.” Representative Steven Haugaard said the public gets a strange message when people look at pay of the state university presidents while the regents raise student tuition.
Haugaard, a lawyer, said there is “a quarter million dollar difference” between salaries of the president of USD or SDSU and state Supreme Court Chief Justice Steven Jensen, who’s paid $143,121. Regarding campuses, Haugaard said, “I think it’s important we right-size salaries as well” [Bob Mercer, “Questions Remain on Former NSU President,” KELO-TV, 2021.04.23].
Yeah, I guess South Dakota wants its universities run by local lackeys who will work for peanuts and thus be entirely beholden to the political pressures of the Pierre club.
South Dakota’s judge pay is also well below the national average. Nationwide, the average pay for a state chief justice in 2015 was $171K. South Dakota’s was $132K, 49th in the nation. Nationally, the average pay for public university presidents appears to be more than three times the average pay for chief justices. Northern’s chief gets just less than twice as much as our high court’s chief… so arguably, Northern’s president is getting doubly underpaid. The SDSU and USD presidents are also just under three times our chief justice’s pay, showing less of a pay gap than exists nationwide between jurists and campus execs. So if you want to talk right-sizing, Steve, either we’re already there, or the market says the right size is much more pay for NSU’s president and the chief justice.
It’s hard to imagine “local lackeys’ paid $143k to run a mere university could do any worse than the grossly over-paid perfumed princes. The regents (and legislature) can do a better job insulating the universities from Pierre’s political pressure.
Perhaps the solution is to dissolve NSU and redirect those savings towards the other regental institutions to bolster existing staff salaries? I would contend NSU being at 73% on-campus housing capacity, well below the other institutions, would indicate less demand for that institution.
We have an absurd number of institutions for our state’s population. If we had fewer, we would have economies of scale that allow for lower tuition costs. The challenge is nobody wants to kill their sacred cow, as the saying goes.
It might be good to check the corporatization of college, the people who teach are paid less while the prez, vice-prezes of all stripes make out like bandits. Its getting worse by year and so is the corporate line. Don’t even bother to check what the coaches make. However, that goes back,way back to when at Wassa Matta U, they fired the English department to hire a coach who would win. They did pass on Red Grange, though, it was a cancel culture of a different kind.
Mr. Wayne has a good thought there. And Mr. Anderson is righter than right. You all know grudznick’s position on Fatcat Administrators.
In setting salaries you have to consider what an administrator is doing. I bet any university in any community in the state is the number one employer (maybe second in some communities behind hospitals), the number one property owner, the number one housing supplier, the number one food purchaser and food retailer, the number one customer of local businesses. I could go on, and I haven’t even touched on the academic side of things, or the difficulties dealing with health emergencies. You are getting by cheaply, because if you took all their job duties, University presidents are getting paid about an order of magnitude or more below what someone in the private sector doing the same job would be getting.
Now, does that mean noting could be done differently to lessen the costs? No. You could unify under a state university system, cut positions, cut campuses. All of that is difficult, involving a lot of community turmoil and political ramifications. But people bitch about administrator salaries because they don’t have the intellect or guts to offer anything else.
Welcome to the free market. Do you want your universities to thrive and succeed? Then you need to put talented people at the top, and talented people have options. Several years ago Doug Knowlton left the DSU presidency for a position as Vice Chancellor for Academic and Student Affairs in the UofM system. Perhaps a step down in position, but you can be sure it was a hefty raise. And he didn’t have to deal with a dopey legislature.
I would be careful using market-driven salaries as an argument for anything, particularly when those arguments are used incommensurately between the world of academe and the corporate world, be they used for faculty or for university president salaries. It’s that same argument that is used for keeping, as an example, English faculty salaries traditionally low in South Dakota while paying engineers handsomely if not to excess. That engineering faculty need be paid more to recruit them away from industry is a ruse: most of them don’t want to work for industry in the first place and have made a deliberate choice to work in academe.
Market driven salary differentials fly in the face of “equal pay for equal work” arguments: English faculty are every bit as crucial to student education as are their higher paid counterparts, clearly demonstrating that it’s not education that is fundamental when it comes to faculty pay scales, but “production,” namely, faculty as cash cows–or not. As it is, the net effect is that English and other low-paid faculty continue to subsidize faculty who have higher salaries.
In the US, federal grants and contracts generated by (some) faculty of select professions provide sources of substantial university overhead, thus subsidizing state taxpayer funding of public institutions—not that the source of the federal monies isn’t taxpayer dollars in the first place. It’s not administrators who bring home the bacon but certain sectors of the faculty body. (But multiple levels of subsidization of bioethanol is a familiar story here in the US: subsidize the farmer, subsidize ethanol producers, subsidize by consumers at the pump–all for a ‘good cause, of course! and we’ve heard many recent arguments nationwide and in DFP on subsidized capitalism).
Similar “not fiscally viable” arguments have been used in the UK to close numerous quality philosophy departments over the last few decades and recently. Philosophy faculty don’t bring in the grants and contracts that, say, science faculty are capable of doing. One also suspects that we can’t have graduates who are well-versed in discussion and works authored by great thinkers coming out of our universities (philosophy undergraduates in the US score very high on many sections of the Graduate Record Exam compared to other majors): such graduates raise to many questions.
Solely market-driven arguments taken to the extreme at the state level in South Dakota would have us close any university department that doesn’t have faculty cash-cows who can subsidize the state, were national accrediting agencies not standing in the way of such agendas. Of course, as Wayne suggests, the lack of cash-cows in some universities compared to others could also have the salutary effect of closing some of the “underperforming.” “underproducing” universities in South Dakota in terms of federal subsidies.
So, do those SD universities who bring in the most overhead to subsidize state monies correlate with presidents who are paid the highest (normed to university size, and other factors)? Just asking. Try to dig an answer out of the SDBOR Factbook if you will (good luck). https://www.sdbor.edu/mediapubs/factbook/Documents/FY21_FactBook.pdf
Cory, what is your premise? That the rising tide of university president salaries in SD will somehow raise all boats (it hasn’t had that effect thus far), or…?
Consider what a CEO of a similar sized employer would be paid and the property holdings of each university. I’m sure someone in the private sector would be paid 7 digit salaries to be the CEO of a business with the number of college employees and property holdings.
Add to the responsibility of a college president that they are in the public spotlight and subjected to that criticism.
Oh Donald, why don’t we just reinstall slavery for instructors? Most colleges are going to adjuncts to teach the majority of classes because it saves so much money that can then be put into other areas, what are those other areas, certainly not full time positions. Just check what the average CEO made in relation to the workers say in 1970 compared to today? An adjunct anywhere gets about $3,500 a class, usually limited to five classes so they can’t be considered full time. No health care, no nothing extra, making under twenty thousand a year, just right up there with McDonalds. Unions are the only way out for colleges too.
Unions are bad, Mr. Anderson. They are very bad. They have crushed the education industry and made the doers and teachers be these slaves of which you write, while the fatcat administrators just get fatter and fatter and fatter. We need some law bills this next year not only to eliminate Northern State Teachers College but to take all that money and cut swaths from the fatcats and put it into a pile for the working teachers to grab from.
Trending in Politics ~
Corporate CEO’s have taken up the liberal representation of America and are the most trusted entity, now.
Republicans, having lost the corporate campaign contributions are actively pursuing and promoting labor unions.
Labor is conservative by nature, as are black & brown males. If Republicans promote these group’s issues, the right’s appeal is undeniable and the donations are there for the counting.
Mark Anderson, I was a unionized Teaching Assistant at UW-Madison during grad school. We went on strike for a month to get a mixed victory/defeat on what the bargaining unit was. I loved research and teaching, but I found professors, even at UW, to be cowardly and lacking in solidarity with their students. It soured me on academic life, so I got out with an MS degree. At the time we had a prick for a university president, who thought grad students should be slaves. Without us, couldn’t run those big classes, which pile students into huge lecture halls, where they make all their money.
My back itches!
In the latest poll of active union members; of all the things unions do, only two got unfavorable ratings. Members view bargaining as a group, monitoring safety procedures, adherence of hourly limits and seniority status, promoting medical and retirement policies, and expanding paid vacations and promotions, favorably. Members were not in favor of politics and strikes, which union leaders have emphasized for decades.
What are the educational requirements to be a university president? How about a judge? I know a superintendents of public schools that had only a B.S. degree and made as much as a judge. All their job duties are so varied.
Fairness, what’s right, and what should be don’t exist in this state. That’s why our youth leave and the state suffers from brain drain.
I should have read the Northern Valley Beacon before I responded.
What I miss is the ability to make corrections after I post. Superintendent should not have been plural.
I think whoever suggests shutting down Northern State College
a) must live near a college so travel is not an issue
b) does not take classes
c) does not appreciate education
Sounds like Haugaard is wearing some mighty big pants lately. Even the suggestion of pulling money from a college or it’s closing makes me shudder with contempt for fools like him and his kind.
Grudz I’m sure your correct, its just so much easier to bargain with your employer by yourself. An individual has so much power by themselves. It’s just so much easier to get on your knees and suck by yourself isn’t it?
Porter, union leaders come from within the union. Republicans don’t support unions unless of course it’s a police union, then they will pretend to. Just look at how Republican governor’s “supported” potential auto unions in their state or unions of any kind.
Mark Anderson –
I’m discussing the future. You’re citing the current and past.
I was an elected Teamster’s official and am still a Teamster’s member.
Harvard professor Richard Freeman and University of Wisconsin professor Joel Rogers asked more than 2,400 nonmanagement workers whether they would prefer representation by an organization that “management cooperated with in discussing issues, but had no power to make decisions” or by one “that had more power, but management opposed.” Workers preferred cooperation to an adversarial stance by 63 percent to 22 percent, a result that held even among active union members.
The Ghent system and Sectorial bargaining are practical solutions to stagnant wages and the rich becoming the super rich on the back of workers.
Meaningful labor reform is more likely to start on the right than on the left. The Democratic Party remains reliant on Big Labor’s political and financial support and seems destined to double down on the failing model. Conservatives, by contrast, are shifting away from their corporate allegiance and giving much greater attention to workers’ concerns.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/04/20/what-american-workers-really-want-instead-of-a-union-at-amazon-483117
M
By that token we need another university in Pierre.
I don’t think so.