The College Fix

The New York Times “Room for Debate” section tackles the compensation of university presidents, featuring four perspectives.

Skyrocketing pay packages for school presidents come on the backs of adjunct professors and students and are symptomatic of the “corporatization of academia,” argues Kathleen Cawsey, an associate professor of English at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Boards of trustees, who decide pay packages and themselves often come from the corporate world, are simply responding to the “marketplace” of comparable universities, says Mintz Levin partner Raymond Cotton, who represents higher education boards of trustees.

For some reason, black university presidents outearn white peers at public universities but the reverse is true – and to a more severe degree – at private universities, according to Dorothy Brown, a law professor at Emory University.

“A university president is a leader whose salary has considerable symbolic value” and should be not entirely out of whack with faculty and staff salaries, argues Cary Nelson, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Read the full debate here. And tell us: What do you think?

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