PURELY POLITICAL Over-Spending

by Jim Buckley

The new class of robber barons. Source: Getty Images

It Really is All About the Money

Peter Salovey is President of Yale University; his salary clocks in at $1.9 million a year. Let’s round that off to $2 million for convenience’s sake. I don’t know the perks involved, but one must consider there are many – housing, retirement, health, transportation allowances, etc. – that probably add at least another half-million or more to his compensation.

He's not alone at that pay level.

The three academics at the heart of the most recent controversy concerning free speech on campus – Harvard President Claudine Gay, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) President Sally Kornbluth – are paid something over $1.3 million each, per year. Presumably, that is in addition to housing on campus and other perks including generous health, vacation, and retirement benefits.

The well-paid Ms. Gay is the Diversity! Equity! Inclusion! (DEI) hire who apparently won the 2023 college top-job sweepstakes. The other ladies in this line-up may also be DEI lottery winner hires, but I don’t know that.

Ms. Gay’s net worth was pegged at $14 million by Forbes, but that was last year, so she has probably jumped over the $15-$16-million category by now. Her net worth was listed as a little over $250,000 in 2010, but with the kind of dough now coming in yearly, it’s not surprising she had done so well so quickly.

All three of these ladies are wealthy, if not “rich” in the current understanding of what constitutes real, sustainable wealth.

Good for them.

Football (and other sports) pays well too

And it isn’t just private and public college and university presidents raking in ten times and more than what most reasonably well-paid Americans being tasked by President Joe Biden to forgive the loans students had taken out to pay for tuition and other living expenses take in.

University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban, for example, makes a reported $11.4 million a year. The University of Alabama is a public university, so the coach’s salary (and that of its president who rakes in a cool $1 million a year) is paid by Alabama taxpayers.

Rival football powerhouse Clemson coach Dabo Swinney pulls down nearly as much as coach Saban: $10.9 million. No doubt its college president makes somewhere in the million-dollar-per-year range too.

According to College Athletics, every one of the top 25 college football coaches makes over $6 million a year.

Including UCLA football coach Chip Kelly.

UCLA’s President earns well over $1 million a year.

UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosia earns a “base salary” (not including perks) of nearly $1.2 million.

All the University of California campuses are publicly financed by California taxpayers.

Which prompts the question:

Are college presidents, deans, administrators, and coaches our new robber baron class?

Yes.

Harvard, which controls a tidy $53 billion endowment fund, is a “private” institution. Even so, in 2023 it was blessed with a $676 million “contribution” from the federal government, not counting the extra $25 million it received from Covid Rescue funds.

In the current school year, Harvard pulled in $5.8 billion (up 11% from last year) out of student tuition, room, board, parking, rent, and health fees.

Annual tuition at Harvard is $52,659. It was $10,266 in 1986.

Harvard continues to get richer.

Resignations Hard to Come By

So, why wouldn’t Harvard President Gay, who has refused to resign after her shameful appearance at the Congressional hearing (and whose record of plagiarism is allegedly second only to President Biden’s) hang on to every precious brass farthing thrown her way while she can?

I know I would.

You would too.

The Harvard Board of Trustees has probably done the math and has calculated that Ms. Gay would likely receive many millions in compensation after filing and winning her “Wrongful Dismissal” lawsuit, so why bother firing her?

She, along with the freshly resigned Liz Magill, Sally Kornbluth, and American University professor Pamela Nadell, couldn’t answer a rather simple question posed by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik during a recent House of Representatives hearing. When asked numerous times whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their university’s code of conduct, their unified and repeated answer was, “It would depend on the context of the statements.”

Stefanik sputtered: “It’s a ‘context-dependent’ decision? That’s your testimony today? Calling for the genocide of Jews is dependent upon the context? That is not bullying or harassment?”

And you know the rest.

Only Magill has had the decency to resign.

From The Harvard Crimson

I conclude this shameful collegiate chapter by quoting from a column written by Harvard Crimson editor Brooks B. Anderson, Class of ’25, who notes:

“It is no secret that Harvard and its peers have amassed fortunes that are largely kept safe from the clutches of the Internal Revenue Service — apart from the 1.4 percent excise tax created under President Donald Trump, against which Harvard continues to lobby fiercely. Amidst rhetoric among Harvard students calling for higher taxes on large corporations and the wealthiest Americans, it seems strange that Harvard’s $53.2 billion, Yale’s $42.3 billion, and Princeton’s $37.7 billion are left off the hit list.”

“Ostensibly, universities have this mostly tax-free status because they are charitable institutions serving educational missions, an exemption which dates to one of the first American income tax laws passed in 1894. This status makes sense. Harvard is one of the world’s preeminent universities; surely it has used its billions of dollars of accumulated wealth to primarily invest in its educational program, building an unparalleled roster of top professors, expanding offerings to students, and reducing class sizes.

“Right?

“Wrong.

“Harvard has instead filled its halls with administrators. Across the University, for every academic employee there are approximately 1.45 administrators. When only considering faculty, this ratio jumps to 3.09. Harvard employs 7,024 total full-time administrators, only slightly fewer than the undergraduate population. What,” Mr. Anderson asks, “do they all do?”

The Crimson editor then concedes that Harvard couldn’t function without some administrators, but 7,024? For the 7,600 or so students? A one-to-one ratio?

He adds that “of the 7,000-strong horde [of administrators], it seems that many members’ primary purpose is to squander away tax-free money intended for academic work on initiatives, projects, and committees that provide scant value to anyone’s educational experience.”

That (if I can paraphrase what he has concluded) is nuts.

And every taxpayer and every college student in America is paying for this madness.

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See you next week!