Politicians and leaders have continuously emphasized the need to cut spending nearly everywhere to help the economy recover — and higher education has been no exception.
Universities have had to grapple with reduced federal and state aid and rising tuition costs, but some experts said this isn’t solely because of the state of the economy — it’s also because of schools’ failures to cut their own expenses and curb inefficient and unnecessary spending.
While the traditional mission statement of universities is to further education and research, Richard Vedder, an economics professor at Ohio University, said that aim is slowly fading with colleges boosting spending on new administrative positions, such as diversity officers, sustainability coordinators and public relations personnel. These departments have become overstaffed and expensive to maintain, Vedder said, without enhancing students’ educations.
But this university and state have been taking steps to ensure all institutions are managing their budgets responsibly, said University System of Maryland Chancellor Brit Kirwan, noting the university has accrued more than $200 million in savings over the past five years.
Tenured professors making six-figure salaries who are continually becoming more disengaged with students, however, aren’t helping the problem, Vedder said. The argument is “the faculty are a bunch of overprotected people, who have got jobs for life, who are arrogant as hell, who try to push off the dirty teaching — the freshman, sophomore classes — to grad students or adjunct faculty who are paid low amounts,” Vedder said.
Faculty, he said, “have the good teaching life and they’re not really killing themselves teaching.”
Of the university’s $1.7 billion budget, just less than $1.1 billion goes to paying personnel, according to a 2013 budget report breakdown.
But given the credentials of some staff members, university President Wallace Loh said the high salaries are worth the price tag, and the university would lose certain faculty members if it didn’t pay them enough.
“Are there some very high salaries? Yes,” Loh said. “Given a university budget of $1.7 billion, to have a handful of high salaries … is not the source of the diminution of per-student spending.”
Professors are essentially taking a pay cut by choosing to teach instead of taking paid jobs in their fields, said associate provost for faculty affairs Juan Uriagereka. Professors don’t choose to teach because of the money and job security but for their passion for teaching, he said.
“You have some of the best minds, not just in the country, but in the world here,” he said. “If they were trying to apply those minds just to make money … they would be making considerably more than as faculty.”
Salaries are ultimately determined by faculty members’ commitment to their craft. Uriagereka said tenure-track faculty members with six-figure salaries are generally those who teach and mentor, research creatively and provide a service for their field. Other faculty members devote their time solely to teaching or researching and generally won’t see the larger paychecks.
Market demand for certain fields will also play a big role in how much professors make. For example, business and finance professors are typically paid more than arts and humanities professors, Uriagereka said.
The highest-paid professors in each college all make six-figure salaries, according to the 2012 Diamondback Salary Guide, but salaries range between departments. Engineering professor Dan Mote, for example, who is also the former university president, makes the most of any professor with $387,166 a year; marketing professor Michel Wedel makes $340,350; education professor Kenneth Rubin, meanwhile, makes about $170,000 a year; and Brian Butler, the highest-paid faculty member from the information studies college, makes $145,000.
This university needs to receive more funding to meet state goals of increasing the percentage of the adult population with a degree to 55 percent, said Joe Vivona, the system’s administration and finance vice chancellor, and to this point he said the system has been “effective” and “efficient” in directing finances.
“In the U.S. today, despite the tough fiscal times, companies and universities and the government are trying to figure out ways to do more with less,” Vivona said. “In the eyes of the state, I think the university system is considered a model of behavior for stretching what we got.”
Salaries and wages haven’t risen in recent years, Kirwan said, demonstrating personnel costs aren’t straining finances and workers are not overpaid.
“No one in the system has gotten a raise for … four or five years, and most of our faculty and staff have been subjected to furloughs,” Kirwan said. “Any thought that there’s been some big increase in compensation is just not consistent with the facts.”
At this university, Budget Director Robert Platky said since 1999, the money spent on instruction as a percentage of the university’s discretionary spending has remained steady, fluctuating between 30.3 percent in 2005 at its lowest and 31.9 percent at its highest last year. This indicates there have been no wild fluctuations in the university’s spending on instruction, he said.
Vedder said unnecessary personnel could be cut from the payroll to protect university budgets and pass fewer costs onto students with tuition, all of which he said would not harm the school’s educational value.
Of this and other universities, Vedder said, “I could redline 500 positions,” and “the basic academic enterprise would go on just as it was before. The teachers would still teach, the researchers would still research, and the university would save $50 to $70 million.”
But the diverse makeup of the faculty is what helps distinguish this university and other top institutions, Loh said, and retaining those faculty members means paying them enough to keep them.
“We have three Nobel prize winners,” he said. “Do you want us to cut their salaries?”
