Please see The Diamondback’s 2008-2009 salary guide.Asking for someone’s annual salary is never a comfortable question. Yet, each year, The Diamondback willingly accepts any heat from the campus community to inform its readers of the university’s faculty and staff incomes.
As the university moves toward its goal of becoming one of the nation’s top research institutions, using high salaries to lure in the best faculty will naturally follow. In fact, a study from the American Association of University Professors recently ranked this university’s professors among the highest paid at public universities across the country.
By printing a university-generated database of salaries, The Diamondback allows you, the reader, to determine whether the university’s investment is well spent. After all, the tax and tuition dollars students and parents pay each year pad the pockets of the people named in this publication.
On the following pages, you will see the salaries of university President Dan Mote and men’s basketball coach Gary Williams climbed 7 percent each this year to $431,900 and $381,840.19, respectively. The university’s highest-paid full-time professor, Michel Wedel, a marketing professor in the business school, took home $315,000.
With such large quantities of public money being divvied out across the campus, The Diamondback firmly believes full disclosure of these numbers, thanks to Maryland’s Public Information Act, is critical to ensuring transparency. But with such raw data must come a bit of context.
In previous Salary Guides, editors in chief-elect have reminded readers of the severe cuts higher education sustained at the hands of a cash-strapped state government. This legislative session, however, marks the fourth year the university received funding increases, meaning memories of deep economic hardship may be fading among some members of the campus population. So, as you read through the guide, consider that financial times were not always this good and wise spending may be the key to weathering what many in Annapolis have called an uncertain economy.
Whether you are a student, tenured faculty member or Dining Services employee, flip through the following pages to see how much your professors, peers and bosses rake in each year. The law gives you the right to know.
-Steven Overly Editor in chief-elect
