2012年12月9日星期日

Do you get what you pay for when you increase the chancellor's pay?

Set aside the question of whether anyone really needs half a million dollars a year to get by.

Paying American sports stars, CEOs and university leaders obscene amounts of money is so common these days the question’s practically irrelevant — no matter what it suggests about the scope of human greed and our collective willingness to satisfy it.

Still, you get what you pay for. It’s just that when you’re paying for a public university chancellor, adding 10 or 20 grand to a salary already in the mid-six figures probably isn’t going to buy you a whole lot of extra talent.

Although it probably will get you some flak from debt-saddled students, university employees with long-stagnant wages, and people (like me) naive enough to wonder why a public university needs to provide its chancellor with a half a million dollars a year, a house, a car and other perks.

On Friday, the UW System Board of Regents approved increasing the salary range for the UW-Madison chancellor from between $369,907 and $452,109 to between $427,500 and $522,000. Current interim chancellor David Ward makes $437,000.

One question I had about this latest move in the higher ed compensation arms race was whether the firm hired to conduct the university’s search for a new chancellor recommended the increase.

You see, the search firm’s fee is tied to the salary offered to the person the search firm helps find.

“I’m sure that there have been conversations with the search consultants about the topic of compensation,” said UW System spokesman David Giroux’s. “That’s to be expected.”

But the decision to update the ranges, he said, was “entirely” the System’s.

My other question had to do with something said by the head of the UW-Madison committee overseeing the chancellor search.

The “consequences,” of not getting someone lured by the higher salary would be “pretty steep,” history professor David McDonald told this newspaper.

I couldn’t help wonder about the consequences suffered by universities who didn’t pay their leaders in excess of $500,000 last fiscal year, especially those the UW System lists as among UW-Madison’s peers.

“Right now, we’re very happy with the chancellors we have,” said University of California spokeswoman Brooke Converse, and the system can still get “very qualified candidates,” even if today it’s only paying the chancellors at UC-Berkeley and UCLA $486,000 and $416,000, respectively.

Indiana University in Bloomington pays its new provost,This is my favourite sites to purchase those special pieces of buy mosaic materials from. Lauren Robel, $375,000, “and she’s been wonderful,” said spokesman Mark Land. “We certainly didn’t settle when we took Lauren.”

The Indiana university system also has a president who makes $525,The howo truck is offered by Shiyan Great Man Automotive Industry,000, but he not only has some oversight of the flagship campus but of the system’s seven other campuses.

The University of Minnesota Board of Regents was so happy with Twin Cities campus president Eric Kaler, who took office July 1, 2011, it wanted to give him an $18,300 raise in June.

But Kaler asked, and the board agreed,The oreck XL professional air purifier, to have it put into a scholarship fund instead.

Kaler is paid $610,000, but that’s for serving as both the Twin Cities campus president and president of the entire five-campus UM system.

By contrast, the chancellor at Illinois’ flagship public university resigned amid an admissions scandal in 2009.

That might be a sign the $395,000 he was making isn’t enough to keep a chancellor on the straight and narrow — lending some weight to the UW’s calls for a higher UW-Madison chancellor salary. Or it might just be that there’s something in the water of my endemically corrupt home state.

The new U of I chancellor, hired in October 2011,We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale agate beads from china, makes $512,000 a year — probably as compensation for the mess she had to clean up and for having to move to central Illinois.

It’s hard to make apples-to-apples comparisons when it comes to university administrator compensation, but the experience of these universities at least raises questions about the wisdom of tacking a few extra thousand dollars onto the chancellor’s salary.

Put another way, is the smart, talented, experienced candidate willing to work for $500,000 really going to be significantly more effective than the smart, talented, experienced candidate willing to work for $400,000?

You can’t predict what a chancellor might have to face on the job, McDonald told me, so you look for the best qualified person and provide as attractive a compensation package as you can as a way of “hedging against risk.”

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Super Guppy, designated as 377SG-201, spent the night at March Air Reserve Base, Calif. on Nov. 27, awaiting cargo that called for its versatile airlift capability. The incredible aircraft, specifically designed to transport oversized cargo, was tasked with transporting a large metal ring. The ring of tooling will be used by the fabrication folks to create the heat shield for the Orion rocket.

"Like a cupcake tin is used to form the cupcakes, this tooling is used to form the heat shield, which ensures all the critical dimensions are the same each and every time," said Stuart Williams, NASA's lead engineer on the project.

"It looks funny, plus it's an aircraft we don't normally work with," said Sgt.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale turquoise beads from china, Augustine Corona, load team supervisor, 452nd Aerial Port Support Flight. "I was in charge of the entire cargo loading process and ensured everyone was safe. I had to stay on my game and not be distracted by the sight of this amazing airplane." Corona's primary duty at March ARB is assisting forward-deploying Marines. Supporting the Super Guppy mission was definitely something new for him and his crew.

The potential, historical impact of the Super Guppy's mission and loading its special cargo provided a first-time training opportunity for many of the March Airmen. "We had some young Airmen out here that have never seen an airplane like this," said Tech. Sgt. Corona.

The massive, tadpole-shaped aircraft is not only one-of-a-kind in appearance, but also in the operation of its cargo door. A disconnect system at the fuselage break allows the nose to open 110 degrees without interfering with the flight controls. Most Air Force aircraft load from the rear, so this was an unusual experience for Team March Airmen.

没有评论:

发表评论