Where all the presidents are above average
Radio comedian Garrison Keillor used to draw a laugh by describing a Midwestern hometown where "all the children are above average."
But Nevada's state Board of Regents seem to have adopted a similar model for the way they evaluate the state's college and university presidents.
With the exception of $182,000-a-year Richard Moore (the full-pay president of a Henderson college which hasn't even been built yet), University and Community College System Chancellor Jane Nichols last week recommended the regents award "merit" pay increases to every eligible college president in the system.
Every one!
Ms. Nichols brought to the attention of the Board of Regents, for instance, the fact that Carol Harter, president of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has been limping along on a mere $187,000 per annum, doing without a raise for nearly three years. The regents now propose to remedy this by catching her up with a 4 percent cost-of-living raise ... and adding a little $6,346 "merit" bump, like a cherry on top.
(Returning the favor, Ms. Harter has advised the board to make sure, come August, that Ms. Nichols -- now struggling along on $195,000 -- receive a raise adequate to guarantee she once again earns more than Ms. Harter. All this despite the fact that some of the state's campuses now face hiring freezes, larger class sizes, and cutbacks at their high school high-tech centers.)
These calculations sidestep the problem of scale, of course. If the cost of buying gas and groceries for an average $18,000 Nevada worker (the kind who does without , in order to help pay Ms. Harter's pathetic salary) has gone up by 4 percent in recent years, that would mean he or she is now paying an extra $720 for milk, eggs, and cereal.
That's possible.
Does it therefore follow that the cost of Ms. Harter's annual, personal consumption of milk, eggs, and cereal has gone up by $7,400?
Of course not. The problem when these across-the-board raises are granted as percentages of prior pay is that they continue to concentrate limited resources among the upper echelons ... where, truth be told, the current definitions of "merit" or "exemplary performance" are hard to discern.
Regent Thalia Dondero last week justified this ongoing potlatch by explaining "If we want to attract the best, the finest, we have to do what other states are doing. We are kind of behind the curve of what they are paying in other states."
But the object here is not to set a rate of pay which would help recruit the "finest" replacement for executives like Ms. Harter, but to decide how much their current work product deserves.
The UNLV president has now been here for seven years. Has she provided us with "the best, the finest"? Do high school and prep school guidance counselors from Boston to Chicago now routinely sit down with their most gifted juniors and seniors -- the kind of kids who score 1500s on the SATs -- advising them, "Well, Sean, well Tabitha, if the cost of Yale or Stanford is going to be prohibitive, have you considered one of the nation's outstanding tax-funded universities? There's the University of Michigan, for instance, there's the University of California at Berkeley, and then there's ... UNLV"?
"Oh, you can't compare Nevada with California or Michigan," will come the quick answer. "They're much larger; they've had longer to build quality programs; the competition is so much stiffer there."
But it's Ms. Dondero who set this standard. A family that tries to "keep up with the Joneses" by paying the same price the Joneses paid for their home -- without demanding the same quality -- is a family of fools.
Is UNLV drawing the best caliber out-of-state applicants, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels? Can the UNLV faculty now brag more outstanding authors and scholars than it did during the days of the late, lamented Murray Rothbard?
Is this board of regents capable of ever saying, "You know, this president has met the minimum requirements, but the Nobel committee has not exactly taken a long-term lease at the local Holiday Inn. We have not exactly seen faculty from more prestigious colleges pleading to work here for less because of the intense atmosphere or intellectual ferment and academic innovation she has fostered. We have not exactly noticed a reluctance on the part of the student body to leave campus over the weekends, lest they miss the world-caliber academic conferences being offered along Maryland Parkway. In fact, we're pretty much still seen nationally as a one-time basketball powerhouse that hasn't made it back to the second round of any tournament since Coach Tarkanian left and all the felons got kicked off our team"?
Precisely what are the standards which Ms. Harter and her fellow presidents have met, on which no improvement could be imagined, which justify raises in the range of 13,823 tax dollars per year?
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $72 to Privacy Alert, 1475 Terminal Way, Suite E for Easy, Reno, NV 89502 -- or dialing 775-348-8591.
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
