The excessive salaries of some college presidents send a message at odds with higher education.
Source: Platinum Pay in Ivory Towers – NYTimes.com
I commented as follows.
“..ostensible mission of academia..” Great word, “ostensible”. Here is how they get away with fooling us.
“..advantage can..be taken of [students] by unscrupulous instructors and institutions..the student estate often does not grasp its own interests, and those who speak in its name are not always its friends..” From “On Higher Education”, David Riesman (1980)
To see how they take advantage of the naiveté of even the brightest students, read “A Tale Out of School – A Case Study in Higher Education”. It’s on my blog inside-higher-ed . It documents how administrators pressured me to “teach” engineers a critical course at Washington U. in St. Louis, and tells why (in their own words) they wanted me to “teach” it their way – a way that boosts the self-esteem of “customers” with an easy A, and the belief that if they can’t do MIT level problems, then something must be wrong with MIT, not them. (See the note on my blog from the student who wrote that. He took the “normal” Wash. U. course – not mine. My students regularly did MIT problems.)
Wash. U. is not special. They are just one of many wanna-be schools that knows how to solve the US News equation for the “winning solution”. How?Here is Riesman again.
“..the ‘wants’ of students to which competing institutions, departments, and individual faculty members cater are quite different from the ‘needs’ of students..”
Finding that solution pays well for Presidents.
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