Academic Salaries? Not so Golden!
Earlier today, I posted on the $700,000 salary of the President of an online only, no faculty university called Western Governors University. How does President Mendenhall justify such a salary? His website suggests he can do this because he claims not to need faculty. That is .. perhaps a good thing since a real university needs a lot of faculty.
This raises an interesting question. How high are the salaries of the faculty Dr. Mendenhall are replacing?
On way of answering this is by looking at the salaries paid to faculty. The Chronicle of Higher Education has assembled the data on salaries for college faculty. The data may shock many in an era where MBAs and beginning lawyers routinely break the magical 100K mark, VERY few FULL tenured faculty get to that level.
Remember that the American University is the model for the world. Unlike K-12 where teachers here are not seen with high respect, American University faculty are seen as being at the top of their fields worldwide. Is Dr. Mendenhall, an administrator of a school without faculty, really worth a salary so much higher than that of full professors?
I suspect the answer is that Dr. Mendenhall does not see his job as academic at all. Rather, he is an entrepreneur. We all know that entrepreneurs are entitle to whatever salaries they can get.
So, if profs are so smart, why don’t more real professors command such salaries?
Why do these supposedly smart and VERY competitive people choose an academic career? I suspect there are two factors:
- Tenure: The freedom of tenure obviously offsets the low salaries.
- The Challenge: Like pro sports or professional music, academia is a competitive sport. The best get jobs, the rest find something else to do. How many high school coaches or music teachers are failed professionals? How many cab drivers or bank clerks are failed PhDs in English lit?