Rensselaer President Leads List of Highest-Paid Private College Leaders | Hacker News Reader

Rensselaer President Leads List of Highest-Paid Private College Leaders

nytimes.com

25 pointsjohnny9918 comments

She's not really the highest paid. Most of it was a 10 year grant that finally vested. If you amortize the money over the 10 years, she's not paid more than other presidents. If anything having the pay as a retention package was probably smart and a better deal for the university.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a more detailed story http://chronicle.com/article/Behind-RPIs-Highly-Paid/150441/

Of interest:

"Most of the former top-level administrators at RPI who spoke with The Chronicle would do so only on the condition of anonymity, saying they still feared retaliation from Ms. Jackson because of her broad influence not only in higher education but also in politics and business. "

That's warped. Not that I have illusions about academic collegiality (I've worked in higher education), but that sounds more like the behavior of a certain car service's execs, not a university president.

Looking at the underlying app/data from the Chronicle, it's surprising to me that the presidents of Stanford, Harvard, and CalTech receive comparatively low pay (under $1M): http://chronicle.com/factfile/private-ec-2014#id=13995_24374...

I would hope that it is because educated people would realize that above a certain amount, an increase in revenue is only an incentive to something illusory.

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.full.pdf&embedded=t...

I suspect that it's a trade of prestige for cash. If you're the president of any of those schools, the prestige follows you for life. You can always trade down on reputation for an increase in pay later. They will always have capable people willing to do the job, and universities are institutions where the head really doesn't have much power. (View it as the managing partner in a law firm, rather than the CEO of an industrial company. The managing partner works on the good graces of the governed. University presidents can only do what the tenured faculty allows.)

Especially when being a college president generally already includes use of a mansion and a ton of free food and travel, so the college president can pretty much bank their entire salary.

I'm more impressed that she makes almost as much as the highest paid NCAA coach[1].

[1] http://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/salaries/

It doesn't say what she's done for the college, other than she's been "fantastic". I suppose she's brought in a lot of money from fund raising and contacts she has.

I wonder if she's liked by the faculty and students? Boards will often overlook a lot if the president brings home the bacon.

I'm an alum and no longer have any association myself (I've even managed to lose myself so they can't call asking for donations). But I have friends still around, including at least one still on the staff.

My impression is that the school, including staff and student body, has a pretty positive view of her.

I'm an RPI alum also, having graduated well before Jackson became president. The few people I know who are still actively involved with RPI don't like her much, and I think the inflated salary is a big part of the reason why. (Of course, most of the people I knew at RPI were malcontents to begin with, so maybe that's not a representative sample...)

Heh. I was such a malcontent, hence my quip about evading their donation request phone calls. My time there was well before Jackson, too - '84-'89.

2011 alum here. When I was a student ('07-'11), Jackson was dislike by many (not all) students, and by some staff (hard to say how much). I was working for the student newspaper when Jackson unilaterally suspended the faculty senate, which created a ton of animosity.

My understanding is that the student opinion of her got better after I graduated.

(Info about the faculty senate if anyone is interested: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/02/02/aaup_blasts_r...)

Whoa.

I note that "shared academic governance" is a requirement for accreditation; one wonders if RPI is too big to not be accredited?

Alum here too and like you I've managed to drop off the fund-raising radar. I wish I could say the same about Williams College where I spent my last semester (exchange program) who, despite my protests, seems to regard me as a graduate for fund-raising purposes. Every year I get a new guilt-inducing calendar "gift" in the mail.

I'm actually at RPI right now. A majority of the student body, at least those I've talked to, don't particularly like her as President. A part of that is the inflated salary, but it's also how the school's being run. The most recent example is actually happening right now.

There have been some robberies in a couple of the residence halls recently. Mainly in the one which is in probably the most sketchy area near campus. The robberies are blamed on people from the neighboring area "piggybacking" into the residence hall (waiting for students to scan their cards, and then following them in), and going into unlocked rooms to steal things. It's an understandable assumption, right?

Well, they responded by locking down all residence halls to only the people who live there. Now, if you want to visit a friend, or you actually need to get into another hall for something, you have two options. One, wait for a friend to come down and let you in, or two, follow somebody else into the building. The policies meant to help prevent robberies through piggybacking are actually making legitimate students piggyback into buildings. After a couple more robberies, they've only increased security measures further.

Each residence hall now only has one entrance/exit in the entire building, with every other door designated as emergency exit only. RA's are supposed to stay at the doors and check IDs, with their obviously unlimited free time. If a student's door is found unlocked, campus security will lock it and put a sign on the door announcing to the world that this person left their door unlocked. Even if it was just to pick up their laundry. With each robbery, the campus is turning into essentially a police state.

A lot of people think that these policies are instituted by Residence Life, but I've got friends there and they're all just as pissed as the rest of us. They also get crap from all the people who think it's their call, when in reality the decision came from MUCH higher up.

And all this is in the past month or so.

Alum (08-12) here, most students dislike her. It's hard to see the benefits she brings to the school, and very easy to find negative points to pin on her, such as the laying off of 80+ employees in '08, the new president's house mansion she had built (which was actually bigger than the town of Troy had permitted her to build, forcing Troy to offer an amended permit AFTER the base of the house had already been built), and the construction of EMPAC (experimental media and performing arts center), a 500 million dollar commitment to furthering the Arts in a STEM school. These negative points could be refuted and cannot be completely attributed to just Mrs. Jackson, but students don't really think about those sorts of things when deciding whether or not they like their president.

> and the construction of EMPAC

Ah. My friends currently involved with the school are part of EMPAC, which explains their positive feelings toward her.

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