Showing posts with label Coaches and Presidents are killing us. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coaches and Presidents are killing us. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 15, 2021

Paul Campos says that college presidents and varsity coaches "are robbing us blind," and he is right

Paul Campos, a professor at the University of  Colorado Law School, wrote an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education on the astounding salaries paid to college football and basketball coaches, who are now making far more money than university presidents. 

Campos commented specifically on the salary paid to Louisiana State University's new football coach, Brian Kelly, and Michigan State University's contract with its football coach, Mel Tucker. Tucker and Kelly both got ten-year contracts worth $95 million.

Varsity coaches are paid far more than college presidents, but they too are making out like bandits. As Campos points out:

[T]he outrageous athletic salaries can even seem to justify the administrative overpay. By a kind of perverse psychological effect, paying a college football coach $10 million per year makes paying a university president $1.5 million, a provost $800,000, and various vice provosts and vice chancellors $500,000 each seem positively parsimonious by comparison. 

Campos notes that most universities operate as tax-exempt charitable institutions,  but they have been captured "by the most rapacious forms of contemporary capitalism." Or, as the Campos essay's headline put it, "Coaches and Presidents Are Robbing Us Blind."

Meanwhile, undergraduates are increasingly being taught by graduate students and non-tenured instructors who are paid a mere pittance.  At my former university, some instructors are paid less than $3,000 per course. If they teach five courses per semester (a killing teaching load), they work at the poverty level.

Meanwhile, the football coach makes three-quarters of a million dollars a year.


LSU's new football coach makes $9.5 million a year and gets personal access to private jet