Overpaid higher educators say they can’t save a cent

By Chris Powell

Public higher education in Connecticut is doomed — doomed! — if the University of Connecticut and the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system don’t get at least $110 million more than Governor Lamont has proposed in his budget. That’s what college administrators and students told a hearing of the General Assembly’s Appropriations Committee last week.

The governor proposes to increase higher education funding by millions of dollars but not enough to compensate fully for the emergency federal money to which the colleges and universities got accustomed during the recent virus epidemic, assistance that is expiring just as the colleges and universities knew it would. But they were confident that they’d get plenty more from state government, as they usually have done. 

The governor isn’t cooperating. He seems to think higher education should economize for once.

Students testifying at the hearing demonstrated only that they have not been taught skepticism and critical thinking. They listened quietly without snickering as spectacularly paid administrators pleaded poverty: University of Connecticut President Radenka Maric, who draws an annual salary of $666,000 with fringe benefits worth another $47,000, and Terrence Cheng, chancellor of the CSCU system, who draws a salary of $441,000 with fringe benefits also worth another $47,000.

The students seemed unaware of the state auditor reports about UConn, like the one about excessive sabbatical time and payments for professors, and unaware of UConn’s improper firing of basketball coach Kevin Ollie, which cost the university $15 million.

Nor did the students seem to have heard about the disastrous mismanagement at Manchester Community College, whose president was fired and then reinstated under pressure of a sex-discrimination lawsuit and paid $750,000 in damages without any explanation to the public. The three administrators responsible were making between $228,000 and $256,000 per year — for community college work.

While the higher education executives agitated for more money at the Capitol, other higher ed employees agitated in the press. A letter from 49 “endowed chairs and distinguished professors” at UConn, published in the Hartford Courant, warned that the university faces a “dystopian future” if it doesn’t get more money. The letter’s lead signer, Manisha Sinha, a history professor, gets an annual salary and fringe benefits worth more than $241,000.

Not even the continuing national catastrophe of college student loan debt can shake the swelled heads.

A few days after the appropriations hearing President Biden announced he is canceling another $1.2 billion in student loan debt, essentially transferring it to taxpayers generally. One needn’t be an “endowed chair” or “distinguished professor” to figure out what is going on here.

The cost of college education has been driven up by government policy even as its benefit to students has collapsed, with millions discovering that higher education led them to poverty instead of good careers and loan repayment. 

Where did the billions in defaulted college loan debt go? To the higher educators, who aren’t the least apologetic about their racket. Indeed, they continue to insist that everything they do is for their students when they are really running a vast transfer of wealth from the poor to the prosperous.

If the value of higher education was aligned with its cost, the compensation of higher educators would be cut. They would teach more, research and publish less. But work more useful to society would be beneath their enormous dignity, and besides, government employee compensation is untouchable in Connecticut. 

Instead, when money needs to be saved in higher education, services to students will be reduced.

Legislators at the appropriations hearing did not press the salary issue, though it deserves an extensive investigation, as do the particular failures of higher education management.

But the General Assembly disbanded its Program Review and Investigations Committee years ago, and now, with state government so big and with so many employees of public higher education living in nearly every legislator’s district, even the most obvious critical questions can’t be asked at the Capitol.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)  

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