More on UW System Chancellors

UW System Chancellors are apparently not just leaving to take higher salaries, we apparently have such a national reputation for having low salaries that other universities are able to use us a training ground for their administrators.

“What Wisconsin does is, it offers salaries that allow people like me to try our wings as chancellors,” Shepard said. “It doesn’t compete for successful chancellors . . . it doesn’t reward those who are successful to keep them here. We end up running a farm club for executive leadership.”

As much as I enjoyed my summers working at a AAA ballpark, the minor leagues are not where this university should be. And then this

“The Wisconsin system is known nationwide as a place for headhunters to begin looking when they’re trying to fill a slot in another state,” said Raymond D. Cotton of the Washington-based Mintz Levin law firm. He specializes in presidential contracts and compensation.

Add to that the sense nationally that Wisconsin’s state Legislature doesn’t value public higher education as much as it used to, and you have a problem, said Jean Dowdall, a vice president at Washington-based executive search firm Witt/Kiefer, who has recruited several UW System chancellors.

Taking a closer look at the story of one of the chancellors who was hired away provides some great evidence for the farm system accusation. Don Betz spent 23 years working at Northeastern State University, came to UW-River Falls to learn how to be a chancellor for 3 years before getting the call up to go back to Northeastern and become their new president.

Also included is an interesting argument that bolsters the voices of those already calling for increased privatization.

Wisconsin is limited in its ability to use private, non-taxpayer money to supplement chancellors’ pay, a controversial but increasingly common practice that UW System President Kevin Reilly says he wants to find a legal way to do here. Former UW-Whitewater Chancellor Martha Saunders’ package at the University of Southern Mississippi, which she took over in 2007, includes $125,000 from private sources.

Having the university not engaging in soliciting private money to help pay the new chancellor would warrant criticism itself, but to not even have the ability to use that as an option is something that should be abhorred. The university is not allowed to pursue something that can only benefit us both through increasing quality and saving money, while at the same time incurring no significant additional costs. If the state legislature is going to refuse to adequately fund us, then we should at least be given the option to pursue that money elsewhere.

Edit: More on the potential for private funding of chancellor’s salaries

An article on this subject wouldn’t be complete without at least one swipe at the state legislature, but this one is particularly poignant in my mind because of who the quote is coming from, the UW-Parkside chancellor of 10 years. I don’t know if you can get much more qualifying firsthand experience than that when it comes to dealing with this issue.

“The system is a really attractive system, but I almost use the word was,” Keating said. “I was satisfied at Parkside, but really disappointed at times with the way the legislators treated the university as a cash cow for the state.“

This article is so chalked full of various other tidbits about our hiring competitiveness (or lack thereof) that its really worth a full read yourself.